Category Archives: Books in translation

Judas: Amos Oz (translated by Nicholas de Lange)

03 Sunday Mar 2019

Posted by in Books in translation, Fiction

≈ 2 Comments

“Here is a story from the winter days of the end of 1959 and the beginning of 1960. It is a story of error and desire, of unrequited love, and of a religious question that remains unresolved. Some of the buildings still bore the marks of the war that had divided the city a decade earlier. In the background you could hear the distant strains of an accordion, or the plaintive sounds of a harmonica behind closed shutters.”

This first paragraph sets the scene: war, hidden lives and emotions, and religion. The city is Jerusalem. Amos Oz died at the end of 2018, and this is his last book. It is the book of an older man, looking back at the past, wondering about alternative paths that, if taken, might have avoided conflicts that have become entrenched.

Oz has been writing about Israel for years. But in Judas, he raises questions not only about the creation of Israel but about Jesus and the conflictual relationship between Jews and Christians. And at the heart of both these stories is a man labelled a traitor.

Shmuel Ash is a student in Jerusalem, in love with his studies and with Yardena. But Yardena has had enough of him: “Either you’re like an excited puppy…or else you’re lying on your bed for days like an unaired quilt”, she tells him and leaves to marry someone else.

Shmuel’s father loses his business, so Shmuel has to give up university. When he sees an advertisement for a “humanities student with conversational skills and an interest in history” to spend a few hours with a 70-year-old man in return for a small salary and board and lodgings, it seems a perfect way to retreat from the world.

The house in the advertisement is old and draws him into its meandering corridor, much as he is later drawn into the lives of the two people who live there. “[T]he passage was not level, but sloped downhill, as if it were a riverbed, not a dark corridor.” He is interviewed by the old man, Gershom Wald, and a young woman whom he later finds out is his daughter-in-law, Atalia Abravanel. He moves in and becomes part of the household, and inevitably, falls in love with Atalia, the mysterious woman just out of reach.

Shmuel is writing his thesis on Jesus and the Jews, trying to understand the how the animosity between Jews and Christians started. After all, Jesus and his apostles were Jewish. Jesus did not want to start a new religion. According to Shmuel, Judas was a spy sent by the Jewish authorities to infiltrate Jesus’s entourage, to find out more about this young preacher. But Judas starts to believe in Jesus and thinks the only way that Jesus can prove his divinity is to go to Jerusalem. But things do not go as Judas planned. Jesus is crucified, and Judas is labelled a traitor.

There is a parallel story here, which Shmuel learns from Wald and Atalia: the story of her father, Shealtiel Abravanel. Abravanel was also branded a traitor because he challenged Ben Gurion on the foundation of the state of Israel, the only member of the Zionist executive committee to do so. Abravanel believed that Arabs and Israelis could live together, but it had to be done through constant dialogue and not through conflict. Like Judas, he is also banished and lives out his days in the old house. 

The conflict that Abravanel tries to avoid leaves its scars on the family. Micha, Wald’s son and Atalia’s husband, was killed in 1948, presumably by Arabs, during the fighting on the road to Jerusalem.

It is a house of ghosts, still lives and betrayals: Abravanel’s room has been left as it was, a shrine to him, and Wald lives with the memories of his dead son. For Wald and Atalia, there seems to be no way out of the house and the pattern their lives have fallen into.   

Oz has a way with words that bring people and scenes to life. The house and Jerusalem are characters in their own right. The house has grills on the windows but in the courtyard are geraniums, sprouting from “a mass of rusty pots and disused pans, paraffin stoves, buckets, basins, tin cans and even a cracked lavatory bowl, all filled with soil and promoted to the rank of flowerpot. … And over all this, lay the silence of a cold winter’s evening. Not the kind of limpid silence that invites you in, but rather an indifferent, age-old silence that turns its back on you.”

Oz writes beautifully and provocatively. This is a book to savour that leaves you plenty to think about.

Macbeth: Jo Nesbo, translated by Don Bartlett

17 Sunday Feb 2019

Posted by in Books in translation, Crime / Thriller, Fiction

≈ Leave a comment

A town in Scotland where the sun never breaks through the clouds, pollution hangs heavy, unemployment is high and people are in thrall to a potent drug called the brew, manufactured and sold by the drug lord, Hecate.

This is the setting for Jo Nesbo’s grim, gritty reworking of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.[1]  He turns it into a police procedural, set around the 1980s (I think).[2] Macbeth is the head of the town’s SWAT team. A former drug addict, he is well-liked and respected by his colleagues. The new police commissioner, Duncan, wants to clean up the town by getting rid of Hecate. This isn’t going to be easy: Hecate’s tentacles spread deep into the town, and many in the local government and police are in his pocket.

