Category Archives: Europe

Book of the month: Iris Wolff

May 28, 2026 By in Book of the month, Europe, Post-world Tags: , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

Last month I had the honour of introducing the Indie Press Network’s spring showcases, two virtual events presenting some of the key titles coming out from small presses in the UK and Ireland in the next few months. As indie presses have long been the heartland of translated literature, I was only too pleased to have the opportunity to hear publishers present some of the books they’re most excited about. (The events were recorded, so if you’re curious, you should be able to watch them online soon.)

Among the many books that appealed to me was a forthcoming title from Moth Books: Clearing by Iris Wolff, translated from the German by Ruth Martin. Martin’s name was the thing that first piqued my interest – I often find that the involvement of certain translators can be a great measure of a project’s quality and I have long been an admirer of her work. I was also pleased to hear that this was the second title by Wolff to be published by Moth – the sort of publisher loyalty that makes a huge difference to an author’s reach, and is increasingly rare and precious among bigger houses. As Clearing only comes out next month, and as I prefer to review older books on this blog anyway, I decided to seek out the earlier novel.

Centring on a German community in rural Transylvania during Nicolae Ceaușescu’s rule, Blurred, also translated by Ruth Martin, is the sort of book big publishers in the UK are unlikely to touch. Because anglophone publishers have traditionally required that books from elsewhere declare their cultural identity clearly (usually set in the country in question and featuring tropes that complement readers’ preconceptions of what life in that place is like), this book’s focus on characters living in Romania rather than Germany would make it problematic to pigeonhole and market in the way that mainstream publishers favour.

The work’s distinctiveness doesn’t end there. The book opens with a note to the reader written directly in English by Wolff, setting out her motivations for writing the story, which draws on her own childhood in the Banat region, and some of her thinking on the purpose of fiction and the nature of time. ‘Writing is a rebellion against time and its greatest impertinence, transience,’ she tells us. ‘I see time not as a directional force but as juxtaposition, concurrence, as an organic web.’ This direct address intrigued me: in all my years of reading internationally, I can’t recall another comparable piece by an author who doesn’t normally write in English. Did the original contain a similar foreword? And if not, why had Wolff felt it necessary to preface her work in this way?

Because, really, the story needs no introduction. The writing is immediate and immersive, opening with Florence travelling through a snowy landscape to deliver her son, Samuel, in a forbidding labour ward beholden to the dictates of Ceaușescu’s ruthless pronatalist policies (which turn out to be the death of Florence’s friend Nika). Harsh and beautiful, ‘this landscape lets you be who you are’. Yet the life lived among the German community is a stripped-back, shrinking existence, in which an innocent visit from a stranger may invite interrogation and torture.

Through it all, Wolff’s humaneness shines through, evident in a deep care for her characters. Indeed, when the pastor Hannes reflects on the nature of empathy, we might be hearing Wolff speak through him: ‘how easy it was to define empathy: if someone is suffering, he feels what I do when I am suffering’. This book vibrates with compassion; Wolff feels with her characters just as the German word ‘Mitgefühl’ implies.

So it is that many of the novel’s most moving moments come when we see characters processing profound losses and shifts. The end of a relationship, the decision to abandon home and family in the hopes of a better life in the west, the reunion with a longlost love – all these things are experienced quietly and privately, with the reader given privileged access to those at the centre of events’ thoughts. ‘There were different kinds of loneliness,’ reflects one after his lover leaves him. ‘The loneliness of the mountain that had always been there. Of the wide-open plain where you felt lost. Of the city and its indifference. There was the loneliness of the staffroom, the overcrowded tram, the empty flat. The loneliness brought on by accusations, accompanied by words like “never” or “always”, no matter whether they came from other lips or your own.’

And yet, for all the loneliness depicted in its pages, the characters of Blurred are profoundly connected across time and space, even if they can’t always see it. This is where Wolff’s views on time make themselves felt. Although broadly chronological, the narrative seems more like a spiral than a straight line. Samuel’s decision to flee his homeland with his friend Oz comes relatively late, and once the pair arrive in the bewildering, capitalist west – where there was ‘so much of everything, two things had to be done at the same time: jogging and pushing a pram; watching TV and talking to guests’ – the past echoes through them. Events are diffused into their lives, features recur down the generations, patterns repeat.

The role of storytelling is also a theme, with narratives’ malleability and necessity for human survival considered by turn. Occasionally, I found myself wishing that Wolff had trusted her readers to infer a few of the technical insights she spells out, which can sometimes feel a little pointed and knowing. But this may simply reflect a difference in the appetite for this kind of exposition in the German readership, or simply my taste.

Overall, this is a great book: engrossing, moving and beautifully told. Credit is due to Ruth Martin for the line she has walked in infusing the narrative with a ‘subtle flavour’ of its varied language world, as she explains in her postscript. And credit to Moth Books for publishing this novel, and to all the indie houses who do so much to bring stories that take us further into English.

Blurred by Iris Wolff, translated from the German by Ruth Martin (Moth Books, 2025)

Picture: ‘Romania Regions Transylvania‘ by DietG on Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0

Book of the month: Tatiana Țîbuleac

February 28, 2026 By in Book of the month, Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments
Moldovan flag flying outside a brick building in an urban setting.

That summer we self-destructed more than we ever had before, and yet we had never been more full of life. Mum looked like a houseplant that had been taken out to the balcony. I looked like a lobotomised criminal. We were, finally, a family.

Moldova was one of the trickiest European countries to source an English translation from when I set out to read a book from every country in 2012. After months of searching, I blind-bought The Story of An Ant by Ion Drutse, translated from the Moldovan by Iraida Kotrutse, a volume that I couldn’t help feeling didn’t showcase Drutse or Moldovan literature at their best.

So it was with great excitement that I learnt that an English translation of a novel by one of the Eastern European nation’s most celebrated authors would be coming from the much-respected publisher Deep Vellum press. Here, at last, was an opportunity to see more of what Moldova could offer.

