Book of the month: Leïla Slimani

December 20, 2023 By Ann Morgan in Book of the month, Europe, Post-world, The stories Tags: book review, books, culture, essays, fiction, France, Helen Vassallo, Leïla Slimani, literature, Morocco, non-fiction, reading, short stories, Translating Women, translation 2 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book of the month: Krisztina Tóth

November 30, 2023 By Ann Morgan in Europe, The stories Tags: books, culture, Hungary, Krisztina Tóth, Peter Sherwood, reading, short stories, translation, Warwick Prize for Women in Translation Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book of the month: Budi Darma

March 31, 2023 By Ann Morgan in Australasia, Book of the month, The stories Tags: Bloomington, book review, books, Budi Darma, culture, Indonesia, short stories, translation 4 Comments

Back in 2014, I attended the award party for the now-defunct Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Coming out onto the street afterwards, I found myself face to face with the late Birgit Vanderbeke, whose novel The Mussel Feast, translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch, received a special mention that year.

I congratulated Vanderbeke and told her I’d really enjoyed the book, an unsettling account of a family waiting for the man of the house to come home. Vanderbeke, however, didn’t look thrilled. To be honest, she told me, the experience with the shortlisting was strange: she’d written that book twenty-five years before. It had been her debut. It was odd to see it celebrated as if it were new.

If Budi Darma, the author of my latest Book of the month, were still alive (like Vanderbeke, he died in 2021), I imagine he might recognise such feelings. First published 40 years ago in Indonesia, his short-story collection People from Bloomington came out for the first time in English in 2022 as a Penguin Modern Classic, translated by Tiffany Tsao.

Written during his time living in Bloomington, US, while the author was studying for a PhD, the book explores the yearning for and fear of human connection. Darma’s protagonists are observers, loitering on the fringes of others’ often bizarre and baffling lives. There is the lodger who observes a gun-toting war veteran in a neighbour’s house, the man who develops a fierce jealousy of his gregarious housemate and the literature enthusiast who takes in a poet who turns out to have an unpleasant disease.

The strangeness of the supporting characters’ actions, however, is nothing compared to the oddness of the protagonists themselves, who reveal themselves in the way they read their surroundings. Their reactions are never stable. Veering from blithe to vicious (several wish violence on acquaintances for seemingly innocuous reasons), these responses are forever catching the reader out.

At times, this can be very funny. Take this passage from early in ‘The Family M’, a story in which the narrator-protagonist takes against two young brothers living in his apartment block:

[…] my life has always been fairly peaceful. Or it was, until the day disaster struck. My car got scratched.

Here, the mismatch between the promise of ‘disaster’ and the banality of the scratched car produces such a jolt that it is almost impossible not to laugh. The starkness of the language and the rhythm (plaudits to translator Tsao here) merely heighten the effect.

Further humour stems from the unlikely and elaborate ruses the protagonists often concoct to achieve their goals or right perceived wrongs. Examples include everything from repeatedly walking down a particular street or shopping at a certain store in the hopes of falling into conversation with the object of an obsession to lobbying for Coca-Cola vending machines to be installed so that the brothers believed to have scratched the car might injure themselves on the discarded bottles.

But such subversions of expectation are also the source of the fear that flows beneath these stories, and erupts to the surface now and then. With protagonists liable to act out their savage and strange desires on occasion, we can never be certain what will happen next. The rules are unclear. Although nominally realist, there is a strange instability not only to the protagonists’ reactions but to the world itself.

Perhaps because of this flightiness, it’s tempting to try to find ways of anchoring the book by positioning it in relation to familiar works and situating it in a larger debate. Indeed, it’s notable how many pages of commentary stand between the cover and the first story – almost as if the editorial folk at Penguin worry readers won’t get the stories without a foreword, introduction and author’s preface to explain them first.

These contain some fascinating insights and reflections. Darma’s PhD was on Jane Austen, leading Intan Paramaditha to dub the collection an absurdist twist on the English novelist’s work in her foreword. Translator Tiffany Tsao, meanwhile, points to the scarcity of depictions of Western societies and characters by non-Western writers in mainstream anglophone literature (although there are plenty in books produced in other quarters). People in Bloomington, she says, could play a valuable part in conversations around cultural appropriation by making the case for redressing the balance that has historically seen writers in dominant cultures depicting those in marginalized groups without the traffic flowing the other way. Darma, on the other hand, reflects on the primacy of theme in his writing.

