I’m not sure if these are immutable truths per se, but if you talk to enough people in the book industry, you’re likely to encounter two strains of thought: 1) each segment feels especially essential to the existence of the whole ecosystem (which really only proves that this is truly an ecosystem, and 2) each segments feels like their work is underappreciated (probably since only a handful of any of us make any significant money).

Without booksellers, books wouldn’t get the same attention and readership; without translators, there wouldn’t be any international literature; without authors, there aren’t any books; but then again, without publishers, there’s no product; or maybe the printers are really the most essential—unless you consider ebooks. You can go round and round with this chicken-egg situation, but what I’ve been pondering isn’t who’s most��important, but which group would have the most interesting stories.

In other words, if I were hired as some sort of ‘book journalist” and was forced to choose to cover one “beat” and one “beat” only, which one would be the most consistently gratifying?

I’m not sure I have an answer . . . yet . . . although I’ll eliminate authors right here and now. Not that authors aren’t interesting people! The stories I’ve heard from Rodrigo Fresán are incredible, but it’s rare that an author is as interesting as their books. Most interviews aren’t all that unique or unexpected. They can be very smart, sometimes illuminating, but mostly are promotional—if not for their most recent book, for the aesthetic and mindset they embody. Which is totally fine, but if I’m being forced to choose �DzԱ���group of people to talk to and report on for the indefinite future, I think I’ll pass.

*

After writing my last post on Andrés Neuman’s , I felt inspired to really�����𲹻���for the first time since all this shit started. It was like his book woke me up again and gave me the mental space necessary to truly�����𲹻���and not just let the words flow by. To engage with texts again. And try and find connections, patterns.

In reading (trans. Will Vanderhyden) for this season of the , I’ve gotten a bit obsessed with��. I’ve ���𲹻���Wuthering Heights��exactly once, in high school, and remember only a handful of specifics. As interested as I am in going back to the source and rereading Emily Brontë’s masterpiece, I’m sort of more interested in the adaptations of this seemingly unadaptable novel. Like the Buñuel movie. Or, in this specific instance, Minae Mizumura’s , translated from the Japanese by Juliet Winters Carpenter, the tagline for which is “a remaking of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights set in postwar Japan.”

My initial plan for this post was to read all 850+ pages and riff on adaptations and the concept of the original as it relates to art and translation.

But then I actually started reading the book.

*

I spend a lot of time talking with translators of all levels. From burgeoning translators (my students), to the mid-career ones who send us submissions, to the masters of the moment (Margaret Jull Costa, Marian Schwartz, etc.). I’m both the chair of the ALTA conference committee AND the only non-translator. I’m talking to translators basically 24/7. Which is why I would never choose to have the “translator beat” for the rest of my life. Again, not because I don’t love translators or anything like that—I truly do—but I think the questions we end up asking translators are endlessly repetitive. It’s a profession that works best when it contains a bit of mystery. I love finding out about linguistic complications that lead to interesting choices that impact the interpretation of a book. (And stem from the translator’s interpretation.) But those are just results, analyzed in reverse. We’ll never fully know what it was inside the translator’s brain that led them to make the creative leap. The explanations are frequently interesting, but I kind of like the magic . . . A translator comes up with something that works because they are a creative artist. Trying to get to the heart of that is like asking an author “how they came up with their book.”

I think I’d shy away from hitching my writing horse to translators solely because I don’t think I have the right questions to cover them for the rest of my life in an entertaining and meaningful way.

*

The prologue of A True Novel is 166 pages long.

The preface—which is only four pages and precedes the prologue—boils down the core plot of the prologue to its essence:

A miracle happened to me two years ago.

It was when I was staying in Palo Alto in northern California, writing my third novel, or, more precisely, trying to write it. I lacked confidence, and progress was slow. Then, out of the blue, I was made a gift of a story, “a story just like a novel.” What is more, the story was meant for me alone. It concerned a man whom I knew, or rather whom my family knew, in New York at one time. This was no ordinary man.

If Mizumura had wanted to, she could’ve started the “true novel” right there, right after that. But instead, she chose to recount her childhood encounters with Taro Azuma, her life in Long Island, the rise and fall of her father’s fortunes, her return to Japan, her struggle to become a writer, and her fortune at being able to teach at Princeton, the University of Michigan, and Stanford—all of which mimics Mizumura’s life.

But Taro Azuma, the man she knew as a child who became a multi-millionaire Heathcliff? The man whose life story she is “gifted” while struggling with her third novel? Well, he’s the one part of the prologue that is invented.

*

Editors? Oh, fuck no. You couldn’t pay me enough to interview and cover editors for the rest of my career. Do you like listening to pretentious boring people who hide their insecurities behind sales numbers and awards? Hearing an editor talk about a book can totally kill your desire to read said book. Art shouldn’t be evaluated in relationship to its total sales, and yet, the most common refrains among this segment of the book industry is “well, it sure did exceed expectations!” and “it’s a great book, but just didn’t get the sales it deserved.” Editors talk about craft like mechanics talk about cars, except that they want to “pimp out” every “ride” to be the thing that will get them reflected glory via sales levels. It’s not about the art itself, it’s about getting the approval of the masses.

