Tag Archives: history

Book of the month: Tsering Döndrup

April 30, 2026 By in Asia, Book of the month, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

‘I wonder if you’ve considered any books from Tibet so far,’ Chris Peacock wrote in a comment on this blog a few weeks back. ‘In recent years, there have been an increasing number of translations from so-called “minority” peoples and languages in China such as Uyghur, Mongolian, and Tibetan. Still a small number, relatively speaking, but there are some really significant books out there. My translation of the novel The Red Wind Howls came out this year, by Tsering Döndrup, one of the most prominent authors in contemporary Tibet. He’s a wonderful writer, and very worth your time.’

I love getting recommendations like this. Although I often feel guilty about how few of them I am able to follow up, it is one of the great privileges of this project that experts and booklovers all over the world share details of intriguing stories that would never otherwise come to my notice.

Peacock’s suggestion arrived at a fortuitous moment. I have long been meaning to seek out some Tibetan literature, having become increasingly intrigued by stories from minority communities in mainland China since featuring Waiting to Be Arrested at Night, the extraordinary memoir by exiled Uyghur poet Tahir Hamut Izgil, translated by Joshua L. Freeman. In addition, I’d been really intrigued by the novel Tibetan Sky by Ning Ken, translated by Thomas Moran, another recent Book of the month. If a depiction of the region by a Beijing-based Sinophone writer could capture my imagination so powerfully, how might a narrative by a native Tibetan compare?

When my copy arrived, I was shocked to learn from Peacock’s introduction of the toll the sharing of the novel has taken on its author since he self-published it in 2006. The authorities seized all his copies on the pretext the book did not have an ISBN and, after a Chinese translation was released in Hong Kong in 2012, Tsering Döndrup had his party membership revoked, his passport confiscated and his salary and pension reduced through demotion. What was it about this story that made its author face such punishment?

The Red Wind Howls is broken into two parts. The first focuses on the experiences of Alak Drong, a lapsed lama who is sent with many compatriots to be turned into a ‘labour machine’ as part of the atrocities that followed the 1958 uprising and during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, ‘a time turned upside down’ that saw widespread famine, tens of thousands of Tibetans killed and many villages reduced to women, children and the elderly. Part two centres on Lozang Gyatso and Tashi Lhamo, another former lama (although one who adheres to his vows) and a young woman who enters into a sham marriage with him for her protection.

The first thing that struck me was the voice. I suppose because of its importance, bravery and the weightiness of the subject matter, I had expected the novel to feel rather dense. It would be a necessary rather than an enjoyable experience, I anticipated – one of those books that I felt pleased to have read rather than savouring in the moment. Instead, what greeted me (and credit is due to Peacock too here) was a fresh, irreverent, surprising narrative that dodged between registers, often undercutting high-flown rhetoric with earthy retorts.

There is a wonderful directness to the writing that allows Tsering Döndrup to take readers to the heart of his characters’ problems in a handful of words. ‘Trying to cultivate the land at more than eleven thousand feet above sea level brought about as much benefit and did about as much damage as trying to graze your cattle in the ocean,’ he writes, succinctly demonstrating the lunacy of the centralised agricultural policies that ravaged his homeland. Elsewhere, in order to convey the full force of the horror that engulfed Alak Drong and his peers when they were transported to labour in a forest hundreds of miles from home, he writes: ‘For a free person, a forest might be a nice vacation spot, somewhere to get away from it all. But for someone deprived of their freedom it’s the very opposite: it feels like a prison cell.’ A deep humaneness underpins the writing, extending not only to the characters and the wronged people for whom they stand but also to the reader and how they might struggle to get to grips with this story.

Structurally, the book feels unusual, at least to an anglophone reader like me. There are no chapters – a deliberate choice, as the author makes clear when he tells us, midway through, that ‘If this novel were divided into chapters, then this would be the chapter about the Eight Cold Hells.’ The narrative is far from linear, swooping between current events, memories, the future, other life incarnations and flashbacks. Some aspects of this seemed familiar to me – I explored a similar approach (without the layering of reincarnation) with the traumatised character of Jonah in my second novel, Crossing Over, in an effort to reflect the way that deep suffering disorganises events and throws a person out of time.