However, these considerations are secondary to the main point: the quality and distinctiveness of the stories. The collection is unapologetically itself. Certain readers will not like it or find it repetitive. Indeed, the stories may feel a little too interchangeable for some. But for those prepared to give themselves over to Darma’s vision, there is an exhilarating ride in store. It’s about time the English-speaking world got on board.

People from Bloomington by Budi Darma, translated from the Indonesian by Tiffany Tsao (Penguin, 2022)

Book of the month: Shahla Ujayli

December 30, 2021 By Ann Morgan in Book of the month, Middle East, The stories Tags: book review, books, culture, publishing, short stories, Syria, translation 3 Comments

Translators have long been my heroes. Almost from the moment I had the eccentric idea to try to read a book from every country in a year back in late 2011, I have found them to be extraordinarily generous, inspiring and wise.

Not only have they helped shaped my understanding of the different ways storytelling works around the globe and revealed many of the blind spots that I continue to challenge myself to overcome in my reading, but they have also repeatedly drawn my attention to writers and trends that I would otherwise have overlooked. Many of the best reads I have featured in this project have come to me by way of a translator’s recommendation.

This is true in the wider book world too. Whether they’re highlighting traditionally overlooked issues, such as the need for more translated titles on children’s bookshelves or the failure to credit translators in reviews and on book covers, translators are often a force for broadening understanding and driving change.

It’s fitting, then, that the final featured title of my first decade of reading the world should be one that a translator fought to bring into the world’s most published language. Sawad Hussain’s ‘Translator’s Note’ at the start of A Bed for the King’s Daughter makes no secret of the struggles she went through to get award-winning Syrian writer Shahla Ujayli’s short story collection an English-language book deal.

In addition to the experimental nature of the writing, one of the major issues Hussain encountered was that the work ‘stepped out of the trope of how Arabic literature is too often digested today’:

‘[The collection] is not an anthropological foray into the heart of Syrian life or history, though it is a “Syrian” short story collection. It is not confined to “women’s issues”, though written by an Arab woman. Rather, the human psyche is explored.

[…]

‘And that is the highest form of literature: not a piece of work that we easily swallow, digest, and after which we rub our bellies gleefully, but rather a body of written work that, rather than giving you the answers, elicits a gut reaction, makes you uncomfortable, puts you on edge and makes you ask (hard) questions. Just as Dena Afrasiabi, the delightful editor of this series, was able to recognize the promise of this collection, I hope that you will also go against the tide, and on a journey of discovery – of the fresh and the possible.’

In short, the writing in this slim volume does not fit into one of the neat marketing categories that publishers often impose on literature from elsewhere, a trend I’ve taken to calling the genrefication of national literatures. In fact, the 22 very short stories in this collection do not conform to many assumptions anglophone readers might have about the short story form itself. I suspect most of the pieces in this volume would not score highly on an English-language creative-writing course.

The maxim ‘show, don’t tell’, for example, has no place in Ujayli’s writing. (Indeed, it has little place in much translated writing because it assumes a shared frame of reference between writer and reader that is unrealistic when it comes to literature from markedly different cultures.) Meanwhile, the author has no hesitation about pulling the rug out from under the reader in the final line, as she does in a number of these pieces, seeming to undermine everything that has gone before. In Ujayli’s world, the experience of waking up to find it has all been a dream seems to be chillingly commonplace.

Instead of the sort of works we might be used to, she presents us with a series of wry, striking shards of writing. Many of them read like parables. Some are more akin to sick jokes. There is the story, for example, of the corrupt police officer who pulls strings to get his brother a gun licence only to be shot by his sibling in the final line. There are the children who Santa fails to visit because of a delay at an Israeli checkpoint.

In such extremely short stories – many of which would fall into the anglophone ‘flash fiction’ category – there is often little room for development or progression. These are largely snapshots rather than short films – a portrait of a dilemma rather than a working through of a problem.