The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes by Tatiana Țîbuleac, translated from the Romanian by Monica Cure, is the story of Aleksy, a misanthropic artist under long-term psychiatric treatment. At the suggestion of his doctor, he starts to write his story, focusing on the summer he and his mother spent in rural France when he was a teenager, as she endured the final stages of a terminal illness. What unfolds does not provide the clarity the medical professionals seek; instead there emerges a powerful portrait of how emotional neglect can warp a childhood, and the quest for reconciliation and peace.

This is the sort of book that would trouble people seeking the ‘spirit’ of a place in the books they read – the sort of readers who, as Monica Cure writers in her Translator’s Note, expect international stories to ‘bear the burden of ethnographic representation’. The novel is not set in Moldova. Indeed, Aleksy is not Moldovan but the grandson of Polish immigrants to London’s Haringey district. The majority of the action takes place in France. Other than in the publisher’s information, Translator’s Note and author biography, the word ‘Moldova’ does not figure in the book at all. What’s more, as Cure explains, she took the decision to render her version in a form of British English, giving the narrative a distinctive idiolect, run through with surprising rhythms.

The novel is risky in other ways too. Aleksy is a profoundly unsympathetic character, who lays into his mother from the opening sentence and drops the first of many suicide references on the second page. Yet, there is a directness and a humour to the writing that keeps us reading. ‘When they have a lot of money, people who are mentally ill are called eccentric,’ Aleksy tells us, and: ‘Dad thought that Pluto was the name of a dog, and that “activism” meant going jogging every day.’

As we read, cracks appear, allowing flashes of vulnerability to shine through, together with fragments of a backstory that form the complex mosaic of the narrator’s interior landscape. These often emerge in exceptionally beautiful writing. Remembering his little sister, Aleksy tells us: ‘she would laugh like a rainbow whose feet were being tickled’. At other points, it is the repetition of simple phrases that convey emotions that cannot be expressed directly. ‘And I shouldn’t be afraid,’ is the refrain in a chapter in which Mother shares a painful truth, telling us all we need to know about both their feelings.

The result is a profoundly moving portrait of the legacy of emotional neglect and the way such experiences warp our tools to build connections. Repeatedly, Țîbuleac and Cure employ imagery that blends pain and tenderness, capturing the yearning of the wounded child to receive love from the person who has hurt him most. ‘I would’ve wanted to pull out of her with red hot pliers all the untold stories, all the unsung lullabies, all the hair tousles I had been owed, but which she had hidden like a cheapskate,’ Aleksy tells us at one point, making his journey towards the quiet, loving acceptance of his mother’s final days extremely powerful.

In this, The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes is not a national or a regional story, but a universal tale. It is one of the most compelling and affecting novels I have read in a long time. I hope we will see more work by Țîbuleac in English very soon.

The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes by Tatiana Țîbuleac, translated from the Romanian by Monica Cure (Deep Vellum, 2026)

Picture: ‘Moldovan Mission’ by Geoff Clarke on flickr.com

Book of the month: Alla Gorbunova

November 28, 2025 By in Asia, Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral, Saint Petersburg

Books come to me from many directions these days. Emails from publishers. Messages from readers of this blog. Suggestions from other writers. Reviews. Social media posts. Conversations with booklovers around the world.

In many cases, I hear about books before they are available. And while I try not to focus on the latest thing on this blog (because good books have long tails and I think the relentless emphasis on the new is one of the book industry’s many problems), I frequently find myself tempted to pre-order things that will be published months down the line.

So it often happens that a book arrives in the post or drops onto my e-reader seemingly out of the blue, long after I’ve forgotten who or what led me to be interested in it in the first place.

This latest book of the month is a good example. Some weeks ago, the cryptically titled (Th)ings and (Th)oughts appeared on my Kindle. As titles on e-readers cannot be easily flicked through or turned around, I started to read it with almost no idea what it was or where it was ‘from’ – much like the participants in my incomprehension workshops, who gamely tackle texts with no contextual information to anchor their reading.

If I’d had a physical copy, publisher Deep Vellum’s blurb on the back cover would no doubt have left me equally intrigued but perhaps none the wiser:

‘Twisting the art of the fairytale into something entirely her own, Alla Gorbunova’s (Th)ings and (Th)oughts is a spellbinding collection of thematically-linked short prose. A teacher contemplates leaving her husband after learning that he doesn’t have a soul; a clerk realizes that the only way to survive in contemporary Russia is to go insane; cars fall inexplicably from the sky; skeletons turn up in abandoned lots; a hapless everyman named Ivan Petrovich travels through a madcap Boschian afterlife, coming face-to-face with his own shortcomings, but failing, time after time, to get it right.’

‘The only way to survive in contemporary Russia is to go insane?’ Surely it’s not possible for someone living inside Russia today (as the little I can find about Gorbunova online suggests she is) to write such things?

In fact, Gorbunova goes a lot further than the blurb suggests, depicting Putin with horns in one story and engaging in a range of reflections on evil and corruption that make little secret of their targets. In one of the Ivan Petrovich pieces, the title hero is tasked with interviewing students and awarding marks according to what bribes have been offered.

As the Russianness of the text began to swim into focus, these things started to challenge my reading. As I explore in the politics chapter of Relearning to Read – in which I discuss my correspondence with Alemseged Tesfai, a writer in Eritrea, widely believed to be one of the most restricted and censored societies on earth – reading a book from a place that we believe has active state censorship can make strange things happen in our minds. The knowledge that the words on the page might not be freely expressed or might have exposed their author to risk has a disruptive impact. As I read (Th)ings and (Th)oughts, I veered between fear for Gorbunova’s safety and incredulity at what she had got away with, which then made me suspicious of whether she has special privileges and is a kind of protected state artist or whether the collection is a form of double bluff, a cynical attempt to convince naïve Westerners like me that the Russian government is much more open and less restrictive than I’ve been led to believe. I found myself reading through the eyes of Putin’s censors as I imagine them to be, on the lookout for subversive statements and turns of phrase, struggling to relax into the text.

Even the discovery that the original collection was published in Saint Petersburg in 2017 when the situation certainly appeared rather different did little to ease my mind. I thought of a conversation I had recently with Uyghur poet Tahir Hamut Izgil and translator Joshua Freeman, whose powerful memoir Waiting to Be Arrested at Night I featured earlier this year. One of the mechanisms the Chinese government often employs is retrospective bans, rendering certain statements unacceptable after the fact and arresting writers for books that have been published with no problem years before. Surely a similar risk could menace Gorbunova here?