With The Red Wind Howls this initially discombobulating approach ultimately had the effect of making the reading experience easier: it absolved me of the need to try to grip onto dates and places, struggling to keep straight the details of this unfamiliar history. Instead, I could give myself over to the immediacy of the experiences described without trying to fit them into a larger pattern or make sense of them – indeed, as Tsering Döndrup shows us, there is no making sense of what Tibet endured during this period.

Yet there are some sharp psychological insights to be gleaned from it. Tsering Döndrup’s satirical eye comes to the fore in skewering both the hypocrisy of many of the religious figures, who readily betray their followers for their own benefit, and the perpetual revisionism of the authority figures, who are forever rewriting history in order to make failures either a success or the fault of those who suffer the most from them. Heartrendingly, he shows us what becomes of people when all is stripped away and how easily any of us might give up our principles in the face of persecution.

But this is not a polemic or a morality tale. Tsering Döndrup is a highly nuanced writer and though there are elements of satire in this book, there is none of the black-and-white thinking that often flattens issue-led novels. No-one is entirely innocent in the way things unfold and Tsering Döndrup resists apportioning blame along purely ethnic lines. The world of his novel is messier and more troubling than that.

Nor is this a world devoid of hope. It is there in the deeds of the anonymous well-wisher who annually slaughters a sleep tethered outside Lozang Gyatso’s tent so that he can survive without breaking his vows. It is in the awkward love that grows between him and Tashi Lhamo. And it is in the secret cache of sacred texts stored in a secluded cave in the hope of better times, texts that ultimately transform Tashi Lhamo’s life.

It is perhaps particularly cruel that a story that places its hope in books should have caused its author so much suffering. To date, although Tsering Döndrup’s other works are available in Tibetan, The Red Wind Howls remains off-limits in his native language. By bringing it into English, Christopher Peacock has allowed this powerful voice to speak to the world’s largest cohort of readers (when you count second-language speakers). Thanks, Chris, for bringing it to my attention.

The Red Wind Howls by Tsering Döndrup, translated from the Tibetan by Christopher Peacock (Columbia University Press, 2025)

Book of the month: Susana Sanches Arins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book of the month: Kim Leine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book of the month: Namwali Serpell

January 31, 2022 By in The stories Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Some weeks ago, I had an email from R. Like many over the past couple of years, they’d had a tough time and found solace in reading. Having been keen to expand their horizons, they had embarked on an international quest, using the List on this blog as a source of ideas and supplementing these with their own discoveries when they felt like it or didn’t like my choices (the best way to use this website, if you ask me).

Their favourite read not featured on my list was The Old Drift by Zambian author Namwali Serpell. I decided to give it a try.

Spanning more than a century, a large cast of characters and numerous countries, The Old Drift is a proudly ambitious book. Similar in scope to The Eighth Life, which R also enjoyed, the novel begins in 1904 with a small pioneer settlement near Victoria Falls, and traces how the connections and traumas forged in that messy collision of people ricochet down the generations. Over its course we meet, among many others, blind British tennis player Agnes who marries across the colour bar, a philandering doctor intent on finding a vaccine for AIDs, the Zambian astronaut who never was, and a woman covered in hair.

Stylistically, the novel is something of a Trojan horse. On the face of it, the form and storytelling are familiar, recalling many of the sweeping, colonial narratives authored in decades past in the global north. Yet this one has a difference: there is a bite to the tone and a zing to the wit that undermines that familiar structure and forces the reader to look again at many of the prejudices and assumptions that might have passed unexamined in such stories before now.

Recalling the telling historical commentary of writers such as Abdulrazak Gurnah, Serpell explodes any notions of glory that may yet be attached to empire in the reader’s mind. The pioneers in her book are a ragtag, brutal bunch, most of whom, having failed elsewhere, decided to ‘go where pale skin and a small inheritance went further’.

