Tag Archives: book review

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: Baqytgul Sarmekova

January 30, 2025 By in Asia, Book of the month, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I love small presses. They are the heroes of the international-literature world, taking risks and bringing into Englishes stories that would never win the backing of the more conservative and commercially driven big houses.

Tilted Axis Press is one of several that I particularly admire. The essay collection Violent Phenomena that it published in 2022, exposing many of the inequalities embedded in the way stories travel, has been a huge influence on me. I refer to it several times in my forthcoming book Relearning to Read: Adventures in Not-Knowing (published by Renard, another lovely small press – preorder your copy here).

I also really admire Tilted Axis Press’s definition of itself as ‘an artistic project, for the benefit of readers who would not otherwise have access to the work [it champions]’ and ‘an ongoing exploration into alternatives – to the hierarchisation of certain languages and forms, including forms of translation; to the monoculture of globalisation; to cultural narrative, and visual stereotypes; to the commercialisation and celebrification of literature and literary translation’. In its small way, I hope this blog also works towards these goals.

So, when I heard that Tilted Axis was running a crowdfunder to help secure its future, I decided to go all in and make a sizeable pledge in return for choosing a bundle of their titles. This month’s featured book was one of these.

To Hell with Poets, translated by Mirgul Kali, is the first English-language collection by Baqytgul Sarmekova, a rising star of Kazakhstan’s literary scene. Wide-ranging and daring, its usually extremely brief stories present ‘shabby aul life’ and urban angst. Their subjects include a colt at the centre of a legal dispute, a family conned by a false betrothal, a dog left to fend for itself after its owner dies, and a woman caught up in an extramarital affair.

‘Parabolic’ was one of the first words that came to my mind when I started to read the collection, but it would be misleading to describe it this way. Though they are concise and contain some of the same symbolic resonance as parables, Sarmekova’s stories do not push a moral viewpoint and try to teach a lesson. Instead, they simply present life as it is, in all its bewildering grubbiness.

Often, as in the case of the title piece, the stories centre on women caught in patriarchal structures that strip them of their idealism and dignity. Indeed, the decision to include the year it was completed at the end of each story makes their achievement all the more impressive – many of these pieces were finished just as the #MeToo movement was beginning to sweep the anglophone world, and capture abuses with a directness and clearsightedness that is still out of reach for many.

Yet To Hell with Poets is not a bald attack on injustice. The situations it presents are nuanced and complex, and all players are at the mercy of forces greater than they are, as well as their blindness to others’ feelings.

The stories are also funny. Sarmekova has an eye for the grotesque. And there is a great deal of bathos in the abruptness with which several characters meet extreme fates. At times, a mischievous, gossipy tone breaks through the texture, almost as though the author is sitting with us, swapping anecdotes.

Indeed, there are moments when Sarmekova seems to make herself her subject. In ‘The Night the Rose Wept’, for example, the protagonist laments her tendency to notice imperfections and make cruel observations during moments of tenderness and connection: ‘I might notice a lipstick smudge on my friend’s teeth as she laughed with abandon, and a cynical thought would cross my mind. Or I might spot my other friend, standing apart from everybody and barely smiling because she was self-conscious of the wrinkles that appeared on her face when she laughed too hard.’ It is difficult not to hear the voice of the author here, reflecting on the cost of her gift for clearsightedness.

And gifted she certainly is: she has the ability to capture a character’s world in a sentence. Often a single detail tells us all we need to know about someone’s vulnerabilities and motivations. There is also a particular virtuosity in the way she handles endings – resisting the temptation to click the box shut too neatly, but rather finding something wistful and compelling that, even though it may be relatively tangential, elevates the piece.

Structurally, the stories feel a little repetitive. Sarmekova favours starting with an arresting image, personage or problem and then ploughing into back story to explain how it came about. The final story in the collection, ‘In Search of a Character’, breaks this mould and hints at new directions in her writing. It will be interesting to see how she develops this as she progresses. More please.

To Hell with Poets by Baqytgul Sarmekova, translated from the Kazakh by Mirgul Kali (Tilted Axis Press, 2024)

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: Angèle Rawiri

November 26, 2024 By in Africa, Book of the month Tags: , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

This was a recommendation from Suroor Alikhan, who kindly invited me to be part of the Hyderabad Literature Festival Online series earlier this year and wrote about our event on her blog. Suroor is an extremely widely read person, so I knew when she suggested Gabonese author Angèle Rawiri’s The Fury and Cries of Women, translated into English by Sara Hanaburgh, that it would be worth a look. As the translation came out in 2014, the book fell comfortably before the 2021 cut off I’ve set myself for my year of reading nothing new. I wasted no time in ordering it.

