Tag Archives: novel

Book of the month: Perumal Murugan

October 31, 2023 By in Asia, Book of the month, Post-world Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

For the past three years, I’ve had the privilege of holding the role of Literary Explorer in Residence at the Cheltenham Literature Festival. This sees me co-curating and participating in a range of events about international storytelling at the UK’s oldest book festival.

Highlights this year included getting to interview my hero Tété-Michel Kpomassie – the writer I’ve most wanted to meet since I encountered his amazing memoir An African in Greenland (tr. James Kirkup) back in 2012. Building on our Zoom conversation last year, the discussion was as lively, joy-filled and life-affirming as his writing.

I also got to run a ticketed version of my Incomprehension Workshop for curious readers. It sold out and the responses were wonderful, further fuelling ideas for my next non-fiction book, of which, I hope, more soon.

Another lovely thing about the role is that I also get to hear about books from elsewhere and meet experts in storytelling from around the world. This year, these included international delegates from book festivals in Argentina, Botswana, Türkiye, India and Nigeria. From these passionate experts, I gleaned a number of book recommendations, including my latest Book of the month, which was one of several titles recommended to me by Dr T. Vijay Kumar, director of the Hyderabad Literary Festival.

Translated from the Tamil by Aniruddhan Vasudevan, Perumal Murugan’s One Part Woman was a smash hit when it was published in India in the mid-2010s, drawing lakhs of readers, prompting the writing of two sequels and changing the course of its authors life, as Murugan explains in his afterword. It tells the story of Kali and Ponna, a married couple who find themselves coming under extreme pressure as the years go by without them having children. Despite the strength of their bond, the rituals, penances and indignities to which they feel obliged to submit in the quest for a child take their toll. At last, the pressure to participate in a controversial rite on the 18th day of a local festival pushes them to breaking point, bursting open the assumptions and prejudices that have made them who they are.

For anglophone readers from the global north, this novel is an intoxicating mixture of the familiar and the strange. Anyone who has experienced or witnessed loved ones battling infertility will find much to recognise in its pages. ‘Please save me from being the talk of the town,’ laments Kali, expressing perfectly the pain of having such private matters made public, while Ponna enters into a masochistic loop, goading herself through ever more punishing and demanding ordeals in the hope of having her prayers answered. ‘Seeking a life, we have pawned our lives,’ she says, while joining her husband to sneer at those with too many children.

Yet instead of medical procedures and gruelling rounds of drugs, Ponna and Kali must do penance, make donations to temples, drink bitter concoctions and ensure they win the gods’ and goddesses’ favour. And at the heart of the novel is the ancient rite that at once lures and terrifies them: the night on which men become gods and all rules are relaxed in the dark streets of a nearby town.

Translator Vasudevan has done a fabulous job bringing the narrative into Indian English. The rhythms and structures of the prose complement the subject matter and setting perfectly, while the repeated use of the modal auxiliary ‘would’ gives the story a mythic quality, blurring the edges and making us half-believe we are reading a fable set long ago. Even linguistic challenges, such as the nuances of the Tamil term for son-in-law, are conveyed in an easy, conversational style.

Yet, despite the relaxed, sometimes mythic quality of the prose, there is nothing imprecise or vague about Ponna and Kali’s relationship. Murugan captures it perfectly, portraying the dynamism that keeps strong marriages alive and presenting a portrait of love that is truly touching – and makes the threat of its unravelling all the more poignant.

There is sharp-eyed comment on contemporary issues too. The legacy of colonialism threads through the pages, knotted around a family story of a humiliating and degrading competition run by a British officer, in which Kali’s grandfather participated.

But the natural world is never far from the story. The tone for this is set in the opening lines, with the planting of the Portia tree that rises and spreads its branches over Kali and Ponna’s travails throughout the course of the book. Alongside this, a number of other natural symbols dot the narrative, drawing and concentrating the reader’s gaze, and complicating questions just as they seem to become clear. ‘He never explained anything. He only drew your attention to things,’ writes Murugan of Kali. He could be describing his own writing style too.

In his afterword, Murugan explains that the novel was prompted by hearing a single word (which he does not reveal) and that writing the story taught him what can happen ‘if the world of values packed within a word bursts open’. ‘I am very eager to know the kinds of experiences it [One Part Woman] might now bring to literary readers across the world,’ he explains. Well, Perumal Murugan, your book centres around one word for me too: wonderful.