I blame agents for this in part, which is why I’m going to toss them out right here as well. The most successful agents are the “best” because they’re always working the angles. They’re like cut throat Wall Street bros, but working in a tiny pond. With�����Ǵǰ��.��And they too try and value books in the weirdest way. A book is “good” based on which high profile editor acquires it. And by “high profile,” I mean “has the biggest checkbook.” Covering agents and their deals? Hard pass.

*

The idea of the “invented part” in��A True Novel really resonates with me, thanks to Fresán. He’s constantly fighting against the autofictional trappings in his triptych—the inclination to assume that since The Writer sort of resembles Fresán himself, that it��������him. This is generally a garbage sentiment, and bad criticism. But we live in an age awash in the desire to wed the desire to share one’s personal experience with the idea of literature and art. Identity politics are very important; not every novel needs to be speaking your own truth. Fiction should be broad enough to welcome all viewpoints, and neither Twitter nor the marketplace should restrict that.

I set��A True Novel��aside for a minute after reading the absolutely brilliant “From Story to Novel” section of the prologue. In this bit, Mizumura unveils her game for this novel. She writes about how she wants to tell Taro Azuma’s story because it was so similar to��Wuthering Heights, that “what I set out to do was thus close to rewriting a Western novel in Japanese.” But she doesn’t�������ٳܲ�������������ɰ����ٱ���Wuthering Heights. She veers. She writes something unique that differentiates itself from Brontë’s novel in part because of the Japanese language. (It’s worth noting that the most recent Mizumura book to come out in translation is [trans. Juliet Winters Carpenter].) This is where things turn very curious.

The problem lay elsewhere.

Taro Azuma’s was a true story. Yet, because it seemed so close to fiction, the more I went on writing, the more uneasy I felt that something important—something I can only call a sense of the real—was slipping through my fingers. [. . .] I was well into the work when I decided that the difficulty I was having probably came from the difficulty of writing a “true novel” in Japanese.

The term “true novel” once played a crucial role in the development of modern Japanese literature. The period when Japan opened its doors to the West, beginning in 1868, coincided with what might be called the golden era of the Western novel. [. . .] It was inevitable that Japanese novelists would also be moved by a desire to reproduce what they perceived to be the most highly evolved form of literature. For them, and perhaps for other non-Western writers, the type of novels written in nineteenth-century Europe, ones where the author sought to create an independent fictional world outside his own life, came to represent the ideal.

This is a bit of a spoiler, but if the Western tradition started with the idea of a “true novel” that is both independent of the author and totally invented (New Criticism really helped push this all along almost a century later, trying to divorce the text from both the author’s intentions and the emotional response of a reader to it), we’ve course-corrected in a severe way in which authors are frequently chided for “writing about what they don’t know.” Meanwhile, in the Japanese tradition, they started with a sort of autofiction, then tried to break out of that.

Half a century later, and after numerous experiments, not all Japanese writers were so sure. Some still claimed that, difficult as it had proved in the past, Japanese novelists should continue to aim for what they staunchly believed was the ideal, a fictional world created by an impersonal author—a transcendent “subject.” Others thought that novelists should basically adhere to writing truthfully about themselves, because being true to oneself, and, ultimately, to life, is what ought to embody the highest aim in literature. Some went further and asserted that such writing was the very soul of Japanese literature, wehre the diary has been an esteemed literary genre for over a thousand years. The controversy led to the emergence of two terms of two different approaches to fiction, one normative and the other descriptive: the “true novel” and the “I-novel.”

*

Do all booksellers have the same basic stories? Right now, they all hate the fact that “selling” books means shipping objects to disembodied customers. That’s a bummer! That’s not what anyone signed up for! If I were asked to cover booksellers only right now, I would likely kill that COVID with a big gulp of bleach. But even during “normal” times? Booksellers aren’t all that more interesting than anyone else in this ecosystem. Having been one for years, I have the same stories about annoying customers, and the same chip on my shoulder about my recommendations not being adopted by the masses. (Even when I know that I was mostly just a megaphone for marketing folk.) Bookselling in the aggregate is less interesting than the individual personalities, but I think I’d rather drink with booksellers than have to interview and write about them.

*

What exactly is an “I-novel”?

In an “I-novel,” readers expect the writer to figure in the work in one way or another. Whether the work is in fact based on the writer’s life or is a contrivance is ultimately irrelevant. The author-protagonist of an “I-novel” is perceived as an actual, specific individual, one whose face may be publicly known in other media. The work is necessarily assumed to be truthful about that individual’s life. Moreover, readers tend to favor works that have no beginning or ending, and are fragmentary, finding them true to life, as life also has no opening or closure as such and is nothing but an accumulation of fragmentary experiences. In other words, what readers look for in this genre is the absence of the authorial will—of the intention to create, through words, an independent universe.

(It would be interesting to bounce this idea off of David Shields’s��Reality Hunger.)