As the book starts, Duff, a police inspector, has been tipped off about a large shipment of drugs arriving at the port. Thinking that he would get all the credit if he pulls it off by himself, he does not inform Duncan and turns down Macbeth’s offer of help. But things go wrong, and Macbeth—who is there with his team, including his trusted friend, Banquo—saves the day.

Walking back from the raid, Macbeth and Banquo are stopped by two women of indeterminate age with ravaged faces and “cold inscrutable [eyes] that don’t let you in, that only reflect their surroundings”. The women are joined by Strega, a man-woman in leopard-skin tight, who works for Hecate. The women predict that Macbeth will become head of the Organized Crime Unit and then Chief Commissioner. He dismisses them but then, as soon as he gets back to the police station, Duncan makes him head of Organized Crime. This is the beginning of the end for him: as Strega says to Hecate, “If people see the soothsayer’s first prophecy fulfilled, they’ll believe the next one blindly”.

Macbeth shares the day’s events with Lady, the beautiful owner of a posh casino, with whom he is in love. Lady, who is more ruthless and more ambitious than Macbeth, sees an opportunity to consolidate power and persuades Macbeth to murder Duncan. At first horrified by the idea, Macbeth eventually buys into Lady’s argument that together, the couple can do a lot of good for the town. (At least that’s what he tells himself.) He murders Duncan and takes over his job as Chief Commissioner, fulfilling the women’s prophecy. But the murder opens the door to his addiction. He takes a bit of the brew to get his courage up for the murder, and he is hooked. The drug fuels his paranoia, and the murders spiral out of control. Lady is made of sterner stuff but she has her demons too, and gradually, they both start to unravel.

Meanwhile Duff has realized what is going on, and is on the run from Macbeth. He joins up with other cops who take the fight to Macbeth. But will getting rid of one man really get rid of the endemic corruption?  

Nesbo sticks quite closely to the original. There are some nice touches: the brew is concocted by the two ravaged women from their secret recipe said to contain “toad’s glands, bumblebee wings, juice from rats’ tails”—like the witches’ brew. Naming their boss Hecate echoes the play too, where she is the goddess of witchcraft. Hecate in the book does not need witchcraft to cast his spell over the town: all he needs is the brew.

The betrayals in the novel feel more visceral than in the play. Macbeth is a character we are familiar with: the incorruptible cop who breaks the rules and gets results. So when Macbeth agrees to kill Duncan, he goes against the stereotype (I did think he agreed a little too easily, though).  Banquo is not a contemporary of Macbeth’s as he is in the play—he is the man who took Macbeth in as a child and gave him a home, which makes Banquo’s murder even more shocking. The bond between Macbeth and his nemesis, Duff (the Macduff character in the play) is also something Nesbo has added. The two men were at an orphanage together and know each other’s secrets. This creates an intimacy but also an uneasy relationship, which brings more depth to their conflict.

Nesbo underlines the filth in the town: the moral corruption is reflected in the weather and the pollution, unlike Fife a short distance away, which is bathed in sunlight. But the men living there choose to do so, as if too much light will expose them for what they are. The book opens with rain, following a single raindrop as it finds its way down to the main characters, a device Nesbo uses again at the end.

This is a book about power, which is the real drug here. Everyone is on the make and will stop at nothing to further their own ends. It fits right in with the world Nesbo has created in his other books. I found it compelling: the violence could be appalling but I couldn’t tear myself away from the story. I usually have trouble with books where none of the characters are sympathetic. Not here.

[1] Macbeth is part of a series commissioned by Hogarth Press, a contemporary reimagining of Shakespeare’s plays. Margaret Atwood’s reworking of The Tempest, Hag-Seed, has also been reviewed on this site.

[2] Before cell phones, at any rate.

Kafka on the Shore: Haruki Murakami (translated by Philip Gabriel)

12 Saturday Jan 2019

Posted by in Books in translation, Fiction

≈ Leave a comment

A man talks to cats, fish and leeches rain down from the sky, a man dressed like Johnny Walker (of whisky fame) is making a flute from cats’ souls, and a stone opens the door to another world. Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of Haruki Murakami.

The book begins with an account of a strange incident just after the Second World War. A teacher and a group of children go foraging for mushrooms in a forest. Suddenly all the children pass out on the forest floor. When they come to, they have no memory of the incident except for one, who never really comes back whole. The children are examined but the doctors find nothing strange or unusual.

The book follows two characters: Kafka Tamura, a 15-year-old who runs away from home to escape his father’s prophecy, an Oedipal curse, and to find his mother; and Nakata, a middle-aged man (“not very bright”, in his words) who can talk to cats. Kafka’s mother left when he was very young, taking his sister with her, leaving the father to bring him up. Nakata is the boy who almost did not survive the incident on the hill—one of the brightest students, he emerged from his coma unable to read but able to talk to cats. As an adult, using this unique gift, he helps people find their missing cats.