One Part Woman by Perumal Murugan, translated from the Tamil by Aniruddhan Vasudevan (Pushkin Press, 2019)

Picture: ‘Parshvapippala (Sanskrit: पार्श्वपिप्पल)’ by Dinesh Valke on flickr.com

Book of the month: Kate Roberts

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Yes.’

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

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

Owen and Jane Gruffydd laughed heartily.

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

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

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

She ran to the shop with the letter.

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

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

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

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

‘Yes, I’m afraid it has,’ he said.

‘Is he still alive?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Publication day giveaway

April 26, 2023 By in The stories Tags: , , , , 20 Comments

My second novel, Crossing Over, comes out today. Hooray! Or half hooray, at least. (Publication days are funny things: part celebration, part anti-climax; part release, part start of a whole new kind of tension.)

For me, this time round has been sweetened by a wonderful event at the venerable Dublin bookshop Hodges Figgis last night, where Irish minister of state for health Mary Butler did me the honour of formally launching the novel. (The whole thing was masterminded by Adekunle Gomez, a founder of the African Cultural Project and an extraordinary champion of sharing stories.)

It’s also been my first taste of having a book featured in a formal blog tour. I’ve been blown away with the responses from fellow book bloggers, with this review on Linda’s Book Bag, this Instagram write-up from Jen travels.along.my.bookshelf and this piece from Elspells among my favourites.

So, in order to keep the celebrations going, I’m offering five signed copies of Crossing Over to be sent anywhere in the world. To be in with a chance of winning one, please leave a comment below recommending a book that features a journey of one kind or another.

And if you think your book group might like to discuss my novel, why not enter the draw to have me attend the session? Contenders so far include book groups in Canada, Australia and New Zealand…

Thank you and good luck!

Calling all book groups

April 12, 2023 By in Events, Post-world Tags: , , , , , , 10 Comments

Would you like me to come to one of your book group meetings? If so, read on…

Later this month, my second novel, Crossing Over, will be published by Renard Press. Built around an encounter between a Malawian man who arrives on one of the small boats crossing the English Channel and a woman with dementia living on the Kent coast, the book is my attempt to put the humanity back into the story of the so-called migrant crisis.

The subject matter is close to my heart. I’d long wanted to write about Operation Dynamo (the 1940 Little Ships mission that saw ordinary people risking their lives to evacuate soldiers from Dunkirk during World War Two). I found the idea of that crossing very moving, while at the same time suspecting that it had been idealized in the national imagination.

Then, in 2016, I moved to Folkestone on the UK’s south coast and started to hear stories of migrants crossing the Channel in small boats. I knew about the crisis in the Mediterranean and had been deeply affected by the BBC’s Exodus documentary series, featuring a number of people making the treacherous journey to Europe.

It was clearly only a matter of time before such crossings became a frequent occurrence closer to home, even as the rhetoric around immigration hardened in the UK parliament and media. What would it be like to write a story that brought together the two kinds of crossings, which held such different statuses in the national discourse?

Crossing Over was the result. Written in an intense nine-month period in 2017, the story sprang to life on the page. It also brought in a lot of the thinking about language, storytelling, and the ways we try and fail to understand each other that I’ve done through this project over the years.

Yet, although I felt it was my best work so far, back in 2017 publishers didn’t think there was a market for the story. It took five years to find a home for it. In that time, I’ve been privileged to work with many asylum seekers in my local area through workshops funded by the Royal Literary Fund and run in collaboration with charities including the Kent Refugee Action Network and Samphire. This has deepened my belief in the importance of using stories to build bridges between people, especially in times of difficulty and division.

So it will be a proud moment when Crossing Over finally comes out in print on 26 April. I have several celebrations planned, but the first of them could involve you. If you think your book group might be interested in reading Crossing Over, please leave a comment below or email ann[at]annmorgan.me by 31 May. All those who do will be entered into a draw and I will attend the winner’s book group discussion of the novel (either in-person or on Zoom).

In the meantime, if you need a bit more information, my publisher, the lovely Renard Press, has put together a handy book group questions guide, which you can find below. This will give you a flavour of the sort of themes the novel involves.

