Translated from Portuguese by Margaret Jull CostaPublished by Harvill Secker, 2009, 200 pages. Original version published in 2006. José Saramago was born in 1922 in Azinhaga, a village in Portugal. The village has a charter that dates back to the thirteenth century, “but nothing remains of that glorious ancient history except the river that passes …
Category: Books in translation
The Last Will and Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo: Germano Almeida
Translated from Portuguese by Sylvia GlaserPublished by New Directions; 2004, 152 pages. “The reading of the last will and testament of Sr. Napumoceno da Silva Araújo ate up a whole afternoon. When he reached the one-hundred-and-fiftieth page, the notary admitted he was already tired…[H]e complained that the deceased, thinking he was drafting his will, had …
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Men without Women: Haruki Murakami
Translated from Japanese by Philip Gabriel and Ted GoosenPublished by Random House / Bond Street Books, 2017, 240 pages. Original version published in 2014. “Here's what hurts the most," Kafuku said. "I didn't truly understand her—or at least some crucial part of her. And it may well end that way now that she's dead and …
The Shadow of the Wind: Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Translated from Spanish by Lucia GravesPublished by Penguin / W&N, 2004, 486 pages. Original version published in 2001. “This is a place of mystery, Daniel, a sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed …
Podcast: Reading for our times—Reading around the world
Some years ago, a friend and fellow bookworm, Kristine Goulding, suggested on this blog that we read a book from every country in the world. And so the reading challenge was born, with only one rule: the writer has to be from the country. We've taken our time over it, but we are now up …
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The Bickford Fuse: Andrey Kurkov
Translated from Russian by Boris DralyukPublished by MacLehose Press, 2017, 352 pages. This is a strange, dreamlike book. Four men are on journeys across the Soviet Union that make no sense, in a landscape where the laws of physics don’t seem to exist anymore. The journeys start sometime around the end of the Second World …
Celestial Bodies: Jokha Alharthi
Translated from Arabic by Marilyn BoothPublished by Sandstone Press, 2018, 256 pages. Original version published in 2010. Celestial Bodies is a novel by Omani writer Jokha Alharthi that won the Man Booker International Prize in 2019. This makes it unusual—there aren’t a lot of books by Omani writers translated into English, and this is the …
The Memory Police: Yoko Ogawa
Translated from Japanese by Stephen SnyderPublished by Vintage, 2019, 288 pages. Original version published in 1994. “‘Things go on disappearing, one by one. … It doesn’t hurt, and you won’t even be particularly sad. One morning you’ll simply wake up and it will be over, before you’ve even realized. … People gather in little groups …
Beyond the Rice Fields: Naivo
Translated from French by Allison M. CharrettePublished by Restless Books, 2017, 500 pages. Original version published in 2016. This is the first novel from Madagascar to be translated into English. It tells the story of Rafa, a young woman, and Tsito, the boy her father buys her for a slave. Their relationship is closer than …
Babylon: Yasmina Reza
Translated from French by Linda AsherPublished by Seven Stories Press, 2018, 208 pages. Original version published in 2016. “The world isn’t tidy. It’s a mess. I don’t try to make it neat.” This epigraph from Garry Winograd, an American street photographer, opens the book. The story is narrated by Elisabeth, a sixty-year-old woman looking back …
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