BTBA2015 – Three Percent

Why This Book Should Win – Street of Thieves by BTBA Judge George Carroll

Monica Carter — Thu, 09 Apr 2015 10:00:00 +0000

George Carroll is the World Literature Editor of and an independent publishers’ representative based in the Pacific Northwest.

– Mathias Énard, Translated by Charlotte Mandell
Open Letter Books

Last year, I advanced Mahi Binebine’s Horses of God, tr. from the French by Lulu Norman, for The Best Translated Book Award a book that follows the lives of a group of teenage soccer players from Sidi Moumen who become Islamist martyrs, suicide bombers in the 2003 Casablanca attacks.

This year I’m championing Street of Thieves by Mathias Énard, translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell, in which one of the main characters becomes involved with an Islamist group turned Jihadist.

I hope that I’m not developing a pattern – not the French translation part, the radicalism part.

Street of Thieves is a coming-of-age story of two childhood friends set mostly in Tangiers during the Arab Spring. Lakhdar, the narrator, wants freedom – to travel, smoke weed, earn money, read French noir detective novels, have sex with Spanish women. His friend, Bassam, introduces Lakhdar to the “Group for the Propagation for Islamic Thought” for whom he becomes their seller of books and pamphlets.

After the organization severely beats a neighborhood bookseller, their paths split, Lakhdar moves away, Bassam gets deeply into the group. Bassam might be involved in a stabbing in Tangiers, a bombing in Marrakesh, and ultimately an assassination.

“Men are dogs,” says Lakhdar, “they rub against each other in misery, they roll around in filth and can’t get out of it…” Exiled from his family because of an indiscretion with his cousin, Lakhdar starts with nothing, lives on the street, takes a series of jobs, goes on the run, falls in love, and ends up in a Barcelona neighborhood of junkies and prostitutes, the Street of Thieves.

Lots of big words – fate, fear, corruption, revolution, liberty, love and loyalty and tragedy, but no theme bigger than identity. Is Lakhdar more than his religion? More than his nationality? In the final pages of the book, he testifies “I am not a Moroccan, I am not a Frenchman, I’m not a Spaniard, I’m more than that . . . I am not a Muslim, I am more than that.”

Love of language, the study of language, the beauty of language are all manifested in the book. Love of books – “which is the only place on earth where life is good” – certainly won this judge over.

Street of Thieves should win The Best Translated Book Award because Énard has filtered multiple complex social issues through the eyes of a wonderfully likable narrator. If I’ve made that sound dreadfully serious, it’s my mistake.

Why This Book Should Win – Last Words from Montmartre by BTBA Judge Monica Carter

Monica Carter — Wed, 08 Apr 2015 10:12:58 +0000

Monica Carter is a writer and freelance critic.

– By Qiu Miaojin, Translated by Ari Larissa Heinrich
NYRB

Last Words from Montmartre is a loaded piece of work before you ever begin reading it. Qiu Miaojin, the young Taiwanese lesbian writer, committed suicide at the age of twenty-six before it was published, before it became “a bible for lesbians” in Taiwan and before her first novel, Notes of a Crocodile, won the esteemed China Times Honorary Award for Literature. The dramatic way she lived and ended her life does not overshadow this novel, but becomes an intense, self-examined manifestation of how desperately she wanted to engage in it.

Yes, as it begins, it may seem to be the paragon of the break-up novel with page after page of incriminations, recriminations, pleading, apologizing, proselytizing, and declaring. Will writer and reader both make it through this emotional excoriation? Yes because Qiu quickly and deftly makes this epistolary novel explore places emotionally and intellectually she’s been to, hold them up to the light and examine them no matter how much it hurts her or us. Last Words from Montmartre is not about these experiences, it is these experiences: being left to sob on the floor as your lover walks out the door, the harrowing pursuit of artistic expression, and the torturous yearning endured at cross-section of sex and desire. Yet, it is also so much more.

“My purity is comprised of my physical body, my soul, and my whole life, and I’ve never given this ‘purity’—as unblemished as a piece of white jade—to anyone but you.”

This is a novel of self-revelation. Composed of twenty letters, don’t take Last Words as if you’re reading someone’s letters to an ex-lover. You are reading an artist fighting for her life albeit with the awareness and control to use novelistic elements. A master of controlled inner chaos, Qiu instructs the reader before she begins that the letters, which are numbered, do not need to be read in order. This is true, they don’t. Yet since Qiu also hints at her own suicide in her dedication, there’s no pull to begin anywhere – one wants to start where she wanted the story to begin. The letters cover the gamut of emotions, but the purity of her passion is tempered the self-consciousness of a novelist. These letters are for you, the universal reader, the one ‘out there,’ not for her lover to whom they are never sent.

“Sincerity, courage, and honesty will deliver humanity. I’ve realized this since coming to France. With sincerity, courage, and honesty, one can face death, extreme physical pain, and even extreme psychological pain. One can resist persecution from individuals, society, or government. To live in preparation of adversity and finding ways to preserve your core values—this is what it means to learn ‘how to live.’”