So, an “I-novel” isn’t exactly an “autofiction,” but.

This is where I paused in my reading of A True Novel. After she mentioned that I-novels are still all the rage in Japan, I decided to test out a hypothesis and picked up��.��

*

Sales reps? They’re also great people, and I���ɴdzܱ�����love to understand the calculus they apply to all the various books from the various publishers and consortiums they represent. Why push Book X over Book Y? Why don’t you ever read titles from Publisher Z? Understanding how reps think might unlock a ton of marketing secrets for small presses everywhere. Or . . . or . . . it’s just about money. If you’re working on commissions, you’re incentivized to push the books with the best chance of selling. That calculus is actually just arithmetic. 15% of $0 is $0. Promote the buzz, follow the trends, keep your family in the black. That’s, well, not that interesting.

I would totally write about reps for the rest of my life if all they talked about was ways in which publishers tried to seduce them. I want to know all about the payola.

*

Full admission! I’m only 40% of the way through��Breasts and Eggs��by Mieko Kawakami, translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd.

Another admission! Not sure I get the hype.

After reading the first 166 pages of A True Novel, I����Ա����I was in the hands of a brilliant writer. Having read the first 150 pages of��Breasts and Eggs, I knew I was reading an I-novel that plays to our current market urges.

Because copying passages from my Kindle is painful and stupid (the book didn’t arrive before lockdown), I’m going to use ��as the best starting point to talk about this.

Kawakami has since become something of a literary feminist icon in Japan. Although “Breasts and Eggs” riled some traditionalists with its frank portrayal of women’s lives, those detractors are outnumbered by her fans, many of them younger women.

They relate to Kawakami’s sharp identification of society’s expectations for women and the efforts of her characters to upend them. In “Breasts and Eggs,” the narrator, Natsuko Natsume, muses about the tyranny of beauty as she tries to understand her elder sister’s obsession with breast implants. [. . .]

Kawakami gained even more renown as a feminist voice after a 2017 interview she conducted with Haruki Murakami, perhaps Japan’s most celebrated modern novelist.

In that interview, which recently appeared in��, Kawakami — whose work Murakami has championed — questioned the “persistent tendency for women to be sacrificed for the sake of the male leads” in his fiction, echoing����of other critics. (Murakami responded to Kawakami’s critique by noting that his focus was not on “individualistic characters,” but on how people interact with the world.)

To be described as a feminist writer in Japan “still has to some extent a negative image,” Kawakami said in an interview via Zoom.

When “Breasts and Eggs” won the Akutagawa Prize, Shintaro Ishihara, then Tokyo’s right-wing governor and a member of the prize committee, described the novel’s tone as “selfish” and “unpleasant and hard to listen to.” [. . .]

When she was 14, Kawakami said, she lied about her age to secure a part-time job at a factory that made parts for air-conditioners. To help with the family finances, she worked as a convenience store cashier, a restaurant dishwasher, a dental assistant and a bookstore clerk.

Growing up working class, she learned that “in most cases the rich stay rich and the poor remain poor,” she said. “Even with effort you cannot always change your life, and I had this severe lesson as a child.”

From its opening sentence, “Breasts and Eggs” is forthright about class: “If you want to know how poor somebody was growing up, ask them how many windows they had.”

To help support her younger brother when he was in college, Kawakami worked as a bar hostess. She later moved to Tokyo to pursue a music career, but it quickly stalled.

As a reminder, you can stay up to date with all BTBA goings on by and by And by checking in regularly here at Three Percent.

Recently, Benjamin Moser, author of “Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector” wrote an discussing the state and struggle of international literature in English translation. Among the statistics and observations of what it takes to bring great writers of non-English languages to not only America, but the world at large, Moser notes that “Literature is made by a community: present and past, dead and alive,” but cautions against the homogeneity that our English-ruled world could impose upon that very same literature.

The Japanese novelist and critic, Minae Mizumura’s book, is half memoir of a writer finding her literary voice through U.S. education and the ultimate decision to practice her art in her native (and dying) Japanese. The other half is a much more academic screed against the very same homogeneity that Moser openly struggles with. To Mizumura, this homogeneity is a present threat that endangers the truths in literature that cannot be translated no matter how hard we work at it. In the shadow of that threat lies her steadfast loyalty to writing not only in her native tongue, but also with a conscious awareness and reverence for the literary traditions of Japan.

To Mizumura, dying languages are worth preserving through literature. To Moser, literature of all languages is worth translating. In fact, works of lost literature are waiting to be discovered.

Both Moser and Mizumura mention the invasive reality of English on the world of literature. In their own separate ways, both argue for the concurrent needs to both preserve and promote regional literatures. It is a delicate balance, to be certain. One actively pursues new translations from the Portuguese. The other consciously writes in her native tongue despite being educated in America. One brings a nearly forgotten voice into English on a wider scale than ever before. The other reinterprets an English classic to reflect the post-war conditions of Japanese tradition in the face of the American led industrial globalized society. It is, however, a society that has led to opportunities of discovering more international writing as well as the decline of the very traditions that Mizumura laments in the wake of popular writers such as Haruki Murakami.