The novel follows Emilienne, a wealthy businesswoman in what we are told is a surprisingly progressive marriage according to the norms of her community. She is the major breadwinner and her husband – who, like her, studied in Paris – was present at the birth of their daughter Rékia and plays an active role in childcare. But all is not well, and when Rékia dies suddenly and violently, the tragedy exposes cracks in the family that threaten Emilienne’s very existence, plunging her into an identity crisis, and forcing her to confront the prejudices, inequalities and values underpinning her life.

It took me a while to understand quite how pioneering a book this is. Because the translation came out in 2014 and because the subject matter feels contemporary (involving a lot of reflection on secondary infertility and female sexuality, including a same-sex love affair), I had assumed the novel was relatively recent. It was only when the subject of AIDS came up some way into the narrative that I discovered it was first published in 1989.

Not only that, but Angèle Rawiri is widely credited with being Gabon’s first novelist, leading with Elonga, published in 1986. I’ve featured a number of trailblazing female writers lauded as their nations’ first published women on this blog over the years (among them Kunzang Choden and Paulina Chiziane), but it is rare to see a female writer named as a nation’s first published author.

Rawiri certainly seems to feel a duty to tackle national problems in her writing. Women’s rights take centre stage but many other political and social issues pass through her narrative too, among them corruption, the way workers become jaded in a capitalist system, and the legacy of colonialism. I was particularly struck by a passage in which Emilienne’s husband Joseph extolls the merits of a single-party system:

let’s have the courage to recognize that we are a selfish tribal people. Take a look at what is happening in the ministries and state-owned companies! First they hire a member of the family, regardless of their abilities, and, if they have none, they look among those around them from their own ethnic group. No, believe me, in order to have a real multiparty system, Africans are going to have to manage to place national interests above their own. In the meantime, the single-party system seems to be what we need. Let me explain: when a country is under the aegis of a single party, its nationals, whatever group they’re from, are forced to meet, discuss, and exchange their opinions about issues that concern them all. They don’t have the time to dwell on tribal issues. Collective motivations almost always win against frictions between individuals. Obviously, with such a political alliance, men learn how to tolerate one another, to love one another, and above all to work toward the same ideals. Isn’t that the goal sought by our leaders!

I don’t agree with Joseph (and I suspect Rawiri doesn’t either), but I’ve never seen the arguments for such a system put so persuasively before.

The passages that deal with female agency and reproductive rights are particularly arresting, and sometimes shocking. For all her professional status and qualifications, Emilienne finds herself at the mercy of a value system that judges women’s worth by their ability to bear children. When she struggles to conceive a second child, her social stock plummets and she is judged to be in need of a ‘cure’. (Indeed, at one stage we are told that a woman choosing not to have children would have to be ‘sick’ in the head.)

As with her presentation of the arguments for a single-party system, Rawiri makes the characters who express these views alarmingly persuasive. (Indeed, were it not for the dedication of the novel to a friend who struggled to conceive, it would sometimes be tempting to think the author’s sympathies lie with them.) In this, the work recalls the brilliant One Part Woman, reviewed on this blog last year.

The novel presents numerous challenges for a twenty-first century reader steeped in the Anglo-American literary tradition. Pacing, a perennial sticking point when stories cross borders, works differently: some apparently major issues are presented or resolved abruptly, while the narrative lingers on events that may seem relatively inconsequential to Western eyes. Some of the dialogue feels rather direct or on-the-nose, and the handling of sexual encounters works according to different norms and assumptions. I also found the choice (whether Rawiri’s or translator Hanaburgh’s) to withhold specific cultural terms a little distancing – referring to another community as ‘that ethnic group’ rather than by name or telling us that characters are speaking the ‘local language’ rather than giving us the word for it.

But this is distance worth travelling in order to experience this trailblazing literary work. Rawiri was not only dealing with challenging subject matter but also carving out a path for a new tradition, depicting places and people who had never been seen in novels before. When novelists like me sit down to write, we follow well-trodden paths, lined with countless examples of how the world around us might be depicted on the page. But although Rawiri may have had some exemplars in the work of Francophone African feminist writers like Mariama Bâ, no-one in her nation had put her surroundings into a published print story before. The scale of her ambition and achievement is extraordinary.