This is a political novel. By the sheer act of honesty in her writing, Qiu was a political writer. Both of Qiu’s novels, as Qiu herself, are treasures and guides for the Taiwanese queer community. She did not want to be invisible, as the government prefers of their queer population; she wanted to be heard and seen as an artist and her sexual identity was inextricably threaded through her works. Compartmentalizing parts of herself would have only meant compromise as an artist—and lack of purity. This is precisely why Ari Larissa Heinrich’s translation is so skillful because he is able to understand Qiu as an artist, including all her tiny nuances, and her importance as an artistic figure, which he so aptly addresses in his Afterword.

“Because I have a fatal, mortal, terminal passion for you. Ultimately I have no choice but death: an unconditional allegiance, an eternal bond to you. (The ultimate rule of desire/eros is this: At their peak, ‘sexual desire’ [erotic desire], ‘desire for love’ [romantic longing], and ‘desire for death’ [the death wish] are all the same.)

This is a novel of passion: the passion to love, to understand, to know, to express, to connect, to live and to die with reason. When these desires are placed in the hands of someone as youthful and sensitive as Qiu, it creates organized chaos, a one-woman show, live on the pages in front of us, making us feel uncomfortable that it is all slightly too real. Yet anxious as she may make us feel, Qiu mining herself on so many levels for the purity and honesty of art commands our respect, our admiration. As readers, when a writer lays bare for us with such brutal honesty, truth will always be what we see.

Qiu gave her life for art, desire and love. This isn’t a book of love letters or a book of suicide notes; its a testament to the power of artistic courage in the face of pain, misery and isolation. Last Words from Montmartre deserves to win because of what it represents for Taiwan’s queer history, what it represents for truth in literature and what it represents for those who have loved and lost.

The Fringe Elements by BTBA Judge Monica Carter

Monica Carter — Fri, 13 Mar 2015 10:00:00 +0000

Monica Carter is a freelance critic.

Discerning how one should approach a written work for translation is a challenging task. The approach of some publishers is to accept the writer’s work as is, with no editorial input, which means the translation is as close to the original text as it can be, disregarding cultural, historical, or stylistic choices a translator might make to ameliorate the text for the proposed audience (for the sake of this post, an English-speaking readership). Another approach is to take into account the work’s historical and cultural references, weigh their importance, and interpret those for the reader. If the translator is allowed to work more liberally with the original text, that creative license allows her to be truer to the overall tone and rhythm of the original. Chad Post and Tom Roberge have an interesting discussion about this on the recent Three Percent podcast.

Although it is admirable to hold the words of an author in such high esteem that the translator must produce a copy verbatim, it’s impossible in so doing to capture an author’s cultural, historical, and/or stylistic intent for a different readership. This point seems clearest with fiction that dwells closer to the fringe than the mainstream. Fiction that is experimental, transgressive, surrealist, fabulist, folkloric, or geographically charged with a storied political history cannot rely on a word-by-word translation if the goal, as it is in this case, is to introduce and engage an English-speaking reader. The translator must decide how to provide a context for the that readership and how much detail is necessary for the reader’s understanding of the text and what the author is trying to do.

As the judges near the end of the decision-making process for the BTBA longlist, it felt important to give praise to a few titles that are extremely well-written and translated to as close to perfection as possible. All are boundary-pushing titles in their own way. They have had little mainstream coverage but deserve it. Challenging the English-speaking readership shouldn’t be done quietly or timidly; it should be done loudly and often. The ideas these three titles contain speak to the difficulties we face in the world today in a new and exciting way.

by Dorothy Tse, Translated by Nicky Harman
Muse Publishing

There are a few short story collections floating around the BTBA longlist discussion, but for my money Dorothy Tse’s collection is by far one of the most captivating, original, and intriguing that I’ve read this year or in the past few years. Tse is a Hong Kong writer who writes mostly in Chinese and readily admits that her writing is never an act “that naturally brings one to the theme of nationality or cultural tradition.” Yet without Nicky Harman’s superb translation, Tse’s style of measured detachment and meticulous prose might be lost. Yet the reader is skillfully led into her surreal worlds, steeped in magical realism and tinged with fabulism. Whether it’s a woman turning into a fish in “Woman Fish,” the ultimate story of psychological gaslighting between wife and husband (“Black Cat City”), or “The Mute Door” about a building where the tenants are in constant search for their own front doors, it’s Tse’s confidence that lures the reader forward, introducing the grotesque, the absurd, and the scatological with such a deft hand and direct style that the reader never feels deceived or that the writer is using any of the surreal twists as a mere conceit.

There’s the feeling of crowded urbanity in most of her stories, the lingering impermanence of reality, and phantasmagorical imagery that offsets the emotionally charged topics of abortion, loss and incest. In “Bed,” a sleep-deprived young girl shares a bed with her father and her older sister and expresses her feelings in a nightmare:

“She pulled back the mound of bedding and discovered her father and her big sister had taken up the whole bed. But they seemed not to need those brightly colored pajamas anymore. They were completely naked and tightly embraced, their fingernails dug deeply into the skin of each other’s back. They seemed fast asleep, curled together like a pair of fetuses. No matter how hard the girl tried, she could not pull them apart, and they were too heavy to push out of bed. The girl just had to sit on the floor, listening all night long to her father and sister emitting low groans like an insect makes just before it pupates and the sound is cut off midstream. The air seemed full of butter about to precipitate, stiflingly hot.”

