That summer we self-destructed more than we ever had before, and yet we had never been more full of life. Mum looked like a houseplant that had been taken out to the balcony. I looked like a lobotomised criminal. We were, finally, a family.
Moldova was one of the trickiest European countries to source an English translation from when I set out to read a book from every country in 2012. After months of searching, I blind-bought The Story of An Ant by Ion Drutse, translated from the Moldovan by Iraida Kotrutse, a volume that I couldn’t help feeling didn’t showcase Drutse or Moldovan literature at their best.
So it was with great excitement that I learnt that an English translation of a novel by one of the Eastern European nation’s most celebrated authors would be coming from the much-respected publisher Deep Vellum press. Here, at last, was an opportunity to see more of what Moldova could offer.
The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes by Tatiana Țîbuleac, translated from the Romanian by Monica Cure, is the story of Aleksy, a misanthropic artist under long-term psychiatric treatment. At the suggestion of his doctor, he starts to write his story, focusing on the summer he and his mother spent in rural France when he was a teenager, as she endured the final stages of a terminal illness. What unfolds does not provide the clarity the medical professionals seek; instead there emerges a powerful portrait of how emotional neglect can warp a childhood, and the quest for reconciliation and peace.
This is the sort of book that would trouble people seeking the ‘spirit’ of a place in the books they read – the sort of readers who, as Monica Cure writers in her Translator’s Note, expect international stories to ‘bear the burden of ethnographic representation’. The novel is not set in Moldova. Indeed, Aleksy is not Moldovan but the grandson of Polish immigrants to London’s Haringey district. The majority of the action takes place in France. Other than in the publisher’s information, Translator’s Note and author biography, the word ‘Moldova’ does not figure in the book at all. What’s more, as Cure explains, she took the decision to render her version in a form of British English, giving the narrative a distinctive idiolect, run through with surprising rhythms.
The novel is risky in other ways too. Aleksy is a profoundly unsympathetic character, who lays into his mother from the opening sentence and drops the first of many suicide references on the second page. Yet, there is a directness and a humour to the writing that keeps us reading. ‘When they have a lot of money, people who are mentally ill are called eccentric,’ Aleksy tells us, and: ‘Dad thought that Pluto was the name of a dog, and that “activism” meant going jogging every day.’
As we read, cracks appear, allowing flashes of vulnerability to shine through, together with fragments of a backstory that form the complex mosaic of the narrator’s interior landscape. These often emerge in exceptionally beautiful writing. Remembering his little sister, Aleksy tells us: ‘she would laugh like a rainbow whose feet were being tickled’. At other points, it is the repetition of simple phrases that convey emotions that cannot be expressed directly. ‘And I shouldn’t be afraid,’ is the refrain in a chapter in which Mother shares a painful truth, telling us all we need to know about both their feelings.
The result is a profoundly moving portrait of the legacy of emotional neglect and the way such experiences warp our tools to build connections. Repeatedly, Țîbuleac and Cure employ imagery that blends pain and tenderness, capturing the yearning of the wounded child to receive love from the person who has hurt him most. ‘I would’ve wanted to pull out of her with red hot pliers all the untold stories, all the unsung lullabies, all the hair tousles I had been owed, but which she had hidden like a cheapskate,’ Aleksy tells us at one point, making his journey towards the quiet, loving acceptance of his mother’s final days extremely powerful.
In this, The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes is not a national or a regional story, but a universal tale. It is one of the most compelling and affecting novels I have read in a long time. I hope we will see more work by Țîbuleac in English very soon.
The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes by Tatiana Țîbuleac, translated from the Romanian by Monica Cure (Deep Vellum, 2026)
In the midst of some pretty gloomy headlines over the last month or so, online African literature magazine Brittle Paper brought heartening news. Its 100 Notable African Books of 2025 shows up some encouraging trends: around a third of the titles on the list are translated from a broad spread of languages, including Shona, Malagasy and Arabic. What’s more, in addition to works by globally renowned names such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Abdulrazak Gurnah (my 2012 pick for Tanzania, years before he won the Nobel Prize), debuts make up around a third of the entries.
Perhaps most striking of all is the fact that 62% of the books are published by independent publishers or presses based in Africa. It seems that the major British and American publishers, commonly known as the Big Five, are no longer calling the shots when it comes to determining what African stories appear in the world’s most read language.