The risk with big-canvas stories such as this is that the scale overwhelms the individual elements; yet Serpell does not fall into this trap. She inhabits her vast range of characters – even the unsympathetic ones – with powerful humanity. Her depiction of Agnes’s sight loss is moving, as is her portrayal of the way her husband, Ronald, edits his homeland’s history to present the version he believes she wants to hear:

‘During his time at university, Ronald had learned that “history” was the word the English used for the record of every time a white man encountered something he had never seen and promptly claimed it as his own, often renaming it for good measure. History, in short, was the annals of the bully on the playground. This, he knew, was what Agnes would expect to hear. So Ronald skipped the real story: the southern migration of the Bemba tribe from the north in the seventeenth century, the battles with other tribes and the bargains with Arab slave traders that had left only a straggling group of warriors wandering the great plateau with its many lakes, carting around a wooden carving of a crocodile, their chitimukulu’s totem, until one day, in the valley at the base of a circle of rocky hills, they came across a sapphire lake, shiwa, with a dead crocodile, ng’andu, on its shores – a sign that they should settle there. Instead Ronald began the story with a white man, one he knew Agnes would recognise from her Grandpa Percy’s stories.

‘”No!” she exclaimed. “The most famous man who ever lived in Africa? He died there?”‘

Serpell is well versed in the challenges of blending history and fiction: it’s astonishing how many national events she weaves through the narrative, from the painful struggle towards independence and the subsequent oppression under Kenneth Kaunda’s United National Independence Party to democratisation and economic struggles, before stretching forward into a nightmarish near-future where the very notion of independence itself is under threat.

Occasionally the research sits a little too close to the surface of the narrative (although when it comes to episodes such as Edward Makuka Nkoloso’s Zambian Space Programme – complete with training techniques such as rolling aspiring astronauts downhill in oil drums – it is joyous). Partly, this is because the book appears to be outward-facing – written for readers beyond Zambia’s borders – with the result that Serpell sometimes explains customs, attitudes and context that she would probably leave unglossed for those closer to home. It would be nice to see her demand a little more of her readers instead of taking such good care not to leave us confused.

This generosity can sometimes slow the pacing, particularly in the final chapters when events seem to demand an acceleration in the telling (at least according to the norms of European novel structure). The mosquito chorus that punctuates each section, though witty and playful, also sometimes slows the pace.

At its best, however, the novel is sublime. Absolutely engaging, mightily imagined, funny, heartfelt and fearless. Thanks, R, for this worthy and welcome addition to my list!

The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell (Hogarth Books, 2019)

Picture: ‘Safari on Rails, met Rovos Rail dwars door Afrika …’ by Martha de Jong-Lantink

Book of the month: Nino Haratischvili

March 31, 2020 By in The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , 6 Comments

In the UK, just before the Covid-19 lockdown came into force (an experience I have begun documenting on a new blog), there was a book-buying boom. Forced with the prospect of staying at home for weeks or even months, many people decided to stockpile reading matter. They favoured long reads, from contemporary tomes by authors such as Hilary Mantel and Hanya Yanagihara to epic classics by Leo Tolstoy and George Eliot.

I have another suggestion for those looking for lengthy, quality novels to add to their lists. Tipping the scales at around 940 pages, Hamburg-based Georgian author Nino Haratischvili’s The Eighth Life: (for Brilka), which has won multiple awards and is longlisted for the Booker International Prize, is a formidable text. Its subject matter is equally weighty, for it takes in 20th-century Georgian and Russian history, depicting the events of more than a hundred years through the lives of several generations of a single family.

The reading experience itself is far from heavy, however. Framed as an exploration of family history written by the grudging Niza, who is co-opted into recovering her niece, Brilka, after she tries to run away to Vienna, the book surprises with its playfulness and ingenuity.

This playfulness takes many forms. There are the structural games that see the reader offered multiple beginnings and teased with hints at events that may not unfold for hundreds of pages. There is the blending in of elements of the fantastic, most notably in the form of the devilishly addictive hot-chocolate, the recipe for which is only passed to select family members on account of the belief that it curses those who taste it. There is the frequent subversion of expectations, whereby characters defy their stereotypes, with the old proving to be much sturdier, the beautiful much more ugly, and the strong much weaker than their outward appearances suggest. There is plenty of humour too, at least in the early stages.

Humour in writing, particularly humour that carries through translation (credit here to Ruth Martin and Charlotte Collins), is often a sign that a writer has a sharp eye. This is certainly true of Haratischvili. The book teams with insights and observations about how we humans work that readers everywhere will recognise, making us feel deeply connected to the story.