A key to their mechanism seems to glimmer in ‘The Strangest Thing that Happened to Me in 2010’, in which an art-history professor recalls a piece of writing submitted by one of their students in response to the brief: ‘Tell me about Surrealism’. Instead of turning in an essay, the student recounts a bizarre experience. ‘This tale of mine will present surrealism in the way of someone outside the depth of thought, not in the way of someone surrounded by it,’ she writes.

Instinct, mysticism, the crashing together of things that don’t belong – these elements seem threaded throughout this collection. To overthink it, perhaps even to try to explain it, is a mistake. These are works that stand outside the depth of thought, working on the reader as dreams do, defying summation or categorisation.

And like dreams, some will leave us baffled. Some may seem nonsensical or childish. But some will resonate profoundly in a way that cannot quite be captured except in the words as they are presented on the page.

There isn’t much writing like this published in English. Some may say there’s a good reason for that. I say it’s an argument for this book’s existence, and for all the other jagged, unsettling works that don’t fit neatly into bookshop categories. Because, as its translator so eloquently argues, stories like this invite us to journey further, to enlarge our sense of what is possible, to envision other ways of seeing.

A Bed for the King’s Daughter by Shahla Ujayli, translated from the Arabic by Sawad Hussain (Center for Middle Eastern Studies, The University of Texas at Austin, 2020)

Book of the month: Liliana Colanzi

October 31, 2017 By Ann Morgan in Book of the month, Post-world, South America Tags: Bolivia, book review, books, culture, short stories, Spanish, translation 1 Comment

With a few notable exceptions, South American countries are generally poorly served when it comes to having their literature translated into the world’s most published language. If you want to venture beyond Colombian, Argentinian or Brazilian literature, you quickly find that quite a few nations only have a handful of their authors’ works available in English.

Bolivia is a case in point. When I cast about for something to read from there in 2012, there seemed to be very little choice. In the end, on the recommendation of the country’s most celebrated contemporary writer, Edmundo Paz Soldán, who graciously responded to my request for thoughts on lesser-known Bolivian writers I might discover, I plumped for the striking and savage short-story collection Sangre dulce/Sweet Blood by Giovanna Rivero Santa Cruz.

Five years later when a translation of another short-story collection by a female Bolivian writer came onto my radar through #WITMonth, I thought it might make an interesting comparison.

A brief summary of the content of some of the stories in Liliana Colanzi’s Our Dead World, translated by Jessica Sequeira, immediately shows up common ground between the authors. Stories of mental breakdown, maternal cruelty, child death, indigenous slavery and suicide make up the meat of this collection; like Rivero, Colanzi has an eye for the darker side of life.

The similarities don’t end there, for Colanzi’s writing possesses a similar muscularity and violence to Rivero’s. She has no hesitation in plunging us into disturbing scenes – such as the brutal killing of a pig, which opens the story ‘Alfredito’. These she fleshes out in precise and alarming detail, revealing that cruelty lives not in the summary of the things we do but in the moment-by-moment choices to deny, impose, withhold or force.

As with Rivero’s work – and indeed a number of the other Latin American works I’ve read – mental illness and the uncanny loom large. The world is never quite stable or trustworthy. The wave that travels through a university campus, triggering a spate of student suicides, is never explained. Neither are the spooky animals glimpsed by a homesick space traveller on Mars.

What gives Colanzi’s writing its own unique flavour, however, is her love of unusual perspectives. From ‘Family Portrait’, in which the surfacing of longstanding grudges between generations is told largely through the eyes of the photographer’s assistant helping to set up a group photograph, to ‘Story with Bird’, in which the narrator steps back briefly from events to envisage a time when humankind is extinct and other unimaginable beings inhabit the earth, the writer delights in showing us her characters from surprising angles.

The most delicious example is the way she crashes together space time and quotidian human existence at the start of ‘Meteorite’:

‘The meteroid traced the same orbit in the solar system for fifteen million years until the movement of a comet pushed it toward Earth. Even so, it took another twenty thousand more years before it collided with the planet, during which time the world passed through an ice age, mountains shifted and the waves gave land masses a new shape. Innumerable life forms died out forever, while others battled ferociously, adapted and repopulated the Earth. When the object at last entered the atmosphere[…] the igneous ball, a meter and a half in diameter, fell on the outskirts of San Borja. Its spectacular descent from the heavens was witnessed by a couple at home, arguing at five-thirty in the morning.’