It’s testament to Gorbunova’s writing, and Elina Alter’s translation, that the storytelling is strong enough to drown out this noise. This is, in part, due to something she shares with Alemseged Tesfai – a love of and gift for humour. ‘Say the unsayable light-heartedly and maybe it hits its target,’ Tesfai told me.

(Th)ings and (Th)oughts seems to take a similar approach. Many of the stories have an absurdist slant that reminds me of the work of Nikolai Gogol. Others trade off their brevity, pulling out the rug from under their characters so that the piece ends with a bathetic thud. In addition, Gorbunova seems to relish mismatching situations and registers to wring humour out of them. From the psychoanalyst drafting a memo to advise clients on how to navigate the ‘difficult circumstances’ that come from being consigned to hell for eternity to the angel handing out iPads and iPhones, there is a mischievous thread of linguistic playfulness woven through this collection.

Yet this lightheartedness is by no means lightweight. A deep understanding of human psychology underpins the pieces so that characters are often at their most relatable when they are behaving most perversely. Mishenka the Contrarian is a great example – a man who because of the cruelties he has witnessed, has made an art of transforming ‘acorns of suffering into the gold of gladness’. I also loved the brief portrait of the art critic N, who risks blowing up his life by posting everything he’s always wanted to say on Facebook.

Through it all runs a sense of affectionate cynicism. Things will probably turn out for the worst, the stories seem to be saying, but it might not happen. And we’ve got to play the cards we’re dealt. Life goes on and we are all part of it, all sitting in an ‘auditorium filled with laughter – a laughter heard since the beginning of the world, as people laugh at the shame and suffering of the flesh – involuntary, helpless laughter, mixed with fear.’

Storytelling may be imperfect, compromised and subject to suppression and malign influence, but it is the best thing we have, even, and perhaps especially, when it is frustrated. The final piece portrays an orphanage filled with poets, a few of whom go on to work for a literary publication:

‘The magazine was published once every seven years on clumsily pasted-together sheets of fragile, yellowing paper, in a run of seven issues, which were all ritually torn apart and scattered over the sea unread, and it was called Hope.’

(Th)ings and (Th)oughts by Alla Gorbunova, translated from the Russian by Elina Alter (Deep Vellum, 2025)

Picture: ‘Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral, Saint Petersburg’ by Pedro Szekely on flickr.com

Book of the month: Nauja Lynge

August 29, 2025 By in Book of the month, Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , 1 Comment

This month, a dream came true. I spent two weeks visiting Greenland with my hero, legendary Togolese explorer Tété-Michel Kpomassie, sixty years after he first arrived in the country that became his home from home (an experience recorded in his landmark memoir, An African in Greenland, tr. James Kirkup, and recently rereleased as a Penguin Modern Classic, titled Michel the Giant, with a new afterword, tr. Ros Schwartz).

It will take me a while to process this incredible experience and I am working on several projects to tell the story of it. Watch this space!

In the meantime, however, I decided it would only be right to make Greenlandic literature the focus for my latest Book of the month. And, it being #WITMonth, I knew I would feature a book by a female author.

If you ask anyone about contemporary Greenlandic literature, one name will dominate: Niviaq Korneliussen, a young Greenlandic writer hailed widely as the leading light of a new generation of voices telling stories on the world’s largest island. Her writing is fresh, daring and confronting, and having started the month reading her novel Last Night in Nuuk, I would have found it an easy choice to feature one of her books. (And she is extremely well worth reading – if you are looking for Greenlandic literature you should absolutely start with her.)

But as I try to highlight lesser known voices on this blog, I decided to look further afield. This brought me to Nauja Lynge’s Ivalu’s Color, adapted from the Danish by the author and International Polar Institute Press.

Lynge is something of a hybrid writer. Describing herself as a Danish Greenlander, she is the descendant of several figures who were instrumental in establishing Greenlandic identity, including Henrik Lund, author of the national anthem, and Hans Lynge, who promoted independence. At first, given her Danish heritage, I was hesitant as to whether to include her in my reading. But as many of the conversations I have had over the past few weeks have involved the influence of colonialism and other political agendas on Greenland, and the way those stories are woven into the Inuit experience (and, as we have seen over the thirteen years of this project, storytelling is a messy, cross-pollinated business that rarely fits neatly in a single box), I decided to give Ivalu’s Color a try.

From the pitch, the novel sounds as though it follows a familiar formula. In 2015, three women are found murdered in the Greenlandic capital, Nuuk. Whodunnit?

Yet, the similarities with anglophone crime fiction end with the premise. Even before you turn to the first page, it’s clear that this is a book that marches to a different beat. In place of a blurb, the back cover has a lengthy endorsement from Martin Lidegaard, former Danish foreign minister. And on the inside flaps we are told that the true victim of the crime will turn out to be the Inuit people.

This political focus continues in the body of the book. In place of an epigraph, we find an unattributed paragraph appealing for a moderate approach to Greenlandic independence:

It’s almost as if there is a chapter in our common history missing. My major concern is that we open the doors to outsiders before we are ready to welcome them. Things take time. This applies to Greenland to such an extent that we might be better off seeing ourselves as a developing country, not co-opted immediately into the international economy.

The characters of the book take a similar tone. Indeed, rather than focusing on the grisly fate of the three women whose bodies have been found in a shipping container (two of whom are barely mentioned), most of the dialogue rehearses political concerns, feeding off the fact that Ivalu, the most prominent victim, was a blogger on issues connected to independence.

Unlike the traditional anglophone detective novel, there is not one sleuth on the trail of the culprit but many. They include the Chinese agent Hong and the Russian agent Nikolai (both of whom do little to disguise their roles in trying to further their countries’ interests in controlling the Arctic), as well as local figure Else.

Like the murder victims, these characters remain relatively faceless. What seems to interest Lynge is not so much the personal stories of the figures she portrays but the bigger forces that drive them. These she explores by choosing to focus on aspects a mainstream anglophone writer would not normally centre, and selecting and ordering details in a way that might seem bewildering or even irrelevant to a Western eye. It is as though the apparatus of a European crime novel has been commandeered and turned to different ends.