This is a powerful tool because much of the history presented here will be unfamiliar to many English-language readers. As I found with several of the eastern European books I encountered during my 2012 quest to read the world (among them my Latvian and Armenian titles), exploring books from countries that have had little literature translated into English reveals how partial the prevailing anglophone understanding of political events is. In the case of the 20th century, the British involvement in the First and Second World Wars – and the subsequent focus on the fighting in Western Europe in history teaching and memorialisation – seems to have constructed a mental wall down central Europe, beyond which few people in this country look.

Haratischvili smashes through this barrier. She forces us to feel the personal consequences of Stalin’s reign of terror, Soviet brutality, the War in Abkhazia and the Sukhumi massacre.

In this, the novel’s length assists her. It takes so long to read that, by the time we reach the end, the events of the early volumes – kept alive in our minds by carefully deployed repetitions and references – have passed into our long-term memory. It is as though we, too, have lived through them, been changed by them and are now looking back on them with wiser eyes.

The book is a little patchy. There are some tropes that do not land quite as I suspect the author hopes (the carpet-weaving metaphor wheeled out in the opening chapters to describe the business of storymaking, for example, feels a little tired). There also seems to be some (possibly cultural) discrepancy between the things that Haratischvili feels needs stating and the things an anglophone author might leave implicit in the text. This has the effect of making some of the observations sound a little obvious or unnecessary. Occasionally, the writing is also a little stagey.

But bof! This is nitpicking. The point is: read this book. If you’re cooped up at home at the moment, this novel will provide some much-needed escapism. It will engross and absorb you. It will teach you many things. By the time you emerge, the world may be changed but so will you.

The Eighth Life: (for Brilka) by Nino Haratischvili, translated from the German by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin (Scribe, 2019)

Picture: ‘Tbilisi Old Town’ by Richard on flickr.com

Book of the month: Sofi Oksanen

October 31, 2018 By in Book of the month, Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , 1 Comment

This book has been on my radar for a long time. I almost wrote that it has been on my TBR mountain since Lola Rogers’s English translation first came out in 2010, but of course that isn’t the case. Back then, when my reading was limited almost exclusively to the products of anglophone writers, this novel would have passed me by.

Still, it was one of the recommendations I got when I asked the world to give me its book suggestions back in 2012. Nearly seven years later, with the help of a nudge from simonlitton on Twitter, I finally got round to Purge by Sofi Oksanen.

The story starts in 1992 when elderly Estonian villager Aliide Truu finds a bedraggled young woman, Zara, in her yard. Against her better judgement, and in spite of her fear that she could be the victim of a trick, she takes the visitor in. The uneasy interaction that follows initiates a slow unfolding of painful personal and national histories, revealing the loyalties and betrayals that link the two characters and making possible a kind of redemption that they might never have been able to achieve individually.

At its best, Oksanen and Rogers’s writing is powerful and spare. Using details adroitly, the narrative sweeps readers back and forth over decades, delivering some profoundly evocative scenes along the way. There are moments of great poignancy, as when we read about Aliide catching sight of the man she falls in love with, in the instant before he sets eyes on her beautiful older sister.

There is also horror. The description of the way trafficked girls passing out of service become canvases for the aspiring tattoo artist who controls them inks itself onto the imagination. Similarly, Oksanen presents the process by which victims internalise abuse and can grow to hate others who have experienced such violations with memorable clarity.

Often the source of the book’s power lies in Oksanen’s awareness of when to stop writing. The most shocking scene in the novel works by galloping the reader towards its terrible conclusion and then stopping just short of the brutal act towards which it has been racing, like a horse refusing a jump, so that the reader is bucked into the hideous conclusion of the scene alone. Reticence also adds a great deal to the account of the following day, when the traumatised women and Aliide’s young niece return home to eat ‘their pancakes with rubber lips, glass eyes shiny and dry, waxed cloth skin dry and smooth’. By refusing to address what has happened directly, Oksanen conveys the ruination of their domestic peace much more effectively than a frank explanation could do.