My latest Book of the month is one of the titles on the list. An Advance Reading Copy was sent to me by its translator, Allison M. Charette. Some years ago she brought the first novel from Madagascar into English after learning through this project that there was no full-length fiction from that nation of some 30 million people available in English translation. Now she’s back with another:Return by the Malagasy author, essayist, poet and playwright Raharimanana, a novel which follows another writer, Hira, on a surreal book tour as he and his story roam ‘the wide world over’, trying to reconcile his happy childhood memories with the reality of his father’s political persecution.
Before I go on, I should offer a health warning: writing about a book like this presents many challenges for the citizen of a former colonial power like me. So much of the vocabulary that has become standard in literary criticism assumes the primacy of the European novel form. Even seemingly innocent formulations can carry the implication that works by writers such as Flaubert, Dickens, Tolstoy and co are the gold standards against which everything else should be judged. I have made an effort to weed this out of my writing, but it’s possible that elements of it linger. Read with care.
In fact, reading with care and questioning the assumptions built into dominant narratives is one of the central threads of Return. Among the many instances of this are Hira’s memories of his younger self discovering the problems with the perspective of many of the Western films aired in his father’s makeshift cinema:
‘Hira did have a sense at the time, a vague sense of what was playing out, of how the white man was always the embodiment of order, justice and good. Yul [Brynner] belonged to the civilizations that had to be conquered absolutely: magnificent but savage, magnificent but bloodthirsty, magnificent but merciless, magnificent but conquered, ultimately conquered, Yul Brynner humiliated by Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments, burned at the stake in Taras Bulba, strict to the absurd in The King and I, Deborah Kerr meant to provide a good and proper education for his son, and for the great king Yul, to boot! It infuriated Hira, why should they have to follow white people’s laws and customs? He would have slapped that Deborah Kerr governess across the face!
‘One time, before they left for the rec room, he asked his father: Why does Yul Brynner always lose, aren’t there any movies where he wins?“The Magnificent Seven”, his father said, he wins in “The Magnificent Seven”. No, I mean where he’s the main character! His father got that small smile on his face that irritated him so much…’
Raharimanana’s narrative works on different terms, making Hira and the events of his home community and continent the focus, and pushing European concerns and structures to the margins. While the German holocaust is mentioned in passing, the horrific events that devastated Rwanda in 1994 – ‘a genocide rocked by a lullaby’ – receive painstaking attention, shaking Hira and the reader to the core.
I repeatedly find myself wanting to call this approach a recalibration of or a response to European narratives, but this feels reductive. It is as though the colonialist in me still needs to see Europe at the centre of this novel, and if it can’t be the hero then it must be the villain, the main negative force against which the story fights. In fact, for much of the book, Europe and its concerns are also-rans – small and rather far away.
The treatment of time is intriguing. Present and past are woven together. Memories are plaited into contemporary events. Like Hira on his book tour, we often don’t know where or when we are. ‘The feelings we keep from the past produce more than our lived reality,’ we read at one point. Often this seems to be the state in which Hira operates.
There is also a deeply sensuous quality to the writing, with the impact of ideas and events often presented primarily through the body rather than discussed and analysed. This heightens much of the novel’s beauty – we feel the splendour of the landscape, for example, and our senses thrill to the wonder of the comingled heritages present in the Malagasy population. But it also intensifies the moments of horror and violence, taking us into suffering in a direct and visceral way.
This is powerfully deliberate: writing, Raharimanana proposes, is the way that Hira and perhaps all of us can find a way to move through and past horrors. Fiction is our best hope of confronting the incomprehensible.
And there is much in this book that will be incomprehensible to anglophone readers. The repeated references to Hira failing to understand things, finding himself conversing with people who don’t speak his language, and grappling with concepts that elude him make it clear that this is a fundamental part of the reading experience and probably something many readers of the original version go through too. However, with the language shift and perhaps added cultural distance that comes with it, more of the passages of this book may play out beyond the English-language reader’s grasp.
At such moments, like Hira, we can only give ourselves over to momentum, letting the whirling tiomena of the narrative sweep us along. An uneasy experience, perhaps. But well worth it when the visibility clears and we can look back and appreciate how far we’ve come.
Return by Raharimanana, translated from the French by Allison M. Charette (Seagull Books, 2025)
‘What have you got in that you’re excited about?’ I asked Hunter at the Folkestone Bookshop when I popped in a while back.
As often happens when I walk into that place, this was the start of a long, fascinating conversation, in which I was ushered from shelf to shelf and table to table, and shown multiple tempting titles, many of them originally written in languages other than English.