Where, then, does this place the three percent figure that is front and center to the English reading world in relation to works in translation? How does someone like me, who is only fluent in the most dominant of languages (with some understanding of casual kitchen Spanish and a picture-book reading competence in German) become so interested in translated fiction? How do I convince others to pick up a lesser known novel that took more than a year of laborious and patient translation work and give it a chance? Why does it matter?

I spend a lot of time thinking about these questions as not only a bookseller, but as a person in an ever-increasingly connected world.

First, I think it matters exactly because we are living within such prevalent connection. Connections that can seem intimate, but so often result in quick flashes and selfies across our screens . . . gone in less time than it takes for Nicholas Cage to steal a sports car. Literature, for me, has always been about curiosity in other perspectives about the world, whether that is a personal narrative of universal human themes or a plot-driven story that pushes us to think in different ways. In a world where seemingly everyone has access to each other all the time, literature gives us a moment of pause and growth. A pause that doesn’t always present itself to us in a media saturated globalized world.

Convincing other people to take these pauses in others’ experiences of the world—especially from other cultures—often boils down to curiosity, which is a quality I find most readers possess. Though it may make Mizumura’s hair stand on end, I don’t see it as much of a stretch to point out to casual readers that learning how one Japanese individual cleans her apartment (Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic Of Tidying Up) isn’t that far removed from learning how one Afrikaner woman organizes and makes sense of her life and family history (Karel Schoeman’s ). A stretch for some, of course, but you’d be surprised at how many customers in my store don’t realize that one of the most popular books currently featured on daytime talk shows is translated from another language . . . and how much pointing that fact out to them has opened them to the realization that translated works of all kinds can be relevant, interesting, and perhaps even important to them.

My conscious interest in international literature started unexpectedly when the editor of this site, Chad W. Post, reached into the trunk of his car and handed me a strange and little known novel by the British experimental writer, Ann Quin. The book was Tripticks and I was told it was “British and intense and about America.” I doubt Chad remembers the exchange, but I read the book and thought it was like nothing I had read before. There was a beat sensibility to it and a Woolf-like tone, but with a completely different feel and a critical romanticism about America that I found utterly compelling. And for some unknown reason, It stuck in my head that it was British. It wasn’t British like Dickens or Austen or Hardy. It was something new to me. From that point, I remember paying more attention to where authors were from and began consciously seeking out contemporary novels from other countries and cultures.

Despite the rampant spread and saturation of the English language in culture and literature, an English novel about America led me to the wider world of international literature and, in part, to a genuine curiosity in understanding experiences around the world. From a bookselling perspective, I don’t see why a book about cleaning your clutter can’t do the same. Of course, with the popularity of authors like Knausgaard or Murakami among readers these days, leading someone to the next translated novel isn’t often that much of a stretch, but with only three percent of all books published in America being translated, I’m happy to have an entry point for readers available anywhere I can find one.

As for approaching four percent, it may not be something achievable in the near future for books in translation based on scale alone, but I’m seeing small micro publishers sprout up regularly who are dedicating their efforts toward bringing international literature to the English reader. In a way, the larger issues that Moser and Mizumura struggle with and passionately work for aren’t dissimilar from what I aim to do as a bookseller. Every day I work to preserve the importance of taking the time to read books while simultaneously aiming to open people up to discovering the myriad nuances of art and experience.

Over the next year, I’ll be reading through as many of the hundreds of eligible titles for the 2016 BTBA as I can. I couldn’t be more excited to be a part of the process. But as much as I’ll be offering my opinions and reactions to the books themselves, I’m also interested in sharing what I’ve seen happening in translation at the bookselling level. From the energetic and passionate publishers I’ve been in communication with to the unique ways that different bookstores work to point out the existence and importance of international lit, there are amazing things happening to bring more readers (and more books) into the three percent realm many of us are eager to grow.

We are very pleased to award the 2013 Best Translated Book Award for fiction to Seiobo There Below by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, translated by Ottilie Mulzet. Fans of the award will no doubt note that this is the second year in a row that it has been given to Krazsnahorkai, with last year’s honors going to his first novel, Satantango, translated by George Szirtes. This fact was taken into account by the judges, as was our desire to honor writing from a wide range of geographies, cultures, and languages, and these are all things that we hope will be continued to be accounted for going forward. But in the end one thing was clear: out of a shortlist of ten contenders that did not lack for ambition, Seiobo There Below truly overwhelmed us with its range—this is a book that discusses in minute detail locations from all around the globe, including Japan, Spain, Italy, and Greece, as well as delving into the consciousnesses and practices of individuals from across 2,000 years of human history. The book also takes bold steps forward in terms of how we think of the form of the novel, and our expectation of how a novel works and what it can attempt to do. In its scope, its depth, and its amazing precision, we found Seiobo There Below to be a work of rare genius. We were likewise very enthusiastic about Mulzet’s translation, which is astonishing for its beauty and its technical skill. In this book of nearly 500 pages, filled with sentences that range on for pages at a time, as well as all sorts of specialized jargon and obscure details, Mulzet doesn’t hit a false note, a truly amazing accomplishment. We must give due congratulations to her great work, as well as register our appreciation to her editors at New Directions, who surely must share in the credit.