Many of Tse’s stories seem horrific, but her character’s responses are relatable and often touching. The environment and parameters of each story may appear eerie and bleak, but there is always an empathic underpinning that simmers below the surface. The characters are not intentionally evil; they are the damaged creating their own worlds to inhabit. As in the opening of “Mute Door,” Tse offers an allegorical answer for the reader and her characters:

“Among all the doors I have come across, it is only the invisible doors of the mime artists that capture the essence of the door. Whether in streets occupied by the language of colonizers or in a red square in the month of June, mime artists can always silently create a house that is theirs alone. All that is needed is a pair of hands and a posture that implies the actor walking close to a wall, and an enclosure instantaneously appears and spins. No groundwork is necessary for a house like that, no foundation on rock—this house is built from the poetry of the body and the mystery of bones and flesh in motion. The room has no boundaries, nor does it have cracks to let anyone in. It dawns on the audience that a door is no more than a fish slipping constantly out of their grasp. One of the sayings of mime artists is, ‘A door is not outside of you.’”

In Snow and Shadow, Tse opens a door for the reader to experience worlds she doesn’t know, but the emotions Tse elicits are familiar. Each story raises provocative questions. Many short story collections can dazzle and amuse, but it is the mark of a quality collection that it also makes one think.

by Josef Winkler, Translated by Adrian West
Contra Mundum Press

With proponents such as Elfriede Jelinek and Thomas Bernhard, it’s difficult to understand why Josef Winkler hasn’t garnered more of an English-speaking audience. He’s won many literary prizes in Germany and his native Austria, including the Alfred Döblin Prize for his novella, Natura Morta, in 2001. Winkler hasn’t had many works translated into English but thankfully, that seems to be changing with the release of in 2013, Natura Morta in 2014 and Graveyard of Bitter Oranges in 2015, both by Contra Mundum Press and translated by Adrian West.

In Natura Morta, a novella that reads like a demonic script version of Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin directed by Michael Haneke, Winkler stays true to his themes of Catholicism, homoeroticism and death. In just over ninety pages, his indefatigable sensory detail pulses and throbs, rots and stinks, foams and drips, sweats and sticks so that the reader cannot escape the suffocating reality of the Roman marketplace, Piazza Vittorio Emanuele. Natura Morta is fragmented, visceral, primordial—a work that uses endless imagery, mostly Catholic iconography, and the sexuality of a teenage boy to dramatize the moral psychomachy of our modern day world. In these snapshots of the marketplace, Winkler chooses Piccoletto, the fig vendor’s son, as the Christ-like object of sexual desire for men and women, desire that subtly buoys the character’s own sense of power:

“One of the girls, folding her hands behind the nape of her neck, turned her head toward the two young men and bit her upper lip coquettishly. The girl tore a piece of fabric, pressed the scrap against her lips, which were smeared with red lipstick, and threw it in the branches of the pine tree. The two boys fetched the lipstick-streaked cloth from the tree and, each snatching the scrap from the other’s hands, pressed it against their noses. One of the bathroom attendants in the park of Piazza San Vittorio, nibbling a green fig, worked a crossword puzzle while the other sank herself deep into the liberally illustrated crime reportage of the Cronaca vera. In exasperation, a gecko dodged the black ants with red heads over the sun-drenched walls of the market bathrooms, trying frantically to return to his niche, which had just been plastered over by a bricklayer. Near the entrance to the market bathrooms, Piccoletto pulled a splinter from the elbow of the alimentari owner’s son and smeared his spit over his friend’s wound.”

With Winkler’s use of repetition, imagery and inference, Natura Morta had to be masterfully translated in order to stay true to the essence of Winkler’s work while also conveying the tone of each fragment and the importance of each image that buttresses the book’s conclusion.

Winkler, like Tse, doesn’t go in for plot. He’s internal and reactionary, in a way, writing his way around those provocative questions that continue to mystify him, anger him, or shackle him. Yet, these are the questions that matter, the questions that should be asked but are too often ignored by many writers. I look forward to Winkler’s next exploration of the world we live in and the hypocrisy of it.

by Bogdan Suceavă, Translated by Alistair Ian Blyth
Twisted Spoon Press

Out of the three books out on the fringe, Miruna, A Tale, is the most accessible. It has a plot, a traditional structure and a few main characters that drive the story. What makes this book more challenging and enjoyable is that it harkens back to the adult fairy tale. Set in Evil Vale, a small hamlet in Southern Romania, Miruna, A Tale is actually many tales woven together and retold by Niculae Berca to his two grandchildren, a seven year-old boy named Trajan and a six year-old girl named Miruna. It’s an older version of the latter child who narrates the book. Most of the stories center around Trajan’s and Miruna’s great-grandfather, the seemingly mythical Constantine Berca, and his archetypal village mates Father Dimitrie, Old Woman Fira the fortune teller, and Oarță Aman, a bandit who robs the rich on their way to Bucharest.

The oral storytelling tradition is so vibrant that it doesn’t take much for the reader to feel herself sitting by the fire listening to Trajan relay the long ago stories of Old Woman Fira’s exorcism for witchcraft by Father Dimitrie, or how Niculae the Welldigger found a water source on a barren hill, or that the ghost of Oarță carved crosses on the faces of Germans during World War I. Many of these fables have a basis in truth or involve an historical element, but Blyth does well not to call attention to these events. There are notes at the end of the text, but they are not numbered or italicized within it; the reader never feels the heavy hand of the translator pointing out the importance of something that the reader might not find necessary to know.