I bought several, but one in particular stuck in my mind: Yun Ko-eun’s Art on Fire, translated from the Korean by Lizzie Buehler. It was the premise that got me. Since I read the hilarious Lake Como by Srđjan Valjarević, translated from the Serbian by Alice Copple-Tošić, for Serbia during my 2012 year of reading the world, I’ve had a weakness for novels that poke fun at art residencies. Indeed, beyond the titles I’ve featured on this blog, one of my favourite reads of this year was Ella Frears’s Goodlord, a book-length narrative poem in the form of an email to an estate agent, which features a section describing a disastrous experience at an artists’ retreat.
Art on Fire sounded like it was cut from similar cloth. Struggling artist turned food-delivery person An Yiji thinks her luck has turned when she is awarded a residency at the prestigious Robert Foundation in California. But there is a catch: the programme is overseen by Robert, a wonderdog who takes photographs and selects the participants, and at the end of each artist’s time at the Foundation, he chooses one piece they have created to be burned.
As the premise suggests, this is a novel that teeters on the surreal. So much about An Yiji’s experiences is recognisable – from the Californian wildfires that delay her collection from the airport to the lumbering mechanisms of the art world – and yet everything feels as though the contrast has been shunted up a notch or two, making the colours faintly cartoonish.
Nowhere is this more true than with the figure of Robert, the Foundation’s eponymous and unnervingly gifted dog, who communicates by means of a mysterious black box and several interpreters. He has very particular views on how artists should interact with him and writes An Yiji a series of passive-aggressive letters that keep her constantly on edge.
Coupled with the narrator-protagonist’s heightened mental state, this makes for an intense and often very funny read. An Yiji is so riddled with imposter syndrome that when the Robert Foundation’s director phones to offer her the placement, she assumes it’s a spam call. Perhaps as a result of the run of disappointments that have dogged her career, she tends to look for the worst in situations. To read her encounter with the skewed logic of the Foundation is to be taken into the fraught mindset many of us may have experienced during the height of the pandemic, when months of isolation made even the simplest things strange.
This unpeeling from reality allows Yun Ko-eun to show up the cracks in many of the things we take for granted. The uneasy relationship between art and commercialism comes under the spotlight, for example, when representatives from the nearby town of Q court An Yiji in the hopes that she will feature their businesses and settings in her work. There’s a brilliant interrogation of the concept of authenticity, which is approached from many angles and comes to a head through the fact that An Yiji’s story is being developed into a film by an actor she met on her way to the residency, who needs her to work with him and the director to decide the ending.
Perhaps most fascinating of all is the discussion of translation that runs throughout the pages. Robert’s approach to communication is intriguing: ‘While humans communicated with one another line by line […] Robert saved the entire space-time of a conversation in his head, like an enormous file transfer system.’ This means that there are several stages – and people – required to compress and reorder human utterances into messages he can digest. What’s more, although An Yiji speaks English, during their conversations she is required to speak through a Korean translator. She becomes enraged when she realises the intermediary is swapping her words for terms Robert prefers during their conversations, with the result that ‘phoenix’ becomes ‘Korean pigeon’ and ‘coffin’ becomes ‘supercar’.
Knowing that we are reading all this in Lizzie Buehler’s translation adds another level to the satire, making this a wonderful example of a book where the translation offers even more than the original.
And Art on Fire certainly offers plenty to start with. It is a rare instance of a deeply funny, feel-good book that has important, thought-provoking things to say about the world we inhabit. Reading it, I was reminded of the words of Eritrean writer Alemseged Tesfai, who told me about the use of humour in his work: ‘Say the unsayable light-heartedly and maybe it hits its target.’ Art on Fire hits its target repeatedly and gives us a lot of entertainment in the process. Highly recommended.
Art on Fire by Yun Ko-eun, translated from the Korean by Lizzie Buehler (Scribe, 2025)
Thanks so much to everyone who has read my work, attended my events and bought my books this year. Your support, enthusiasm and suggestions play a huge part in keeping me going. If you’d like to join the free Incomprehension Workshop taster on Tuesday 20 January 2026 at 7.30pm GMT, please register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/mvu2Yq8uRdCOZCinIaj_kA#/registration
Wishing you all a very happy New Year and many wonderful reads!
One of the lovely things about this project is the interactions I’ve had through it with writers around the world. The Chinese literary master Ning Ken is a great example. After I gave a quote to support Thomas Moran’s English translation of Tibetan Sky, I received a copy of the finished book sent from Beijing, inscribed with a message of thanks from the author as shown above. His publisher tells me it means:
‘If my humble work surprised you, that is exactly what I hoped for. Rarity makes it all the more precious. Thank you for your poetically concise critique.’
