Category Archives: Europe

Book of the month: Laia Fàbregas

January 31, 2024 By in Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

There’s been a wonderful response so far to my call for suggestions for my year of reading nothing new. Translators have been particularly forthcoming, proving once more how central they are to championing the circulation of texts between languages. Already, my TBR pile is teetering under the weight of many new additions, several of which I hope to feature on the blog this year.

First up is a title translated by Samantha Schnee, founding editor of Words Without Borders. She tweeted the following: ‘It’s a novel called LANDING by Laia Fabregas which was published by the wonderful but sadly now defunct HispaBooks back in 2016. They found a lot of hidden gems so their list is worth a look.’

The premise to Landing (most of the opening chapter of which is available to read here) reads like a thriller: a man and a woman sit next to each other on a flight from Barcelona. After the man dies during the descent, the woman takes a box from him that he was planning to give to his son in the Netherlands. The narrative that follows, told in chapters alternating between his and her perspectives, pieces together what led them to this point and how their brief encounter changes the woman’s life for good.

Yet, although the book opens with a bang, this is a not a high-stakes page-turner. It is the writing, rather than the premise, that captivates and compels. Interior and intimate, the narrative brims with insights that are almost breathtaking in their succinctness and directness: ‘how difficult we can make things for ourselves when we don’t have the nerve to say what we’re thinking or what’s going on;’ ‘In a flash I understood why he was the way he was, he had lost his father too young, which is why he’d had to make himself more important than he was.’

The unfurling of the female protagonist’s story and character is particularly fascinating. Early on, we become aware that the lens through which we are looking in her chapters is skewed or perhaps blurred. We learn that she has been told by her boss at the tax office that she ought to be more sociable and that she is engaged in some kind of search. Her distinctive, thrawn take on the world around her is by turns disarming and disconcerting. But it is only gradually that the extent of her trauma and isolation is revealed.

In the course of the narrative, there are some beautiful and quirky philosophical reflections and diversions. I particularly enjoyed the presentation of Ana Mei Balau, a polyglot whose work involves discovering untranslatable words, inventing equivalents in other languages and then receiving royalties for their use for the first few years they’re in circulation. Similarly, the depiction of the artistic journey of Willemien, the man’s dead wife, is wonderfully realised, illustrating a point reminiscent of Susan Sontag’s argument that art shouldn’t represent ideas and submit to interpretation but simply be.

In the face of such subtlety and richness, the demands of the plot can occasionally start to chafe. It is as though the story outgrows its premise – wanting, like Willemien’s art, simply to be rather than to explain itself – with the result that events can occasionally feel a little contrived or forced. A couple of times, the female protagonist tells another character information without letting us in on the secret, leading to a kind of collapse of the fourth wall where we become aware of Fàbregas choosing to withhold details so as to maintain tension. ‘Sometimes the reasons that two people come together are completely circumstantial. But all that matters is what happens next,’ the male protagonist observes. But that isn’t all that matters. Not in this novel, at least. Indeed, what happens becomes increasingly secondary to the rich, interior worlds Fàbregas reveals.

The timing of the book’s original publication may have something to do with this. When my first novel, Beside Myself (about twins who swap places in a childhood game and get trapped in the wrong lives), came out in 2016, narratives that alternated between perspectives to excavate trauma and explore secrets were relatively common. The age of the psychological thriller was upon us. A year later, Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine – to whose title character Fàbregas’s protagonist bears more than a passing resemblance – would take the anglophone world by storm.

But in 2011, when Landen hit the shelves in Spanish, this sort of storytelling was far less prevalent – in English-speaking circles, at least. As such, the concept may have felt more radical and organic than it does now. It may also be that there is greater tolerance in hispanophone literature for withholding information in plain sight.

Though they might read as criticisms, these thoughts aren’t meant negatively. If anything, this experience proves how powerful this novel is: the things that would make this book compelling in most writers’ hands become secondary and slightly awkward on account of the quality of the writing. Fàbregas doesn’t need to employ such mechanisms to convince us to stick with her.

Fifteen years after it appeared in Spanish and eight years after Schnee’s translation was published, Landing remains resonant. It is a book that explores distance in all its forms – in language, in culture, in memory and in our most intimate relationships. It is compelling in spite of rather than because of its premise – a humane, wise and addictive reflection on peopleness that slips by so effortlessly it almost seems to read itself.

Landing by Laia Fàbregas, translated from the Spanish by Samantha Schnee (Hispabooks, 2016)

This year I’m reading nothing new. I’m only featuring titles on this blog published no later than 2020. If you have an older title from elsewhere that you think I should consider, please send me an email (ann[at]annmorgan.me) or leave a comment below.

Book of the month: Leïla Slimani

December 20, 2023 By in Book of the month, Europe, Post-world, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of books about books. Specifically, books about reading, writing and translating. This is partly because I find these kinds of books fascinating but also because my next book is going to be about rethinking the way we read. More details to follow soon…

So it was a joy to hear from academic, translator and champion of women in translation Helen Vassallo (if you haven’t yet come across her Translating Women site, it is a treasure trove of insightful commentary and exciting titles) about a new collection of work by French-Moroccan literary superstar Leïla Slimani that she had just brought into English. And an even greater joy when she kindly sent me a copy.

Unlike the novels that made Slimani’s name (chief among them Lullaby or The Perfect Nanny, as it was variously translated into English, which won the Prix Goncourt and became France’s most-read book of 2016) The Devil Is in the Detail brings together three slender works released separately in French. It is the first in a series published by Liverpool University Press with Florida State University’s Winthrop-King Institute that aims to showcase ‘cutting-edge contemporary French-language fiction, travel writing, essays and other prose works’ that ‘reflect the diversity, dynamism, originality, and relevance of new and recent writing in French’.