The Fury and Cries of Women (Fureurs et cris de femme) by Angèle Rawiri, translated from the French by Sara Hanaburgh (University of Virginia Press, 2014)

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)

#WITMonth Book of the month: Angélica Gorodischer

August 29, 2024 By in Book of the month, South America, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
kalpa imperial

This #WITMonth, it was the translator who attracted me to my featured title. I often find this is the case: now that I’m relatively well versed in how books come into English, there are certain translators’ names that predispose me to try stories. Because I admire other projects they’ve done or know them to be particularly committed to championing interesting voices, I regard their involvement with a book as a sign that something is worth investigating.

In the case of Angélica Gorodischer’s Kalpa Imperial, originally published in Spanish in 1983, it wasn’t the translator’s other translations but her novels that piqued my interest. Despite not being particularly keen on sci-fi (although I’m warming up to it in my fifth decade), I’m a big fan of the work of the late Ursula K. Le Guin. If you haven’t read her, you’re in for a treat.

Along with her novels, poetry, short fiction, criticism and books for children, Le Guin’s website lists four translations in her bibliography. Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire that Never Was is one of these.

As its subtitle suggests, the book charts the history of an imaginary empire. It does so through multiple voices, bringing alive the idiosyncrasies, cruelties, obsessions and triumphs of a host of the personages who have shaped and been shaped by this history.

Many of these figures are marvellous creations. Take the dealer in curiosities who buys a boy who can dance in an era when dancing has been forgotten. Or the urchin who shrugs off her abusers and rises to be empress. And there are numerous sadists in the mix too – many of them military men who delight in pursuing their proclivities in the professional arena.

The prose is similarly inventive and startling. Lyricism jostles with surprise on every page. There is also plenty of humour.

Lists in novels are frequently a bugbear of mine: I find them wearing and am often tempted to skip them. But Gorodischer and Le Guin’s lists engrossed me – masterclasses in rhythm and the subversion of expectations.

There is subversion at the structural level too. Sometimes events are narrated several times by different voices – fishermen, passersby, servants and a dedicated storyteller. Indeed, along with the empire itself, the figure of the storyteller is the only consistent presence in the book. Most discussion of the novel I’ve seen declares that there are multiple storytellers involved in it. This wasn’t clear to me – I read the storyteller as being a single voice. But if you know different, please tell me!

Certainly, the tone of the storyteller is varied. At times fawning and affectionate, the narrator can also be downright rude to the reader – ‘if you could imagine anything you wouldn’t have come here to listen to stories and whine like silly old women if the storyteller leaves out one single detail.’

What remains consistent, however, is the book’s excavation of the mechanics and purpose of storytelling. ‘I’m the one who can tell you what really happened, because it’s the storyteller’s job to speak the truth even when the truth lacks the brilliance of invention and has only that other beauty which stupid people call mean and base,’ the narrator declares at one point. And at another: ‘a storyteller is something more than a man who recounts things for the pleasure and instruction of the crowd[…] a storyteller obeys certain rules and accepts certain ways of living that aren’t laid out in any treatise but are as important or more important than the words he uses to make his sentences[…] no storyteller ever bows down to power’.

There is a clarity to the prose and to the insights the book presents into its characters’ motivations that reminded my of Le Guin’s other writing.

This got me thinking anew about the influence of readers and translators on stories. It’s something that’s been on my mind lately as I’ve been receiving feedback from beta readers on the manuscript of my forthcoming book, Relearning to Read: Adventures in Not-Knowing (preorder your signed collectors’-edition copy now!). The brilliant insights and responses I’ve had from these first readers have been invaluable in helping me finetune the book, and they have developed my understanding of it too. Relearning to Read now carries their influence and is the stronger for it.

Translators, of course, aren’t simply readers providing feedback that a writer may respond to or ignore. They rewrite a book in their own words. But this rewriting is in response to reading. It can’t help but meld their own talents and perspectives with the strengths and weaknesses of the primary work. There is an inevitable hybridity to the end result.

Of course, part of what attracted Le Guin to the project of translating Kalpa Imperial may have been the sense of a synergy between her work and Gorodischer’s. Unlike many translators, Le Guin had the luxury of picking and choosing the books she worked on. Translation wasn’t her primary career.

Still, reading her rendering of this Argentinian sci-fi/fantasy classic, I can’t help but wonder if translation itself doesn’t have something of the fantastical or speculative about it: a processes that fuses the capabilities of two minds. It sounds like something Le Guin herself might have envisioned in one of her novels: a revolutionary technology that enables the magnification of creativity, multiplying the powers of those involved. In that sense, when a book is the product of two writers working at the top of their game, as the English version of Kalpa Imperial seems to be, might translations offer a supercharged reading experience, a kind of literature squared?

Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire That Never Was by Angélica Gorodischer, translated from the Spanish by Ursula K. Le Guin (Small Beer Press, 2013)

Picture: ‘kalpa imperial’ by Dr Umm on flickr.com

Book of the month: Machado de Assis

July 31, 2024 By in Book of the month, South America, The stories Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

This month, the seventh in my year of reading nothing new, I delved back further than usual. My edition of July’s featured title was published in 2020, but the original came out some considerable time before that, in 1881.

The English translation of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas is a collaboration between two translators to whom I owe a debt of gratitude. Back in 2012, Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson were among the nine volunteers who translated A casa do pastor by Olinda Beja so that I would have a book to read from São Tomé and Príncipe.

As its title suggests, the novel by the legendary Brazilian author Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis presents an account written from beyond the grave by its title character, an aristocrat with a string of failed love affairs and thwarted political ambitions to his name. It wastes no time in declaring its singularity. Right from its dedication (to the first worm to gnaw its author’s flesh), it demonstrates a determination to explode conventions and taboos.

The narrative also rides roughshod over literary customs. Digressions abound, chronology scatters and we are repeatedly informed that the author is minded to cut a section we have just read, as well as told about notes for chapters that will not be written, and, once, presented with a passage in which all dialogue is blank. ‘This is, after all, the work of a dead man’, Brás Cubas or whatever remains of him declares, as if with a shrug.

Indeed, being dead seems to absolve the protagonist-narrator of all obligations to please, giving him carte blanche to lay into whomever he chooses. The reader is no exception, and neither is Brás Cubas himself:

The main problem with this book is you, the reader. You’re in a hurry to get old, and the book progresses slowly; you love direct, sustained narrative, a regular, fluid style, whereas this book and my style are like a pair of drunkards: they stagger left and right, start and stop, mumble, yell, roar with laughter, shake their fists at the heavens, then stumble and fall…

Of course, regardless of its narrator’s declarations about having no need to please, such devil-may-care posturing is extremely entertaining and pleasing. A great deal of humour comes from a choice of register that deflates the pretensions of the characters. There is also a wonderful inventiveness to the writing. Although he often abandons analogies in mid-flow, the imagery Brás Cubas does use is often startlingly fresh and witty. ‘One morning, while I was strolling in the garden, an idea appeared on the trapeze I have inside my head,’ he declares at the start of chapter two. Among the many things to admire about the translation is surely the fact that Jull Costa and Patterson have managed to achieve a voice that is simultaneously erratic and distinctive, that, while roving among the registers, feels true to its singular speaker. (Although the inclusion of footnotes creates a strange tension in this anarchic, irreverent text: I found myself constantly questioning whether what seemed to be straight, factual glosses were in fact up to something I hadn’t fathomed – maybe they were.)

Another of the book’s startling qualities is the way it seems to reach both forward and backwards in literary history. Its irreverence and textual high-jinks recall the works of eighteenth century writers such as Sterne; there is more than a touch of the picaresque about it; yet its inventiveness also hints at psychedelia and the experimentation of the greats of modernism. In this sense, Machado has achieved a powerful impression of, if not the eternity that entraps its narrator, then timelessness.

The same goes for its satire. At once of its moment and resonant beyond its setting, Machado’s exposure of the hypocrisy of this society built on the backs of slaves, in which the desire for fame eclipses genuine advancement and learning, speaks to worlds he can never have known.

At one point Brás Cubas even seems to reach from the pages to grip our hands. He imagines a ‘bibliomaniac’ seventy years or so on from the time of writing considering the novel. The description is not flattering – he conjures a sallow, white-haired creature whose main interest in the volume is because it is rare rather than of any literary value.

I like to think I’m some distance from the figure Machado imagined. Yet, knowing the author to have been something of a ‘bibliomaniac’ himself – he reportedly set himself the goal of reading all the world’s classics in their original languages – I suspect he may have more sympathy for such creatures then this depiction implies. At any rate, another seventy years on from the time of the bibliomaniac Brás Cubas pictures, this bibliomaniac salutes his author, even as she corrects him: the value of his novel has nothing to do with its scarcity. It is thankfully widely available. And a jolly good thing too.

The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson (Liveright, 2020)

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)

Book of the month: Fatou Diome

May 30, 2024 By in Africa, Book of the month, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

Don’t judge a book by its cover, the saying goes. Frankly, though, if I were assessing Fatou Diome’s The Belly of the Atlantic, translated by Lulu Norman and Ros Schwartz, on its appearance, I probably wouldn’t have picked it up. The pictures of the figure in the boat and the foot on the ball feel wearily familiar, if not a little clichéd.