As a reader, I found this challenging. The old knee-jerk irritation I often feel when I struggle to understand literature that works on other terms rose in me, and I was tempted to dismiss the book as bad. Indeed, there are aspects of Ivalu’s Color that will be deeply problematic for many anglophone readers, particularly when it comes to the presentation of Hong. Lynge describes him and his actions in terms that betray a strikingly different, even shocking, approach to presenting otherness.

There is also a challenging discussion of femininity and ‘primal’ womanhood running throughout the book, which at times seems to take a stand against ‘the modern age’s fussily democratic women’. This, when set against Hong’s shocking encounter with Else, raises uneasy questions.

However, as I continued on through the pages of this book, I found another Greenlandic title that I was reading in conjunction with it beginning to shift my thinking. Knud Rasmussen’s The People of the Polar North, tr. and ed. G. Herring, features the verbatim accounts of many Inuit myths collected by the great explorer on his expeditions through his homeland. Striking and strange, these tales share some of the hallmarks of Lynge’s writing. There is a similar relative effacement of the individual and focus on bigger forces. Extreme and sometimes shocking acts are presented baldly and with little ceremony. They inhabit a framework that calibrates ideas of community, duty, tradition, physicality and individuality very differently. Perhaps Lynge was fusing the storytelling ethos of the country of her birth with the commercial structures of European literature? Wasn’t that, in itself, thought-provoking and subversive?

For me, Ivalu’s Color wasn’t an easy or enjoyable read, but it was a valuable one. It was fascinating to see Nauja Lynge testing the limits of a familiar genre and trying to reshape them to accommodate her aims. It was a reminder that truly reading widely (far beyond the offerings that the mainstream outlets curate for us) requires openness, and a readiness to embrace gaps and questions. There is still so much we don’t know.

Ivalu’s Color by Nauja Lynge, adapted from the Danish by the author and International Polar Institute Press (IPI, 2017)

Book of the month: M.G. Sanchez

July 28, 2025 By in Book of the month, Europe Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

This writer came onto my radar thanks to Keith Kahn-Harris, author of The Babel Message: A Love Letter to Language, with whom I did a musical incomprehension experiment a few years back.

He shared some information with me about Llanito, the language of Gibraltar (a British Overseas Territory at the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula). It was, he told me, an amalgam of Spanish and English with bits of Maltese and Genoese thrown in. In fact, the literary scene in Gibraltar was similarly fascinating, a kind of experiment in answering the question of how small a population you need to establish a literary culture. 

Yorkshire-based M.G. Sanchez is a key player in this, having co-founded Patuka Press, which publishes anthologies of Gibraltarian writing. Indeed, several of Sanchez’s own books feature Llanito and his most recent has both an English and a Llanito edition. The title that caught my eye on his back catalogue, however, was Diary of Victorian Colonial and other Tales, my latest Book of the month.

Originally published in 2008 through Rock Scorpion Books, a now-defunct publishing forum that Sanchez also founded after he struggled to find an outlet for Gibraltarian work, Diary is Sanchez’s second work of fiction. It features one novella and two shorter works that, according to its marketing material centre on ‘themes of emotional and geographical displacement’.

The title work is the most ambitious piece. Chronicling the return of ex-convict Charles Bestman to Gibraltar, the land of his birth, in the nineteenth century, it explores what it means to belong and how history can entrap us in many senses. After this comes ‘Intermission’, a stream-of-consciousness account of a UK-based magazine publisher’s snap decision to give up the world and enter a French monastery. Last and, for my money, least is ‘Roman Ruins’, the story of an Italian lawyer’s attempt to save a homeless Kosovan man.

Voice is one of the key strengths of Sanchez’s writing. The first two pieces lift off the page thanks to compelling, energetic and distinctive first-person narrators. The diary form is not easy to pull off and sustain for a whole work of fiction, and it’s credit to Sanchez that Bestman’s account is engaging, and peppered with telling observations. Meanwhile, the would-be monk of ‘Intermission’ is often extremely funny. His claim that the notorious British serial killer Fred West looked ‘a bit like an ugly Tom Jones’ had me laughing out loud. Although his spiel is occasionally repetitious and tips over into raw ranting on a few occasions, lines like this meant that I was more than happy to stay with him for the ride. There is a rich, mischievous seam to the writing in the first two-thirds of the book that put me in mind of anglophone authors such as Helen DeWitt and C.D. Rose, as well as the Brazilian writer Machado de Assis.

It’s also fascinating to see colonialism and Britishness discussed from fresh angles, as Sanchez does in the first two pieces. There is a Trojan horse element to many of the passages, with certain ostensibly harmless or familiar formulations being used to smuggle in sentiments that challenge the status quo or reframe ideas. Some of these, such as the magazine publisher’s reflections on political correctness gone mad, now feel a little dated, but many are still disconcertingly fresh.

There’s a meta element to the title work too. At the end of the text, an editor’s note informs us of the way in which the diary was discovered and praises Rock Scorpion Books for publishing it after it was rejected by many other outlets. Finding a way to be heard and recognised is, it seems, part of the story.

Language has a big role to play in this. Llanito and Spanish feature in dialogue in the opening piece, while French appears in ‘Intermission’, and Italian and Serbian ring the changes in the final story. Multilingualism and pluralism are part of the fabric of this literary world, with Sanchez rarely choosing to translate on the page. Bewilderment and codeswitching are de rigueur.

All that said, the final story is an odd fit in this collection. Whereas the first two pieces complement each other tonally, stylistically and thematically, ‘Roman Ruins’ feels as though it is out on a limb. From the retail blurb, I see that a story called ‘The Old Colonial’ is listed in its place in the collection, and I wonder if a late need for a substitution has led to this piece being shoehorned in.

Certainly, there is a stilted, slightly unfinished quality to it. Characters often seem to exist to make arguments rather than to act in their own right, with several conversations featuring long expositions of the history of the former Yugoslavia and the atrocities committed during and since its collapse (although as I write this, I’m conscious that numerous literary traditions have a much higher tolerance for political and historical discussion than is generally accepted in anglophone literature – it may be that Gibraltarian literature does too). Coming after the mischievous, subversive antics of the first two pieces, the straightness of ‘Roman Ruins’ is hard to take. I also found the female lawyer less convincing than Sanchez’s male creations. All in all, the story felt uneven.