Certainly, the collection features a diverse range of prose. Short stories rub shoulders with essays. There’s the transcript of a staged conversation Slimani had with newspaper director and writer Éric Fottorino. And the volume ends with an urgent piece in praise of politician and women’s rights champion Simone Veil, followed by a selection of quotations from her. It is the sort of amalgam that marketing bods at mainstream anglophone publishing houses would veto in a heartbeat.

Thank goodness, then, for indies and university presses. Because the curation of these superficially dissimilar pieces reveals striking threads running through Slimani’s thinking and creative practice.

Take her views on reading’s relationship to feminism. For women, as she explains in On Writing, her interview with Fottorino, time with books is essential because ‘a woman who reads is a woman who is emancipating herself’. With this in mind, she echoes Virginia Woolf’s call for a room of one’s own, claiming that this is important to allow space for reading as much as for writing.

This idea of the part reading plays in shaping women’s agency is demonstrated in the short story ‘Elsewhere’. Protagonist Rim finds books hold the key to her freedom. Her father ‘gorged her with stories’, giving her the world in printed form so that in the end she is confident enough to go out and meet it on her own terms.

Slimani’s reflections on her writing are particularly fascinating. Unabashed about discussing her own struggles – from an abandoned project to inhabit the minds of the Charlie Hebdo attackers to an unpublished first novel – she is disarmingly honest about the effort it requires: ‘There probably are such people, born writers destined for greatness, but I think there are a lot of people who just need to work hard, to meet the right person at the right time or need inspiration to strike at the right moment.’

Such frankness feels unfamiliar coming from such a lauded writer. In the English-speaking world, the fiction of the overnight success still has a powerful hold over the way we talk about books. (‘Ssh, don’t tell people that,’ a PR person muttered to a novelist friend of mine when they mentioned they had six failed manuscripts in their bottom drawer.)

But then, Slimani has always been a writer to challenge convention. Whether she’s penning gripping thrillers that win the highest literary honours (admittedly not such a departure in the Francophone world, where crime fiction more often receives critical acclaim), or exposing the hypocrisy underpinning the treatment of Moroccan women, she is unapologetic in her views, even when this risks controversy. Refusing to allow ‘a pseudo-respect for other cultures’ to muzzle her, she calls out injustice where she sees it.

Yet this forthrightness rests on a belief in the importance of togetherness and the joy of sharing space with those who think differently. The short piece ‘Our Gods and Our Homelands’ ends with an appeal for the France of 2016 to mirror the big Christmas meals Slimani remembers enjoying in Morocco as a child:

‘where everyone was welcome, where no one judged either the drunkenness of some or the outspokenness of others. Where the older generation did not dismiss the things the younger ones cared about, where everyone present chuckled at the blasphemers. Where at the end of the day the only thing that mattered was the awareness of how lucky we were to be together in a world where everything is hell-bent on dividing us.’

As we move into 2024, may our world take on more of the spirit of Slimani’s childhood Christmases. And may our reading, like this collection, be wide-ranging, ambitious, thought-provoking, challenging, engrossing and inspiring.

Thanks to everyone who continues to follow this blog, and whose comments, messages and suggestions keep fuelling and expanding my reading and writing adventures. Wishing you all a very happy Christmas and a joyful New Year.

The Devil Is in the Detail and other writings by Leïla Slimani, translated from the French by Helen Vassallo (Liverpool University Press, 2023)

Book of the month: Krisztina Tóth

November 30, 2023 By in Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

The other night, I was at an award ceremony. No, not the Booker Prize, but one nearly as influential, at least as far as translated literature is concerned.

Held at the Warwick Business School at the Shard in London, the seventh annual prize-giving for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation celebrated a shortlist of eight titles drawn from 153 eligible entries (nearly three times as many as the award attracted in 2017). This year, the shortlist featured texts from two new source languages: Danish and Vietnamese. It being the first year the award welcomed self-translations, there was also one of these on the shortlist: the fantastic graphic novel Your Wish is My Command by 26-year-old Egyptian Deena Mohammed (pictured on the left of the screen above). This went on to win – an exciting choice.

One of the highlights of the evening was the fact that the translators of each of the shortlisted titles appeared either virtually or in person to talk briefly about the books and read an excerpt. Sometimes harrowing, sometimes amusing and invariably thought-provoking, these presentations provided brilliant windows into the works in contention, confirming once more the key role translators play in championing books from elsewhere. Indeed, it was Peter Sherwood’s delivery of two extracts from his translation of Krisztina Tóth’s Barcode that led me to seek it out and choose it as my latest Book of the month.

Though first published in Hungarian in 2006, this collection of fifteen stories feels startlingly fresh. Some of this may have to do with the fact that the majority of the pieces focus on childhood and adolescence, unpacking experiences that have a timeless universality (or at least feel relatable to those of us who were children in the late twentieth century). An American penfriend comes to stay and turns a schoolyard crush sour; a class detention pushes an anxious girl to make a false confession; friends in a deprived housing estate trade rumours about the grotesque demise of former residents while the authorities embark on a project with much more damaging consequences.

Yet the content is only a small part of the book’s power. The stories centring adult experiences – lost love, difficult neighbours, traumatising brushes with medical staff and airport officials – contain a similar compelling immediacy, pointing to something much more subtle and skilful at work in the writing.

There is a virtuosic quality in the leaps Tóth makes. Concision is made much of in anglophone creative writing teaching, with students encouraged to cut all unnecessary words. Tóth’s approach is somewhat different: she sets up her worlds so convincingly that she can afford to skip several steps in her narration, trusting that her reader will keep up. During a beach scene, we jump to a discussion about going to ‘fetch it’ and know immediately that ice-cream is on the cards; the discovery that a child has worms is conveyed through an expletive.