The novel certainly did surprise me. Like the image that its title suggests – of a Tibetan sky burial, in which a dismembered body is left on a stone plinth for eagles to bear aloft – this is a book that turns many accepted (Western) norms upside down.
On the face of it, the novel is a love story. The troubled divorcé Wang Mojie, who came to rural Tibet on a ‘Teach for China’ scheme, encounters the alluring and mystifying Ukyi Lhamo, who has spent time studying in France. Both are on a quest for meaning, and they bond over their lack of fulfilment and conviction that answers may be found in mystical Tibet, but as Wang Mojie urges Ukyi Lhamo to satisfy his masochistic fantasies, they find themselves pushed to and beyond the limits of human connection.
Through all this run Wang Mojie’s interior monologues and authorial reflections. ‘As the author of this novel, I will interrupt the narrative from time to time with thoughts and comments,’ Ning Ken, or whoever he is positing as the author, informs us near the start. They certainly make good on this promise, filling the text with thought-provoking and sometimes mischievous asides that often undermine and sometimes soften the characters, as well as sharing some of their own struggles with and doubts about the process of writing. Indeed, it’s no spoiler to say that the book ends with a lengthy authorial disquisition on the unreality of endings, bringing in reflections on Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out and discussions with the characters in the novel about what would have been a fitting resolution. ‘While fiction is, of course, made up, we should think of it as the art form of the exploration of the possible, fiction imagines different possible lives,’ the authorial voice tells us.
In Ning Ken’s hands, fiction can imagine impossible lives too – at least to those of us used to looking from a Western perspective. In Tibet, the novel shows us, rules work differently, and this is partly a question of language. The concept of selfhood remakes itself, ghosts exist and people have very different views on life’s purpose and meaning, partly because the language of the nation fosters other ways of thinking – ‘We place strict limits on what we think is possible and impossible, but Tibetans do not acknowledge these limits. They don’t accept, or one might say their language does not accept, that death exists.’
In its difference and singularity, Tibet provides a brilliant setting in which to bring together Western and Eastern philosophy. Ning Ken does this through the visit of Robert, a Paris-based academic keen to debate his son who has embraced Buddhism. This is done through at times dense but often hearteningly frank and sometimes irreverent discussions – we’re told at one stage that we’re better off skipping Derrida, as he only really has meaning for exceptional intellectuals like Wang Mojie, and he’s an overthinker. For a reader like me, it was fascinating to see this culture clash filtered through a Chinese perspective.
Yet even Tibet cannot resist the pull of globalisation. Despite the hunger for authenticity that Wang Mojie and Ukyi Lhamo share, the novel bristles with examples of a trend towards ‘cultural hybridity’. Historic rituals are staged for tourists who look on listening to music played through boomboxes and sipping coke. This performative ‘postcard culture’, we learn, has arisen partly because of the hiatus in Tibetan practices brought about by ‘what we may call, euphemistically, the “intervention of history”.’
Reading lines like this, along with references to people being imprisoned for praying and the events of ‘the Square’, I found myself feeling strangely anxious. Was it safe for an author in mainland China to write about the actions of the government in this way? Then I shook my head and smiled. Whether intentionally or not, Ning Ken was once again turning things upside down for me, forcing my assumptions into the light in the process. Why did I imagine I knew what the Chinese government would or wouldn’t allow? (This is something I examine in the politics chapter of Relearning to Read, where I look at some of the mental labyrinths we go through when we read works written under censorship or in political systems different to our own.)
What resonated most for me was how Tibetan Sky explored the experience of not-knowing. In a way I’ve rarely encountered in fiction before, it captured what it’s like to feel bewilderment in the face of cultural artefacts we don’t know how to ‘read’ – books written in scripts we can’t decode, songs in tonal systems to which our ears are not attuned. What’s more, it showed the value of staying with these experiences – exploring them and turning them around in our minds to notice how we respond. Indeed, not-knowing seems to be fundamental in the journey towards enlightenment – when the 29-year-old Buddha began his spiritual quest, we learn, he did so in confusion.
This is a book that works on you in ways that it is only possible to articulate in part. ‘Reading in Tibet is really reading,’ Wang Mojie informs us. ‘You feel as if no one else exists, you are outside of time, away from the world. It is a peaceful, dreamlike state. This dreamlike reading, the dreamlike thoughts that came to me while I was reading, made me feel as if I were floating in air, everything around me filled with my own soaring thoughts.’