As much as we admire Seiobo There Below, it was not an easy decision to elevate this book above our two runners-up, and there was much in-depth discussion and passionate arguments in favor of all three finalists. Although there can only be one winner, it is important to us to honor the range of styles, geographies, languages, and cultures that made it so challenging to select the 2013 honoree. Thus we offer these words of praise for our two runners-up:

We found Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s short novel The African Shore, masterfully translated by Jeffrey Gray, to be almost the perfect counterpoint to Seiobo There Below. In its sonnet-like perfection, even a single out-of-place word would have marred this novel’s hypnotizing effect, so due praise must be given to Rey Rosa and Gray for presenting us with this seamless, engrossing story. We also admired the strange logic by which Rey Rosa’s book functions, telling two parallel narratives that are connected by that strange symbolic creature, the owl. The African Shore felt very much to us like a story that only Rey Rosa could have told, a small, perfectly cut jewel that we can stare into endlessly. It is emblematic of the very rich exchange between Rey Rosa’s native Guatemala and the Morocco in which he lived for a decade, and its minimalist aesthetic points us toward an interesting new direction for Latin American literature to follow in the new century.

We were equally enamored of Minae Mizumura’s work in adapting Emily Brontë’s Gothic classic Wuthering Heights to contemporary Japan, translated most spectacularly by Juliet Winters Carpenter. As the novel continues to evolve as an art form, it is essential that it take stock of its legacy and find ways to rejuvenate its classics. Mizumura does not only this but also interrogates the idea of the “true novel“—the Western novel in the tradition of Flaubert, Dickens, et al.—against the traditional Japanese novel. As have many great Japanese writers before her, she reaches into the rich intersection between East and West to create something distinctly Japanese yet global in scope, a satisfying investigation of individual characters, the landscape of her nation, and various novelistic traditions. This wonderful novel marks the entry of a major talent into the English language, and we are proud to honor Mizumura’s long overdue arrival.

translated from the French by Lulu Norman (Morocco; Tin House)

translated from the Romanian by Sean Cotter (Romania; Archipelago Books)

translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (Italy; Europa Editions)

translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett (Netherlands; Open Letter Books)

translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett (Norway; Archipelago Books)

translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet (Hungary; New Directions)

translated from the Japanese by Juliet Winters (Japan; Other Press)

translated from the Spanish by Jeffrey Gray (Guatemala; Yale University Press)

translated from the Arabic by Humphrey Davies (Lebanon; New York University Press)

translated from the Dutch by Paul Vincent (Netherlands; Pushkin Press)

Actually, to be more specific, I want to talk about Germans singing karaoke. The book fair itself was fantastic. We met with dozens and dozens of people, found at least a half-dozen books we want to publish, and ate a year’s worth of currywurst. (I also drank all of Surhkamp’s wine at their swanky party. And heard a lot of details about the most of which I can’t write about here.)

As it turned out, the St. Louis Cardinals were playing the L.A. Dodgers on the final night that we were in Frankfurt. Most everyone reading this knows about my love for the Cardinals (and my heart-wrenching disappointment that they lost to the fucking Red Sox), and seeing this was the playoffs, I had to find a way to see the game. Luckily, right next door to our hotel was an Irish Sports pub that also specializes in karaoke.

Although our waitress referred to it as “that singing shit,” I was sort of excited about the mixture of baseball and karaoke. Karaoke is one of those great moments when you get to publicly witness people overvaluing their skills. People generally think of themselves as the exception to the rule—ask all the stock traders in the world if they’re above average or below average and 75% of them will claim to be “above,” something that’s statistically bullshit—but rarely put that out of such obvious display.

Of course, this being Germany, I was expecting ALL the Bon Jovi and Guns n’ Roses, and possibly the ‘Hoff. But NO. NOT EVEN ANY ABBA. We were treated to exactly none of that. Instead, we got a totally different array of shitty music: multiple Billy Joel songs, a Dolly Parton finale (sung by a tone deaf guy who was a regular), and even NICKELBACK.

What was even more interesting than the bizarre song choices (“9 to 5”?? Has this ever been sung at another karaoke bar?) was the way in which German karaokers over-annuciate all the lyrics. There was no slurring or mumbling when the one dude belted out “WOAH-OH-HO-OH. FOH ZE LON–GEST TIME.” It’s as if they were adding in syllables to make sure that each word was fully articulated.

No where was this more apparent, and disturbing, than in the rendition of “How You Remind Me.” Listen to the “video” to remind yourself of a) how fucking terrible this song is, b) that the chorus to this song is “Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no / Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no,” and c) how Mr. Linkin Park trips from vowel to vowel with a bit of fierce in his voice.