But then perhaps evenness isn’t necessarily a virtue, or a quality essential to every work or literary tradition. It may be that Sanchez and his fellow Gibraltarian writers are nurturing a literary culture that works according to other standards – one that has no need to appeal to the sensibilities of a citizen of the country that once colonised their homeland. Sanchez has since published numerous works that may have taken his writing in any number of directions. I’m intrigued to learn more.

Diary of a Victorian Colonial and other Tales by M.G. Sanchez (Rock Scorpion Books, 2012)

Picture: ‘Gibraltar’ by John Finn on flickr.com

Book of the month: Susana Sanches Arins

February 27, 2025 By in Book of the month, Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , 9 Comments

I heard about this title from María Reimóndez, a brilliant Galician writer, translator, interpreter, academic and feminist campaigner who I met at Dibrugarh University International Literature Festival earlier this month. Moved by what she had to say about the erasure the Galician language and culture has battled, I asked for her recommendations.

She mentioned several intriguing authors whose work ought to be translated into English, among them Begoña Caamaño (whose two published novels rewrite male-authored classics) and María Xosé Queizán. And for work that has already made it through the translation bottleneck into the world’s most published, language, she directed me to Small Stations Press, an indie that carries an impressive number of works in translation by Galician female authors, including Luísa Villalta and Anxos Sumai.

The title that stood out for me, however, was and they say by Susana Sanches Arins, translated by Kathleen March. Drawing on the author’s family’s involvement in the atrocities of the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War, it is, according to Reimóndez, ‘a wonderful lesson in how to answer the question that many people in the West sometimes ask – what do we do with people in our families who have been perpetrators or complicit with the most terrible crimes in history?’ As soon as I got back to the UK, I ordered a copy.

It’s just as well that Reimóndez recommended the book so warmly because I might have found the blurb and surrounding text a little offputting had I picked it up independently. The book is framed as uncategorisable, written ‘its own genre’ as translator March puts it or a ‘mosaic of miniature narrations’ according to María Xesús Nogueira in her introduction – descriptions that struck me as a little self-conscious and effortful, as though the writing would try too hard to be clever and impress.

But then I started to read. My goodness. The cleverness is there in spades, yes, but it is an embodied cleverness, suffused with feeling. As Arins grapples with the actions and omissions of her forebears, particularly, those of the sinister uncle manuel, she smashes up against the limits of a storytelling framework designed to silence dissent and minimise the transgressions of the powerful.

‘they say history is written by the victors, but it’s also true that they unwrite it. that’s how uncle manuel, who was bad and acted badly, is only in the registers of local history as the mayor of his town for a few years. and that’s all.’

All structures, including language itself, this book demonstrates, have been set up to muffle the truths the author needs to express.

As such, the radical, genre-busting elements of the book establish themselves as attempts to break free from constraints and embrace a larger, more generous mode of expression. From the eschewal of capitalisation and the use of repetition, revisions and contradiction, to the presentation of the text as fragments and the striking deployment of line breaks, we experience this text as a remaking of what it is to use language to explore the human condition.

While the book may forge its own kind of genre, as March claims, it has kinship with a number of other titles that smash accepted frameworks in order to approach unmentionable truths. Two that spring to mind are A Book, Untitled, by Shushan Avagyan and translated from Armenian by Deanna Cachoian-Schanz (which I discuss in my forthcoming Relearning to Read) and Zong! Canadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip’s radical excavation of the murder of around 130 African slaves for insurance purposes in 1781 told solely in words taken from the 1783 court case that determined their drowning was legal.

As in those works, an extraordinary empathy flows through the pages of and they say. The text considers the suffering and joys of all the living beings it enfolds, from oxen dragging heavy loads through to school children arguing over what duty they have to consider the wrongs of the past decades after the fact.

One of the book’s most striking elements is its readiness to embrace and own the fallibility of the author herself. Several times, we see accounts being challenged and revised. Readers even pop up in the text, disputing what was claimed pages before or correcting details. Memory, Arins repeats, is a ‘slippery eel’ and it would be ridiculous to claim that she has some sort of unquestionable authority (the sort of authority paraded by uncle manuel, perhaps) simply because she has set her words down in a book.

As a result of this, the book never ends. The edition I own is an ‘expanded version’, incorporating feedback and stories supplied by the first wave of Galician readers.

‘stories are always undone, and redone. voices are like hands that remove brick after brick.’

Indeed, in the acknowledgements, Arins writes, ‘the best thing that came out of the book for me was a phrase: i have to tell you a story.’

Even the notion of closing the final page and stepping away is undone in and they say. This is a book that invites us in rather than proclaiming a narrative we must meekly accept. It is one in which we participate, regardless of our knowledge of the events it explores, joining its community by virtue of our shared humanity.

and they say by Susana Sanches Arins, translated from the Galician by Kathleen March (Small Stations Press, 2021)

Book of the month: Kim Leine

December 23, 2024 By in Book of the month, Europe, Post-world, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

This novel was a recommendation from leading English-Danish translator Signe Lyng. After we met at the Dublin Book Festival in November, she generously sent me a list of recent Danish-language novels that she admires, including Niviaq Korneliussen’s Last Night in Nuuk and Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume.

One of Lyng’s suggestions stood out to me for two reasons: firstly, because it came out twelve years ago and so the English-language version was likely to fit my criteria of only featuring books published pre-2021 on this blog this year. Secondly, because Greenland is a big focus of the plot, and as anyone who knows about my admiration for the Togolese explorer Tété-Michel Kpomassie will realise, Greenland is a place that particularly captures my imagination. (Indeed, 2025 promises to bring some exciting news on that front – watch this space!)

Kim Leine’s award-winning and bestselling The Prophets of Eternal Fjord, translated by Martin Aitken, tells the story of Morten Falch, an eighteenth-century Danish missionary who travels to Greenland to spread the gospel to the Inuit. Ambitious and earnest, yet riddled with doubts and secret desires (and fixated on Rousseau’s observation that ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains’), Falch finds himself tested in the colony’s harsh physical and social climate. Principles crumble in the face of insurmountable inequalities, corruption and human frailty, with gut-wrenching results.