The young Miruna is the heir apparent as keeper of the tales, and over three summers, her grandfather’s stories grew more complex and detailed until “Miruna eventually [comes] to conceive the world in the form of a fairy tale, living for years in a world full of the fantastical, which gave her the air of being a child prodigy, one of those who know something of history and geography before they even start attending school but cannot say for sure if King Carol and Prâslea lived at the same time or before one another.”

Even as some of the tales are magical or enchanting, sounding like a postcard from the rural hills of Romania, where “the fays lifted him up by the arms, as if he, the giant of Evil Vale, were light as a snowflake, and they bore him toward the palace of crystal and porphyry,” they’re still serious in tone, planting the seeds of the Russo-Turkish War and World War I and stressing the geographical isolation of the village.

This book is a bewitching tribute to the Balkan tradition of oral storytelling and to Suceavă’s loyalty to the traditional culture of his grandparent’s small town in the Carpathians. Paired with Blyth’s vivid translation, this is work that hopefully will be passed on as many times as the stories within.

The Frontrunners, Part Two by BTBA Judge Jeremy Garber

Monica Carter — Thu, 12 Feb 2015 11:29:25 +0000

Jeremy Garber is the events coordinator for and also a freelance reviewer.

(Bellevue Literary Press)
Eduardo Halfon, translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn

Like a companion volume or literary reverberation, Eduardo Halfon’s Monastery continues the itinerant wanderings begun in his beautifully-composed The Polish Boxer. Monastery’s narrator, a certain Eduardo Halfon, encounters and engages the world around him – be he beside the West Bank barrier, seeking an intimate jazz performance in Harlem, or visiting a coffee plantation in Guatemala. Reflective and reminiscent, the short stories/tales/vignettes that make up Halfon’s second work translated into English are effortlessly gratifying. Halfon needn’t employ a stylistically singular prose style (although he writes magnificently) or rely on compelling, convoluted plots to evince the wonder of the world around him. Each of the eight pieces contained within Monastery offers a melodic yet transitory glimpse of the seemingly insignificant moments that eventually merge into memories of consequence.

Halfon, honored as one of the Bogotá 39, has about a dozen works to his name. El ángel literario (“The Literary Angel”) – a 2004 semifinalist for the Premio Herralde (won previously by the likes of Javier Marías, Roberto Bolaño, Enrique Vila-Matas, and Daniel Sada) – appears to be, like both Monastery and The Polish Boxer after it, an astounding semi-autobiographical work that blends genres and transcends the merely fictional. Seeing more of the Guatemala City-born author’s works in translation would be a gift.

Maybe it was her driving. Maybe it was the combination of hash and the heat inside the Citroën and the adrenaline rush I’d gotten with the soldiers. Maybe it was something much darker and more fleeting. I rolled the window all the way down, stuck my head out and, breathing in the warm fresh air, thought of other walls. Chinese walls and German walls and American walls. Holy walls of temples and damp mossy walls of cells. The brick walls of a ghetto, the walls surrounding an entire people imprisoned in a ghetto, starving in a ghetto, dying slowly and silently. All of a sudden, I saw or imagined I saw on the wall (we were driving very fast and my eyes were almost closed and my pupils were dilated) the all-black figure of the girl in the Banksy painting: her black braid, black bangs, little black skirt, black shoes, black face looking up, her whole body facing up toward the sky as she floats up the wall with the help of a bunch of black balloons held in her tiny black hand. It occurred to me, my head halfway out the window and already experiencing a delicious lethargy from the hash, that a wall is the physical manifestation of man’s hatred of the other. A palpable concrete manifestation that attempts to separate us from the other, isolate us from the other, eliminate the other from our sight and from our world. But it’s also a clearly useless manifestation: no matter how tall and thick the construction, no matter how long and imposing the structure, a wall is never insurmountable. A wall is never bigger than the spirit of those it confines. Because the other is still there. The other doesn’t disappear, never disappears. The other’s other is me. Me, and my spirit, and my imagination, and my black balloons.

(Open Letter)
Carlos Labbé, translated from the Spanish by Will Vanderhyden

It is a game. Not a novel. There is no story. Only rules.

A metafictional, heady tale of disappeared children, a novel-game coauthored by laboratory subjects, and a hatred/fear-inducing drug called hadón, Navidad & Matanza is the first of Chilean-born writer Carlos Labbé’s works to be published in English. Excerpted previously in Granta’s The Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists 2010 issue (as “The Girls Resembled Each Other in the Unfathomable”), Navidad & Matanza’s labyrinthine story within a story is both sinister and foreboding.

Labbé, a novelist and screenwriter (who penned his master’s thesis on Roberto Bolaño), deftly weaves an intricate, enigmatic story into and around itself. Navidad & Matanza could be the hallucinogenic amalgamation of a César Aira plot with setting and characters conceived by Bolaño – if written using Oulipo-style constraints. Though less than 100-pages in total, Labbé’s novel has an inebriating effect that persists well after the book’s conclusion. With ample imagination and commanding style, Navidad & Matanza certainly marks Labbé as a young author from whom we ought to anticipate great, fascinating things to come.