Sometimes this playfulness topples into the outright weird. There are digressions and odd turns of events that feel too loosely threaded through the narratives. And, as is almost always the case with collections of this kind, certain of the stories are more successful than others.

On the whole, though, this is an arresting book. Its pieces work together to remind us that, although we are small, short-lived organisms in a vast and ancient universe, we nevertheless have the capacity to do startling things.

Our Dead World (Nuestro mundo muerto) by Liliana Colanzi, translated from the Spanish by Jessica Sequeira (Dalkey Archive Press, 2017)

Picture: ‘Abandoned steam engine in Uyuni train cemetery’ by Jimmy Harris on flickr.com

Korean discoveries

January 28, 2017 By Ann Morgan in Asia, Post-world Tags: books, culture, Kim Yujeong, Korea, reading, short stories, students, translation 6 Comments

Kim Yujeong

Some of the highlights of my Year of Reading the World were the unpublished translations of literature from countries with few or no books commercially available in English that people around the planet sent me. These included my Turkmen and Panamanian reads (both of which, I’m pleased to report, have since made it into commercially available English versions, although the Panamanian book is not currently on sale) and a collection of short stories by the Santomean writer Olinda Beja, which was translated especially for me by a team of volunteers.

Reading these works was an enormous privilege. It introduced me to some great writers whose works were off-limits to English speakers and gave me a taste of some of the many wonders that exist outside the anglophone literary sphere. It also filled me with gratitude to the many people who had prepared these manuscripts in their own time purely to share stories that they loved.

So last year when I got a message from Juwon Lee, the vice president of T.I. Time translation club at Gimhae Foreign Language High School (GIMFL) in Jangyu, South Korea, offering to prepare another translation for me, I was intrigued. The students were keen to introduce me to two Korean writers they admired, Kim Yujeong and Hyun Jin-geon. If they translated three short stories, would I be prepared to give them a read?

Of course, I said yes. Duly, towards the end of last year, the manuscripts arrived. And last weekend, I finally sat down with them.

I can certainly see why the GIMFL students are fans of Kim, an early-20th-century Korean writer, who made a lasting impression in his short 29 years of life. Bold and audacious, the writing in the stories feels very fresh and direct.

Both of his works deal with power and powerlessness. In ‘Camellia Flowers’, a 17-year-old faces a dilemma when the daughter of the land manager who oversees his family’s farm persists in making his rooster fight her stronger bird. Meanwhile, in ‘Bombom’, the protagonist grows increasingly resentful of the servitude he has been lured into by a man who has promised him he can marry his daughter when she is grown up (needless to say, every time the prospective son-in-law brings up the possibility of setting a date for the ceremony, her father claims she is not yet tall enough).

My favourite of the three pieces, however, was Hyun’s sardonically titled ‘A Lucky Day’, follows rickshaw man Kim Cheomji as he secures some handsome fares after a spell of getting little work. Yet, as his elation grows at the money he is earning, we learn gradually that his wife is seriously ill. In a very subtle and finely balanced piece of writing, the author shows us how denial and hope conspire within the old man to make him postpone returning home until it is tragically too late.

A passion for exposing injustice and hypocrisy runs through both authors’ writing, making the stories urgent and compelling. These are by no means po-faced rants against the system, however. There is humour and playfulness too. The characters are a vibrant and idiosyncratic bunch, not afraid to express their opinions in language that is often direct, earthy and packed with colloquialisms.

Here, I have to congratulate the T.I Time club members. It is no mean feat to translate into a language that is not your mother tongue. Indeed, most professional translators only work into their first language because of the difficulty of catching nuance precisely in a language that you have not grown up with, no matter how fluent you may be in it.

As such, it is impressive that the students have managed to achieve such consistency of tone and ingenious language use in their renderings of Kim and Hyun’s work. They have certainly achieved their objective of introducing me to his writing and showing me why they like it.