This is a truly absorbing novel. One of those rare fat books you wish was even longer. The writing is at heart of this. There is a wonderful dexterity to Leine and Aitken’s prose, which takes us inside Morten’s most intimate thoughts (as well as those of a number of characters he encounters), laying bare his blind spots, idiosyncracies, vulnerabilities and desires.

Part of the work’s power comes from the attention to detail and physical sensations. The writing excels at delineating the minute shifts in power dynamics that accompany crucial moments and decisions, showing how easily things might turn in another direction, and yet simultaneously making us feel the inevitability of what transpires.

The most powerful example of this involves a protracted rape scene, which shows the ebb and flow of control, and captures the absurdity, humanity and even wrongheaded moments of tenderness, humour and connection in the midst of the cruelty and brutality being inflicted. ‘I’m sure it’s not as bad as it feels,’ the attacker tells their victim at one point, revealing the self-deception underlying all the worst suffering depicted in the book. Leine presents a powerful anatomy of objectification, showing the way skewed power dynamics warp thinking, feeding off our struggle to conceive of others as having interior lives that are as rich and nuanced as our own.

Interestingly, the book starts with a brief translator’s note, explaining that using the third person pronoun to address someone was a feature of polite discourse in eighteenth-century Danish and that Aitken has chosen to retain it in the English version. This feels like a risky decision – distancing and potentially confusing. Yet Aitken makes it work, establishing a new variant of formal speech that quickly feels natural to the world of the novel. This and the numerous virtuosic descriptions and assertions often couched in deceptively simple terms are testament to the skill of this writer-translator pair.

Take my favourite line, used to describe an infested mattress on the ship on which Morten sails: ‘The lice seep forth like water.’ How horrifyingly marvellous is that? It captures the action so simply and so precisely. You can see the lice rising out of the fibres. It is absolutely the right formulation to bring that moment to life. And if I sat at my desk for half a year it would never occur to me.

And of course it is in this ingenuity, this care, this attention to detail, that the hope of this majestic novel lies. Because although he depicts characters enchained by their own perspectives and desires, Leine reveals by the world he creates for us that we can transcend our small, partial viewpoints. We can look further, we can feel beyond the boundaries of our own experience. The best storytelling allows us to to do this. And it is by making this possible that books like The Prophets of Eternal Fjord live beyond their moment.

And so I come to the end of my year of reading nothing new for this blog. What have I learnt? Well, although my other writing projects and work chairing events at literature festivals mean I haven’t been able only to read books published pre-2021, turning down the volume on the hype around newly published works over the past twelve months has proved instructive.

There are many books that make a big splash when they appear and there are others that echo more loudly with the passing of the years. Sometimes there is a correlation between the two, as with The Prophets of Eternal Fjord. But often books that are big when they come out fall away in time: many of the literary stars of previous eras are barely remembered now.

While big publishers have a fair bit of influence over which titles are visible at first, it is readers who dictate what will be remembered and what will speak beyond its moment. It is the books that stay with us, that we continue to recommend and return to that will live on.

This is exciting and encouraging. It means we all have a say in shaping our literary culture. And it means that small presses that don’t have the marketing fire power of the big houses may still produce work that finds a large audience and reverberates down the years.

Thanks to everyone who has shared their suggestions of older books that stay with them this year. Here’s to many more wonderful literary encounters (and a possible trip to Greenland) in 2025!

The Prophets of Eternal Fjord by Kim Leine, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken (Atlantic Books, 2016)

Picture: ‘Old Church in Upernavik’ by David Stanley on flickr.com

Book of the month: Hugo Claus

October 31, 2024 By in Book of the month, Europe, Post-world, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , 8 Comments

A few weeks ago, I found myself having lunch next to the Belgian author David Van Reybrouck. We were in the writers’ room at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, where he had just taken part in a panel discussion on the end of empire, drawing on his Baillie Gifford Prize-shortlisted book Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World, translated by David Colmer and David McKay.

When I explained my role as the festival’s literary explorer in residence and how it had come out of this project and my first book, Reading the World, he exclaimed: ‘I just had that book in my hand!’ It turned out he had picked it up in the festival’s bookshop and checked the list at the back to see what I had chosen for Belgium. ‘You picked a French-language writer I’ve never heard of!’ he said with a mischievous smile.

More than twelve years after I set out to read the world, it was clearly high time I ventured into Flemish literature. So I asked what he would recommend.

According to Van Reybrouck and to the blurb on the back of my 1991 Penguin edition, translated by Arnold J. Pomerans, Hugo Claus’s The Sorrow of Belgium (first published in 1983) is one of its homeland’s most important novels. Set in Flanders between 1939 and 1947, it follows the coming of age of Louis Seynaeve, whose family collaborates with the Germans during the Occupation. Through the unfolding of tortured domestic relationships, it reveals the national and cultural cost of betrayal, brutality and war.

It’s easy to see why The Sorrow of Belgium appeals to Van Reybrouck, whose Revolusi I was listening to while I read this novel. Both books find ingenious ways to pleat together the personal and the political: while Revolusi interweaves extraordinary eyewitness testimony with wide-ranging historical analysis, The Sorrow of Belgium uses intimate, personal details to reveal the psychological cost of occupation and domination. As Louis obsesses over his father’s secret stash of toffees, navigates a series of disturbing early sexual encounters and steers his way through fraught relationships with the nuns and priests in charge of his education, we see the isolation and insecurity that the horrors unfolding largely offstage have wrought in him.

The book captures the tedium and pettiness that can characterise the everyday experience of momentous historical events (as many of us may have found during the pandemic). ‘The only thing you went through [during the Occupation] was making sure you got enough food and clothes and coal,’ Louis tells his mother. This both is and isn’t true: we see all the characters shaped and changed by international events. Although their reality may be measured out in the availability of provisions and snippets of local gossip, the pressure they are under is always evident, coming out in surprising, disturbing and sometimes amusing ways.