A similar dexterity is at work on the structural level. Tóth constructs many of the stories like essays or pieces of creative life writing: several apparently disconnected episodes or themes are introduced and then brought together to form a point. Between them, Tóth leaves gaps, trusting the reader to infer what is going on behind the scenes.

Though it’s risky and potentially reductive to try to explain a writer’s techniques too neatly, a key glimmers tantalisingly in the title story: ‘Tepid Milk (Barcode Lines)’. There, the narrator describes her method for writing secrets in her school books:

‘I often wrote very personal messages in the bottom margins. I drew the letters extra long, so they became distorted and stick-like, which made the written words look like parallel stripes. And when I also made the stem of the letters a little thicker, the secret looked like a barcode: to decipher it you had to look at it from a different angle.’

These are, in some ways, stories that invite us to consider them from multiple angles. Less like the photographs to which short stories are often compared in anglophone discourse, these are more akin to snowglobes that we can turn and consider from a range of perspectives, seeing what reveals itself and catches the light.

Much as he did at the WIT ceremony, Peter Sherwood brings Tóth’s work to life on the page. His lovely line in cosy colloquialism complements the stories’ conversational and sometimes confessional feel, as well as playing up the moments of humour. This also makes the darkness that lurks in the margins and occasionally spills into the centre all the more menacing.

Seventeen years after it made its appearance in its original language, it is a joy to see this brilliant collection reach the anglophone world. ‘A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say,’ wrote Italo Calvino in The Uses of Literature, translated by Patrick Creagh. In English, Barcode has just begun to speak.

Barcode by Krisztina Tóth, translated from the Hungarian by Peter Sherwood (Jantar Publishing, 2023)

Book of the month: Jörg Mühle

September 29, 2023 By in Book of the month, Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

September is #WorldKidLitMonth, so, with the help of my resident six-year-old, I decided to write about one of the translated children’s books on our shelves (many of which we’ve heard about through the brilliant World Kid Lit project).

As its title suggests, When Dad’s Hair Took Off, Melody Shaw’s translation of Jörg Mühle’s Als Papas Haare Ferien machten, tells the story of what happens when Dad’s hair flies away and goes on an adventure with its owner in hot pursuit.  Illustrated by the author, it takes readers on a wild goose chase that sees Dad causing all sorts of chaos around town and keeps you guessing right to the end.

Humour is the book’s great strength. My daughter and I both love the moment where Dad pounces on a lawn, believing the blades of grass to be his hair. There’s also a brilliant sequence where the hair sends postcards from its travels, featuring a sparkling set of puns ‘from hair, there and everywhere’ that really get under dad’s skin.

The illustrations make the book memorable. Mühle studied at the Offenbach School of Design and the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and his talent shines on every page (although my daughter feels the cover could be more interesting, perhaps featuring a speech bubble giving more a sense of dad’s horror and outrage at his hair’s exodus).

Although the story goes through a number of surprising twists and turns, it has a relatively mundane beginning. My daughter thinks this is a bit of a missed opportunity. It’s a shame that the hair takes off in the bathroom, she says, because that is a very obvious place for something like that to happen. She would also like there to be a door to Ancient Egypt somewhere – although she accepts this would make it a rather different story.

For the most part, though, she thinks it’s a great book with a wonderful and unexpected ending that keeps the laughs coming right to the final page.

I agree. As children’s authors often observe, the challenge for writers in this genre is that they have to satisfy two audiences: the child at which the story is nominally aimed and the adult who will buy or borrow the book, and may read it aloud repeatedly. The upshot is that some contemporary children’s books have a slightly arch, two-faced feel, spinning a story to please the little one while winking at the parent over their head. Sometimes, the plot will be a little too obviously engineered to push a message calculated to encourage good behaviour or positive attitudes. In such a version of this book, for example, Dad might learn to make peace with his hairless state and discover that he is enough on his own.

The joy of When Dad’s Hair Took Off is that it has no truck with such well-intentioned double dealing. It is simply funny, anarchic and beautifully presented. As such, it unites rather than divides its audience, making the reading experience a truly shared and rewarding endeavour.

When Dad’s Hair Took Off by Jörg Mühle, translated from the German by Melody Shaw (Gecko Press, 2023)

Book of the month: Kate Roberts

July 25, 2023 By in Book of the month, Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , , 6 Comments

Another unfamiliar translated classic this month, but this time it’s from my home country. Retranslated into English by Katie Gramich in 2012, Kate Roberts’s 1936 novel Feet in Chains is acknowledged to be a masterpiece, albeit one likely to be unfamiliar to many speakers of the UK’s majority language.

Set in rural north Wales, the novel follows the fortunes of the Gruffydd family of Fridd Felen, a farm in the hills of Snowdonia, in the decades after Jane marries Ifan up until midway through the first world war. Drawing on Roberts’s observations and research during her time living in the region, it reveals the economic and social injustices that entrench and deepen inequality, leading many of the local quarrymen and their families to be crushed (literally and figuratively) by forces beyond their control.

Yet, although the subject matter is grim, this is not a relentlessly depressing novel. There is humour in the interactions between the characters and their jockeying for position in the local hierarchy. The opening, where newly married Jane attends chapel in her new community and nearly faints during the preacher’s longwinded sermon, sets up a series of rivalries and tensions that plays out beautifully in small domestic details, snide comments and telling looks over the following chapters.

Language is a central theme. Jane and Ifan do not speak English, although several of their sons go on to learn it when they win scholarships, and this provides the source for much discussion about identity and belonging over the course of the novel. Here’s an example from when Jane attends the prizegiving at her son Owen’s school:

‘I wish I could have understood what that man who was giving out the prizes was saying,’ said Jane Gruffydd, ‘didn’t he look like a nice man? Did he give a good speech, Owen?’

‘Yes.’

‘Isn’t it a shame we don’t understand a bit of English, Ann Ifans?’