This approach also works when it comes to the numerous historical events upon which the narrative touches. The Chernobyl disaster is a good example. Although it is  a relatively small component in the overall narrative arc, Oksanen makes it count by seizing on a few arresting details to bring home its monstrous impact:

‘Later Aliide heard the stories of fields covered in dolomite and trains filled with evacuees, children crying, soldiers driving families from their homes, and strange flakes, strangely glittering, that filled their yards, and children trying to catch them as they fell, and little girls wanting to wear them in their hair for decoration, but then the flakes disappeared, and so did the children’s hair.’

The writing is not always this good. There are some questionable adjectives and places where repetitions feel clumsy (impossible for me to know whether this was the case in the original). There are also a few too many similes that don’t work hard enough to earn their place. In addition, Oksanen (and I’m pretty certain this must be down to her unless Rogers did some substantial rewriting when she translated the novel) has a habit of finishing scenes with a single-sentence detail about an insect or bird on the fringes of the action. It can be very effective, but she uses this device a little too often and by the middle of the book it’s rather wearing.

The structural daring of the book also makes for the occasional wobble. Now and then, cutting back and forth across the decades necessitates the inclusion of some expository passages that jar with the narrative’s usual reticence. In particular, the extracts from the notebook of Aliide’s brother-in-law Hans feel bald to the point of functional a lot of the time.

Issues like this are almost inevitable, however, in books of such ambition. They certainly don’t spoil the ride. This novel is as engrossing as it is important, shedding light on a side of history too often neglected in the English-speaking world. Oksanen should be congratulated for the risks she takes – when they pay off, as they do most of the time, she is hard to beat.

Purge (Puh-distus) by Sofi Oksanen, translated from the Finnish by Lola Rogers (Atlantic, 2011)

Picture: ‘Room III Patarei Prison’ by Raimo Papper on flickr.com

Book of the month: Naivo

November 28, 2017 By in Book of the month, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , 8 Comments

This month’s pick is a special one. About a year ago, I reported that this project had prompted US-based translator Allison M. Charette to travel to Madagascar in search of a book that could become the first complete novel to be translated into and published in English from the island nation. A few weeks ago, I finally got to read it.

Set in the precolonial era when slavery was practised in the nation, Beyond the Rice Fields by Naivo (Naivoharisoa Patrick Ramamonjisoa) presents the intertwined stories of Fara and her father’s slave, Tsito. As the changes of the 19th century buffet their homeland, sending waves of white (vazaha) missionaries and industrialists to challenge the ancient hierarchies – and instigating a violent crackdown on Western practices by the reigning monarchs – the pair must navigate the choppy waters of their personal histories. In so doing, they come to see themselves and each other differently, identifying what is valuable in the society that surrounds them and learning what they must reject.

As with novels such as the (as yet unpublished in English) Ualalapi from Mozambique, unfamiliarity is one of the great joys of this text for anglophone readers. From details such as the importance of the correct arrangement of domestic objects so as to please the ancestors and striking expressions – ‘by my father’s incest’, for example – through to rituals including the fampitaha competition, a dance contest in which female competitors must, among other things, perform while being carried on men’s shoulders, the book is a lavish representation of a remote and strange world.

Sometimes this is alarming. The graphic presentations of the brutal tangena ritual, in which those accused of witchcraft are forced to drink poison and only deemed to have proved their innocence if they manage to regurgitate three bits of skin, and the executions of Christians hurled to their deaths from cliff tops, are startling. Similarly, the description of the graveyard where the corpses of those put to death are consumed by wild dogs makes for troubling reading.

Difference is everywhere apparent on the linguistic level too (credit to Allison M. Charette here). Arresting images abound. We learn, for instance, that Fara’s father ‘smells like bulls moving to summer pastures’, while an unreliable narrator’s story changes colour constantly ‘like a chameleon when children hiss at it’. British readers will be particularly enthralled by the passage in which Tsito visits Chatham, Kent and describes the English port town through fresh eyes:

‘We crossed through a small wood and finally reached the top of the hill, crowned by a structure called Fort Pitt. It was one of several fortifications that the English had built around their industrial center. This one had been converted into a hospital, treating mostly construction-related injuries, which seemed like a bad sign to me. Man pays an ever-increasing cost to rise to power, no?’