The experience of reading Tibetan Sky is similar.
Tibetan Sky by Ning Ken, translated from the Mandarin by Thomas Moran (Sinoist Books, 2025)
I’m not really a book blogger. Yes, I write about books on this blog – and yes, I did once upon a time review close to 200 books in a year here – but the commitment, stamina and output of other book reviewers in the virtual sphere now leave me and my once-a-month writeups in the dust.
In the international-literature arena, some of the names that spring to mind include Marina Sofia, Stu Allen and Tony Malone. These bloggers and others like them maintain an astonishing pace, easily equally my efforts in 2012 in many cases. And they’ve been going for years, bringing attention to thousands of titles that deserve to be better known by readers of the world’s most published language.
Within the anglophone literature sphere, there is a whole raft of other, equally industrious reader/reviewers. I knew little about them until my publisher, Renard Press, organised a blog tour for my novel Crossing Over two years ago. For a month leading up to the release of the book, I had the initially daunting but ultimately lovely experience of seeing my story thoughtfully and generously reviewed by a different book blogger each day. It helped build buzz around the book and, at what can often be an oddly lonely and unsettling time for an author, allowed me to enjoy seeing my work going out into the world.
I was so impressed by the blog tour that I wrote an article about it for The Author, the member’s magazine of the UK’s Society of Authors. As part of my research for this, I interviewed former English teacher Linda Hill of Linda’s Book Bag. I was amazed by what she told me: the volume of books she features is such that she operates a traffic light and scoring system to help her keep track of them, and she schedules her posts many months in advance. It sounds like a full-time job, except that, of course, for Linda and most other bloggers like her, it is unpaid: the only material reward they get for the hours and hours they spend reading, planning and reviewing are free advance copies.
Because blog tours are less of a thing when it comes to international literature, and because I only rarely feature brand-new books (preferring to promote older titles that deserve a second look) and only do one review a month, I have never taken part in a blog tour.
This month, however, I am making an exception for a title that is close to my heart. Where Snowbirds Play, Gina Goldhammer’s debut novel (published by Renard Press’s imprint Hay Press on 6 May 2025), takes us into the privileged world of 1990s Palm Beach, where British graduate Philip has just secured a placement at a new marine life institute. But all is not what it seems both among the super rich who fund him and in Philip’s own story. Soon, secrets, rivalries and financial scandals are bubbling to the surface, and as hurricane season looms it seems unlikely that everyone will escape unscathed.
I love this book for two reasons. Firstly, I love it because I’ve had the privilege of seeing it develop over several years in my capacity as a mentor/editor to its author. Working with a writer and seeing their ideas fill and rise until they find their fullest expression is an extraordinary process, and one that I’ve had the joy of experiencing a number of times since I was published, most frequently as a mentor for the Ruppin Agency Writers’ Studio.
But I particularly love this book because it is so singular and true to itself. Only Goldhammer could have written it. As I say in the supporting blurb I gave for the book, the novel offers an arresting perspective on a lifestyle few experience firsthand. Taking readers into the heart of privilege, Goldhammer spins a compelling story that lays bare the tensions, frailties, desires and self-deceptions that drive human beings everywhere. Sumptuous, witty and surprising, this novel will transport you to a world that is at once absorbingly fresh, and a charming – and alarming – reflection of our own.
And I’m delighted to see that other readers are already recognising the book’s uniqueness. On one of the earlier stops in the Where Snowbirds Play blog tour, bobsandbooks wrote that they were ‘left feeling like this was something a little bit different’. I couldn’t agree more.
Where Snowbirds Play by Gina Goldhammer (Hay Press, 6 May 2025)
This was a recommendation from Suroor Alikhan, who kindly invited me to be part of the Hyderabad Literature Festival Online series earlier this year and wrote about our event on her blog. Suroor is an extremely widely read person, so I knew when she suggested Gabonese author Angèle Rawiri’s The Fury and Cries of Women, translated into English by Sara Hanaburgh, that it would be worth a look. As the translation came out in 2014, the book fell comfortably before the 2021 cut off I’ve set myself for my year of reading nothing new. I wasted no time in ordering it.
The novel follows Emilienne, a wealthy businesswoman in what we are told is a surprisingly progressive marriage according to the norms of her community. She is the major breadwinner and her husband – who, like her, studied in Paris – was present at the birth of their daughter Rékia and plays an active role in childcare. But all is not well, and when Rékia dies suddenly and violently, the tragedy exposes cracks in the family that threaten Emilienne’s very existence, plunging her into an identity crisis, and forcing her to confront the prejudices, inequalities and values underpinning her life.