‘I don’t know, indeed; you understand quite enough in this old world as it is. Who knows how much pain you manage to avoid by not knowing English?’

Owen and Jane Gruffydd laughed heartily.

Yet not knowing the language turns out to be a source of suffering in many situations. It is the ability to speak English that awakens the younger generation to some of the injustices built into their society. Through reading books in English, they learn about the political ideas of the left and are inspired to start unionising and agitating for better working conditions.

And it is Jane’s inability to speak the language of the national administration that leads to the cruellest scene in the book, when she receives a letter about her son, Twm, who is away fighting in the trenches in France.

These papers were in English. She saw Twm’s name on them and his army number, and there was another thick sheet of white paper with just a small bit of English on it.

She ran to the shop with the letter.

‘Richard Huws, here’s an old letter in English come. Can you tell me what it is? It’s something to do with Twm at any rate.’

The shopkeeper read it, and held it in his hand for a moment, saying nothing.

‘Sit down, Jane Gruffydd,’ he said, tenderly.

‘What is it?’ she said. ‘Nothing’s happened, has it?’

‘Yes, I’m afraid it has,’ he said.

‘Is he still alive?’

‘No he isn’t, I’m afraid. Ann!’ he called from the shop into the kitchen, ‘bring a glass of water here now!’

At such moments, the reticence and understatement in the writing is extraordinarily powerful. Roberts brings us so close to her characters’ experiences that language of any kind is almost redundant (although the effect also relies on distance – the assumption that the reader, with the benefit of historical hindsight, will have a more accurate estimation than Jane of the realities of life in the trenches and understand the contents of the letter before she does). The dignity and spareness in the prose packs a punch that no amount of description could achieve.

That Roberts has made a deliberate choice to hold back at these points becomes clear when you set them against her meditations on the political and economic context of the characters’ lives. Perhaps more didactic than we are used to seeing in English-language British novels, these passages expand on the causes of the personal dramas we watch play out, making no secret of the author’s views on where the blame lies.

To those used to reading UK literature in English, this perspective and approach may feel unsettling and strange. The choice of what to explain and what to leave implicit may jar or surprise.

To me, however, as the grandchild of a bilingual Welsh speaker, there is something compellingly familiar about this narrative. In the rhythms and cadences Katie Gramich has achieved in her translation, I hear my grandfather’s voice. His startling directness, his mischievous humour. The story feels true and close in a way I don’t quite have the language to explain. For the first time, it has made me think about the realities of the lives of my great-great-uncles, who were at work down the mines in the same period as Ifan works in the quarry. They died long before I was born and spoke a different language to me, but through this story I was able to enter into something of their experience. Much as I found when I encountered my first book in translation from Welsh at the end of my 2012 year of reading the world, reading this novel felt like coming home.

Feet in Chains (Traed mewn Cyffion) by Kate Roberts, translated from the Welsh by Katie Gramich (Parthian Books, 2012)

Picture: ‘View‘ by Hefin Owen on flickr.com

Book of the month: Eva Baltasar

April 28, 2023 By in Book of the month, Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

Back in the Neolithic age, when I was an undergraduate student, there was a fashion at my university for professors to set provocative questions on the contemporary literature exam paper. One example went something like this: ‘The Booker prize rewards the right author but rarely the right book. Discuss.’

The truth is, literary prizes can be tricky things. At their best, they are great platforms, raising up brilliant books that many of us would never otherwise hear about. As I found several times during my quest to read a book from every country, they can be invaluable guides for readers with little experience of books from certain parts of the world, particularly when they are led and judged by experts on the writing of the region.

However, prizes can also be skewed by the interests and biases of their founders and sponsors. At their worst, they run the risk of rewarding literature that conforms to a certain kind of system or worldview rather than purely championing quality writing. Or, as the essay question suggests, they make awkward compromises driven by external factors, plumping for safe choices over daring, exciting work.

The International Booker Prize, however, seems to be doing a fairly good job of dodging these pitfalls. Since it merged with the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2015, it has recognised a number of brilliant and surprising works that refuse to conform to the anglophone publishing industry’s prevailing trends.

This year’s shortlist is no exception. Not only does it feature Standing Heavy, a Book of the month of mine from a little while back, but it also contains the engrossing and mind-bending Boulder.

This is a novel that resists a summary. ‘Nothing is essential when you refuse to imprison life in a narrative,’ explains the protagonist in the opening pages, as she describes her nomadic existence, largely as a chef on board cargo ships. Gradually, however, the scattered elements in the pages are pulled into alignment by a relationship that at first grounds and then overwhelms the narrator, to the point where she risks losing herself.

Part of what is so arresting and subversive in the writing is its presentation of a female voice discussing female experience as though from the outside. ‘I talk about women without counting myself among them,’ says the narrator. ‘I’m not a woman. I am the cook on an old merchant ship.’

As a result, when her lover Samsa decides to have a child, the narrator finds herself observing gestation and early motherhood, while struggling to define and defend her own role in the family. At times, her tone is misogynistic. In fact, her femaleness gives her licence to express things that may sound unacceptable in a male voice. Mired in domesticity, she explains how responsibility ‘sutures itself to the brain and contaminates the blood with its narcotic fluids’, leading her to seek solace with drinking buddies and other women in the time-honoured tradition of many a jaded husband.

But there is also a wonderful freshness to her perspective. Her description of observing Samsa deliver their child is one of the most powerful reflections on the process of giving birth I’ve had the privilege to read:

‘It becomes clear to me how imperfect nature is. Imperfect and cruel, almost furious. It’s not wise and never has been. How many centuries have to pass before a woman can give birth without it looking like an experiment? The midwife keeps a cool head. She asks the baby to flow and Samsa to flow with it. All I can think about are cesareans. I am witnessing something reckless. Like stealing jewels from a museum or breaking prisoners out of a police van—there’s just so much that can go wrong. Every second contains a possible mistake. Danger sticks out its tongue and coats everything in a layer of gluey, lethal drool.’