Kafka ends up in a library in Takamatsu—the last place he thinks his father will look for him—where he is befriended by Oshima and the person who runs the library, Miss Saeki. In the meantime, Nakata has been involved in a murder and is on the run, but also on a quest to find a stone that can open the door into another world. He is helped by Hoshino, a truck driver who gives him a lift.

As the story develops, Kafka and Nakata’s paths start to converge. Kafka reads in the paper that his father has been brutally murdered and the police are looking for him to find out what he knows. But who killed the father? Was he the Johnny Walker character whom Nakata stabbed?

Despite the murder, this is not a whodunit. It is about people trying to make sense of their pasts and their identities. And sometimes that requires walking into an alternative universe that is buried deep in the forest near Oshima’s cabin and guarded by two soldiers left behind from the Second World War.

Kafka on the Shore is a fascinating book that does not answer all the questions it raises. Murakami builds his story through interconnected layers where repercussions from events ripple out beyond their immediate surroundings. This book is never predictable—you never know how it is going to unfold.

My only gripe is that the translation uses Americanisms which seem a bit strange coming from Japanese characters (like “Jeez Louise”). But that’s a small complaint. Read this book—it is utterly strange and compelling.

Frida Folk: Gaby Franger (translated by Gita Wolf)

05 Saturday Jan 2019

Posted by in Art, Books in translation

≈ 2 Comments

Review by Sadhana Ramchander

Frida Folk celebrates, in an unusual manner, the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, and her many ‘avatars’.

This is indeed a fascinating book! It documents an unbelievable variety of interpretations of Frida­—the woman and the artist—by crafts-people and artists from all over the world. From murals to traditional tin shrines to hand bags and cushion covers to T-shirts and clay figurines, this book features them all. In the process, it entices you to read more about Frida, and also to see and understand her own paintings, which by the way, are NOT featured in this book.

I found the chapter on the art of the Aguilar Sisters very interesting. Their folk figures are original and unique. One of the sisters makes a Frida figurine with a child, even though Frida never had a child. This artist says, “maybe she didn’t have one when she was alive, but now that she’s dead, she gets one in my work.” It takes courage to say this, and only another artist can muster this courage!

The chapters are short, the writing lucid, and the book well laid out, bright and cheerful. The last part of the book titled, “Frida waits at every corner” is a collection of Fridamania photographs by Rafael Doniz.

Frida Folk is not a book you read and put away. It is a book you want to keep re-reading and looking at. And at the end of it, it makes you want to start your own collection of Frida memorabilia. The book reiterates Frida’s cult status and the fact that it is indeed very rare for an artist to be as popular as her, anywhere in the world.

Frida’s sister, Christina Kahlo, is a guest author. The chief photographer is Rafael Doniz. Published by Tara Books, Chennai, India, the book has been designed by Ragini Siruguri and production supervised by C. Arumugam. The German version is titled Frida Pop.

Best books of 2018

22 Saturday Dec 2018

Posted by in About reading, writing and books, Autobiography / Biography / Memoir, Books in translation, Crime / Thriller, Current Affairs / Politics / Society, Fantasy / Sci-Fi / Ghosts, Fiction, Historical fiction, Non-Fiction, Philosophy, Poetry, Travel

≈ Leave a comment

My request for the best books you read this year had an overwhelming response! Thank you to those of you who sent in their lists.  

The lists below not only cover  a wide range of subjects, but also span centuries, from 2018 to those published hundreds of years ago. Fiction includes fantasy, crime and family sagas. The non-fiction books range from an account of the attack on Charlie Hebdo, problems with the Indian judicial system, to history, autobiography, politics, science and travel. We also have poetry, so there is something for everyone. I was delighted to find so many books in translation. Some are in French or Spanish and have not been translated (yet).

And I am proud to say that Achala Upendran’s first book made the cut—it’s incredible to see someone I have known since she was a child mature into a talented and successful writer.  

There is plenty for you to explore. Links are to reviews on this site (or to reviews on Women on the Road). Blurbs in quotes are from contributors.

Contributors: Caroline Dommen, Dalip Mehta, David Dunkley, Deborah Eade, Jenifer Freedman, Jo Grin-Yates, Kamakshi Balasubramanian, Kristine Goulding, Leslie Jones, Leyla Alyanak, Mariana Duarte Mutzenberg, Marie-Graziella Nguini, Sajid Mahmood, Sally-Anne Sader, Sergio Sandoval, Sophia Murphy, Stara Amidouch, Suroor Alikhan, Susie Partridge, Thomas Fitzsimons, Tom Peak, Usha Raman and Will Ramsay.

If you are not among the contributors, do share your list with us. We would love to hear from you. And here’s to another year of fantastic books!