Thank you and good luck!

crossing-over-book-group-questionsDownload

Book of the month: GauZ’

January 23, 2023 By in Africa, Book of the month, Post-world, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

A few months ago, I had the privilege of sharing a stage with award-winning translator and International Booker Prize judges chair, Frank Wynne. Before the event started, he mentioned that he had checked out this blog some years ago, aware that a number of the country choices were likely to be translated by him, given that there was very little available in English from much of francophone Africa.

Certainly this chimed with my experience during my 2012 quest, when some 11 UN-recognised nations – many of them French- and Portuguese-speaking African countries – had no literature in commercially available English translation that I could find. I can’t claim to have performed an exhaustive survey of Ivorian literature in English in the years since, but it is true that both my original Ivorian read and this latest Book of the month were translated by Wynne. I have read all the literature I have so far encountered from this West African country through the same person’s eyes.

On the face of it, however, the two books couldn’t be more different; whereas Ahmadou Kourouma’s Allah is not Obliged follows the fortunes of a foul-mouthed child soldier, Standing Heavy by GauZ’ presents Paris (and by extension, the world) from the perspective of the often undocumented African security personnel, or heavies, hired to guard its shops. Yet below the surface lie many of the same tensions that drive Kourouma’s novel. The legacy of colonialism and slavery inform the power dynamics playing out in the high-class emporia of the Champs-Élysées every bit as much as on the killing fields of West Africa; under the watchful eyes of Ferdinand, Ossiri and their peers, the wealthy and the desperate come to worship the gods of global commerce, moving in the grip of forces perhaps most clearly discernible to those paid to observe.

The way Gauz’ plays with structure is one of the novel’s greatest triumphs. Reflecting the fact that this is a book about people who stay still for hours on end, he dispenses with the sort of chronology often seen in Anglo-European novels and instead presents a narrative stitched together largely from pensées and observations. These are as wide-ranging as they are witty and rich, taking in everything from the correlation between someone’s salary and the distance their coccyx typically spends from a seat, to the sales-shopping habits of babies and the historical inequities encoded into white-linen trousers. They also offer opportunities for virtuosic flourishes from the translator, my favourite being ‘the bland leading the bland’.

Another striking example proposes a genetic theory of the Antilles:

‘When slavery existed, it was vanishingly rare, and almost impossible, for a Black male slave to procreate with a White mistress. It was therefore White masters who, with Black women, created the ethnic diversity of the Antillais. And, since it is the male who assigns the sex of the male child with his Y chromosome, we can therefore affirm that all mixed-race men in the Antilles definitely carry a Caucasian Y chromosome. Abstract for the theory: in the Antilles, man is White, woman is Black.’

The cumulative effect of these reflections is powerful. Essentially, the narrative schools the reader in the coping mechanisms of those paid to stand and watch. ‘In order to survive in this job, to keep things in perspective, to avoid lapsing into cosy idleness or, on the contrary, fatuous zeal and bitter aggressiveness, requires either knowing how to empty your mind of every thought higher than instinct and spinal reflex or having a very engrossing inner life.’ The latter is what the narrative models. Reading it, we learn in real time the rhythms of a life on the margins.

The tightrope that Gauz’ walks is presenting collective experience without allowing his characters to collapse into facelessness. The individual impressions from the shop floor help with this, but would probably be too flimsy on their own. As a result, he weights them with accounts of historical and political shifts in the latter half of the twentieth century that had a bearing on the experiences of West African immigrants to France.

At times, the result is a little diffuse and perhaps hard for those more used to plot-driven novels to follow, yet an inner logic is at work. For those who stick with it, interconnectedness is the prevailing impression – a web of ties, obligations and loyalties that extends across the globe. One that encompasses not only the standing heavies and those they watch, but also the reader.

Standing Heavy (Debout-payé) by GauZ’, translated from the French by Frank Wynne (MacLehose Press, 2022)

Picture: ‘Avenue des Champs-Élysées from the Arc de Triomphe, Place Charles de Gaulle, Paris’ by David McKelvey on flickr.com

My novel: Crossing Over

September 13, 2022 By in Post-world Tags: , , , , , , , , 14 Comments

Book deals are a bit like buses, as the jokey British saying goes: you wait ages and then two come along at once.