The use of language is key to the book’s success (hearty credit to translator Julia Sanches here). Fragments at the opening. Contradictions. Disjointed phrases and objects. The narrator drifting from place to place, garnering fleeting impressions that are gradually harnessed into longer sentences as convention snares her in its net.

One of the most thrilling aspects is the writing’s capacity to simultaneously reveal and conceal the emotional or psychological reality of the situations it describes. On several occasions, a word that the narrator seems to have intended in a figurative sense later proves to have literal truth. As she becomes unstuck from herself, so her words turn against her, at once masking and advertising the extent of her predicament.

For my money, this thrilling subversion of language and convention is what makes Boulder’s place on the International Booker Prize shortlist so well deserved. But perhaps that’s because subversiveness appeals to me. It could be that disruption is simply another kind of system and it’s in my nature to reward and promote stories that conform to it.

Either way, the fact remains that this is a wonderful, thrilling read. Slender but far from lightweight, this novel rides roughshod over heteronormative storytelling etiquette. It’s great to know that its shortlisting will mean it finds its way into many more readers’ hands.

Boulder by Eva Baltasar, translated from the Catalan by Julia Sanches (And Other Stories, 2022)

Picture: ‘Merchant ships’ by Andres Alvarado on flickr.com

Book of the month: Kristín Ómarsdóttir

October 31, 2022 By in Book of the month, Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , 1 Comment

This has been a particularly exciting month for me. As Literary Explorer in Residence of the Cheltenham Literature Festival for the second year running, I got to spend nine days in conversation with a fascinating array of writers and storytellers from all over the world.

There were too many wonderful events to list here. However, some personal highlights included an hour-long discussion with Japanese sensation Mieko Kawakami (facilitated by the brilliant interpreter Bethan Jones), my Read the World interview with Kenyan author and activist Nanjala Nyabola, and talking about writing the refugee experience with Dutch writer Rodaan Al Galidi and Caryl Lewis, author of Martha, Jack and Shanco, translated from the Welsh by Gwen Davies, which was the final book of my year of reading the world back in 2012.

Then, on the last day of the festival, I chaired a discussion between two fabulous novelists, including the author of my latest Book of the month. Guest curated by bestselling US novelist Celeste Ng, whose latest novel All Our Missing Hearts presents a bleak vision of an America in which discrimination against those with Chinese heritage is enshrined in law, the theme of the session was dystopian fiction around the world. Joining me to discuss this fascinating topic were US debut novelist Jessamine Chan, whose compelling The School for Good Mothers has already been named by The New Yorker as one of the best books of 2022 so far, and Kristín Ómarsdóttir author of Swanfolk, translated from the Icelandic by Vala Thorodds.

Set in a country that no longer exists, the novel follows Elísabet, an employee of the Special Unit of the Ministry of the Interior, whose life is thrown into chaos when she encounters a hybrid species of swan women living in the woods near her home. Caught between the tightly controlled existence required by her employer and the weird excesses and demands of creatures that defy the logic she has been taught to believe, Elísabet must find a way to bridge the gulf between these two worlds.

As this summary suggests, there is a mythic and even surreal quality to the narrative. In our discussion, Ómarsdóttir was open about the fact that she draws heavily on Icelandic fairy tales and legends in her writing, and this shows. Not only are the swanfolk themselves – human from the waist up and avian from the hips down – like something out of mythology, but the mysterious nature of the world in which we find ourselves and the lack of certainty over what is real and how all this came to be lend the book a dreamlike feel.

As readers, the ground is constantly shifting under our feet. The double dystopia that unfolds before us – Elísabet’s stifling daily existence and the swan people’s need to live secretly for fear of persecution – plays by rules that are never fully explained. Instead, hints are dropped. We learn that Elísabet is under constant surveillance, beholden to her constantly shifting employee rating and afraid of being promoted. Similarly, the swan people explain little of their culture and mores, but veer between violence and tenderness with alarming unpredictability.

Sometimes, the result is very funny, particularly when this subversion of expectations takes place on the linguistic level. Ómarsdóttir and Thorodds crash together registers and concepts in a way that sometimes made me laugh with surprise. Humour in this book, though, comes with a health warning. For much of it, Elísabet is engaged in writing a report on the city’s stand-up comedians. Yet when the comedians finally appear, they give a performance that is anything but funny. (‘I’m a very serious person,’ said Ómarsdóttir when I asked her about this, with a twinkle in her eye.)

There are also moments of extreme consternation, many of them centring around the question of legacy and motherhood. The swanfolk, whose egg yield has dwindled to almost nothing, fear extinction – a plight that put me in mind of Jacqueline Harpman’s dystopian tour de force I Who Have Never Known Men, translated by Ros Schwartz, and also made for a brilliant discussion with Jessamine Chan, whose The School for Good Mothers presents a nightmare US in which parents found to be in breach of their responsibilities are sent to re-education camps.

Yet in Swanfolk even a reading that posits the book as an investigation of motherhood is not left to stand unchallenged: when an egg is delivered into Elísabet’s safekeeping at the ministry, her colleagues cast doubt on its origins, intimating that the swan people may be all in her mind.

As a result, we are constantly second-guessing the story and ourselves. Words become unmoored from the meanings we are used to giving them. Like Elísabet, we begin to doubt our instincts and lose the power to articulate our thoughts. Observations glimmer in the narrative and wriggle out of reach. And lest we are tempted to settle on anything concrete, the book admonishes us: ‘Books that search for a conclusion and closure are at risk of disappointing their readers. Conclusions dampen the impulse to innovate and to imagine.’