Photo: Hackley Public Library (CC BY 2.0)

FICTION

General fiction

  • Ocean-Rimmed World: Joe D’Cruz (2005, translated from Tamil into English in 2018)
    The struggles and changing fortunes of the Parathavars of the Tuticorin coast—a community of seafarers and fisherfolk.
  • Go, Went, Gone: Jenny Erpenbeck (2015, translated from German into English in 2018)
    A retired professor gets to know some African refugees in Berlin. A scathing indictment of Western policy toward the European refugee crisis.
  • Des ailes au loin: Jadd Hilal (2018)
    A story of four generations of Palestinian-Lebanese women for whom migration becomes a way of life.
  • Qui a tué mon père: Edouard Louis (2018)
    “Especially in these times of gilets jaunes,[1] this is a very powerful and personal account of what we call la France d’en-bas.”
  • Les prénoms épicènes: Amélie Nothomb (2018)
    The relationship between a father and daughter.
  • The Overstory: Richard Powers (2018)
    Nine Americans come together to fight the destruction of forests. “A compelling book.”
  • Flights: Olga Tokarczuk (2018)
    Interweaves reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body. “At times uneven, but I liked her language.”
  • The Labyrinth of the Spirits: Carlos Ruiz Zafón (2016, translated from Spanish into English in 2018)
    The last in the Cemetry of Forgotten Books series. Alicia uncovers murders tied to the Franco regime.
  • Stay with Me: Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ (2017)
    A Nigerian couple’s unsuccessful attempts to have children tells on their marriage.
  • Lincoln in the Bardo: George Saunders (2017)
    “An unusual book—a sort of fragmented Spoon River Anthology.”
  • Behold the Dreamers: Imbolo Mbue (2016)
    A Cameroonian couple try to stay in New York—a story of migrants trying to make a life for themselves.
  • A Gentleman in Moscow: Amor Towles (2016)
    About a man who is ordered to spend the rest of his life inside a luxury hotel.
  • The Sellout: Paul Beatty (2015)
    Subversive look at race in the US.
  • Go Set a Watchman: Harper Lee (2015)
    The sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird.
  • Optic Nerve: Maria Gainza (2014, to be translated from Spanish into English in 2019)
    The story of a woman’s life told through artists and paintings.
  • Americanah: Chimananda Ngozi Adichie (2013)
    The experiences of a young Nigerian in the US and in Nigeria. Raises questions of race and belonging.
  • A Man called Ove: Fredrik Backman (2012, translated from Swedish into English in 2013)
    A curmudgeon finds his world turned around when a chatty family moves in next door. “It made me laugh out loud, and I love books that do that.”
  • The Sound of Things Falling: Juan Gabriel Vásquez (2011, translated from Spanish into English in 2013)
    How the drug trade in Colombia impacted on the lives of people.
  • Nazi Literature in the Americas: Roberto Bolaño (1996, translated from Spanish into English in 2008)
    A biographical dictionary of fictional right-wing Pan-American writers and Nazi sympathizers. Black humour.
  • Disobedience: Naomi Alderman (2006)
    A young photographer living in New York goes back to her orthodox Jewish community in London when her father dies and has to confront her past.
  • A Way through the Woods: Aminuddin Khan (1997)
    “Made me nostalgic for the people and stories of India I remembered hearing about when I first went to Hyderabad in the 1980s.”
  • Stoner: John Willams (1965)
    Follows William Stoner’s undistinguished academic career and his marriage and affair.

Classics

  • The Grapes of Wrath: John Steinbeck (1939)
    A family of tenant farmers migrates during the Great Depression.
  • War and Peace: Leo Tolstoy (1869, first translated from Russian into English in 1898)
    “I glazed over some of the war bits, and the epilogue is overwrought. But these are minor in the broad sweep of the novel (partly written by Tolstoy’s wife).”
  • The Tenant of Wildfell Hall: Anne Brontë (1848)
    “A classic I had never managed to get to and was surprised by how much I enjoyed it and admired both the writing and the characters.”
  • The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus: Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen (1668, first translated from German into English in 1912. This entry refers to a 2018 translation.)
    “The account of the life of an odd vagrant named Melchior Sternfels von Fuchshaim.” (from the subtitle)

Crime

  • The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle: Stuart Turton (2018)
    “The most unusual whodunit I’ve read. Takes the idea of a murder in a country house and puts a completely different spin on it.”     
  • IQ (2016), Righteous (2017) and Wrecked (2018): Joe Ide
    Joe Ide is a Japanese-American crime fiction writer.
  • Inspector Armande Gamache series: Louise Penny
    Set in Quebec.

Humour

  • Last Week Tonight with John Oliver Presents a Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo: Jill Twiss, illustrated by Gerald Kelly (2018)
    A story about a gay bunny who belongs to US Vice President Mike Pence. “Something that rounds off the crazy year.”