Besides, although I’ve read and enjoyed football novels in the past – and know that a great writer can make any topic absorbing – I usually do so in spite rather than because of such subject matter. Not being a sports fan, I rarely find knowing a book is built around a particular game tempting.

But I did pick up this novel, which came out in French in the early 2000s and in English in 2006, for two reasons: partly because Senegal was one of the nations that had relatively few novels available in translation when I did my original Year of Reading the World, but also because I’m a particular admirer of the work of one of its translators: Ros Schwartz. Seeing her name on the title page suggested to me that this would be worth a try.

In fact, this book subverts the apparently familiar tropes of its cover in powerful ways. Narrated by Salie, who lives in France, the novel crystallises around a series of phone calls from her younger brother, Madické. A football fan with a difference, Madické is obsessed not with the French team beloved of his peers but with the exploits of the Italian player Maldini and needs to hear how every match he plays turns out. The one television on their home island of Niodior is temperamental to say the least, hence his SOS calls to his sister to fill him in. These conversations prove the catalyst for a series of reflections on and memories of Salie’s life, the immigrant experience, and the gulf that travelling from one world to another opens up between those who leave and those who stay behind.

The female perspective is part of what makes the book so striking. The opening descriptions of football mania and boys revelling in the beautiful game invite us to assume a male narrator. It is only gradually, with the repeated presence of strong, female characters, and strikingly direct observations about discrimination and the hypocrisy of patriarchal society, that the narrator’s position becomes clear. Indeed, it is only some pages into the narrative that Salie reveals herself as ‘a moderate feminist’ who ‘wouldn’t want testicles for the world’, and who looks with some disdain on the standards her brother is expected to conform to in order to satisfy her home society’s conception of ‘man’.

This covert disruption of what might be thought of as the default narrative voice for a book like this makes much about it fresh and startling, even twenty years after its publication. Familiar ideas are presented from new angles. And the tales of those who remain on Niodior, trapped in cycles of poverty and prejudice, gleam with troubling brilliance. The story of Sankèle, who pays a terrible price in an effort to escape an arranged marriage, is particularly memorable.

For a reader in the UK, the novel may seem uncannily prescient. In its exploration of the desire that many young people have to leave Niodior and try their luck in Europe, and its presentation of the grim reality and crushing obligations that await those who make the leap, the book seems to anticipate the stories that flooded Western media years later of African migrants braving horrific risks in search of a better life. For example, here’s Salie reflecting on the gap between Madické’s idea of her daily life and the reality:

‘It was no use telling Madické that as a cleaning woman my survival depended on the number of floor cloths I got through. He persisted in imagining I wanted for nothing, living like royalty at the court of Louis XIV. Accustomed to going without in his underdeveloped country, he wasn’t going to feel sorry for a sister living in one of the world’s great powers after all! He couldn’t help his illusions. The third world can’t see Europe’s wounds, it is blinded by its own; it can’t hear Europe’s cry, it is deafened by its own. Having someone to blame lessens your suffering, and if the third world started to see the west’s misery, it would lose the target of its anger.’

Of course, the fact that these words written in the early 2000s read as prescient to someone like me also shows up the selectiveness of the anglophone world’s storytelling: the so-called ‘migrant crisis’ is not a new phenomenon, Diome’s novel reminds us, regardless of what prevailing accounts of it may lead us to assume.

Structured as it is, the book can feel a little static. Salie is relatively passive – partly because she is trapped by her situation and partly because she is trapped by the past. As such, she is perhaps more in the position of one of the oral storytellers of her homeland, recounting rather than participating in events. The writing, however, brims with energy. Like its perspective, the novel’s imagery is fresh and striking, melding Senegalese traditions, nature and computer technology to paint the world in bold colours. If, occasionally, the narrative tips over into polemic, well, who are we to argue?

Reading The Belly of the Atlantic made me reflect on many things. It reminded me of the valuable way stories from elsewhere can disrupt, problematise and reshape the narratives that surround us. It also helped me remember how important older books are in anchoring us and counteracting the kneejerk impressions of the now. If we only ever read new titles – no matter how brilliant they may be – we can easily become detached from the threads of history, and lose sight of the lines and grapnels cast back down the decades that bind us to the world and to one another.

The Belly of the Atlantic by Fatou Diome, translated from the French by Lulu Norman and Ros Schwartz (Serpent’s Tail, 2006)