That was not at all how it was sung that night in Germany. Instead of the sort of growl that’s a Nickelback trademark (cough), everything was as clean and orderly as possible (cough, Germans). So we got something like this:

It’s not like you to say so-HREE
I vas VAYting on a dee-fer-RENT sto-HREE
Zis time I’m me-STAY-ken
Foh hending you a haht vurt brea-KING
And I’ve been VRONG, I’ve been down,
Been to ze bot-TOM ov EH-VE-REE bottle
Zeez faif VURDS in my head
Scream “ah vee ha-VING fun yet?”

And this guy didn’t just sing one time and then give it up. He went up there TWICE. Oh, karaoke.

Translated from the French by Paul Knobloch. (Tam Tam Books, $15.95)

Boris Vian was amazing. It’s a true shame that he died at such a young age (39), in such a tragic way (supposedly, he snuck into a premiere of the movie version of I Spit on Your Grave, stood up, yelled, “Those are supposed to be Americans? My ass!,” and died of a heart attack). It’s hard to imagine how many great works he would’ve produced had he lived to the ripe old age of Philip Roth.

Tam Tam Books—which is run by Tosh Berman, former buyer at Book Soup, and is dedicated to making Vian’s works available to English readers—is in a perfect position for a Vian resurgence, what with a new movie version of coming out this year, and this newly translated novel sounds spectacular:

Red Grass tells the story of Wolf, an engineer like Vian himself, who, with the help of Saphir Lazuli, a mechanic, has devised a bizarre “machine” with which he hopes to annihilate old inhibiting memories.

More exciting than the plot is the Vian language which,

undergoes unexpected subversions, as new concepts, sports or occupations are invented, such as “rednecking,” “bloodsport,” and “thigh climber.”

Thigh climber!

Translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell. (Two Lines Press, $14.95)

Two Lines, which comes out of the is one of the best, and longest-running, journals for literature in translation. When they announced last year that they were going to expand into doing books, this seemed like a natural, and exciting, evolution.

This collection is pretty intriguing. Littell, whose Kindly Ones was a huge deal in France, but not so well received in most other countries, followed up his gigantic novel with four short books he wrote for the Montpellier publisher Fata Morgana. Exploring “sex, love, and memory,” this 178-page book provides a nice entry to Littell’s prose.

Translated from the Japanese by Juliet Winters Carpenter. (Other Press, $29.95)

This book is beautifully produced. Two perfect paperbacks in a slick slipcase—this is one of the best designed volumes I’ve received all year.

Hannah Vose wrote a fantastic review of this book for us, so be sure and check that out for more info on the book itself. (She’s very convincing about how worthwhile this book is.)

Sticking with book design for a second: Have any of you seen S. by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst? HOLY SHIT. I knew this was going to be a multi-media sort of experience, but the product itself is pretty stunning—just look:

And, in typical Lost fashion, there are lots of real-world “clues” that tie into the book, including and

I’m totally getting sucked in . . . It’s like Lost all over again . . . Such a sucker for these sorts of games . . .

Translated from the Vietnamese by Martha Collins. (Milkweed Editions, $16.00)

LAP! As is noted in the bio page to this collection, Ngo Tu Lap got his Ph.D. from Illinois State University where he interned at Dalkey Archive Press. Both Nate and I were there during that time, and remember a number of Lap stories. (And the fact that he totally knows how to rock a black leather vest.) My favorite was when he cooked us all a traditional Vietnamese dinner, then implied that it contained dog . . . It didn’t, but shit, for a second there I think most of us bought it . . .

Translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver. (New Directions, $14.95)

Tom and I talked about this book on one our recent podcasts, including the fact that Tom got the estate to chance the reference to the “FBI agent” to a “CIA agent,” which makes a lot more sense in the context of the plot.

We also talked about the word “fucking.” There are more “fuckings” in this book than in any other book I’ve read recently. Although there are a lot of times that this is used to illuminate the way the protagonist’s mind works, I’m sure it’ll be a bit overwhelming to some readers.

That said, I really appreciated Francisco Goldman’s blurb stating that this is, “The best fucking novel ever written about Mexico City.” Reminds me a bit of Toby Litt’s blurb for Carlos Labbé’s Navidad & Matanza, which he refers to as “headfuck fiction.” More blurbs need to include the word “fuck.”

Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews. (New Directions, $13.95)

Sticking with ND’s November releases for a minute, Shantytown is the ninth book by Aira that they’ve published. I haven’t had a chance to read this one—Will Vanderhyden is working up a review for us and took the only galley that arrived—but I love using his books in my World Literature class. They’re all readable, enjoyable, and work in a similar way: At some point early on, Aira gets to believe in one unbelievable thing (in Ghosts it’s the existence of ghosts, in The Literary Conference, it’s the impossible to render description of the treasure and how it’s found) and then is free to do basically anything in the text. (Such as having huge silkworms come out of the hills.) This is a great set-up for talking about what translations have to accomplish . . .