Fantasy/Futuristic

  • The Sultanpur Chronicles: The Shadowed City: Achala Upendran (2018)
    Peace reigns in Sultanpur until a spell releases a rakshasi[2]and threatens to plunge the empire into chaos.
  • The Power: Naomi Alderman (2016)
    What happens when teenage girls have immense physical power to cause pain. 
  • Laurus: Evgeniy Vodolazkin (2013, translated from Russian into English in 2015)
    A healer sets out on a voyage of redemption that spans ages and countries.
  • Kafka on the Shore: Haruki Murakami (2002, translated from Japanese into English in 2005)
    “A weird and wonderful book about a young runaway and a man damaged by an accident trying to untangle their pasts.”
  • The Master and Margarita: Mikhail Bulgakov (1967, first translated from Russian into English in 1967)
    The devil pays a visit to Moscow. Subversive with lots of black humour.

Historical fiction

  • Homecoming: Yaa Gyasi (2017)
    The story of two half-sisters from a village in Ghana in the 18th century. One marries an Englishman and the other is sold into slavery.
  • Pachinko: Min Jin Lee (2017)
    Set in Japan in the early 1900s, it is about Sunja, a pregnant teenager and how her decisions impact on her life.  
  • L’Art de Perdre: Alice Zeniter (2017)
    “The consequences of being on the wrong side of history and not really belonging anywhere, this is about the Harkis[3] in France. Zeniter raises issues that French society does not really want to deal with and that individuals are still struggling with.
  • Burial Rites: Hannah Kent (2013)
    The final days of a young woman accused of murder in Iceland in 1829.
  • Les naufragés de l’île Tromelin: Irene Frain (2009)
    In 1761, a ship carrying slaves is wrecked on an unknown island in the Indian Ocean.  Fifteen years later, there are only eight survivors. What happened on the island?
  • The Book of Night Women: Marlon James (2009)
    “A haunting book about slavery in Jamaica in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.”
  • The Jewel of Medina: Sherry Jones (2008)
    A fictional biography of Aisha, the favourite wife of Prophet Muhammed.
  • Pompeii: Robert Harris (2003)
    A recreation of Pompeii in the days before Vesuvius erupted.
  • The Known World: Edward P. Jones (2003)
    About black slave owners in the US.
  • The World My Wilderness: Rose Macauley (1950)
    “A story of post-war Italy and London and the casual neglect of children by adults who were too busy with the aftermath of war to pay much attention to their children’s needs.”

Retellings

  • Circe: Madeline Miller (2018)
    A reworking of the story of Circe, the Greek goddess.
  • Frankenstein in Baghdad: Ahmed Saadawi (2013, translated from Arabic into English in 2018)
    Frankenstein in present-day Baghdad.
  • Norse Mythology: Neil Gaiman (2017)
    An enjoyable retelling of the Norse myths.
  • Hag-Seed: Margaret Atwood (2016)
    Margaret Atwood’s take on The Tempest.
  • Home Fires: Kamila Shamsie (2017)
    The story of a Pakistani immigrant family in Britain, and about being Muslim in the UK. Based on Sophocles’s Antigone.

NON-FICTION

Autobiography/Biography/Memoirs

  • Le Lambeau: Philippe Lançon (2018)
    “An account by one of the surviving journalists of the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack.”
  • Becoming: Michelle Obama (2018)
  • What Happened: Hillary Rodham Clinton (2017)
    “Political analysis of the shocker vote that saw Donald trump rise to the US presidency, as well as an honest introspection for Hillary – her life, career, mistakes, regrets and unfaltering sense of hope.”

History

  • The British in India: David Gilmour (2018)
    “Excellent and a marvellous compilation of the subject matter.”
  • Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China: Paul French (2011)
  • Kohinoor: The Story of the World’s Most Infamous Diamond: William Dalrymple (2017)

Science and living

  • Darwin Comes to Town: Menno Schilthuizen (2018)
    “Linking two of my favourite things: cities and biology.”
  • Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City: Richard Sennett (2018)
  • I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life:  Ed Yong (2015)

Travel

Writing and reading

  • First You Write a Sentence: The Elements of Reading, Writing … and Life: Joe Moran (2018)
  • The Library Book: Susan Orlean (2018)
  • Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction: Brian Dillon (2017)

Philosophy

  • The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User’s Manual: David R. Godine (2018)
  • Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are: John Kaag (2018)
    “He made Nietzsche a personal experience beyond the philosophy and linked to Nietzsche’s time in the Engadine.”

