Tara Cheesman is a freelance book critic, National Book Critics Circle member & 2018-2019 Best Translated Book Award Fiction Judge. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Quarterly Conversation, Book Riot, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Rumpus and other online publications. She received her Bachelors of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram

Ěýby Sinan Antoon, translated from the Arabic by Jonathan Wright (Yale University Press)

The protagonist of Sinan Antoon’s novel, The Book of Collateral Damage, is an Iraqi expat who returns to Baghdad as a translator. Nameer is hired by a pair of Americans filming a documentary. It’s his first time back since his family emigrated to the United States when he was a child.

While in Iraq he decides to visit the bookshops on al-Mutanabbi Street. There he meets a bookseller named Wadood who is working on an unusual project: a kind of catalog of the objects destroyed in the bombings. It includes commonplace items like a handmade kashan, a stamp album and a stone wall. But also a fetus, a Ziziphus (or Christ’s Thorn) tree, and a pair of twins. His stories are often told from the point of view, and in the voice, of the anthropomorphized objects. Structured as colloquies, or “conversations,” they call to mind the Aesop’s fables and Hans Christian Anderson fairy tales. Nameer, intrigued, tries to convince Wadood to let him translate the writings into English. And Wadood, considering the offer, leaves a copy of his manuscript at Nameer’s hotel in an envelope. Nameer takes it back to America with him.

Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police, another book on this year’s longlist, is also concerned with the disappearance of everyday things. Particularly the items we most take for granted. In both Ogawa’s and Antoon’s writing the empty spaces left behind are imbued with emotional and cultural significance. In The Memory Police, each disappearance is a loss to the community, but one which most of the community accepts in silence. There is a gentleness to her descriptions, and a tangible sadness. Even if they don’t remember what they’ve forgotten, they remain aware of the act of forgetting. In The Book of Collateral Damage the colloquies are more violent, but no less haunting. Each loss is a complete erasure and the human component, as perpetrators and victims, is surprisingly powerful—even when described by an inanimate object without contextual awareness.

I say “my mother” because I claim that she loved me as if I were her son. I remember how her son used to cry in her arms when she fed me. He and his three brothers. But he’s grown up now. But even so she told him off when he tried to persuade her to get rid of me and replace me. “But this oven is older than you. It has fed you and your brothers since your father died and it has helped pay your university fees. I won’t let it go till I die,” she said. She used to swear by me, saying, “By this oven!”

After returning to the United States, Nameer takes a job at Harvard, and then NYU, teaching Arabic language and literature. He keeps the manuscript. Years pass. He completes his dissertation, falls in love, and remains in contact with Wadood—though the ongoing war and Wadood’s personal situation make it difficult at times to stay in touch. Nameer remains obsessed with translating Wadood’s stories, despite Wadood asking him not to. Nameer has also begun collecting articles and pictures from newspapers about the continuing war in Iraq. He hangs them on his apartment walls in hope they will provide him with the inspiration he needs to write a novel of his own.

The Book of Collateral Damage reads as semi-autobiographical. At one point, Nameer talks about an idea he has for a novel about a young man who washes the corpses of the dead in Iraq—pretty much the plot of Antoon’s 2013 novel, The Corpse Washer. His protagonist identifies with Iraq as his home country, but as an American he is far removed from the actual fighting. The truth is that other than a few insensitive colleagues, and family members who still reside in Iraq but with whom he doesn’t seem particularly close, the war barely impacts his day-to-day life. And, yet, he struggles and cries out in his sleep. He’s often angry and unhappy. He carries the war inside him and his girlfriend believes he suffers from P.T.S.D. As the book goes on we see that the occupation of Iraq has affected Nameer and Wadood differently, but both men carry emotional and psychological damage because of it.

I was going to ask him whether he knew that in Arabic the words for hope and pain were almost the same, with just the two consonants transposed—amal and alam.

Most of what I’ve written so far is plot summary, barely touching on the overarching themes or the translation or how strange it was to be reading this book while I, like other non-essential workers, sit at home in obeyance of stay-at-home orders issued in response to a global pandemic. Antoon is very good at capturing the strangeness (and frustration) of living tangential to, yet still affected by, historical events. Years from now, when someone asks what it was like during COVID-19, what do we say? We stayed at home, took long walks, sewed masks and worried about how to pay our bills. While the men and women in hospitals and grocery stores, distribution centers and manufacturing, public service and food delivery, still went to work every day. Nameer wants to do something, to have some positive impact on what is happening in Iraq, when in reality he is both helpless and irrelevant. He is also aware of the hypocrisy of his position. It’s not all that hard to relate.

Should this book win The Best Translated Book Award? Maybe. If I’m being honest . . . I don’t know. Its chances seem slim, when you consider that I’m writing about it rather than one of this year’s judges. My recommendation is read it anyway. Jonathan Wright’s translation is keen and light. He wisely lets the plot bear the weight, not the prose. It’s a good book. And a good reminder that our present situation is just another blip in the history of civilization. Antoon writes about the Iraq war from a different perspective than we’re used to seeing. Nameer is both Iraqi and American. He is aware that he is in a privileged situation—working for an elite university and living comfortably in one of the most expensive cities in the world. His family remains safe. In one sense, the bookseller Wadood is a thread that stretches between Baghdad and Manhattan, allowing Nameer a connection to a country and a war he feels increasingly removed from. As I said, Antoon writes best about ordinary people caught on the periphery of battle. He does so honestly, without shying away from the truth about his characters or their situations, even when those truths are sometimes unattractive and those situations far outside our ability to control.