Language and storytelling are constant themes. Louis’s father rails against French speakers, while, at the start of the novel, Louis and his boarding school chums make the sharing of so-called ‘banned books’ a condition for admittance into their secret club of Apostles. Even before the Occupation and certainly during it the narrative seems to hum with an awareness of what may or may not be said, and the form of language acceptable.

The Penguin edition adds an extra layer to this. ‘The people of Flanders speak Flemish, a variant of Dutch which is distinguished from the version spoken in the Netherlands by minor differences in accent and vocabulary only,’ writes Arnold J. Pomerans in his ‘Translator’s Note’. The edition proclaims that it is translated from the Dutch, and the blurb even trumpets The Sorrow of Belgium as ‘the most important Dutch novel to have been published since the war’. All of which leaves a reader like me wondering what Claus – whose work has so much to say about language and how it relates to identity, and who is widely described as a Flemish writer – may have made of this. Would he have agreed with Pomerans’s assertion that the differences between Flemish and Dutch are so slight as to be negligible? Did he in fact write this book in Dutch? Or is this an example of an English-language publisher not wanting to risk putting readers off with too much intimidating detail? Would a novel billed as translated from Flemish (if that is what this is) have been a tougher sell?

Language use in the novel is fascinating in other ways too. The narrative bends to explore the limits of subjectivity, diving in and out of Louis’s consciousness so that we are often uncertain how much veracity to accord events. In a manner reminiscent of anglophone modernist greats such as James Joyce, Claus excels at depicting the partial, fragmentary nature of experience and perception. This is something that Louis, himself an aspiring writer, laments:

‘He failed to see connections between things, that was true. For one reason or another he found this proof of his inability to recognise the basis, no, the very structure of things, incredibly depressing. He swore all the way back home. Others were able to gain an immediate, coherent, rational picture of complex, fragmented objects, facts, incidents all around them, but not he, no matter how hard he tried, but then he didn’t try very hard, because he didn’t know how to.’

Yet what seems to Louis to be a failing is, Claus shows us, the reality of human experience. There is often greater honesty in scraps and fleeting impressions than in neat, coherent accounts. The desires and messiness of the body (often described in vivid detail) are more truthful than the high-flown, impenetrable rhetoric that figures such as Louis’s troubled mentor Rock deliver to classrooms of bemused schoolboys.

The personal is political, Claus and Van Reybrouck show us in their different ways, because it is often the best way we can appreciate what has happened. Patchy and flawed though this appreciation may be, it is necessary to keep us conscious of the distance we have travelled. Our grasp on reality is often feeble and fumbling. That is why we need storytelling.

The Sorrow of Belgium by Hugo Claus, translated from the Dutch (Flemish?) by Arnold J. Pomerans (Penguin, 1991)

Book of the month: André Maurois

September 30, 2024 By in Book of the month, Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , 3 Comments

Some years ago, my father-in-law gave me a secondhand boxset of facsimile editions of the first ten Penguins, released in 1985 to celebrate the industry giant’s fiftieth anniversary.

My TBR pile being what it is, to my shame I only gave it a cursory glance, which showed me that it included works by some of the biggest names of the mid-twentieth century anglophone literary scene: Agatha Christie, Ernest Hemingway and Dorothy L. Sayers among them.

Recently, however, as I was pondering my choices for my year of reading nothing new, the collection caught my eye. Surely there wouldn’t have been any translations in that list of first ten Penguin titles, which proved so successful that the imprint became an independent publisher the following year?

I was wrong. There was one. The very first title, in fact. And it was hardly the book I would have expected to be chosen to launch a publishing venture setting out to offer affordable contemporary fiction.

Ariel by André Maurois, translated from the French by Ella D’Arcy and published originally by the Bodley Head in 1924 before coming out as the first Penguin in 1935, is a biography of the major Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Picking up from its subject’s unhappy time at Eton College and following him through his rise to fame, turbulent friendship with Byron, marriages and the trauma of his children’s deaths, up until his drowning at the age of 29, the book offers a compelling portrait of this singular figure, whose personality ‘poured outwards in a sort of luminous fringe melting into that of his friends, and even into that of perfect strangers’.

Seeing a famous English writer portrayed through French eyes is illuminating. Throughout the opening pages of the book, there is a subtle locating of Shelley in relation to French concerns, from the impact of the French Revolution on the education system that shaped him, to his early reading of Francophone authors. (‘To love these Frenchmen, so hated by his masters, seemed an act of defiance worthy of his courage.’) It is an intriguing example of the way texts centre certain readers by amplifying particular elements or concerns – one of the questions we often explore in my Incomprehension Workshop.

Narrated with engaging wit, the book brims with brilliant anecdotes. A particular favourite of mine is the account of Shelley’s father opening unlimited credit for his son at a bookseller’s in Oxford when he started there as a student: ‘My son here,’ he said, pointing good-humouredly to the wild-haired youth with luminous eyes who stood by, ‘has a literary turn, Mr Slatter. He is already the author of a romance’ – it was the famous Zastrozzi – ‘and if he wishes to publish again, do pray indulge him in his printing freaks.’

With such enthusiastic backing, how could Shelley have failed to take the literary world by storm?

Depictions like these make for a rich and engrossing reading experience. And there is something deeply reassuring and satisfying about the certainty with which Maurois recounts unknowable thoughts and conversations – from the responses of local children watching the recovery of Shelley’s remains to the musings of the young Shelley in the midst of his childhood games.

But there is something unsettling about this too. Such readiness to put words and thoughts into the mouths and minds of those he describes bespeaks an authorial confidence that I find troubling as a writer. While it is seductive to think that such clarity is possible, it is problematic, harking back to a time when authority was perhaps less readily questioned.

This is particularly true when it comes to the unexamined generalisations, assumptions and prejudices that pepper the pages and are stated as fact – everything from the tightfistedness of Scots (‘the citizens of Edinburgh, difficult to get at where their purse is concerned’) to the solution to the Irish question (‘Instead of expecting their freedom from the British, the Irish should free themselves by becoming sober, just, and charitable’).

Women bear the brunt of this. ‘It is rare that pretty women show a taste for dangerous ideas,’ Maurois informs us. ‘Beauty, the natural expression of law and order, is conservative by essence.’ Well, slap my face and call me a Gorgon!