It took me a while to understand quite how pioneering a book this is. Because the translation came out in 2014 and because the subject matter feels contemporary (involving a lot of reflection on secondary infertility and female sexuality, including a same-sex love affair), I had assumed the novel was relatively recent. It was only when the subject of AIDS came up some way into the narrative that I discovered it was first published in 1989.
Not only that, but Angèle Rawiri is widely credited with being Gabon’s first novelist, leading with Elonga, published in 1986. I’ve featured a number of trailblazing female writers lauded as their nations’ first published women on this blog over the years (among them Kunzang Choden and Paulina Chiziane), but it is rare to see a female writer named as a nation’s first published author.
Rawiri certainly seems to feel a duty to tackle national problems in her writing. Women’s rights take centre stage but many other political and social issues pass through her narrative too, among them corruption, the way workers become jaded in a capitalist system, and the legacy of colonialism. I was particularly struck by a passage in which Emilienne’s husband Joseph extolls the merits of a single-party system:
let’s have the courage to recognize that we are a selfish tribal people. Take a look at what is happening in the ministries and state-owned companies! First they hire a member of the family, regardless of their abilities, and, if they have none, they look among those around them from their own ethnic group. No, believe me, in order to have a real multiparty system, Africans are going to have to manage to place national interests above their own. In the meantime, the single-party system seems to be what we need. Let me explain: when a country is under the aegis of a single party, its nationals, whatever group they’re from, are forced to meet, discuss, and exchange their opinions about issues that concern them all. They don’t have the time to dwell on tribal issues. Collective motivations almost always win against frictions between individuals. Obviously, with such a political alliance, men learn how to tolerate one another, to love one another, and above all to work toward the same ideals. Isn’t that the goal sought by our leaders!
I don’t agree with Joseph (and I suspect Rawiri doesn’t either), but I’ve never seen the arguments for such a system put so persuasively before.
The passages that deal with female agency and reproductive rights are particularly arresting, and sometimes shocking. For all her professional status and qualifications, Emilienne finds herself at the mercy of a value system that judges women’s worth by their ability to bear children. When she struggles to conceive a second child, her social stock plummets and she is judged to be in need of a ‘cure’. (Indeed, at one stage we are told that a woman choosing not to have children would have to be ‘sick’ in the head.)
As with her presentation of the arguments for a single-party system, Rawiri makes the characters who express these views alarmingly persuasive. (Indeed, were it not for the dedication of the novel to a friend who struggled to conceive, it would sometimes be tempting to think the author’s sympathies lie with them.) In this, the work recalls the brilliant One Part Woman, reviewed on this blog last year.
The novel presents numerous challenges for a twenty-first century reader steeped in the Anglo-American literary tradition. Pacing, a perennial sticking point when stories cross borders, works differently: some apparently major issues are presented or resolved abruptly, while the narrative lingers on events that may seem relatively inconsequential to Western eyes. Some of the dialogue feels rather direct or on-the-nose, and the handling of sexual encounters works according to different norms and assumptions. I also found the choice (whether Rawiri’s or translator Hanaburgh’s) to withhold specific cultural terms a little distancing – referring to another community as ‘that ethnic group’ rather than by name or telling us that characters are speaking the ‘local language’ rather than giving us the word for it.
But this is distance worth travelling in order to experience this trailblazing literary work. Rawiri was not only dealing with challenging subject matter but also carving out a path for a new tradition, depicting places and people who had never been seen in novels before. When novelists like me sit down to write, we follow well-trodden paths, lined with countless examples of how the world around us might be depicted on the page. But although Rawiri may have had some exemplars in the work of Francophone African feminist writers like Mariama Bâ, no-one in her nation had put her surroundings into a published print story before. The scale of her ambition and achievement is extraordinary.
The Fury and Cries of Women (Fureurs et cris de femme) by Angèle Rawiri, translated from the French by Sara Hanaburgh (University of Virginia Press, 2014)
This #WITMonth, it was the translator who attracted me to my featured title. I often find this is the case: now that I’m relatively well versed in how books come into English, there are certain translators’ names that predispose me to try stories. Because I admire other projects they’ve done or know them to be particularly committed to championing interesting voices, I regard their involvement with a book as a sign that something is worth investigating.
