Tag Archives: writers

New year, new list

December 30, 2013 By in Post-world Tags: , , , , , , , , 16 Comments

8329959687_cb402f96d6_b

This time last year I was preparing the final post of my Year of Reading the World: the 197th book review of the international reading project that took over my life in 2012. In the 12 months since then, I’ve been on many related adventures – from being invited to write and speak about what we got up to that year, to taking part in exciting events, workshops and initiatives to promote reading books from further afield.

What’s more, I’ve heard from many more readers and writers around the planet and continued to receive lots of intriguing book recommendations. Many of them have sounded so good that I knew I had to share them, so in the last few weeks I’ve spent time going through all the suggestions I’ve had in the last year and updated the list accordingly. Do check it out if you’re planning some literary travels or bookpacking in 2014.

Among the comments, I’ve been particularly pleased to receive suggestions for some of the countries that have very few entries – Fiji, Nepal, Malaysia, the Solomon Islands and Oman are all looking stronger thanks to recent additions and I’m especially intrigued by Veronica’s suggestion of Balys Sruoga’s Forest of the Gods for Lithuania, translated into English by the author’s granddaughter.

It’s also been great to have further tips for some of the most well-represented countries. We now have lots more recommendations of Indian literature written in languages other than English, especially Bengali stories. Hungary and Turkey are also looking formidable, and as several people have told me to read Bosnian writer Meša Selimović’s Death and the Dervish, I’m definitely going to have to give it a go.

As I found last year, there are growing mountains of titles that you feel should be translated into English but are not yet available. Romanian writer Dan Lungu’s Raiul găinilor is one such. According to Cristi, it has been translated into French and her description certainly makes it sound tempting:

‘It’s a novel about the small world of a street at the outskirts of a Romanian city, where people live only to be in the center of attention, and that makes them do whatever it takes to get the attention they crave. It’s immensely hilarious and benefits from the author’s sociological expertise.’

In addition to including your recommendations on the list, I’ve taken the liberty of sticking on some of the international titles I’ve been particularly impressed by recently, among them Jérôme Ferrari’s Where I Left My Soul, an astonishing glimpse inside the torture chambers of the Algerian War, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah. Apart from featuring some rather misleading depictions of how quickly and easily blogs develop a following (the heroine’s Lagos blog picks up 1,000 unique visitors in a handful of days without any effort on her part – something most new blogs take weeks if not months and lots of publicising to achieve), this is one of the most insightful and engrossing things I’ve read all year.

It’s also been great to hear from many of the writers whose work I’ve read for this project – Michael Aubertin, Anna Kim, Samson Kambalu, Cecil Browne, Daniel Kelin, Glenville Lovell, Ak Welsapar, Marie-Therese Toyi and Philo Ikonya to name but a few. In fact I was delighted when Philo included one of my comments about Kenya Will You Marry Me? on the cover of her new book, Still Sings the Nightbird. It was also lovely to receive this comment from Ahmed:

‘Hi, Ms Morgan, I am from the tiny islands of Maldives. You chose one of the best books to read about our beliefs, culture and lifestyle. Just now informed Mr. Abdulla Sadiq of your choice. He was delighted. What a great idea!’

It made me smile to think that Abdulla Sadiq could know the influence his freely available translation of his homeland’s classic story Dhon Hiyala and Ali Fulhu has had on a random person on the other side of the world.

Finally, I’ve been delighted to hear from more of the growing army of world readers and book groups embarking on global projects around the planet. From those who’ve been going for years, to those who started yesterday and from those reading under all sorts of time, genre and setting constraints to those simply seeing what they can find, there seem to be more and more of us with every week that passes. This is testament to the extraordinary times we live in and can only be a good thing. I hope my list helps you navigate some of the rockiest terrain and look forward to updating it further as exciting new literary territory opens up for English-language readers around the globe.

Thanks again for all your interest and support. It continues to be a great encouragement as I settle down to write the final draft of Reading the World: Postcards from my bookshelf (published by Harvill Secker in 2015) in the coming weeks.