Translated from the Italian by Richard Dixon. (Frisch & Co., $7.28)

Including this here both because Frisch & Co. deserves some praise, but also because of this line:

A hilariously dark tale in the tradition of César Aira, The Combover confirms Bravi’s unique status among Italian contemporary writers.

So, if you love the nine Aira books New Directions has put out, you should definitely check this out.

Also, it involves Lapland. LAPLAND.

Translated from the Bulgarian by Olga Nikolova. (Open Letter Books, $12.95)

Thanks to the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation, Olga Nikolova spent a few weeks in Rochester working on this translation and learning about the American publishing scene. As part of her education, on her last day here, we decided to take her to a “cougar club” which just so happens to be managed by Cuban author José Manuel Prieto’s brother. So, a literary cougar club? Anyway, as it turned out, Olga’s last night in town corresponded with the “What Women Want Weekend”—a frightening thing that involved hundreds of middle-aged women descending on Taylor’s to meet the Ģ����ý’s a cappella group, the Yellowjackets. (Who appeared on NBC’s The Sing-Off.) Those kids barely made it out alive . . . But man, what a shit show! All the awkward dancing, the walk-by ass grabs, the make-up and hair! It was a thing that can only be experienced, never described. And Olga absolutely loved it. The way I remember, she almost “accidentally” left her passport behind so that she would be stranded in Rochester, frequenting the Taylor’s every weekend . . .

the first ten releases.

A few years back, Dalkey Archive announced that they had received a massive grant from the Literary Translation Institute of Korea to publish 25 Korean books. The first 10 come out this month, with the remaining 15 due in 2014.

I recently served as a judge for South Korea’s biennial translation contest, and ended up reading all 11 books published in English translation in the past two years. There’s more to say about those books and that contest, but for now, it’s worth noting that Dalkey, in one day, almost exceeded the total number of Korean books published over the previous two years. That’s what funding and determination can do!

Of the ten books that are coming out now, the four that caught my eye are: translated by Yewon Jung, Inrae You Vinciguerra, and Louis Vinciguerra; translated by Jennifer M. Lee; translated by Hwang Sun-ae and Horace Jeffery Hodges; and translated by Christopher Joseph Dykas.

If you’re interested in learning more about the series, and these ten books, you should really download this PDF sampler, which includes excerpts from all of the books.

Translated from the Russian by Carol Apollonio. (Dalkey Archive Press, $15.00)

Sticking with Dalkey for a minute, this book sounds wonderful:

A bitingly funny twenty-first century satire, The Maya Pill tells the story of a mid-level manager at a frozen-food import company who comes upon a box of psychotropic pills that’s accidentally been slipped into a shipment. He takes one, and disappears down the rabbit hole: entering the mind of a Chinese colleague; dreaming that he is one of the rulers of an ancient kingdom; even believing he is in negotiations with the devil. A mind-expanding companion to the great Russian classics, The Maya Pill is strange, savage, bizarre, and uproarious.

I’m also intrigued by this title knowing that Carol Apollonio was one of Bromance Will’s professors at Duke. (And speaking of Bromance, it’s not too many more months before I can start including titles on this list.)

Translated from the French by Donald Winkler. (Biblioasis, $18.95)

Number one reason to read this book? Stephen Sparks of Green Apple and the BTBA blurbed it:

Well-executed, with a cinematic quality and keen visual sense . . . Segura locates the political through the personal in a way that is uncommon.

That’s it for now . . .

To go against the grain of prologues and intros (more on that from This Hannah in a bit), here’s the beginning of her review:

If you’re one of those people who habitually skim the prologue to a book, Minae Mizumura’s _A True Novel_—her third novel and the winner of the Yomiuri Literature Prize in Japan in 2002—might not appear to be for you. That is to say, the prologue takes up at least a third of the first volume of the book, and it’s pretty important for understanding the circumstances in which the story that makes up this “true novel” takes place, in addition to sorting out what, exactly, a “true novel” is. Luckily for you, O prologue skippers of the world, there is nothing dry or uninteresting about the first 165 pages of this book, which introduces the protagonist, Taro Azuma, as Mizumura knew him when she lived in America during her teens. In fact, if you were somehow unaware of the name of the author when you came into the reading the book, you might not realize that the entire thing wasn’t a fictional account from an outsider to establish what happened during the gaps in the main story. I actually forgot a couple of times that I was reading a prologue at all.

The main function of the prologue here is to both set up the circumstances which led to this novel being written, and to sort out for the reader what exactly a “true novel” is. On the outside, it seems like it might be an oxymoron: because a novel is fictional, it surely can’t be “true,” right? Or maybe the title refers more to the fact that the novel is an example of the “true” form that a novel should take. It turns out that in this case, “true” is a combination of the story’s basis in reality and its following in the pattern of Western classics: authentic, “true” novels. Mizumura takes a few pages to explain the history of the “true” and “I-novels” and it makes no sense fragmented, so all I’m going to say is read the damn prologue, or else flounder in confusion. Your choice.