And the good news is that, although the stories by Kim that they prepared for me are not available in English, some of the writer’s other works do seem to have been translated (at least according to Wikipedia). Meanwhile, the online encyclopedia also suggests that some of Hyun’s work has been translated, including a version of ‘A Lucky Day’. So, if you’re interested to sample their work too, you can.*

Thanks very much to all the members of T.I. Time at GIMFL. I wish you great success in everything you go on to do.

* UPDATE: T.I. Time has made its translations available online, free for anyone to view. Thanks again to the students.

Amended on 31/01/2017 to reflect the fact that ‘A Lucky Day’ is by Hyun Jin-geon and not Kim Yujeong.

Book of the month: Sema Kaygusuz

August 25, 2015 By Ann Morgan in Book of the month, Post-world Tags: books, culture, Maureen Freely, Sema Kaygusuz, short stories, translation, Turkey, Turkish 10 Comments

Short story collections have traditionally been a hard sell in the UK. Unlike publishers in the US – where short pieces have long been a key part of the literary culture – companies in the British book industry have tended to focus almost exclusively on novels, with only well-known writers getting deals to release assortments of shorter works.

In recent years, particularly since short-form writers Lydia Davis and Alice Munro scooped the Man Booker International Prize and Nobel Prize for Literature respectively in 2013, things have started to change. Last year, the Telegraph newspaper reported that, according to the Bookseller, short-story sales had risen by 35%. And where sales figures lead, publishers tend to follow.

If anyone needed further evidence of the power and value of short stories, The Well of Trapped Words by Turkish writer Sema Kaygusuz makes a compelling case. Peopled with outcasts, misfits, trauma survivors and eccentrics, the collection makes for arresting reading. From the tale of the mentally disturbed girl whose self-loathing focuses itself on her feet, to the account of the old man driven into a frenzied search for water after years of drought, the pieces pit characters against the norms of their communities, rattling propriety’s cage.

The brevity of many of the tales allows Kaygusuz to write with an intensity that might be difficult to sustain – and to read – over longer stretches. Revealing how emotion seeps into and colours the world, tainting sight, taste and smell, she captures moments of crisis vividly. A particular favourite of mine is this description of the moment before a woman boiling fruit in her kitchen realises a snake is about to bite her toddler in ‘The Viper’s Son’:

And this is when the whole world went silent.

The whole world. Even the birds stopped singing. Standing over the plums, Zilver suddenly noticed that the only sound she could hear was their bubbling.

There are also impressive longer pieces, often portraying an emotional reversal and frequently exploring gender politics. For example, two of the strongest stories, ‘Stolen’ and ‘Deep Inside’, delineate a devastating shift in relationship dynamics, in both cases leaving the men bewildered as the women they thought of as theirs assume control.

The precision of the language in many of the pieces is striking – and here praise must go to translator Maureen Freely too. My copy is riddled with pencil marks picking out phrases that distil a complex truth or emotion into a small cluster of words – the feeling of ‘regrets steaming inside me, and somehow, strangely, washing me clean’, for example, or the description of ‘a girl whose life is fading at the creases. Its multi-coloured fabric […] fast unravelling’.

There is also a winning streak of wit and irreverence in the writing, as when the narrator of ‘Tacettin’ tells the reader that the title character had ‘a neck twice the size of yours and maybe five times the size of mine’. I don’t know about you, but I think this is the first time a book has called me fat.

Sometimes the structure lets the writing down a little. While a few too many of the stories rely on the device of a final section told from another perspective to tie up the loose ends, a number feel a little loose and meandering. In addition, passing references to political figures and events in a couple of the pieces may prove trip hazards to readers not familiar with Turkey’s history (although the smattering of footnotes do help smooth the path).

All in all, though, The Well of Trapped Words is a testament to the power of storytelling. By turns funny, alarming, familiar and strange, this collection will surprise, challenge and delight. Hats off to Comma Press for publishing a work not only in a genre but also from a language that has traditionally been underrepresented on British shelves.

The Well of Trapped Words by Sema Kaygusuz, translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely (Comma Press, 2015).