Current affairs

  • The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities: John J. Mearsheimer (2018)
  • Anita Gets Bail: What Are Our Courts Doing? What Should We Do About Them?: Arun Shourie (2018)
  • Fear: Trump in the White House: Bob Woodward (2018)
    “Absolutely terrifying—this man has the nuclear codes! I developed an unexpected respect for Tillerson, Mattis, Porter and Kelly as I read.”
  • Women and Power: Mary Beard (2017)
  • Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City: Matthew Desmond (2016)
  • Indian Muslim Spring: Why is No One Talking About It?: Hassan Suroor (2014)

Poetry and reflections

  • Kumukanda: Kayo Chingonyi (2017)
  • Benedictus: A Book of Blessings: John O’Donohue (2007)
    “A mixture of poems and reflections on blessing different events from Beginnings to Endings to Callings.”
  • The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos: Anne Carson (2001)

[1] Yellow jackets, the symbol of the popular protest in France in 2018.

[2] A female demon.

[3] The generic term for native Muslim Algerians who served as auxiliaries in the French Army during the Algerian War of Independence from 1954 to 1962.

[4] Scroll down the page on Asia to find the review.

To the Back of Beyond: Peter Stamm, translated by translated by Michael Hofmann

24 Monday Sep 2018

Posted by in Books in translation, Fiction

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

What happens when a man walks out of his seemingly perfect life?

Thomas and Astrid live in a village in northern Switzerland. Thomas has a steady job, they have two children, a nice house and a marriage that seems to work. Until one evening, back from a holiday in Spain, they put the children to bed and sit outside with a glass of wine and the paper. Astrid goes in to check on the son, Konrad. Thomas leaves his unfinished glass of wine and walks out of the gate. And keeps walking.

Astrid, in the meantime, goes to bed, thinking Thomas will follow. She doesn’t really notice his absence until halfway through the day. She makes excuses for his absence to his secretary and the children, hoping that he would come back. But he doesn’t, and she goes to the police.

The book alternates between the two: Thomas, as he manages to survive with whatever he had in his pockets, staying out of sight, sleeping rough; and Astrid, trying to maintain an appearance of normality, especially for the children. She tracks down his whereabouts when he uses his credit card but he has already moved on.

Thomas does not have any obvious motivation for leaving: the day he walks out is like any other. But Peter Stamm, in summing up Thomas’s life so far, gives you a glimpse of what he was escaping from: “he had functioned in the way expected of him, without it being ever discussed”. The freedom Thomas craves is the freedom from expectations. Now, wandering through the countryside, he lives in the moment, surviving in whatever way he can, with nothing to prove to anyone.

Stamm’s writing is spare and deceptively simple. He describes the events dispassionately: there is emotion but for the most part it is kept just under the surface. The writing emphasises the way both Thomas and Astrid keep an emotional distance from their lives and from those around them. When their daughter Ella was a baby and cried incessantly, Astrid would sometimes leave her alone in the house and go and sit on a bench by the station. And in a strange way, she seems to understand Thomas’s need to leave.

I loved Stamm’s writing and the economical way he can capture a scene. The family goes to a barbeque with Thomas’s handball teammates. “Astrid sat at a table with three couples who seemed to be friends and were sharing village gossip, with loud shouts of laughter. … By the time Thomas finally jammed onto the bench facing her, laughing at some comment or other that someone had called out, she said she was tired and wanted to go home… she had the feeling that she couldn’t stand the noise and merriment for another minute. In spite of that, they didn’t go home until much later, after midnight, when there was a chill in the air.”

This book is about relationships and love, and also loss, the empty place at the table, the slowly fading memory of someone dear. Astrid, describing him to the police, “had the sense that Thomas was rigidifying as she described him, becoming unrecognizable, the image of a dead man”. At one point when she thinks he is dead, she imagines Thomas’s family and friends trying to keep his memory alive by telling and retelling stories about him which “over the years would come to stand in for him, and finally, ironically, cause him to disappear.”

But the core of the book is the love between Thomas and Astrid. In an odd way, their relationship strengthens away from each other. Stamm has written an unusual and rather haunting book.

Shadowless: Hasan Ali Toptas, translated by Maureen Freely and John Angliss

19 Sunday Aug 2018

Posted by in Books in translation, Fiction

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

I am honestly not sure what to make of this strange, hallucinatory book. Reading it is like wandering into a dream where not everything makes sense. In spite of its title, it is full of shadows and fog. In essence, this is a book about memory and what it means to exist.

The story takes place in a remote village in Anatolia: “there was no village further from the State than this one, and no village further from God”. The day after the muhtar is re-elected, the barber Nuri disappears. The muhtar sends out men to look for him but they return without any news. Another barber mysteriously shows up in the village and takes over Nuri’s shop. Then when the most beautiful girl in the village goes missing, things really start to fall apart.

Meanwhile, Nuri reappears in a barbershop in Istanbul. The people in the barbershop in Istanbul wait, forget the past and sometimes vanish. They either turn up in the village or are never seen again.