In the case of Angélica Gorodischer’s Kalpa Imperial, originally published in Spanish in 1983, it wasn’t the translator’s other translations but her novels that piqued my interest. Despite not being particularly keen on sci-fi (although I’m warming up to it in my fifth decade), I’m a big fan of the work of the late Ursula K. Le Guin. If you haven’t read her, you’re in for a treat.
Along with her novels, poetry, short fiction, criticism and books for children, Le Guin’s website lists four translations in her bibliography. Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire that Never Was is one of these.
As its subtitle suggests, the book charts the history of an imaginary empire. It does so through multiple voices, bringing alive the idiosyncrasies, cruelties, obsessions and triumphs of a host of the personages who have shaped and been shaped by this history.
Many of these figures are marvellous creations. Take the dealer in curiosities who buys a boy who can dance in an era when dancing has been forgotten. Or the urchin who shrugs off her abusers and rises to be empress. And there are numerous sadists in the mix too – many of them military men who delight in pursuing their proclivities in the professional arena.
The prose is similarly inventive and startling. Lyricism jostles with surprise on every page. There is also plenty of humour.
Lists in novels are frequently a bugbear of mine: I find them wearing and am often tempted to skip them. But Gorodischer and Le Guin’s lists engrossed me – masterclasses in rhythm and the subversion of expectations.
There is subversion at the structural level too. Sometimes events are narrated several times by different voices – fishermen, passersby, servants and a dedicated storyteller. Indeed, along with the empire itself, the figure of the storyteller is the only consistent presence in the book. Most discussion of the novel I’ve seen declares that there are multiple storytellers involved in it. This wasn’t clear to me – I read the storyteller as being a single voice. But if you know different, please tell me!
Certainly, the tone of the storyteller is varied. At times fawning and affectionate, the narrator can also be downright rude to the reader – ‘if you could imagine anything you wouldn’t have come here to listen to stories and whine like silly old women if the storyteller leaves out one single detail.’
What remains consistent, however, is the book’s excavation of the mechanics and purpose of storytelling. ‘I’m the one who can tell you what really happened, because it’s the storyteller’s job to speak the truth even when the truth lacks the brilliance of invention and has only that other beauty which stupid people call mean and base,’ the narrator declares at one point. And at another: ‘a storyteller is something more than a man who recounts things for the pleasure and instruction of the crowd[…] a storyteller obeys certain rules and accepts certain ways of living that aren’t laid out in any treatise but are as important or more important than the words he uses to make his sentences[…] no storyteller ever bows down to power’.
There is a clarity to the prose and to the insights the book presents into its characters’ motivations that reminded my of Le Guin’s other writing.
This got me thinking anew about the influence of readers and translators on stories. It’s something that’s been on my mind lately as I’ve been receiving feedback from beta readers on the manuscript of my forthcoming book, Relearning to Read: Adventures in Not-Knowing (preorder your signed collectors’-edition copy now!). The brilliant insights and responses I’ve had from these first readers have been invaluable in helping me finetune the book, and they have developed my understanding of it too. Relearning to Read now carries their influence and is the stronger for it.
Translators, of course, aren’t simply readers providing feedback that a writer may respond to or ignore. They rewrite a book in their own words. But this rewriting is in response to reading. It can’t help but meld their own talents and perspectives with the strengths and weaknesses of the primary work. There is an inevitable hybridity to the end result.
Of course, part of what attracted Le Guin to the project of translating Kalpa Imperial may have been the sense of a synergy between her work and Gorodischer’s. Unlike many translators, Le Guin had the luxury of picking and choosing the books she worked on. Translation wasn’t her primary career.
Still, reading her rendering of this Argentinian sci-fi/fantasy classic, I can’t help but wonder if translation itself doesn’t have something of the fantastical or speculative about it: a processes that fuses the capabilities of two minds. It sounds like something Le Guin herself might have envisioned in one of her novels: a revolutionary technology that enables the magnification of creativity, multiplying the powers of those involved. In that sense, when a book is the product of two writers working at the top of their game, as the English version of Kalpa Imperial seems to be, might translations offer a supercharged reading experience, a kind of literature squared?
Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire That Never Was by Angélica Gorodischer, translated from the Spanish by Ursula K. Le Guin (Small Beer Press, 2013)
Don’t judge a book by its cover, the saying goes. Frankly, though, if I were assessing Fatou Diome’s The Belly of the Atlantic, translated by Lulu Norman and Ros Schwartz, on its appearance, I probably wouldn’t have picked it up. The pictures of the figure in the boat and the foot on the ball feel wearily familiar, if not a little clichéd.