These sorts of unfamiliar ways of viewing and capturing human experience make the text richly nourishing, particularly for English-language readers who also write. They show us new ways of imagining, recalling Goethe’s claim about the importance of literary cross-cultural exchange for keeping storytelling vibrant: ‘Left to itself, every literature will exhaust its vitality if it is not refreshed by the interest and contributions of a foreign one.’

Nevertheless, the unfamiliarity of many aspects of the book also poses challenges for English-language readers. Though parts of it are deeply evocative, surprising approaches to pacing and certain storytelling customs, such as announcing the year in which events take place, make some passages feel oddly distant. At times, the text rushes through the deaths of fairly major characters only to linger for pages at a time on the rhythms of the rural day. These differences in weighting can be distracting, but, for readers able to keep an open mind, they are hugely informative too: they reveal what is important both to Naivo and his original readers. In this way, they are perhaps as illuminating about life in Madagascar as the historical events described.

Readers may also struggle to keep tabs on the vast cast of characters that move through the text. The unfamiliar hierarchies of the Malagasy monarchy compound this, making the machinations of various pretenders to power hard to follow.

However, as with the pacing, this is less a problem inherent in the text than a challenge for Western readers to overcome. It is a function of the fact that, by and large, we anglophone booklovers don’t venture into narratives that diverge very far from the models of storytelling we know.

For those who are able to push through this barrier, the rewards are rich: vivid, thought-provoking narration; rich, mind-furnishing imagery; and an insight into a place and time that has hitherto been absent from the English-language literary landscape. Being a nation’s first text to be translated into the world’s most-published language is a heavy burden for any novel to bear, but Beyond the Rice Fields more than stands up to the challenge. It is proof that the anglophone exploration of Malagasy literature is long overdue.

Beyond the Rice Fields (Au-delà des rizières) by Naivo, translated from the French by Allison M. Charette (Restless Books, 2017)

South Sudan’s story continues

January 9, 2014 By in Africa, Post-world Tags: , , , , , , , 6 Comments

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Those of you who have followed this project since the early days might remember Julia Duany. She is the South Sudanese author and senior civil servant who very kindly wrote and recorded the story that kicked off my year of reading the world on 1 January 2012.

If Julia hadn’t been so generous, I don’t know what I would have done about finding something to read from the world’s newest country. South Sudan had only come into being a handful of months before my literary quest began and was still feeling the impact of a long and bloody civil war that had devastated the region. The nascent nation had virtually no roads, no hospitals, no schools and certainly nothing in the way of a book publishing industry.

Julia’s story reflected this. She wrote with great feeling about her experience of returning to her homeland in 2005 after 20 years in the US to work to build her nation from the ground up. She was under no illusions about the challenges that lay ahead, but she was also full of hope and pride for her new nation.

Sadly, in the last month, fighting between the supporters of the South Sudanese president and those of his former deputy has brought great suffering to many in the region. With much of the country in chaos and thousands fleeing their homes to escape arrest or execution, it’s very hard to make contact with people there and find out what’s going on.

So when a producer of BBC Radio 4’s iPM programme contacted me to see if I could put her in touch with Julia to get an inside perspective on the situation I was determined to do my best to help. Luckily, it turned out that Julia had left South Sudan to spend Christmas with her family in the US shortly before the trouble erupted. Speaking from Washington, she recorded a powerful and moving account of her experiences and thoughts on the latest terrible events, which was broadcast last weekend (you can hear it here, although I suspect this won’t work outside the UK). As those of us in peaceful places wish each other Happy New Year and set out with high hopes for 2014, it’s sobering to think what Julia faces as she waits to return to the country she and her compatriots have worked so hard to establish.

One colleague of Julia’s is especially in my thoughts at the moment. Deng Gach Pal, the man who put me in touch with Julia and with whom I have kept in touch since I met him in the run up to South Sudan’s independence in 2011, has not answered my emails since the fighting broke out. I hope this is merely down to him being busy trying to cope with the extremely difficult circumstances in the capital, Juba, but I know that there is a chance that things are more serious than that. As you can see from an article I wrote about him for the New Internationalist, Deng is an extraordinary person full of enthusiasm and energy and has overcome challenges most of us could never imagine in his life. I can only hope that he is safe.