In addition, there are multiple references to Shelley ‘forming’ both his wives, as well as a disturbingly blithe description of him spending an evening in the bedroom of the 16-year-old Harriet when she is ill – ‘next day Harriet was quite well.’ In such cases, a skewed power dynamic seems, if anything, to be a cause for celebration in Maurois’s eyes.

Such a blend of empathy and blindness showing up in this book first published exactly 100 years ago is intriguing. What assumptions and blind spots crowd the work of contemporary writers?

This is one of the joys of reading internationally: it allows us to recognise the narrowness of certain ideas and assumptions by throwing them into relief against stories that work on quite different terms. All credit, then, to Penguin pioneer Allen Lane for launching his bid to take the mass market by storm with a translation – and not just any translation but a reprint of a biography of a poet to boot. What commercial house today would do the same?

Ariel by André Maurois, translated from the French by Ella D’Arcy (Penguin, 1935; 1985)

Book of the month: Ag Apolloni

June 28, 2024 By in Book of the month, Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments

This book was one of two sent to me by Colin. He was going on a trip to Kosovo and volunteered to go to some bookshops on my behalf to see what Kosovan booksellers would choose for me as standout books from their nation.

Kosovo wasn’t included in my original year of reading the world. Although it’s recognised by more than 110 countries, it isn’t officially UN-recognised. As such, it’s one of the many nations that fell under the ‘Rest of the World‘ banner, which ended up being represented by Kurdistan that year.

I was intrigued to see what Colin what find. He sent me an email from Pristina, where he had had a great conversation with a bookseller at Libraria Dukagjini. She recommended three titles that had been translated into English: the international hit My Cat Yugoslavia by Pajtim Statovci, who writes in Finnish, translated by David Hackston; Night Trails by Mustafe Ismaili, translated by the author; and Glimmer of Hope, Glimmer of Flame by Ag Apolloni, translated by Robert Wilton and published by Elbow Books. She also mentioned an untranslated novel, Genjeshtars te vegjel by Fatos Kongoli (which translates Google translates as ‘Little Liars’).

I have MCY, but the other two translations intrigued me. Colin posted these to me, persevering when the British customs returned the books first time round. The Ag Apollini in particular caught my eye. ‘A masterpiece,’ proclaimed Mieke Bal on the cover and it had been named as Kosovo’s 2020 novel of the year. I decided I’d better see what all the fuss was about.

Apolloni calls this book a ‘documentary novel’ and I can see what he means. Built around a real-life research trip he made with academic Dritan Dragusha and film director Gazmend Bajri, the narrative records his responses to the stories of two women whose families disappeared during the Kosovo War. One, Ferdonija, spends her life waiting, still setting the table twenty years later in the hope her four sons will return; the other, Pashka, burnt herself to death when the remains of two of her children were returned.

Yet, in many ways, this book is more essay than documentary: it brings in Apolloni’s thinking on Greek tragedy and weaves together literary and cultural references from throughout human history to cast the hideous events of the recent past in a timeless, mythic light. Reflecting on the fact that of the more than 100 plays Aeschylus is known to have written only a handful survive, it explores what loss on every level means and how it shapes the human condition.

At the centre of the book is an intellectual challenge: how do you tell a story about someone who has no future, whose life is in the past? Apolloni puts it like this: ‘how can you write something about someone who just sits and laments their own fate?’ Stories are surely action and agency, after all? Protagonists do things.

Aeschylus provides the answer: the lost play, Niobe, surely did just that, recording the suffering of the bereaved mother at the heart of it, taking the audience into the centre of her pain. Apolloni sets out to achieve something similar.

And he succeeds. This is no cold, academic exercise. Feeling is everywhere in this book, both in the raw and extraordinary portrayal of Pashka and Ferdonija, but also in the other stories that touch theirs, many of which are realised in no more than a sentence or two.

A particularly moving section involves a visit from a high-profile Holocaust survivor, who comes to meet the war’s victims. ‘What I know is that I must be here at least,’ he tells a woman. ‘I must be. I cannot suffer in your place, but I have to be present at your suffering. That’s all I can do.’

Yet, in being present in such a way, he is himself a sort of timeless figure – ‘like the high priest of Shiloh, determined in his compassion to shelter all of the children and raise them in the tabernacle’. By being intensely part of specific, extreme experience, he assumes a sort universality.

This is a key theme of the book: timelessness is made out of intense nowness, out of raw, compacted pain. ‘Tragic myths are created by great shocks. In the direst cases, we are myths recycled.’

So it is that the contemporary details of Ferdonija’s static existence speak beyond their moment. The descriptions of the photographers posing her and staging her home so as to present her grief as they see fit reveal themselves to be part of the changeless human condition. The feelings this evokes resonate with Niobe, with Electra, with Antigone – with all those mythic female figures who lamented and felt the weight of others’ eyes upon them.

The universality of these feelings stretches not only back through time but outwards across political boundaries. In the face of such a story, all people, regardless of their heritage and allegiances, cannot help but respond. So it is that when Gazmend Bajri screens his film, people on all sides of the conflict respond to the suffering: ‘Pain is human, not national. This has nothing whatever to do with nationalism, and so the audience suffered along with the actor.’

Of course, reading this book now, in another time of great suffering, adds another layer. When many in other parts of the world – in Palestine, in Sudan, in Ukraine, to name but a few – are experiencing similar horrors on a comparable scale, this story feels particularly telling. For many, the thought of reading it might seem too much – the last thing you want when we are already bombarded with so much misery.

Yet this is precisely what makes Glimmer of Hope, Glimmer of Flame uplifting. In the face of so much suffering it is easy to feel helpless and overwhelmed. Storytelling – when it is as honest, humane and insightful as this – gives us a way to get alongside these experiences, to be present. By giving shape to sorrow, stories allow us to commune with it: ‘Gazi films Ferdonija so that we too may feel her tragedy; he knows that this is how you kindle cartharsis in the spectator, participating in the suffering of the main character, so that passio becomes compassio.’

There may not be anything we can do in the face of these horrors, Apolloni shows us, but there is a way we can be.

Glimmer of Hope, Glimmer of Flame: a documentary novel by Ag Apolloni, translated from the Albanian by Robert Wilton (Elbow Books, 2023)