Free Chinese literature

June 27, 2015 By Ann Morgan in Asia, Post-world Tags: books, China, culture, Paper Republic, short stories, translation 4 Comments

As those of you who’ve followed this project for a while will know, China is very poorly represented in terms of the number of its books that make it into English. According to Chinese translator collective Paper Republic, only 20 fiction and poetry books were published anywhere in the world in English in 2013.

So it’s great to hear of an initiative by Paper Republic to try to broaden anglophone readers’ access to literature from the world’s most populous country. Starting last week, the collective has promised to publish one translated short story on its website every Thursday for the next year.

The stories will be freely available. And if the first two pieces – a witty and touching sketch of the power dynamics in a romantic relationship by novelist A Yi, and wistful ‘The Road to the Weeping Spring’ by Li Juan – are anything to go by, they promise to be a weekly highlight.

The first two stories are also refreshingly short, making them the perfect tasters for anyone keen to sample writing with a view to discovering authors whose books they might like to try. Ideal companions for the morning commute, a quick cup of tea or a soothing ten-minute read before bed.

Book of the month: Pepperpot

August 26, 2014 By Ann Morgan in Book of the month, Post-world Tags: book of the month, books, Caribbean, Commonwealth Short Story Prize, culture, Peekash Press, Pepperpot, publishing, short stories 12 Comments

I wrote in my last post about the nervous wait to hear whether or not my forthcoming book will be published in the US. What I didn’t say was that of course I was incredibly fortunate to be in a position to have my work considered by publishers in the first place: for writers in many parts of the world just getting your work onto an editor’s desk can be a struggle because there simply aren’t the publishing networks in place to foster, promote and sell much new material.

The Caribbean is one such place. With hundreds of small islands dotted over more than a million square miles of ocean, the region faces big challenges when it comes to moving goods around – and books are no exception. When you tot up the cost of editing, printing and shipping titles, it’s hard to see how a publisher in the region could make any money. People in the industry seem to agree because, apart from a few hardy enterprises in bigger nations like Jamaica, there are very few publishing houses in the region – in fact one of the most famous companies that deals in Caribbean literature, Peepal Tree Press, operates out of Leeds in Yorkshire, England, thousands of miles away.

Add to this the relatively young literary culture of the islands (until a generation or two ago most books taught in schools were by British and American authors) and the lack of literary agents and, until recently, support programmes for Caribbean writers, and you begin to wonder how an aspiring wordsmith in a place like Barbados could hope to get his or her stories out. So when Antiguan writer and blogger Joanne C. Hillhouse tipped me off about an anthology made up of the best Caribbean entries to the Commonwealth Short Story Prize (for which I was privileged to act as a longlister late last year), I was keen to take a look.

Bringing together work by writers in Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago, Belize and more, Pepperpot: Best New Stories from the Caribbean aims to broadcast the region’s literature to a wider audience. It is the first title published under the name Peekash Press, a collaboration between Peepal Tree Press and Akashic Books set up to publish works by writers living in the Caribbean – as opposed to those in the diaspora, who make up the majority of these publishers’ lists.

Just as the collection seeks to bring new work to the wider world, so it also opens up fresh perspectives. If you thought that an anthology of short stories written in the Caribbean might reflect back at you all those tempting clichés of white-sand beaches, piña coladas and long, sleepy afternoons, you can think again. Packed with drama, many of the tales throb with a violent energy and deal with the very darkest human impulses. We read of gang violence, dead children, beatings, abuse and robbery.

Indeed, if you want a masterclass in how to start your stories with a bang, this is the book for you. Memorable first lines abound, perhaps the most striking being the opening of Sharon Leach’s ‘All the Secret Things No One Ever Knows’: ‘Ten years ago, I found out that I wasn’t my father’s only girlfriend.’

There’s also humour. I particularly liked Barbara Jenkins’ ‘A Good Friday’ for this, with its loveable-rogue narrator who gets more than he bargains for when a devout young woman in distress happens by his bar.