Picture of an ash-dressed Mundari child celebrating the first South Sudan Independence Day by Freedom House

Monaco: grace and beauty

December 23, 2012 By in Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 12 Comments

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If there were a league table for the number of books set in a place per head of population, Monaco would be up there with the best of them. Nestled in the French Riviera, the tiny but hugely wealthy principality has long been the holiday destination of choice for many of the world’s great, good, and not-so-good, including lots of writers. The results speak for themselves: novels set or partially set in the 0.76 square mile sovereign state include Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca and Graham Greene’s Loser Takes All, as well as many more besides.

But while hordes of foreign authors have written about the nation, home-grown literary works are much harder to find. Indeed, Monégasque writers are so thin on the ground that the Prince Pierre of Monaco Literary Prize, founded in 1951, has never gone to a local author. 

This leaves armchair adventurers like me in a dilemma. With no Monégasque novels, short story collections or memoirs available in English (the closest I got were some translated plays and poetry by Monaco-born Armand Gatti), I had to choose between opting for a work by a non-national writer who spent time in the place or broadening the scope of ‘book’. At one point, I even found myself wondering if there was any way I could justify reading a strange pamphlet called Russian Expatriates in Monaco, Including: Marat Safin, Andrei Cherkasov, Elena Dementieva as my Monaco book. (I discovered it sloshing around in the unknown bindings on Amazon and bought it out of curiosity, only to find that it was a run down of various Russian nationals’ tennis careers).

While I was wondering what to do, a French friend made a suggestion: what about reading a biography of Grace Kelly, the Hollywood star who married Rainier III, Prince of Monaco, in 1956 and became a national treasure? I laughed and went on contacting anyone and everyone I could think of in and around the French Riviera.

However, when I got in touch with Beatrice Projetti, secretary and treasurer of the Association Monaco-Japon, I was made to think again. Like many other people I’ve emailed out of the blue this year, Projetti proved to be extremely helpful, and we struck up a long correspondence, during which she explored many options on my behalf. Somewhere in the midst of it, she mentioned that her brother had published a bilingual book called Grace Kelly: Princesse du Cinema, which included many pictures and other sources from the celebrity’s life. 

It got me thinking. By that stage in the year, I’d read several transcribed oral stories about national legends, such as The Epic of Askia Mohammed recounted by Nigerien griot Nouhou Malio. Passed down from generation to generation, these works couldn’t really be said to have a single author, and were more of a collective expression of cultural identity and history honed and shaped by many voices. Seen in this light, could a story about a modern legend – a woman who came to be seen as the epitome of Monégasque glamour, yet who retained a certain mystique right up until the patchily explained car crash that killed her – count as my Monaco book?

Bringing together photographs, posters and stills from the actress’s 12 films, Grace Kelly: Princesse du Cinema provides an overview of the star’s career up until her marriage. Although there is very little text – made up mostly of captions, quotes from co-actors such as Cary Grant and James Stewart, and sometimes clumsily translated plot summaries and excerpts from film scripts – a story emerges from the ‘special documents’ of the photographs (as the introduction describes them). From the poster for 1953 film Mogambo, on which Kelly loiters in the background behind the sultry Clark Gable and Ava Gardner, to the lavish display designed around her face for The Swan two years later, the actress’s meteoric rise to fame is writ large on these pages.

As you might expect in a tribute work such as this, complete with its non-translated preface by son Prince Albert, Grace Kelly’s beauty and elegance are the central theme. Whether she is posing in a ball gown, staring dreamily out over the head of her Oscar, or cowering in a pit on location, the actress’s charm and magnetism are always the first things that strike the eye.

Yet, as the pages turn, a shadow narrative comes into focus. With shots of daily life and on-set discussions mingled with film stills again and again, the line between reality and fantasy becomes harder and harder to draw. At times, we cannot be sure whether we are looking Cary Grant and Grace Kelly relaxing on the set of To Catch a Thief or John Robie and Frances in the midst of another heist.

This blurring of fact and fiction is never more apparent than in the depiction of Kelly’s marriage. Presented with its own poster (the extravaganza was filmed by MGM as compensation for Kelly reneging on her contract to star in Designing Woman) the ceremony is every inch the Hollywood fairytale – the end title card might as well have ‘And they all lived happily ever after’ written on it.