A very happy new year to you all. Watch this space.

Picture by Rakka

Madagascar: over to you

December 21, 2012 By in Africa, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 13 Comments

IMG_0398

‘You should easily be able to find something from Madagascar,’ said a friend a few months ago. ‘It’s massive.’

Massive though the world’s fourth-largest island nation may be, its literature is not widely translated. In fact, there’s so little out there that, seeing the gap on my list, Sophie Lewis, Editor at Large at And Other Stories, offered to lend a hand. She sent me her translation of a short story, ‘Za’, by Francophone Malagasy writer Jean-Luc Raharimanana. The story on its own would not be enough – it had developed into a novel but this was not yet translated; however, she would contact Raharimanana to see what else he could suggest.

The next day Lewis was back with the news that not a single Malagasy novel had been translated into English. Given what I’ve found to be the case with several other Francophone and Lusophone African countries this year, this didn’t surprise me a great deal, but Sophie was shocked – so much so that she’s determined to do something about it and is keen to hear about Malagasy novels that might be suitable for And Other Stories to translate and publish (please put your suggestions at the bottom of this post).

In the meantime, however, there was only one book that fitted the bill for my purposes: Voices from Madagascar, edited by Jacques Bourgeacq and Liliane Ramarosoa.

Published in 2002, the anthology brings together prose and poetry from more than 15 writers, including Raharimanana, in an effort to address the lack of translated Malagasy literature (which its editors claim stems from the country’s political isolation during its Marxist era and the fact that none of its publishers distribute abroad). Presented in parallel with the original French texts, the works range from bleak, violent tales such as David Jaomanoro’s ‘Funeral of a Pig’, in which a son orchestrates a brutal attack on his mother, through to bombastic, witty pieces like Lila Ratsifandriamanana’s ‘God Will Come Down to Earth Tomorrow!’, in which the world anticipates a visit from the Almighty.

There is a great deal of anger in this book, particularly in the early stories. This comes through in hard-hitting, personal pieces such as Raharimanana’s ‘Case Closed’, which sees an abused woman forced to aid a trafficker by sewing drugs into her baby’s corpse, as well as sharp, satirical stories like ‘The President’s Mirror’, in which writer Bao Ralambo goes to town on the fickleness and narcissism of the title character. There are also more rounded, extended works like Jean-Claude Fota’s ‘Walk No Work’, which depicts brilliantly the mental disintegration of a bright graduate in the face of continual rejection and lack of opportunity, recalling such bildungsromans as Knut Hamsun’s Hunger and MT Vasudevan Nair’s Kaalam.

In addition, the collection provides some fascinating glimpses of Malagasy customs and mores. The shocking tradition of insulting a corpse to honour it at a funeral, for example, crops up several times, while there is an almost magical sense of the clash between the old and the new in stories such as Narcisse Randriamirado’s ‘Grandmother’. We also witness the way that many customs are weighted against gender equality in ‘In the Top’ by Alice Ravoson, which sees a woman strive to put herself through university in the face of family expectations that she will remain tied to domestic life.

As is nearly always the case in an anthology like this, some pieces come across better than others. While there is a lovely, poetic quality to much of the prose writing – no doubt owing to the fact that many of the writers work in both forms – it sometimes tips over into opacity and vagueness. The unrelenting shock and violence of the early pieces may also put some readers off, which is a shame as the collection broadens out beautifully.

Overall, though, as a tasting platter of Malagasy literary talent, this is a flavourful and moreish offering. Reading it adds to the sense of how many great works we must be missing because of the lack of cultural exchange to date. It’s surely high time that changed, so go on, tell me: what Malagasy novels should we English-language types be reading?

Voices from Madagascar ed. Jacques Bourgeacq and Liliane Ramarosoa (Ohio University Press, 2002)

What counts as a story?

December 22, 2011 By in Project preparation Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments

It seemed so simple: read one book from every country in the world in 2012. What could possibly be confusing about that?