That’s certainly what it feels like for me at the moment. A little more than two weeks before the launch of the updated edition of Reading the World: How I Read a Book from Every Country, I have happy news of another publication to share. This one in particular has taken a lot of waiting – five years to be precise.

I wrote my second novel, Crossing Over, in 2017, shortly after I’d moved to live on the Kent coast. Back then the reports of small boats crossing the English Channel were few and far between. The migrant crisis, as it was becoming known in the English-speaking world, was still mostly in the Mediterranean. So this novel, which centres around an encounter between a recently arrived migrant and an 87-year-old woman with dementia, was largely speculative.

It was my most ambitious project to date, and one that brought together a lot of the thinking about the role of storytelling in building our sense of one another’s humanity, different Englishes, and the limits and possibilities of mutual understanding that is at the centre of my reading-the-world work. It contained what I believed was my best writing so far; working on it had felt like spreading my wings.

But – despite a lot of great responses from early readers and interest from several major publishers – it failed to find a home with a big press. Audible was keen, so it came out as an audiobook in 2019.

For a long while, I resigned myself to Crossing Over not existing in print. But as time went by, this felt less and less satisfactory.

In the intervening years, as more and more boats began to arrive in this area, I had the chance to work with a number of people who had made the crossing, thanks to the support of the Royal Literary Fund and collaborations with local charities, including KRAN and Samphire. I also attended a vigil on the beach down the road in solidarity with the 27 people who drowned trying to make the trip last November. These experiences and the hardening of UK government policy towards those risking their lives for the hope of security in my home country made me feel increasingly strongly the importance of using stories to build bridges.

And so I decided to try again, this time approaching the kind of small, independent publishers who so often champion the extraordinary, boundary-pushing books I feature on this blog. A few months ago, I agreed a deal with the wonderful Renard Press.

Their publisher, Will Dady, told The Bookseller this: ‘I’m absolutely delighted to have acquired the UK and commonwealth rights to Ann Morgan’s beautiful new novel, Crossing Over. A stirring tale that considers the plight of those forced by circumstance to leave their homeland and cross the Channel in search of a better life, as well as the realities of living with dementia, the book is a real celebration of humanity, and leaves you reeling, thinking about what others are facing in their lives and the power of connection, even when language fails.’

Crossing Over comes out in April 2023. No doubt I’ll be pestering you about buying it nearer the time (in fact, those in the UK and Commonwealth countries can already pre-order it here). But for now I’d just like to say hooray and thank you to the many people who believed in this project, and to the hundreds of readers, writers and translators around the planet who keep my faith in the power of storytelling strong. Yes!

Book of the month: Graeme Armstrong

October 27, 2021 By in Book of the month, Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Earlier this month, I had the honour of being Literary Explorer in Residence at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, one of the biggest events in the UK’s literary calendar. Created as part of a three-year focus on the theme ‘Read the World’, my role saw me taking part in 18 events over five days, including launching my new Incomprehension Workshop for adventurous readers and delivering a keynote speech, which you can catch on the #CheltLitFest Player until the end of this year.

The experience led to many memorable moments and fascinating conversations. These included a discussion about crime fiction around the world with international bestseller Ragnar Jónasson, Indian mystery writer Manjiri Prabhu and crime-writing critic and novelist Joan Smith, and an event on what reading the world means with novelist Clare Clark, academic Helen Vassallo, who writes the brilliant Translating Women blog, and translator and social researcher Gitanjali Patel.

I was also delighted to catch up with teams from several of the small publishers my reading adventures have brought me into contact with over the years. Representatives from Istros Books, Charco Press and Europa Editions UK all joined me on the stage in the Huddle to talk about their work championing literature from elsewhere (indeed, the Europa team are in many ways responsible for the continuation of this blog, having prompted me to start my Book of the month slot by persuading me to read the work of a little-known – in English – Italian writer called Elena Ferrante back in 2014).

Of all the conversations I had at Cheltenham, however, one in particular stands out in my mind. It was with Scottish writer Graeme Armstrong, author of the bestselling and award-winning novel The Young Team, only the third UK title I’ve featured in ten years of writing this blog.