The rest is silence, leaving a strange sense of hollowness and inscrutability lingering in the wake of the woman who is somehow everywhere and nowhere in this book. In the absence of any insight into what happened after the lights were switched off and the cameras packed away, the image is all. And perhaps that’s precisely the point.

Grace Kelly: Princesse du Cinema edited by Richard and Danae Projetti (Stanislas Choko, 2007)

Paraguay: remembrance of things past

December 14, 2012 By in South America, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

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Sometimes when you’re trying to read a book by a writer from every country in the world, you have to travel in time as well as space. While there may not be any translated literature from that nation available in print at the time you’re looking, if you dig back into the past you can occasionally get your hands on an edition of a translation published decades ago that will take you into an imaginary universe from which you would otherwise be shut out. These out-of-print books are like portals, opening and closing  at will: not everyone can get to them, they pop up in surprising settings and you’ll rarely find one in the same place twice.

My Paraguayan pick was one of these books. As far as I can find out, there is little other than Helen Lane’s 1986 translation of Augustos Roa Bastos’s I The Supreme out there for us English-language readers (do tell me if you know differently). Luckily, I was able to get hold of a faded 1988 edition listed by an independent bookseller on Abe Books (there are a few others on there at the moment, but they may disappear at any time).

The 1974 novel, which saw Bastos permanently exiled from his homeland, is a fictional rendering of the recollections, pronouncements and paranoid fantasies of the early 19th century Paraguayan dictator Dr José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia (who dubbed himself El Supremo). Constructed by an anonymous compiler from a mountain of charred dossiers, pamphlets, correspondence and other documents salvaged from a fire at the time of the ruler’s death, the narrative presents a mind turning in on itself as the tyrant confronts his own mortality.

From the first page – which displays a lampoon in the voice of El Supremo found nailed to the cathedral doors in the capital – the text babbles with questions about identity, authority and authorship. The novel is shot through with footnotes and extracts from other works that contradict the primary account, as well as revisions from the tyrant as he creates his own account of the founding of the Perpetual Dictatorship. As El Supremo’s shadowy scribe puts it, in this world of reconfigurations, suppressed voices and fabrications, ‘even the truth appears to be a lie’.

For all the slipperiness of the narrative, however, the character of El Supremo looms large, riddled with the conflicts, eccentricities and the lack of empathy that comes from years of being cut off from normal human interaction. Bastos’s portrait of the ruler’s paranoia, who sees himself surrounded by people with ‘a bad case of the itch to be kings’, is brilliant and points up the psychology behind the grotesque and brutal punishments he metes out as casually as he orders his food – the cells blocked up to admit no light, the traitors left sitting in the sun, the man forced to row until he dies. These are offset by El Supremo’s delusions about his own benevolence, reflected in outbursts of irrational generosity – as in the case of the meticulous list of toys he orders to be distributed to children at Epiphany.

Bastos’s greatest achievement, however, is that, while revealing the monstrous actions and self-deception of the tyrant, he brings out his humanity too. This comes through in the lonely, sober tone of many of the entries in El Supremo’s private notebook, as well as through glimpses of the ruler as a frail old man playing dice in his slippers and contemplating the impending loss of his faculties. It also lives in his flashes of insight into his situation and his wistful daydreams about how if he had met a woman and had a family he might have enjoyed a peaceful, quiet old age, rather than sitting in fear and isolation, thinking about crowds burning his effigy and listening to ‘the sounds of a sick mind clattering along’.

For all its brilliance, however, the novel does come with a health warning: its dense, heavy style will be too rich for some appetites. The concentration wanders in its maze of associations and you sometimes have to retrace your steps to pick up the thread again. Although Bernard Levin might have read it twice in a weekend – as he writes breezily on the back cover – the book will take most people much longer to get through (I had to allow four days).

If you stick with it, however, the rewards are great. The I the Supreme is many things: a portrayal of the nightmare of being able to trust no-one but yourself; a portrait of a mind hemmed in; and a reminder of how easily we might be other than we are. Extraordinary.

I the Supreme (Yo el Supremo) by Augusto Roa Bastos, translated from the Spanish by Helen R Lane (Faber & Faber, 1988)