To that end, five friends of similar interests and I had come up with a system that, in the beginning, seemed like an original and fascinating discovery. A novel-game. In short, it involved rolling dice, moving your token to a space with prefigured plotlines and formal constraints, writing a text according to those constraints and, that night, mailing this text to the other participants. Everyone had been assigned a day of the week, except Sunday, a day of rest. It was a game of complex rules and seduction. And the result was out of control.

THE BOOKS I HAVEN’T FORGOTTEN, OR IN LIEU OF A PLOT by Madeleine LaRue

Monica Carter — Tue, 27 Jan 2015 10:37:48 +0000

Madeleine LaRue is Associate Editor and Director of Publicity of .

I have an embarrassing inability to remember plots. It took me three readings of The Brothers Karamazov just to be able to remember beyond a few weeks who had actually killed Fyodor Pavlovich — and The Brothers Karamazov is one of my favorite books. I have no idea why this happens; but no matter how exciting they are, plots in my brain have a very short half-life. On the other hand, the emotional or ethical texture of a book — especially a book I liked — will remain with me for years, completely unattenuated. Now that the announcement of the longlist is approaching, it’s been interesting to go back to my notes, to see which titles I’ve forgotten and which are somehow still with me.

The following books don’t have much in common, other than this tenacity (which is, of course, highly subjective) and the fact that they haven’t been talked about much on this blog. None of them, I feel, would be out of place on the longlist.

There’s a type of mysticism in by Qiu Miaojin (translated from the Chinese by Ari Larissa Heinrich) that recalls Clarice Lispector, but Qiu’s philosophy feels solid in a way that Lispector’s often does not. Qui’s narrator, a young, queer Taiwanese woman living in Paris, feels a pain and an ecstasy embedded in everyday objects and experiences: letters, phone calls, film screenings. Hugely important to the blossoming Taiwanese literary culture of the 1990s, Last Words from Montmartre also bears the tragic urgency of books whose authors later committed suicide. Qiu took her own life at the age of 26, but the work she left behind is astonishingly mature. Its literary merit alone would be enough to recommend Last Words from Montmartre to the longlist, but as a work of queer literature — a tradition that up to now has been disappointingly underrepresented among BTBA contenders — it deserves even more serious consideration.

Tove Jansson, the Swedish-speaking Finnish author best known for her children’s books about the Moomin family, was also one of the most brilliant short story writers of her time. Her stories have been slowly making their way into English for a few years now, but NYRB’s (translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal and Silvester Mazzarella) is the first collection likely to attract significant attention from American audiences. I am unabashedly biased when it comes to Tove Jansson; I love her, and even though technically she’s already posthumously won the BTBA once (in 2011, for her novel The True Deceiver), her short stories could give almost anyone a run for their money.

by Ingrid Winterbach (translated from the Afrikaans by Iris Gouws and the author) is a very mysterious novel about an entomologist in a remote, desert-encircled South African town. Summer lies heavily over every sentence, sleepy, slow, and sensual, and yet throughout the novel there is a taut, nearly unbearable line of tension. As elusive as its title promises, Winterbach’s novel may not exactly be the sort to inspire rabid enthusiasm, but it is very subtly and intelligently done.

And one more word on my most recent read: Like Last Words from Montmartre, by Hilda Hilst (translated from the Portuguese by John Keene) is passionate and epistolary, but its tone couldn’t be more different. Letters from a Seducer is an irreverent catalogue of outrageous, theatrical sexualities. Hilst delights in breaking taboos and detailing fetishistic obsessions, making constant fun of phallocentrism and bourgeois sensibilities. But she does it with a good sense of humor and often great literary panache. (Translator John Keene deserves praise for the number of euphemisms he’s managed to generate for various body parts alone.) Behind the absurdity are also flashes of deep feeling, comical desperation in the face of writing, and these meditations lend Hilst’s short novel staying power as literature, and not only as (in the author’s own words) “brilliant pornography.”

FEAR OF THE LONGLIST by George Carroll

Monica Carter — Thu, 06 Nov 2014 10:03:36 +0000

George Carroll is the World Literature Editor of and an independent publishers’ representative based in the Pacific Northwest.

None of the spoke with pitcher Madison Bumgartner in the dugout before he took the mound in the ninth inning of the seventh game of the World Series except for a brief exchange with his catcher Buster Posey. Partly due to superstition and partly because Bumgartner was intensely focused, was in the zone.

I’m currently in The Best Translated Book Award reading zone. Please do not distract.

There are rules and traditions about not speaking the name of something, whether it’s Voldemort in the books or Nest Egg in , or saying rain while fly-fishing.

This is so, in my mind, with longlist and the BTBA.

There’s an ultra-secret password-protected, for-your-eyes-only spreadsheet that the BTBA judges use that lists the title, author, translator, publisher, language, and country for each of the 2015 submissions. There is a column for each judge to place her notes or remarks. (Don’t try to access the spreadsheet, publishers, it will self-destruct quicker than Jim Phelps’ MI instructions.)

Fortunately my spreadsheet column is at the beginning of that section, just to the right of Katrine Osgaard Jensen’s. She uses a letter code, which I’m pretty sure I’ve cracked. But I scroll right no further, for therein lies the use of longlist, the word that assigns power, the word which can strip power. “Longlist contender, must longlist, short of longlist, no longlist.” It can draw you in (I better read this) or repel (I better move on to something else).