The story moves between mirror worlds that are in some way connected. Characters go back and forth between the two worlds, not sure how they got there. Narratives loop back on themselves. It’s not even clear how substantial these two worlds actually are. When the muhtar hears people knocking on his door, he expects the villagers but finds only insubstantial shadows.

People contain within them multiple versions of themselves, all of whom coexist; but sometimes two versions of a person are doing different things. One of the main characters is the watchman, who becomes increasingly depressed as things unravel. “He wafted from street to street, like an empty sack, blown from one wall to the next. He seemed to be shrinking as he went: leaving crumbs of himself on the roads and plains and cliffs and nights he left in his wake.

“But still, inside that crumbling watchman, there were hundreds of other watchmen, each very different from the next. One watchman found the energy to search for the muhtar from time to time. … One wanted to gather up his things and leave the village. One had a good, long cry.”

And there is a writer in the barbershop in Istanbul who seems to know more than he should about the village (it’s the only time the book uses first-person narrative). Do the people exist only in his imagination? Is he writing this story, making the reader part of the creative process, or is he just a part of the story?

The writing is beautiful and lyrical, but trying to make sense of it is trying to grab a fistful of mist. I think I shall reread it, slowly, and allow it to carry me instead of trying to bend it to my reality.

No sweet song, this

03 Sunday Jun 2018

Posted by in Books in translation, Crime / Thriller, Fiction

≈ Leave a comment

book coverLullaby by Leila Slimani

Translated from the French Chanson Douce (2016) by Sam Taylor (Faber & Faber, 2018)

I encountered Leila Slimani and her work in the New York Times Review of Books, months before the English translation came to market. My fingers raced across the keyboard to Amazon, only to find I had to wait four months before copies would become available, and for the first time ever (okay, outside of pre-ordering the Harry Potter books for my daughter) I placed an order and held my breath.

The opening sentence, which plays on the book jacket above the title, and repeated in multiple reviews in multiple papers around the world, is a bare, unadorned statement.

The baby is dead. It took only a few seconds.

So you have the grisly end to the story, which is the beginning of an exploration of the multiple complexities that structure our lives and the dynamics that ensue when people from different worlds come together. A young couple, intelligent, ambitious, and aware in the manner of the urbane liberal middle class, wish to hire a nanny to care for their two children when the mother, a brilliant lawyer, goes back to work after a baby break. “No illegal immigrants, agreed?….to look after the little ones, it’s too dangerous.” Says Myriam to her husband, Paul, as they stage their small apartment to convey an assurance they barely feel, to receive the applicants for the post. “She is awaiting this nanny as if she is the Savior.”

Louise is perfect (the title of the North American edition is The Perfect Nanny), with a face “like a peaceful sea, its depths suspected by no one.” She brings the much-needed order to their household, coaxing the children into good behaviour and rustling up delectable home-cooked meals that win the work-worn hearts of the parents who return from their demanding jobs, tired and grateful. Most importantly, she gives them back their time with each other, allowing them to rediscover an intimacy they had lost to parenthood.

But Louise’s own life is cold and empty, one of rejection, deprivation, and a million broken dreams and as she fills it, more and more, with the lives of Miriyam’s children, Mila and Adam,  “The silent apartment is completely under her power, like an enemy begging for forgiveness.”

Lullaby is a thriller told in reverse, a deliberate forensic examination of how something comes to be. The deliberate distance maintained by the narration, as if you are watching it all unfold through a six-inch thick pane of glass, in slow motion, makes it all the more powerful. Slimani takes us deep into the emotional labyrinth of motherhood, where it is not all sacrifice and smiles, but also resentment, rage, regret, confusion. She carefully dissects the hypocrisies of class difference, complicated as it is these days with carefully hidden attitudes to race, ethnicity and gender. She explores what it means to nurture children that are not your own, who unhesitatingly betray your love by running into a parent’s arms the moment you set them down. Miriyam and Paul love Louise, but they are also a little frightened of her, and at times, hate that they are reminded that they have so much, and she, so little. After all, they live in a fashionable part of Paris, a neighbourhood where people “offer friendly greetings even if they don’t know each other” while Louise escapes every day from a bare one-room apartment to fulfil Miriyam’s “guiltily nursed” fantasies of an idyllic family life.

We know how it all ends, but the fascination with the question of why keeps one reading. Apart from the central characters—Louise, Miriyam, Paul and the children—there are others, bit players in this drama that shapes people, shapes events.

Slimani’s style is one of short, sometimes even brusque, sentences that allow the scene to unfold, but don’t let you linger. The novel moves forward in tension-filled bursts, told almost entirely in present tense, giving the reader the sense that you can’t tarry or you might be left behind as the narrative moves relentlessly towards its end.