Perhaps the most telling insight into what’s going on at the heart of this complex, troubling and surprising read came during my discussion with its author. Ómarsdóttir revealed that, in her view, modern society is like a spaceship speeding away from reality. It could be that we need storytelling like this to bring us back down to Earth.

Swanfolk by Kristín Ómarsdóttir, translated from the Icelandic by Vala Thorodds (Harvill Secker, 2022).

Photo by Monica Dunkley

Book of the month: Ivana Sajko

August 31, 2022 By in Book of the month, Europe Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

Women in Translation Month is a brilliant time for book recommendations. A cursory search on #WITMonth on Twitter invariably brings up a wealth of tempting suggestions, and that’s even without the list of new releases that WITMonth founder Meytal Radzinksi generously shares every year to help promote the reading of translated literature by women and address the imbalance that sees more than 65 per cent of literary works coming into English authored by men.

So it was that I found my August book of the month after a tweet caught my eye. I can’t say what it was about this particular post, or indeed remember who wrote it, but something in the enthusiasm of the words prompted me to seek out Mima Simić’s translation of the oddly titled Love Novel by Croatian writer, theatre director and performer Ivana Sajko.

In spite of the warmth with which I’d seen the book discussed, I nearly didn’t get past the first chapter. Opening in the middle of a fight between the couple whose troubled relationship it follows, the narrative bristled with fury and violence, striking a sharp, angular tone that I wasn’t sure I had the energy to stick with for a whole book, even one as slender as Love Novel (which weighs in at not much more than 100 pages).

It was only the softening at the end of the first chapter – when the unnamed female protagonist, an out-of-work actress, retreats to her child’s bedroom and tries to soothe the toddler with a string of brittle and whimsical claims, and flights of fancy – that made me think I might be missing something and persuaded me to persevere.

I’m very glad I did. Over the following pages, I discovered that this slight book is a work of enormous range. The emotional intensity that had nearly overwhelmed me in the opening chapter was not the relentless, one-note barrage of anger I’d feared but an illustration of Sajko’s extraordinary capacity to suffuse her narrative with the feelings of those she portrays. From the ludicrous to the poignant and the excruciating to the banal, she inhabits her characters’ realities with a freshness that is at times quite astonishing, rendering this story of a couple pushed to breaking point by circumstances largely beyond their control as gripping and engaging as the most high-stakes thriller.

This power probably doesn’t come from Sajko alone. Mima Simić’s ‘Translator’s Note’ at the end, in which she reveals that this story of poverty and struggle is hers too – one lived by almost all those she knows who grew up in the former Yugoslavia – makes clear how invested she is in this project. ‘The world of Ivana Sajko’s Love Novel is my world,’ she says, going on to reveal that the translation process took her more than a year because ‘every time I opened the book, it was like a punch in the gut. A punch by someone I knew, a family member.’

Simić’s description of how hard she worked to overcome the ‘not-quiteness’ of the story’s expression in another language, and her evident commitment to rendering the work as powerfully as possible in English provide an interesting case study for those considering the issue of the direction in which translation should work. (For a long time, the prevailing assumption in the anglophone industry has been that translators ought to translate into their mother tongues, with the result that native English speakers have largely been the ones who win contracts to bring foreign works into the world’s most-published language. Recently, however, a number of people have begun to query this, rightly demonstrating that this can be limiting and short-sighted, restricting the movement of texts and the opportunities open to those working in different languages.)

Love Novel makes a powerful argument for approaching the question on a case-by-case basis. Not only is the power in the writing impressive (although Simić is quick to stress that she doesn’t believe you have to have lived through an experience to translate it well, and I would say the same is true for writers), but there is a quality in the voice that feels distinctive, and which a first-language English speaker may have hesitated to try to achieve.

It’s hard to know how to write about this – the language we have with which to review translations in English is still very underdeveloped and sparse. But while being entirely grammatically correct (with the flexibility that literary writing allows), the text has a striking timbre that seems to complement its subject matter and place of origin. It’s something to do with the cumulative effect of choices that skew its rhythms in a certain direction, accenting the voice. So it is that, as we read about everything from irreverent reflections on how Jesus milked his crucifixion to a nosy neighbour’s grizzly demise in a wheelie bin, the world in which this is all taking place remains present.

Yet, in the way of the best novels, the writing is universal too. One of Sajko’s key methods for achieving this is reflecting psychology at the sentence level, shifting tenses and tumbling from contemplation into action and even hallucination as scenes become fraught. She knows and shows how we think in extreme moments – that peculiar blend of insight and delusion that at once connects us to and separates us from the rest of the world. What’s more, though the experience portrayed in this novel may feel deeply personal and particular to people who lived through it, like Simić, for those of us staring down the barrel of an economic crisis, much of the book will read as scarily fresh and timely.

Brilliant, strange, funny, angry and sad, this is an extraordinary novel. A welcome addition to the anglophone bookshelves. Highly recommended.

Love Novel (Ljubavni roman) by Ivana Sajko, translated from the Croatian by Mima Simić (V&Q Books, 2022)

Picture: ‘Zagreb graffiti’ by duncan c on flickr.com

*Ukraine special* Book of the month: Oleg Sentsov

March 30, 2022 By in Book of the month, Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , 5 Comments

This month has been an unusual one in my reading life. Shortly after the news of Russian forces invading Ukraine, I took the decision to spend March exploring Ukrainian literature. With the exception of a few non-fiction titles I’m looking at for other writing projects, I devoted my reading time over the following four weeks to books from the nation, drawing my choices from suggestions shared with me on Twitter, posted on other platforms, and published in a rash of recent articles, such as this.

I think it’s the first time I’ve focused on one country for an extended period since I started reading the world. To date, I’ve tended to skip about between nations as my curiosity, research obligations and other people’s recommendations dictate. It was fascinating to dedicate a period of time to a body of writing from a particular region, and see what connections and thoughts this generated.