I just have a list. Books move around like the stairways at Hogwarts. (Did I mention I just watched all of the Harry Potter movies?) Books that I read early in the process that I thought were really good, were really good, but they’re not as really good in comparison with the other really good books that I’ve now read.

That doesn’t mean that some of the books I’ve read don’t keep popping up a like a literary Whac-a-Mole. But will they make it to l-word? I don’t know.

Milena Michiko Flasar’s , Pascal Garnier’s , Eduardo Halfon’s , both Bohumil Hrabal titles and , Carlos Labbe’s , Michel Laub’s , Valeria Luiselli’s , Scholastique Mukasonga’s , Andres Neuman’s , Roderigo Rey Rosa’s , Paulo Scott’s , Solvi Bjorn Sigurdsson’s , Goncalo Tavares’ , Antoine Volodine’s , Christa Wolf’s .

All have much to love and I can do no better than to arrange them alphabetically.

Cesar Aira’s , Roberto Bolano’s , Hilda Hilst’s , Jorn Lier Horst’s , Giulio Mozzi’s , Haruki Murakami’s , Audur Ava Olafsdottir’s , Antonio Skarmeta’s , Juan Pablo Villalobos’ , Urs Widmer’s .

Again, only alphabetical, all flawed in little ways, but solid nonetheless.

Predicting the longlist is a bit like handicapping horses: consistency, class, form, and pace. Books get boxed, parked out, shuffled back. Fortunately, I have miles to read before I sleep and need not place my bets until March.

DANIEL MEDIN’S BTBA FAVORITES: FALL 2014

Monica Carter — Wed, 29 Oct 2014 10:00:00 +0000

Daniel Medin teaches at the , where he helps direct the and is Associate Series Editor of .

Can Xue: , trans. from Chinese by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen, Yale/Margellos

The strangest and by far most original work I read this summer was Can Xue’s The Last Lover. How refreshing it is to encounter fiction that so resolutely disregards conventions of character and plot! The protagonists of this book do not develop—they transform, as do their relationships to one another, from one scene to the next. And they do so unpredictably, in ways that surprise and delight. As in much of Can Xue’s fiction, the prose is comic and disturbing at one and the same time. John Darnielle had in mind when he pointed to the “grammar of dreams” that underpins that volume of stories: “situations in which a general meowing sound throughout a hospital provokes not the question ‘what’s going on?’ but instead ‘where are the catmen hiding?’” A similar grammar is present in The Last Lover, her most ambitious—and perhaps most radical—novel to date.

Faris al-Shidyaq: , trans. from Arabic by Humphrey Davies, NYU

I wrote about the charms of this novel last winter, when the first two volumes were eligible for the prize. It should come as no surprise that the other two are now contenders as well. This chapter from volume three appeared in the 2014 translation issue of London’s . It’s preceded by a concise introduction by Humphrey Davies, whose translation of Shidyaq remains among the most gymnastic and resourceful amongst this year’s competition.

Elena Ferrante: , trans. from Italian by Ann Goldstein, Europa

There’s no denying the force of Ferrante’s writing. I discovered volume 2 of the Neapolitan Novels last spring when it made our longlist. (Such are the privileges of judging for BTBA; you have to read the 25 titles selected to this list, and thereby profit directly from the enthusiasms of others.) I devoured it whole, then did the same to . Ferrante inspires that rare thing, rarer still among contemporary writers: the compulsion to read everything she’s ever published. Like its predecessors, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay bristles with intelligence and is executed with startling clarity. And like the other books in this series, it is all-absorbing. Here’s Ariel Starling in a recent review for “Subtle as the plot may be, it would do the work a grave disservice not to note that Ferrante is, in her own way, a master of suspense. Reading these novels, one becomes so immersed in the world of the characters that even an offhand comment from a minor acquaintance can (and often does) carry the force of revelation—the books are nearly impossible to put down.”

Hilda Hilst: , trans. from Portuguese by Adam Morris, Melville House

I’ve already posted on Letters from a Seducer which had been scheduled for 2013 release but entered the world on the wrong side of January 1. Goes without saying that this title and its extraordinary translation by John Keene has not weakened in the slightest since my initial encounter. Hilst deserves to be in the mix when winter arrives and we begin to draft lists. The question then is likely to be: which horse to back? The answer’s not immediately obvious, to the great credit of Hilst’s translators and editors. With My Dog Eyes was as exhilarating to read as the Letter and . Hilst has been blessed with a generation of astute translators who are now introducing her work to an Anglophone readership. With My Dog Eyes struck me as the most aphoristic of the three novels. It begins unforgettably: “God? A surface of ice anchored to laughter.” Adam Levy wrote a canny essay for Music & Literature about this year’s eligible Hilst titles; read it .

I’ve little doubt concerning the importance of the above works for their respective languages. Those without Chinese or Italian or Portuguese have Annelise Finegan Wasmoen, Ann Goldstein, and Adam Morris to thank for ensuring that their greatness has been preserved in the face of formidable challenges. I’d like to mention briefly the names of a few more translators whose work has impressed over these first few months of reading. They succeed at communicating the vitality of the voices translated, but also for their accomplished prose in English. They are, in no particular order, Jason Grunebaum from the Hindi of by Uday Prakash; Daniel Hahn from the Portuguese (Brazil) of by Paolo Scott; Chris Andrews from the Spanish (Guatemala) of by Rodrigo Rey Rosa; and Karen Emmerich from the Greek of by Amanda Michalopoulou, whose passages about the bewilderments of adolescent sexuality rank—alongside volume three of by Karl Ove Knausgaard—among the funniest things I’ve encountered so far.