Besides, although I’ve read and enjoyed football novels in the past – and know that a great writer can make any topic absorbing – I usually do so in spite rather than because of such subject matter. Not being a sports fan, I rarely find knowing a book is built around a particular game tempting.
But I did pick up this novel, which came out in French in the early 2000s and in English in 2006, for two reasons: partly because Senegal was one of the nations that had relatively few novels available in translation when I did my original Year of Reading the World, but also because I’m a particular admirer of the work of one of its translators: Ros Schwartz. Seeing her name on the title page suggested to me that this would be worth a try.
In fact, this book subverts the apparently familiar tropes of its cover in powerful ways. Narrated by Salie, who lives in France, the novel crystallises around a series of phone calls from her younger brother, Madické. A football fan with a difference, Madické is obsessed not with the French team beloved of his peers but with the exploits of the Italian player Maldini and needs to hear how every match he plays turns out. The one television on their home island of Niodior is temperamental to say the least, hence his SOS calls to his sister to fill him in. These conversations prove the catalyst for a series of reflections on and memories of Salie’s life, the immigrant experience, and the gulf that travelling from one world to another opens up between those who leave and those who stay behind.
The female perspective is part of what makes the book so striking. The opening descriptions of football mania and boys revelling in the beautiful game invite us to assume a male narrator. It is only gradually, with the repeated presence of strong, female characters, and strikingly direct observations about discrimination and the hypocrisy of patriarchal society, that the narrator’s position becomes clear. Indeed, it is only some pages into the narrative that Salie reveals herself as ‘a moderate feminist’ who ‘wouldn’t want testicles for the world’, and who looks with some disdain on the standards her brother is expected to conform to in order to satisfy her home society’s conception of ‘man’.
This covert disruption of what might be thought of as the default narrative voice for a book like this makes much about it fresh and startling, even twenty years after its publication. Familiar ideas are presented from new angles. And the tales of those who remain on Niodior, trapped in cycles of poverty and prejudice, gleam with troubling brilliance. The story of Sankèle, who pays a terrible price in an effort to escape an arranged marriage, is particularly memorable.
For a reader in the UK, the novel may seem uncannily prescient. In its exploration of the desire that many young people have to leave Niodior and try their luck in Europe, and its presentation of the grim reality and crushing obligations that await those who make the leap, the book seems to anticipate the stories that flooded Western media years later of African migrants braving horrific risks in search of a better life. For example, here’s Salie reflecting on the gap between Madické’s idea of her daily life and the reality:
‘It was no use telling Madické that as a cleaning woman my survival depended on the number of floor cloths I got through. He persisted in imagining I wanted for nothing, living like royalty at the court of Louis XIV. Accustomed to going without in his underdeveloped country, he wasn’t going to feel sorry for a sister living in one of the world’s great powers after all! He couldn’t help his illusions. The third world can’t see Europe’s wounds, it is blinded by its own; it can’t hear Europe’s cry, it is deafened by its own. Having someone to blame lessens your suffering, and if the third world started to see the west’s misery, it would lose the target of its anger.’
Of course, the fact that these words written in the early 2000s read as prescient to someone like me also shows up the selectiveness of the anglophone world’s storytelling: the so-called ‘migrant crisis’ is not a new phenomenon, Diome’s novel reminds us, regardless of what prevailing accounts of it may lead us to assume.
Structured as it is, the book can feel a little static. Salie is relatively passive – partly because she is trapped by her situation and partly because she is trapped by the past. As such, she is perhaps more in the position of one of the oral storytellers of her homeland, recounting rather than participating in events. The writing, however, brims with energy. Like its perspective, the novel’s imagery is fresh and striking, melding Senegalese traditions, nature and computer technology to paint the world in bold colours. If, occasionally, the narrative tips over into polemic, well, who are we to argue?
Reading The Belly of the Atlantic made me reflect on many things. It reminded me of the valuable way stories from elsewhere can disrupt, problematise and reshape the narratives that surround us. It also helped me remember how important older books are in anchoring us and counteracting the kneejerk impressions of the now. If we only ever read new titles – no matter how brilliant they may be – we can easily become detached from the threads of history, and lose sight of the lines and grapnels cast back down the decades that bind us to the world and to one another.
The Belly of the Atlantic by Fatou Diome, translated from the French by Lulu Norman and Ros Schwartz (Serpent’s Tail, 2006)
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)
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)