Drawing on Armstrong’s experience of gang culture in North Lanarkshire, Scotland, The Young Team tells the story of Azzy Williams, who grows up in a post-industrial wasteland of deprivation, addiction, sectarianism and violence. Narrated by Azzy at the age of 14, 17 and 21, it charts his rise through and eventual fall out of the ranks of the Young Team, taking the reader into the heart of a cycle of neglect and abuse that most mainstream storytelling prefers to ignore.

The book is not an easy read in many senses. In addition to the profanity and violence that fill its pages, it is written in dialect – something that was a key factor in the book being rejected some 300 times before it found a publishing deal. Armstrong explores his desire to write in this way powerfully in his article ‘Standard English is oor Second Language’.

Comparisons to Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting are obvious – and indeed Armstrong cites reading that book as one of the key inspirations that prompted him to leave gang life and study to be a writer. However, it’s important not to let the Welsh parallel detract from Armstrong’s achievement: in finding a written framework for his mother tongue (as opposed to the east Scottish dialect of Welsh’s novels), he has not only created a new mode of expression but breathed fresh poetry into written English, even as the language strains and cracks to contain the narrative’s voice. (The audiobook, narrated by Armstrong, adds another level to this, even featuring lusty renditions by the author of several Orange marching songs.)

The writing has an extraordinarily compelling, immersive quality. Whether he’s describing tripping at a rave, acting up in school or beating up members of a rival gang, Armstrong captures all the colours of the experiences he portrays. We feel not only the pain and the pity of many of the situations he presents but the humour too, and even the thrill. (‘That was our Vietnam,’ Armstrong told me someone he knows once said, looking back on their shared years in the gang.)

For Armstrong, though, storytelling is about more than simply evoking experience. Now involved with anti-violence and addiction-recovery campaigns, he makes no secret of his ambition to use his writing to effect change. The novel declares this too: each section begins with a striking statistic or piece of research focusing on violence, suicide, deprivation or addiction levels in his home region. At times, it almost has an essay-like quality, with points made, and then illustrated and backed up by the events that follow.

As a result, the pacing takes on an unusual quality in the second half of the book. The fizz and thrill of the early chapters, as we see the young Azzy embrace gang life, dissipate. Instead of the ratcheting up of tension and pace we might expect in a more traditionally plotted book, the narrative takes on a heavier, more contemplative tone. Armstrong has no intention of providing a neat pay off. We are forced to confront the messy consequences of what has gone before and to dwell with Azzy in the aimless brokenness that leads many in his community to be drained of all hope and vitality at 21, whether we like it or not.

This book is not an easy read, but it was never meant to be. As with the first UK book I featured on this blog back in 2012, albeit in a very different way, it forced me to confront the glaring disparity between my reality and the lives of those only a few hundred miles from my front door – the many worlds my nation contains. Its message is too urgent to be anything but uncomfortable. After all, as someone remarked after my conversation with Armstrong in Cheltenham, not many book festival events end with the sentence: ‘Literature saved my life.’

The Young Team by Graeme Armstrong (Picador, 2020)

Book of the month: Helga Flatland

August 29, 2019 By in Book of the month, Europe, Post-world Tags: , , , , , , 5 Comments

This Women in Translation month (#WITMonth), or August as it’s known in some parts of the world, I’ve been rather spoilt for choice. Although the number of female-authored books being translated into English is still low in comparison to those by men, the awareness-raising efforts of recent years have seen a glut of fabulous titles by women made available to anglophone readers.

Those keen for recommendations now have a wonderful resource in the shape of blogger and #WITMonth founder Meytal Radzinski’s freshly compiled list of ‘The 100 Best Books by Women Writers in Translation.’ Drawn up from nominations from readers around the world, this is an attempt, in Radzinski’s words, ‘to create a new canon of sorts’. I for one shall be mining it for suggestions.

Even without this wonderful list, many of the best titles I have read so far this year have been works in translation by women. Favourites have included Leïla Slimani’s Lullaby, translated from the French by Sam Taylor; Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline, translated from the Italian by Tim Parks; Ariana Harwicz’s Die, My Love, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Moses and Carolina Orloff; and Annelies Verbeke’s Thirty Days, translated from the Dutch by Liz Waters, which was my June Book of the month.