The Best Translated Books So Far

Monica Carter — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 09:15:17 +0000

James Crossley is a bookseller at . He writes regularly for the store’s blog and for the website of the .

Having talked about books that I think other people will probably like, it seems like I should talk at least a bit about the ones I do.

Bohumil Hrabal’s (translated by Stacey Knecht) has already been highly praised here on the blog by Jeremy Garber (and elsewhere by that inestimable dean of BTBA judges, George Carroll) and I’m calling the shotgun seat on their bandwagon—it really is that good. If you don’t want to trust us, maybe Ivan Vladislavić can talk some sense into you. He calls it a “mesmerizing novel,” and being a brilliant novelist himself, albeit one who writes in the lesser language of English, he should know.

Among the few books in the running that can stack up to HM is , a series of linked short stories put out by Karolinum Press in the Czech Republic. It’s set in the (literally) Bohemian forest village of Kersko, a place notable for drunkenness, lust, venality, and especially the garrulousness of its inhabitants. Their self-serving lies pile up into mountains of manure, and the plots veer from the unbelievable into the surreal and the sublimely ridiculous. Comical, crude, and character-rich, it’s an altogether Hrabal-esque extravaganza of corkscrewing prose. Well, not -esque, because it too is by Bohumil Hrabal. Credit to translator David Short for channeling the flow of the author’s language without stanching it, and to the publisher’s design team as well. This edition is stunning, printed on thick paper that’s a pleasure to touch and practically spilling over with art. It’s bad form to make predictions about the finalists this early in the game, but if Hrabal’s not among them, it’ll only be because he was in competition with himself.

I’m also very high on the much more subdued submission from France’s Pierre Michon, , which is part of . It combines two short works that were first published separately, and even together they make a book, translated by Ann Jefferson, that clocks in at a scant 116 pages. In both sections, Michon has drawn obscure figures out of the mist of ecclesiastical history and fictionalized episodes from their lives. Their motivations are distinctly pre-modern, driven by a Christian faith that’s barely removed from paganism, and they feel wholly convincing while remaining utterly alien, at least to this hopelessly secular reader. Quiet, complete, and near-perfectly realized, it might be what Austen described when she wrote about “a little bit (two inches wide) of ivory” worked with “so fine a brush.”

From the same Yale series comes David Albahari’s . from the Serbian by Ellen Elias-Bursac). Like his earlier novel Leeches, it deals with the fragmentation of the former Yugoslavia, this time treating the conflict more obliquely and displacing it to the placid setting of Banff, British Columbia. At an arts conference, a painter from Saskatchewan becomes obsessed with a Serbian writer and jealous of his burgeoning friendship with the descendant of a Croatian traveler. The vaguely homoerotic triangle that forms is far less important and intense than the maelstrom of ethnic guilt that spins in their psyches and finally wrecks them in an inexorable climax. Warning: Albahari has something against indentations. I think the lack of paragraphing adds to the headlong quality of the tale, but tastes vary. As a public service to traditionalists, I therefore provide an ample selection of pilcrows to be added to the text as needed: ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶

No one who’s reading this can be unaware of track record of excellence with world literature, and it’s always difficult to rank their books against each other, but by Mathias Énard (trans. by Charlotte Mandel) may be their best publication of 2014. It follows a young Moroccan man as he comes of age at home and travels across the Mediterranean to re-establish himself in Barcelona, and it manages to push almost every cultural hot button along the way. Immigration, terrorism, misogyny, the promise and failure of the Arab Spring … it could come across as a paint-by-number op-ed piece, but in fact it addresses these topics organically. The politics arise inevitably out of the fiction rather than the fiction being an artificial veneer over the politics.

by Eduardo Halfon comes from the Spanish by way of Lisa Dillman’s translation, and it chronicles the journeys of a Guatemalan writer, not coincidentally named Eduardo Halfon. It can’t quite decide whether it’s a novel or a short story collection, and I’m not sure how much reality or imagination lies behind it, but Halfon makes a good deal of hay out of that confusion. The plot carries him from the jungle of Central America to jazz concerts in North America, submarine bases in Europe, and beaches in Asia, and the unstable structure of the book prismatically expands the possibilities for interpretation. (Those who’ve read his very similar prequel, , will have to cope with further contradictions, as characters and events from it recur, subtly altered, in Monastery.) Detachment and dislocation have rarely been so well depicted as this. And believe me, in the middle of trying to read as many as possible of more than 400 books in less than a year, I know from dislocation.

New BTBA Judge James Crossley Highlights His Picks for Bestsellers

Monica Carter — Tue, 21 Oct 2014 08:46:49 +0000

James Crossley is a bookseller at . He writes regularly for the store’s blog and for the website of the .

By this point several judges have had an opportunity to share their thoughts about participating in the BTBA process, and it’s hard to come up with anything especially original that I can contribute. But that’s rarely stopped me from blogging in the past, so why would it now?

