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Michael Orthofer runs the – a book review site with a focus on international fiction – and its weblog.

Final selections

The deadlines approach – well, that one first, big deadline: with the Best Translated Book Award longlist due to be announced March 11 we judges have to decide what makes the 25-book cut. Twenty-five titles seems like a lot, but the procedure is that each of us submits our top-ten list (on March 1), from which the top sixteen vote-getters make the longlist, and then each judge gets to add one personal choice to round off the list, for a total of twenty-five titles. So each of us only gets to select ten+one titles. (, only six of my top-ten choices for the longlist made it (with a seventh then slipping on as the plus-one).)

Since my top-ten/must-have list currently stands at roughly fourteen titles (fluctuating daily, as two or three titles different fall in and out of favor, depending on my mood …) this is proving a more arduous exercise than I had hoped. Twenty-five slots would be easy (well, easier … maybe) to fill), but ten feels really, really tight.

There are half a dozen or so titles that I simply can’t not put in my top-ten (which, in cruel-tease-form I won’t name here – though I’m probably sufficiently on the record regarding my feelings about them elsewhere …) – because I think they are really the most deserving (and, in some cases, because I worry that they might otherwise be overlooked) – but after that it gets complicated. There are a couple of titles that so many judges already seem to feel enthusiastic about that I’m not sure I need to put my full weight behind them yet – books by recent BTBA winners like WiesÅ‚aw MyÅ›liwski’s or Krasznahorkai’s , for example, or Karl Ove Knausgaard’s , among others. But it’s hard to leave off any title that I truly want in the running: one favorite not making the initial cut is okay, since we each get to add that one personal selection, but likely there will be several that don’t get enough votes, making for quite a quandary with that lone personal selection…..

There are a lot of titles at the upper margins, the ones that I think I could make a case for – clear top-25 titles, to me, but maybe not top-ten (though some days I’m convinced title X is, other days title Y …).

There are the big novels my name-authors: Javier Marías’ (translated by Margaret Jull Costa), Antonio Muñoz Molina’s (translated by Edith Grossman, The Economist just recently that: “Its author, one of Spain’s leading writers, has been unjustly ignored in the English-speaking world. With this book, he should get the acclaim he deserves” (though Entertainment Weekly (yes, well …) the novel moves at: “the pace of a narcotized elephant” …)), Christa Wolf’s .

There are the works by authors who have been getting great reviews and quickly gaining large followings, like Robert Walser () and Elena Ferrante .

There are translations that have already won translation prizes: by Gerbrand Bakker, which won (under a different title) the British counterpart to the BTBA, the and Dimitri Verhulst’s -winning . And I was already on a translation-prize-jury that found Elfriede Jelinek’s to be a worthy winner – the – so how can I not longlist it this time around? (Sure, the competition might be tougher here – certainly there are a lot more titles in the running – but this remarkable piece of work (and the excellent translation) continues to stand out – helped also by the fact that it’s different from almost everything else we’re looking at.)

There are the smaller works that linger nicely (and often don’t seem to have gotten enough attention). Sure, Amélie Nothomb’s is kind of simple much of the way – but in its conclusion totally won me over. Jang Eun-jin’s – among the least-Dalkeyesque of the (many) Dalkey Archive Press titles to consider – has been among this year’s most pleasant reading surprises. The same goes for Uday Prakash’s , a rare (okay, the only …) translation from the Hindi we get to consider. And while Yoko Ogawa’s is the rare smaller (paperback original, too) title in translation to get pretty widespread coverage I still think it’s widely misread as a story-collection: I find it comes together beautifully and very effectively as a unified novel-whole. And then there’s a book like Jan Jacob Slauerhoff’s , which held me rapt and whose strangeness still haunts me.

Finally, there’s than annual search for a worthy ‘genre’ title – a top-notch thriller, solid sci-fi, or the like. There were certainly mysteries and thrillers galore to consider this year (like every year), but it was not a great year – with the highly touted ones feeling particularly derivative. I suppose Ogawa’s Revenge might be considered genre, of sorts (horror). Otherwise, there’s only one of these titles in my mix: Ofir Touché Gafla’s (and not just because of the author’s awesome/ridiculous name – ³Ù´Ç³Ü³¦³óé!), which certainly hasn’t gotten the (‘mainstream’) attention it deserves.

Of course, time is not yet up, the decision doesn’t have to be made yet. I still have a few weeks days of reading ahead of me, a few more books to discover and consider. Part of me hopes to find another gem – but part of me also worries: what then? which book gets knocked off the already too-long list?