First, a couple of caveats. It’s important, particularly when talking about literature in translation, not to fall into the visibility trap – the assumption that what is available in English is a representative spread of a community’s stories. The factors that decide which books travel beyond their country of origin’s borders are complicated, various and shifting. Often (as I have discussed previously), the tiny proportion of stories that make it into the world’s most published language from many parts of the world say more about what feels authentic to commissioning editors in London and New York (and what their marketing departments believe people like you and me want to read) than they do about the breadth and character of a particular region’s literature. (Although it is to be hoped that initiatives such as the recent translation drive spearheaded by Tault may do something to change this, at least in Ukraine’s case.)

Broadbrush generalisations, such as the tendency for Ukrainian literature to contain irreverence, humour and the sort of defiant resilience in the face of oppression we have seen reported in many news stories, are easy to make. Indeed, I have encountered numerous examples in recent weeks – from the contrarian heroine of Tanja Maljartschuk’s A Biography of a Chance Miracle, translated by Zenia Tompkins, and the outrageous gangsters who stalk the pages of Isaac Babel’s Odessa Stories, translated by Boris Dralyuk, to the quixotic plot to force the EU to grant Ukraine membership by smuggling the entire population through a tunnel into Hungary that forms the premise of Andriy Lyubka’s Carbide, translated by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler.

What’s more, it would be tempting to say that works such as Carbide – published with the tagline ‘The much anticipated response to Voltaire’s Candide’ – and Yuri Andrukhovych’s Moscoviad, translated by Vitaly Chernetsky and built around a 24-hour binge in Moscow after the manner of James Joyce’s Ulysses, reveal a streak of audacity in Ukrainian writing. Just as Oksana Zabuzhko deconstructs the novel form and language itself in her groundbreaking Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex, translated by Halyna Hryn, so these writers appear unafraid of helping themselves to the world’s classics and turning them to their own ends.

Yet, to make claims like this without knowledge of what hasn’t made it through the translation bottleneck would be foolish. It would be to forget that these themes and characteristics may have been part of what made publishers judge these stories to have international appeal – and that collectively they may present a somewhat distorted picture, one that at least partly reflects anglophone interests and concerns. Reading in English as I do, I could not hope to achieve a balanced, comprehensive survey of Ukrainian literature, even if I devoted a year to the project.

So what was I trying to achieve with this kind of targeted reading? For many of those who have scoured the round-ups of Ukrainian literature shared around the web in recent weeks, a desire to understand the horrors unfolding in the nation will have been a key motivation. This is quite natural and certainly anyone who spends time reading translated literature from Ukraine will be left in no doubt as to the complexity and longevity of the tensions that have fuelled this crisis. Perhaps one of the most nuanced and engrossing depictions can be found in Andrey Kurkov’s Grey Bees, translated by Boris Dralyuk, which comes out in the US this week.

Taking too anthropological or socio-historical an approach to reading makes me uneasy, however. I have never been comfortable with the idea of books speaking for their communities. I don’t think individual stories can be reliable telescopes through which to view life elsewhere. Nor should they be.

So, I decided to return to first principles and remind myself of the ethos that underpinned this project when I launched it ten years ago: curiosity; exploration; accessing voices; seeing what spoke most powerfully to me.

This month, that turned out to be Life Went on Anyway: Stories by Oleg Sentsov, translated by Uilleam Blacker. Put together over email while celebrated film-maker Sentsov was imprisoned in Russia on dubious terrorism charges (he was released as part of a prisoner exchange in 2019), the translation of the collection contains a series of autobiographical pieces centred largely on childhood, plus an opening biography that, according to Blacker, was originally included by mistake.

The simplicity and directness of the writing is disarming. ‘A bit about my personal life: for more than ten years I’ve been living with the same woman. I’m married to her. I have two little kids with her. I love them all,’ runs a section of the erroneously included ‘Autobiography (In Literary Form)’ – in which Sentsov admits that he didn’t take a nine-to-five job on graduating because he’d have murdered his co-workers and that he spent a year ‘ripping people off’ selling herbal products on a market stall.

When he turns this frankness to childhood, the writing soars. The depiction of the bond between a boy and his pet in ‘Dog’, for example, is deeply moving:

‘It was fun to hang out in a gang, but I preferred walking alone in the forest with my dog. They were unforgettable moments. When he searches for you, after you’ve deliberately stayed behind a bit and hidden in the bushes. Searches for you and finds you. And how happy you are when you find each other again after such a brief parting. The dog is happy that he found his master, and the master is happy that he has such a clever dog, and you’re both happy because you love each other and you’re together again.’

This switch into the present tense is a hallmark of the collection. At such moments, it is as though Sentsov turns to the reader to compare notes, saying: ‘you recognise this, don’t you? You’ve been here.’ And even if you haven’t, the power of the writing – the trust and confidence it contains – is strong enough to sweep you into the vision, so that it is as if you too, in your childhood, walked through the woods with your dog.

Humour works to strengthen this connection. This is less the thrawn, irreverent wit we sometimes see celebrated as being distinctively Ukrainian than an affectionate admission of the ludicrousness of human existence, often linked to an awareness of its fragility. In ‘Testament’, for example, the narrator imagines his funeral and the scattering of his ashes in the rain, with a cheeky grandchild peering into the urn to see a clump of Grandpa still hanging on. Similarly, numerous walk-on characters are endowed with quirks that could easily be handled cruelly and yet, through Sentsov’s eyes, seem oddly precious because of their uniqueness and ephemerality. (Witness: Svetka, the talentless would-be singer who sets her sights on stardom decades before the TV screens are thronged with tone-deaf wannabes.)