More than one judge, most recently fellow Northwest bookslinger Jeremy Garber, has written about the honor it is to be involved with the Best Translated Book Award. Ditto that. It’s ego-inflating whenever someone seems to care about my opinions, all the more so when it’s the people at a high-class outfit like the BTBA who do. And it’s a true privilege to think that I can play a small role in bringing attention to the huddled masses of international literature yearning to breathe freely on American shores. I’m like a !

Disgusting paternalism aside, it really is a treat to read all this great writing from around the world. I’m a fan of literature in translation who keeps up with the work of dozens of authors and publishers, but barely a day has gone by without my finding in my mailbox a remarkable book that I’ve never heard of before. Even months away from the final voting, it would be easy for me to compile a very credible shortlist, and I have to remind myself that many more remarkable books are on their way.

What may be most exciting is that by the end of the process I’ll have as complete a picture as possible of an entire segment of the industry. We in the US see relatively little of the world’s production of fiction, which is bad, but it’s still possible (just) for me to familiarize myself with every single piece of fiction newly translated into English during this calendar year, which is fascinating to consider.

One thing I’ve observed is that there’s a broader range of work available than I’ve been finding on my own. I gravitate toward books that don’t come across like mainstream American fiction, books that through their language or form remind me they come from somewhere else, but there’s plenty of reading pleasure to be obtained from fiction that’s not focused on estrangement. Judge M.A. Orthofer has already covered some of the mystery/thriller/suspense titles that have come from abroad in 2014, and there are a number of others that could have strong popular appeal. Jonas Jonasson, for example, had a bestseller a couple of years ago with , and he has a BTBA entry this year called that’s equally entertaining.

Want proof that not all French novels are thinly-veiled memoirs weighed down by existential angst? That rumor is dispelled by Armand Chauvel’s : “When Léa and Mathieu first cross paths, it is under false pretenses—Mathieu is posing as a vegetarian, infiltrating the local animal rights community for information that will force Léa’s restaurant toward a swifter demise. And while Léa suspects that Mathieu isn’t all that he appears to be, she has no idea how deep his culinary deception goes. Neither of them can deny the attraction they feel for each other, and it seems as though they might be setting a table for two … until Léa learns the truth.” Swoonworthy for the right reader, n’est-ce pas?

Bulgaria provides a companion volume for foodies via by Virginia Zaharieva. It’s a good bit grittier than Chauvel’s romance, telling of a young woman growing up under Communist rule who finds solace in the domestic arts passed down by her grandmother—the dozens of recipes that are critical to the heroine’s identity are right there in the text. As a person whose most-used kitchen utensil is a corkscrew, I wouldn’t have chosen to read Zaharieva’s story without the BTBA, and I wouldn’t have known anything about the satisfactions that it offers.

As these and other books have rolled in, I’ve realized how much I’ve missed in earlier years, and I’ve been tempted to start digging into previous longlists and back catalogs. I can’t, of course, given that I still have so much of this year’s crop to harvest. The pile of paperbacks next to my desk is inspiring, but as it continues to climb past the height of an average fourth-grader, there are also moments when I feel like sloping off in search of bad science fiction novels that can be consumed like potato chips. Until the pile actually buries me, though, I’ll persist.

BTBA 2015: Things That Have Caught My Eye by Scott Esposito

Monica Carter — Fri, 17 Oct 2014 10:33:52 +0000

This post is courtesy of BTBA judge, Scott Esposito. Scott Esposito blogs at and you can find his here.

As we work our way through the 500-some new translations released in 2014, I’m going to repost on a few books that have stood out for me so far. This list is not exhaustive at all, and it is incredibly subjective, so, disclaimers. But for what it’s worth, here it is.

by Marcos Giralt Torrente (translated by Margaret Jull Costa)

It’s like Giralt had a direct line into the skull of Javier Marías—and, yes, this first novel from one of Spain’s biggest authors can stand up to that kind of comparison (plus, look who translated it). But Giralt is no Marías clone. Though his style is clearly indebted in this book, the concerns and narration are wholly Giralt’s. Very few authors could write a debut novel this good.

by Juan Jose Saer (translated by Steve Dolph)

From debut to swan song: La Grande was what one of Argentina’s greatest postwar authors was working on when he died in 2005. He got close enough to finishing it that I think we can consider it a complete work. It’s huge, ambitious, and very successful.

by Frankétienne (translated by Kaiama L. Glover)

As publisher Jill Schoolman put it, Frankétienne is a force of nature. A poet and author with dozens of works to his name, he is also an artist, musician, and activist. In this slim book he (among other things) articulates his aesthetic of spirialism. It looks to be an amazing read.

by Saadat Hasan Manto (translated by Matt Reeck)

Manto gets name-checked a lot as the greatest Urdu short story writer of the 20th century. After having read a few of the stories in this book, I can believe that.

by Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein)

Just as Knausgaard’s moment seems to be fading, Elena Ferrante is heating up in the U.S. media. And with good reason.

by Jon Fosse (translated by Eric Dickens)

Jon Fosse’s original Melancholy was a damn good read. So, of course, I’m hoping that Dalkey manages to live up to its Nov. 11 release date so that we can consider this for the award.

by Patrick Modiano (translated by Mark Polizzotti)

I have to hand it to the Nobel committee—they usually end up picking writers that I find pretty interesting. I’ve never read Modiano and am eager to give this one a look. Plus, Yale has been doing astonishing work with its Margellos series, so the fact that they were on to this before the Prize is a good indication.