It’s no surprise that the novel won France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt in 2016. It is nothing like your regular whodunit; after all, we know who did it right from the start.

Recognizing the Talent of the Translator: The Subtle Art of Translating

21 Monday May 2018

Posted by in About reading, writing and books, Books in translation

≈ 2 Comments

From time to time, this blog showcases books in translation to tempt readers to explore writing from countries that do not always make it to the bestseller lists. But we often overlook the work of the translator, who has not only to be fluent in two languages but has to be able to write. The fact that we read books written in other languages is not simply because they have been rendered into another language (English, in this case) but also because the translation does justice to the original.

Rachel Cooke in this article for The Guardian, says that the quality of the translation is paramount.

“Last year, I decided to treat myself to a new copy of Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan, a novel I have loved ever since I first read it as a teenager, and whose dreamy opening line in its original translation from the French by Irene Ash – “A strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sadness” – I know by heart. But which one to get? In the end, I decided to go for something entirely new and ritzy, which is how I came to buy the Penguin Modern Classics edition, translated by Heather Lloyd.

Some days later, in bed, I began reading it. The shock was tremendous, disorienting. “This strange new feeling of mine, obsessing me by its sweet languor, is such that I am reluctant to dignify it with the fine, solemn name of ‘sadness’,” went the first sentence, which sounded to my ears a little as though a robot had written it. For a while I pressed on, telling myself it was stupid to cling to only one version, as if it were a sacred thing, and that perhaps I would soon fall in love with this no doubt very clever and more accurate new translation. Pretty soon, though, I gave up. However syntactically correct it might be, the prose had for me lost all of its magic. It was as if I’d gone out to buy a silk party dress and come home with a set of nylon overalls.”

Read the full article on The Guardian website. Cooke’s article is followed by short pieces by translators of some well-known foreign writers.

A Land Without Jasmine: Wajdi Al-Ahdal, translated by William Maynard Hutchins

07 Monday May 2018

Posted by in Books in translation, Fiction, The reading challenge

≈ Leave a comment

Over the last year, Yemen has been in the news, its people suffering the ravages of war and famine. I realized that I knew very little about the country, especially what it had been like to live there before the troubles began. I’ve always found fiction to be the best way in to understand a society, especially if the writer is from the country/community. Fiction takes you into people’s homes and minds in a way that non-fiction does not.

So I got myself this book, written by Wajdi Al-Ahdal, one of Yemen’s best-known writers. In 2003, he had to leave Yemen because his book Qawarib Jabaliya (Mountain Boats) upset radical conservatives. He was eventually able to return but I somehow don’t think this book is going to endear him to the conservatives—he writes not only about the way women are treated in this very patriarchal society but also about women’s sexuality. They are seen as both the keepers of the family’s honour and objects of desire.

The centre of this book is Jasmine, a young woman living in Sana’a. She is bright and beautiful, focused on her studies. Until one day she doesn’t come home from university. No one can find her—she seems to have vanished into thin air. And for many of the people around her, a land without Jasmine is a diminished place.

Each chapter is narrated by a different person, starting with Jasmine herself. She complains about the male gaze that follows her everywhere: whether it’s the shopkeeper across the street or the construction workers on her way to the university; men ogle her and seem to follow her every move, in spite of the veil and long black coat she wears when she leaves the house. She feels that she is suffocating under this constant watchfulness, “a noxious type of male violence”.

It is not only older men who are obsessed with Jasmine. Ali, the adolescent boy in the flat opposite hers, is in love with her. They used to be friends until Jasmine’s father thought she was too old to be hanging out with boys. So now, unable to speak to her or approach her, he waits every morning for Jasmine to leave for university and follows her like a shadow.

When one day she doesn’t come home, her father and brothers go looking for her, convinced that she has in some way sullied the family’s honour. It seems like that men in the family and the clan are more worried about their honour than about what happened to Jasmine. The only people who seem to really care are her mother, Ali, the man running the café at the university and the policemen investigating her disappearance.

All of them take turns at telling their side of the story. And each narration adds yet another piece to Jasmine’s story. And because she is the first character you meet, you can separate the truth from people’s perceptions of her. The last chapter goes back to Jasmine herself, through her mother who finds Jasmine’s diary, which hints at events much stranger than anyone had imagined.

This is a slim book at just 82 pages. The end is intriguing, but I am not sure whether I completely believe it. It isn’t the element of magic realism that bothers me but the woman writing the diary feels very different from the woman in the first chapter. Even allowing for the secret lives we all lead inside our heads, I found it a little hard to believe. At some level it feels like a male fantasy, the kind that has been dogging Jasmine all her adult life, even though it is supposed to be her diary.

In spite of that, I found it a fascinating glimpse into a country and a culture that I really didn’t know much about.