But as soon as I started to plan the project in earnest, the questions started coming in. Was I including poetry? What about plays? And memoirs? Where did I stand on biographies? Did journalism count? Did the books have to be contemporary?

I realised I was going to have to define my terms a little more carefully.

A lot of the people I spoke to about this project felt that I should stick to prose fiction. This was my first instinct too. After all, novels, novellas and short stories are the main media for storytelling, aren’t they? Surely I should keep a level playing field between all countries by reading only one particular kind of book?

But as time went on, I got more and more recommendations for intriguing books that wouldn’t fit that mould and found myself getting frustrated. I heard of literary award-winning journalism that had led to bounties being placed on writers’ heads and biographies detailing extraordinary lives, and I wanted to read them.

There were also books that straddled several genres. Dr Ruth Martin, who recommended Elias Canetti’s autobiographical work The Torch in My Ear for Austria, for example, wrote in her comment that ‘the writing is wonderfully literary and he does “embellish” the truth a little’. One man’s memoir might just be another man’s fairytale…

I also realised that, while prose fiction may be fairly ubiquitous, it’s by no means native to every culture. In fact, in places where stories tend to be passed on verbally, narrative poems may be much truer reflections of literature there.

The question of contemporaneity also gave me a dilemma or two. Much like M Lynx Qualey, who very kindly wrote a blog post setting out her recommendations for Arabic literature in translation,  I was tempted to keep to recent texts. But when Dr Valerie Henitiuk of the British Centre for Literary Translation told me that her all-time favourite translation was Sonja Arntzen’s rendering of the 10th century Japanese Kagero Diary, there was no way I was going to bar it from the list.

So, after chewing it over for a while, I decided that I would count all narratives that could be read to full effect by one reader on their own. This means memoirs, novels, short stories, novellas, biographies, narrative poems and reportage are in and, with regret, non-narrative poetry and plays are out.

I also decided that while I would stick to mainly contemporary stories, I wanted to leave the door open for fantastic blasts from the past. The one condition is that the works have to have been created when the country was in existence in something like its modern-day form.

So if you know of an outstanding eighth century Swedish epic, or an intriguing narrative poem from Tuvalu, now’s your chance to tell the world (well, me, at least) about it. Keep the suggestions coming in – there are still quite a few gaps on that there list…

Can you help me read the world?

October 24, 2011 By in Project preparation Tags: , , , , , , , 50 Comments

In 2012, the world is coming to London for the Olympics and I’m going out to meet it. I’m planning to read my way around as many of the globe’s 196 countries (yes, I count Taiwan) as I can, sampling one book from every nation.

I want to read a story from Swaziland, a novel from Nepal, a book from Bolivia, a… well, you get the picture.

It’s going to be tough — according to the Society of Authors, only 3 per cent of the books published in the UK each year are translations. There are plenty of languages that have next to nothing translated into English. Then there are all the tiny tucked away places like Nauru and Tavalu (I know, I hadn’t either), where there may not be much written down at all.

Some countries have a culture of almost exclusively oral storytelling (alright, get your giggles over with now). Others have governments that don’t like to let works of art leak out to corrupt westerners.

And that’s not to mention the whole issue of what constitutes a national literature in the first place. Is it by a person born in that place? Is it written in the country? Can it be about another nation state?

Frankly I don’t know. I’m hoping I’ll figure out the answers (or at least my answers) to some of these questions en route.

What I do know is I can’t do it by myself. As anyone who’s dropped in on my A year of reading women blog will realise, I tend to stick mostly to British and North American writers, with the occasional South African, Australian and Indian thrown in. My knowledge of world literature is shamefully anglocentric.

So I need your help. I need you to tell me what’s hot in Russia, what’s cool in Malawi, and what’s downright smoking in Iceland. I hope to get as good a list together as possible in advance so I can hit the ground sprinting come New Year’s Day.

The books can be classics or current favourites. They can be obscure folk tales or commercial triumphs. All I ask is that they capture something of the character of a country somewhere in the world — oh, and that they’re good.

With thanks to Jason Cooper for the idea.

Picture by Steve Lennon