My selection for this month, however, came onto my radar by way of another blogger, John Fish of The Last Word Book Review. I saw him tweeting about Helga Flatland’s A Modern Family and was inspired to try out this celebrated Norwegian writer’s English-language debut for myself.

The premise is simple enough. Adult siblings Liv, Ellen and Håkon find their lives thrown into confusion when, just shy of their father’s seventieth birthday, their parents break the news that they are planning to divorce. This revelation sparks an intense period of questioning and insecurity, in which the assumptions on which their lives rest are tested and the ties between them stretched out of shape.

Flatland has the gift that I most often covert in the work of other writers: the ability to make everyday events compelling. Whereas my two published novels and the one I am working on now all feature characters pushed to breaking point by extraordinary events – my way of cracking people open to get at the workings within – Flatland finds the drama in the quotidian and makes us see how even something as mundane as clearing the table can be fraught with meaning and tension.

Flatland operates on the level of fine detail. Alive to the minute adjustments that switch the points of conversation and send exchanges careening off along unexpected tracks, she gives us characters who are perpetually frustrated in their attempts to live up to their own and one another’s standards by insecurities and shared history. We feel Liv’s exasperation at her tendency to regress in the face of her mother’s disapproval and cringe at Ellen’s boyfriend Simen’s inability to read the family dynamics so that he keeps chuckling long after a conversation has taken a sombre turn. This precision makes the novel deeply synecdochic, with almost every small exchange and event standing for momentous shifts below the surface.

The drama also lives in the gaps between its personages’ perceptions. With multiple episodes narrated several times from the viewpoint of the three main characters, we see the sometimes funny and sometimes tragic discrepancy that can often exist between people’s readings of the same events.

There are also a few wry interjections from Flatland. Although the comments nominally come from the narrators, there is too much knowingness in the gripes about novels in which characters end up at meaningful locations without being aware how they got there and the tendency to belittle women’s fiction for them not to carry some authorial weight.

This knowingness is occasionally a problem. The articulateness with which Håkon – the least successful of the three narrators – explains his motivations, for example, strains credulity. His insights into his predicaments sometimes feel too precise to be quite real.

Overall, though, this masterful Norwegian writer’s anglophone debut is an utterly compelling and satisfying read. It reminds us how full and rich life is, how the quietest existence can brim with urgency and drama – and how much wonderful writing we English speakers have yet to discover.

A Modern Family by Helga Flatland, translated from the Norwegian by Rosie Hedger (Orenda, 2019)

My next novel: Crossing Over

March 23, 2019 By in Post-world, The stories Tags: , , , , 11 Comments

One of my earliest memories involves an audiobook. I must have been about three or four when, on a trip to my local library, a cassette of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet caught my eye. My mother let me take it out and I remember sitting upstairs playing it over and over on a huge metal tape recorder. I couldn’t understand most of the words but I remember being impressed by their urgency and rhythm: something powerful was being expressed here.

Over the years that followed I listened to many story tapes. Even after my eyes learned to read words faster than the snappiest narrator could deliver them, I would still sometimes drift off to sleep to the strains of an old favourite. At one stage in my teens, I could often be found sitting in my bedroom knitting (I was an extremely cool kid…) while a classic novel played. Passages of Lorna Doone and The Mayor of Casterbridge still ring in my ears from time to time.

In my thirties, I rediscovered the joy of listening to stories and now frequently take audiobooks with me on my runs – recent highlights have included Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Sarah Krasnostein’s The Trauma Cleaner and Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime.

So it is with great pleasure that I share the news that my next book, a novel called Crossing Over, will be coming out as an Audible Original title this month. Centred around an encounter between 87-year-old dementia sufferer Edie and Jonah, a traumatised Malawian migrant hiding in her barn, the book explores how, though we may never be able to comprehend other people perfectly, our interactions may lead us to a better understanding of ourselves. Bringing in research into British and Malawian history, and my experience of life on the UK’s south coast, where small boats of migrants have been arriving for several years, it builds on my interest in testing how altered mental states can disrupt storytelling, language and memory.

This is a subject I first ventured into with the help of my bi-polar heroine, Smudge, in my debut novel, Beside Myself. Just like that book, Crossing Over owes a great deal to my year of reading the world and the many extraordinary stories I have since read from beyond my national borders, which have taught me to imagine further and take greater risks in my writing than I would ever have otherwise dared. I hope it’s also a jolly good read.