The drama and humour are heightened by robust and often very inventive language. At their best, the writers use their imagery not only to illuminate the experiences of their characters but also to share specific details about their worlds. So, for example, we read in Ivory Kelly’s ‘This Thing We Call Love’ of conversations that ‘were like boil-up, with plantains and cassava and other kinds of ground food and salted meat thrown into a pot of water, in no particular order, and boiled until the pot is a steaming, bubbling, savoury cuisine’, or in Joanne C. Hillhouse’s own ‘Amelia at Devil’s Bridge’ about rocks that ‘are sharper than a coconut vendor’s cutlass’.

Many of the stories are brought to life with equally colourful dialogue, although this poses some interesting questions. A number of the writers have chosen to represent the dialects of their characters for a Standard English-speaking reader (so that someone who uses British or American English could pronounce the words phonetically and get them to sound as the characters would say them). While there are practical reasons for this choice, it has the effect of implying a reader who comes from elsewhere, as though the literary legacy of previous generations is still present on some level. It will be interesting to see whether the region’s authors continue to write in this way in years to come.

As is inevitable with anthologies of this kind, the quality of the pieces varies. Structure is shaky in some, while others have a frustrating, unfinished feel, as though they are fragments of larger works. A few fall into the trap of telling rather than showing, or cram so much incident in that they read more like synopses for novels or (in some cases) action films than stories in their own right. There are also instances of overwriting, where tenuous metaphors and similes are heaped onto sentences too flimsy to take their weight.

Taken as a whole, however, this is an exciting and heartening book. It proves – if anyone was in any doubt – that the Caribbean has plenty of homegrown literary talent to draw upon. Congratulations to Peepal Tree Press and Akashic Books for creating a platform for these authors in the shape of Peekash Press. Judging by this collection, there are thrilling things ahead.

PepperPot: Best New Stories from the Caribbean (Peekash Press, 2014)

Eyes on the prize

May 15, 2014 By Ann Morgan in Post-world Tags: books, Commonwealth writers, culture, Lucy Caldwell, prizes, reading, short stories Leave a comment

Exciting news this week: Commonwealth Writers has announced the regional winners of its international Short Story Prize 2014.

There’s always something nice about seeing authors recognised for good work, but this year I have two reasons to be particularly delighted by the list of five writers representing Africa, Asia, Canada & Europe, the Caribbean and the Pacific.

The first is that my old university friend, Lucy Caldwell, is the winner for Canada & Europe. Author of several excellent plays and novels, Lucy already has many accolades to her name, including the prestigious Dylan Thomas Prize for her second book The Meeting Point, which is set in Bahrain. Indeed, Lucy’s extensive research into that country meant that she was one of the people I turned to for advice when I was trying to find something to read from the small Persian Gulf state back in 2012.

The other reason that the list of winning stories makes me smile stems from the fact that I had the privilege of reading one of them almost six months ago. This was because I was lucky to be on the team of readers in the UK and around the world invited to help draw up the longlist for the prize.

In my case, this meant receiving a batch of some 120 stories in December and having a little over two weeks to read and assess them – a challenge for which my experience of devouring and blogging about four books a week during my year of reading the world stood me in good stead.

As well as a privilege, being a prize longlister was fascinating. Having nothing but the title, the writer’s region and the words on the page to go on, I was free to judge the works with an open mind and heart. I was amazed at the range of topics and inventive approaches wordsmiths around the world took on, with a considerable number venturing into the realms of fantasy and science fiction – something prize veterans tell me is relatively unusual.

I’d like to say that the standard was consistently high, but the truth is there were a few rotten apples in the barrel. What was tougher, however, was that the majority of stories were good but not exciting, leaving me hesitating over whether to put them down as a Maybe or a No on the spreadsheet (all those I put as Maybes would be read again, whereas the Nos were discarded – the Yeses went through to the next stage).

Nevertheless, every so often, a story would reach out and grab me by the scruff of the neck, making the world around me recede and thrilling me with what it had to say. Asia winner Sara Adam Ang’s ‘A Day in the Death’ was one of those and I am delighted that she has come out on top in her category.

I wish her, Lucy and all the other regional winners luck as they await the announcement of this year’s overall winner in Kampala, Uganda on 13 June. May this be one of many more successes in their writing careers.

Photo by Harvey Goldblum

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