At root, the writing is driven by a profound empathy that enables Sentsov to inhabit the rounded, conflicted reality of a huge number of the figures who pass through his pages. As he does in ‘Grandma’, he excels at presenting a situation and then taking the reader inside the truth of it, revealing how far from simple even the most bald of statements may turn out to be. In this way, he reveals the workings of some of humanity’s most profound and problematic experiences – from childhood bullying to the development of social conscience, and from the processing of guilt and loss to the passing of time – using his own life and perspective as the lens through which to focus his vision.

For this – to me, at least – is what great stories are. Not explanations. Not studies of human action. Not definitive representations of the experiences of particular groups. But a person saying: here I am in all my silliness, vulnerability, wonder and mystery. And this is how the world looks to me.

Life Went on Anyway: Stories by Oleg Sentsov, translated from the Russian by Uilleam Blacker (Deep Vellum, 2019)

Picture: ‘A Ukrainian flag in the streets of Berlin-Mitte‘ by Felipe Tofani on flickr.com

Book of the month: Jacqueline Harpman

February 28, 2022 By in Book of the month, Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , 7 Comments

Getting translated into English is a tricky business. An anglophone book deal represents an opportunity for a writer to access a huge international audience because novels that appear in English have a greater chance of securing other language deals. But, with literary translations making up 3 to 5 per cent of publications in much of the English-speaking world, there is a narrow bottleneck to negotiate to achieve this kind of global reach.

For many books, time is of the essence. Editors love novelty and the idea that they are discovering talent before anyone else. As a result, most novels that don’t get picked up for translation in the year following their first publication are unlikely to make it beyond their original language.

Every so often, however – perhaps because of a news event or the efforts of a particularly tenacious champion – an exception breaks through. And sometimes books get several incarnations. Such is the case with Belgian author Jacqueline Harpman’s classic I Who Have Never Known Men, which was published in French in 1995, and first appeared in Ros Schwartz’s translation as The Mistress of Silence in 1997, before being republished under the more direct translation of its title in 2019, seven years after its author’s death.*

I was lucky enough to interview Ros Schwartz for the Royal Literary Fund’s Writers Aloud podcast some months ago. In a metaphor that feels uncannily resonant for the times we are living through, she used the French word ‘passeur’ to explain what translators do. ‘Passeurs were people who helped refugees escape during the war,’ she told me. ‘[A translator is] a passeur, a ferry if you like, between cultures.’

The image of the passeur is also relevant to Harpman’s novel. Narrated by a nameless girl who is one of 39 female prisoners held in a subterranean cage until the day an alarm sounds, leading the guards to flee while the door is open, the novel explores exile and alienation. Left to wander a deserted landscape that they cannot even be sure is Planet Earth, the women piece together the fragments they discover to try to understand what has happened to them and how to survive until the bitter truth finally reveals itself.

The richness and depth with which Harpman inhabits her narrator’s experience is astonishing. Indeed, it is no surprise that she was a psychoanalyst, for she presents the psychological shifts with which the protagonist encounters her predicament incredibly vividly. Those of us who have lived through lockdowns will recognise the truth in the heightened sensitivity you develop and the greater significance small events and objects take on when your world shrinks. Similarly, it is fascinating how thoroughly Harpman brings to life the experience of living without timekeeping devices and the ingenious way the narrator adapts to this.

The novel is also a powerful portrait of how we try to make sense of things – the ways we attempt to read situations we lack the necessary contextual information to understand. As so many of us do when confronted with texts that work differently to the kinds of stories we are used to, the women in the novel draw on their own limited knowledge to plug the gaps in their comprehension of this strange new world.

In the case of the narrator, who has been imprisoned since she was an infant and knows little of adult human civilization, this tendency is particularly clearly demonstrated in the naive fantasies she constructs around the young guard who keeps watch over the cage. Ignorant of the mechanics of sexual relationships, she tells herself stories that blend scraps of information with instinct and guesswork to bring about a mysterious ‘eruption’ in her maturing body. ‘This was extremely difficult because I was simultaneously the inventor of the story, the narrator and the listener awaiting the shock of the unexpected.’

Indeed, exploring the potential and purpose of storytelling forms an increasingly urgent theme. Repeatedly, along with questions about what defines human existence, the novel invites us to consider what a text is and what it does. Towards the end of the book, the narrator, who, we learn, is writing the account we’re reading, reflects on the strange alchemy that happens when someone reads a story: ‘The reader and I thus mingled will constitute something living, that will not be me, because I will be dead, and will not be that person as they were before reading, because my story, added to their mind, will then become part of their thinking.’

Yet, even as she examines storytelling, Harpman resists many of its conventions. There is a playful irreverence at work sometimes in the text: ‘Underneath, there were several items,’ writes the narrator at one point. ‘[…] But I shan’t go into the difficulties I had in identifying and naming all these things because that would be too tedious and I wouldn’t enjoy it.’ The reader’s curiosity is just one factor in the crafting of this story; this text must also serve its author’s pleasure.

At other points, the narrative seems to critique itself: ‘So few things happened during all those years of walking. I found the bus, I lost the road, I arrived here.’ It is almost as though Harpman is taunting the reader with her refusal to bow to plot conventions by withholding the revelations and resolutions the setup seems to demand. Indeed, on the face of it, this is a profoundly bleak and open-ended book.

To read it this way, though, would be to miss the subtleties at work beneath the surface that bring about the very transformation the protagonist claims reading is capable of effecting. For in being worked upon by Harpman and Schwartz’s fine words, we find ourselves changed from passive bystander to active participant. The story we hold in our hands may be a lonely one. But the fact that we are able to read it and enter into its protagonist’s strange experiences conveys a message of profound hope.

I Who have Never Known Men (Moi qui n’ai pas connu les hommes) by Jacqueline Harpman, translated from the French by Ros Schwartz (Vintage, 2019)

Picture: ‘Tundra Landscape‘ by Alaska Region U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service on flickr.com

*Corrected on 1 March 2022 to include details of the earlier edition.