What’s more, I’m thrilled to have a brilliant narrator reading my words. British actress Adjoa Andoh has brought to life parts in everything from Shakespeare plays to Doctor Who. She’s also a star in the world of audiobooks, with such outstanding novels as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and Naomi Alderman’s The Power to her name. I can’t wait to hear what she does with my work.

Crossing Over is available for preorder. If you are able to purchase a copy or tell your friends about it, you’ll make my day.

Being translated

September 3, 2017 By in Post-world Tags: , , , , , , , 16 Comments

 

 

 

 

 

Having spent the past five years thinking a lot about translation and how important it is, I’ve been delighted to have a chance to observe the process from a different angle over the past twelve months. My novel Beside Myself has received book deals in around nine language territories, which means that I have had the privilege of seeing my writing translated into other tongues.

This has been a strange experience. As I don’t speak Thai, Polish, Chinese or Italian (some of the languages in which my work now exists), I have no way of knowing how the respective translators have rendered my story. I have had to trust them and my publishers to produce a fair representation of my original work, one that I hope will convey the kernel and spirit of the narrative to readers in their respective language markets.

From my own research and experience with reading translations, I am aware that this might involve a degree of alteration or the inclusion of extra bits of explanation in order to convey concepts that may not be familiar to people in other parts of the world.

As such, the process has brought home to me once more the generosity and fragility of translation – that it is essentially an exercise that relies on strangers reading your work with sympathetic and discerning eyes.

However, although I can’t read the foreign-language versions of my novel (apart from the French – of which more soon!), I have been able to consider the different book jackets and titles that publishers have chosen to give my work. This has been an education in the way that different book markets operate and so I am sharing a selection below. Above, from left to right, are the UK hardback, UK paperback, US hardback and US paperback covers for comparison.

(For those who don’t know, the novel centres around a pair of identical twins who swap places in a game and then get trapped in the wrong lives when one of them refuses to change back.)

 

Vida robada

This is the cover of the Spanish edition. I like the sepia feel of the picture, which harks back to my central characters’ childhoods in the 1980s.

The literal translation of the title is ‘Stolen life’. This is interesting as it makes a more definitive statement about who is to blame for what happens in the novel than the original title. Spanish readers will have the sense that someone has done something wrong before they even begin the first page.

 

 

Moja siostra …czy ja?

The Polish cover is intriguing. We’re in thriller territory here. The mirror gets across the idea of twinship and doubleness. However there is a much darker feel to everything, as though the beautiful woman in the reflection is about to come to serious harm.

The title (‘My sister… or me?’) is much more direct than the English or Spanish versions. In Poland, readers know that this is a story about choosing between sisters as soon as they glimpse the spine of the book.

 

 

Beside Myself

The Taiwanese edition seems like a halfway house between the two previous versions. We have the slightly retro-feeling little girls, but the fragmenting of the picture lends a dark feel as though everything is about to fall apart.

The Taiwanese publisher has kept the English title on the cover (apparently this is common practice in this part of the world), but I’m not sure whether the Chinese characters are a literal translation of it or a different title – can anyone help me out?

 

 

The Person Who Stole My Name 

The Chinese cover is the most unusual of the ones I have seen. In fact, when I was first sent it, I was so intrigued that I asked my agent to find out what the thinking behind it was (in case you were wondering, there aren’t any flamingos in the novel).

The answer came back that the separation of the species – the little girl and the birds – was intended to indicate loneliness. This is a central theme in the novel, so that makes sense to me.

As with the Spanish title, Chinese readers of ‘The person who stole my name’ will have the sense that a wrong has been done to someone before they turn to the first page.

 

À sa place

The French cover also prompted a question, as to my British eyes it seemed to have slightly erotic overtones (again, not a strong feature of the book). My French editor, however, assures me that this is not the case in the French market.

I really like the ambiguity of the title (‘In her place’), which leaves open the question of which twin’s identity is under threat.

As I can read French (very slowly and with a big dictionary), I will be able to see how the story has been carried over into this new language. I’m planning to get stuck in as soon as I finish editing my next novel.

I’ll let you know how I get on…