Like that little prologue? For the rest of the review, go here

The main function of the prologue here is to both set up the circumstances which led to this novel being written, and to sort out for the reader what exactly a “true novel” is. On the outside, it seems like it might be an oxymoron: because a novel is fictional, it surely can’t be “true,” right? Or maybe the title refers more to the fact that the novel is an example of the “true” form that a novel should take. It turns out that in this case, “true” is a combination of the story’s basis in reality and its following in the pattern of Western classics: authentic, “true” novels. Mizumura takes a few pages to explain the history of the “true” and “I-novels” and it makes no sense fragmented, so all I’m going to say is read the damn prologue, or else flounder in confusion. Your choice.

What I can excerpt is a bit on Mizumura’s thought process as she considered making a novel out of the story told to her by Yusuke Kato about a man Mizumura knew as a teenager:

It was when I finally began to write about Taro Azuma that I came up against an obstacle I had not foreseen. What I had taken to be a gift from heaven was, I gradually found out, not all that simple. The further I progressed, the more insistent that problem became: how to take “a story just like a novel” and turn it into a novel in Japanese.

. . .

The story I was told on that stormy night was merely one of many love stories already told a thousand times. Why turn it into yet another novel? There was only one answer I could think of: it recalled the translated Western novels I had encountered as a girl, especially one that never failed to make a disturbing impression on me every time I read it: a literary classic set on the wild Yorkshire moors and written more than a hundred and fifty years ago by the English-woman E.B… What I set out to do was thus close to rewriting a Western novel in Japanese.

So here we finally come up against the thing that the back cover of this book does not want anyone to forget: this novel is “a remaking of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, set in postwar Japan.” I’m hesitant to agree with that statement entirely. While the plot of the story does seem to mimic, in some places, that of Wuthering Heights, with all the main characters represented (the outsider, the housekeeper, the poor abused boy, the rich girl he loves, etc.), the fact that the story is real kind of discounts it, in my mind at least, from being a “re-making” of anything—in addition to many obvious changes, including “new” characters, who shift the progression of the plot away from Brontë’s classic. Mizumura herself states that, although the story seemed to fit that pattern to begin with, as she was writing she saw it take its own, unique shape. But perhaps I’m just splitting hairs. At any rate, I was pleased to discover that I enjoyed A True Novel immensely (much more than I enjoyed Wuthering Heights, in point of fact). I accredit the gap in my enjoyment between the two books to several things, but in particular that, whereas Wuthering Heights is a romance novel, and pretty much only that, A True Novel is the story of so much more—family rivalry, economic turmoil, loss, and the growing modernization of a country coming into the 20th century at full throttle.

And really, all comparisons to Wuthering Heights aside, the stark sense of reality in this book informed both by the genuineness of the general plot and the expertly-done character development plants the story—and the characters in it—firmly on the ground. No one would ever be tricked into believing this is a biography or a non-fiction book, but the skill with which Mizumura fleshes out people who she’s only ever “met” through second and third hand accounts is staggering and wonderful. Everything is cleanly situated in space and time, localized to the latter half of the 20th century in Japan and giving the reader a view into the ever-shifting lives of the “better families” who were forced to make adjustments in their every-day lives due to post-war policies, but held on fiercely to the societal prejudices that allowed them to maintain their social, if not their monetary, superiority. With the added black-and-white photographs illustrating various places and things mentioned in the text, you’ll never lose touch with where or when the story is, and you’ll begin to absorb the feeling of the mourning in which the older generations are for the cultural past swept away in the current of modernity.

The plot is triple-layered: the outside is the story of Yusuke Kato’s brief interactions with the Saegusa family, Taro Azuma, and Fumiko Tsuchiya one summer week when he was vacationing with a friend. The next layer is Fumiko’s retelling—to Yuksue—of the things she witnessed during her acquaintance with the Saegusa, Shigemitsu, Utagawa, and Azuma families. The innermost layer of the plot is the history of the Saegusa, Shigemitsu, and Utagawa families, as told by the Shigemitsu’s maid to Fumiko when Fumiko was in the Utagawa family’s service. Each layer of the plot is nested inside the other to create a fully expanded story, from before the beginning to after the end. Each of the narrators brings a part of the story into being, although not necessarily in order, to create a fully satisfying novel that entirely lacks the tug of lethargy that is always a risk in books this long. Every word is important here, every page brings something new, something that the reader is eager to know, and that makes this novel an easy read, despite its length. Juliet Winters Carpenter and Ann Sherif have created a translation that is smooth, evocative, and modern, while maintaining the air of affectation that surrounds the central families.

So, for those of you who slept through Brit. Lit. II (don’t worry, I don’t know who you are—I was half-asleep, myself), hate romance novels, or are just generally afraid of long books, fear not. Minae Mizumura’s A True Novel is reader-friendly, engaging, and, while similar in places to Wuthering Heights, far longer, much more interesting, and (I’ll argue, to the distress of English literature teachers everywhere) more important in the conclusions (or lack there of) it ultimately draws. A True Novel is a simultaneously expansive and private insight into the struggle between traditional Japanese values and incoming Western conventions, monetary wealth and spiritual value, and status and love—a work of literature not to be missed.