Tara Cheesman is a blogger turned freelance book critic, National Book Critics Circle member & 2018 Best Translated Book Award Fiction Judge. Her reviews can be found online at The Rumpus, Book Riot, Los Angeles Review of Books, Quarterly Conversation, 3:AM Magazine, et al. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram

ĚýbyĚýShahriar Mandanipour, translated from the Persian by Sarah Khalili (Iran, Restless Books)

An Iranian soldier is wounded, both physically and emotionally, in the Iran-Iraq War. The soldier, Amir, has had his arm amputated and suffers from severe Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He is missing large chunks of memory. When his mother and sister find him in a military psychiatric hospital, he is registered under a false name. They bring him home, but he both is and isn’t the man they remember. With only a dream about a beautiful woman he does not recognize to guide him, Amir sets out to discover what happened to him and whether the titular Moon Brow, the name he gives his mystery woman, actually exists.

Mandanipour sifts through the rubble of Amir’s mind seeking the truth, and in this labor he is assisted by the Kiramen-Katibin. In Islam, these “honorable scribes” are two angels who sit on our shoulders and record our every action. The one who sits on your right shoulder writes down your good deeds, while the one who sits on the left writes down the bad. On the Day of Judgement, they recount to Allah all they have seen.

These two angels become a structural device, providing the memories of record which reveal the kind of man Amir was before his injuries. In a series of non-sequential flashbacks, we meet a spoiled and entitled rich kid who, when faced with the personal and political turmoil of Iran in the 1980s, joins the military not out of a sense of patriotism or duty but to run away. Amir’s is an act of rebellion, designed as much to punish his family as to escape them. A gesture rendered irrelevant when he returns, unable to communicate any of these things. He does not remember his reasons. Or his actions. Or what lessons he has learned. And so he lashes out, psychologically incapable of using words to explain the eruption of emotions he struggles with.

This is a riveting book, beautifully translated by Sarah Khalili. Its intensity is as much a result of her familiarity with Mandanipour’s prose (this is their second collaboration) as from the interesting structural decisions Mandanipour makes. Amir and the reader solve the mystery of his past together. The slow release of information, combined with Amir’s fragile mental state, makes for a tense first half. But in the second, when all is revealed, we get a sense of the author’s genius.

Why should this book win The Best Translated Book Award? Because, in addition to having a narrative structure that would dazzle even John McPhee, it features a protagonist who is neither particularly good or entirely evil. A man who has probably harmed more people in his life than he’s helped. Who rails at his fate, without acknowledging the ways in which he’s been blessed. Who, in opposition to every plot convention, receives no story arc of redemption. Amir is left to make his way through this world as best he can. Just like the rest of us.

Justice is not binary. The Honorable Scribes’ reports are statements of fact. And once we understand that, we see Amir’s life should be examined and judged in its fullness and complexity. To simply to weigh the good versus bad would be reductive. This is a love story which recognizes that individuals act within a moral spectrum. And that our intentions matter as much, or as little, as our deeds. Any grace we receive cannot be earned, only arrived at through seeking the truth and accepting the tragedy of our shared humanity. By any standard, and in any language, Moon Brow is a masterpiece.

by Santiago Gamboa, translated from the Spanish by Howard Curtis (Colombia, Europa Editions)

One of the characters in Return to the Dark Valley is a “crazy and eccentric Argentinian,” a possible sociopath, who says he is the bastard son of Pope Francis and has renamed himself Tertullian, after the father of Latin Christianity. While he narrates sections of the book, he is only a supporting actor in Santiago Gamboa’s complicated plot, a masterpiece of manipulation which unfolds over four hundred and sixty-one pages. Tertullian is one of five different narrators, each with his or her own distinctive voice and history, who provide the many stories which come together to form what we gradually realize is, when distilled down to its essential form, a thriller. Albeit a wonderfully literary one.

At its center is the man known affectionately as “the Consul” who has travelled to Spain at the request of Juana, the woman with whom he has an intimate, yet undefined, relationship. (Both characters appear in an earlier novel by the same author). While waiting for Juana in Madrid he meets another young woman, Manuela, who in an act very like the Catholic sacrament of confession, reveals to him her story. Eventually Tertullian will add his voice to this fragmented tale, as will a priest turned armed militant. And the 19th-century poet Arthur Rimbaud—whose name came up in more than one book eligible for this year’s prize—also plays a part, in the form of meditations kept by the Consul in a notebook. Rimbaud’s biography is spread across the novel and forms its connective tissue.

It seems an unlikely combination. Until you realize they are all expatriates, fleeing or having fled violence at home. Brought together, by way of tenuous connections and a shared human condition, to help Manuela make peace with her own violent past.

Return to the Dark Valley is as close to being a flawless book as anything I’ve ever read. That’s a bold statement, I know—but to find a book that is well made, so solid in its construction, is rare. Gamboa is a writer who has complete control over his medium. Every sentence, nuance and emotional beat carries weight. He’s created characters who are substantial—with identifiable mannerisms, voices, and vocal rhythms. The pacing is absolutely perfect. The violence, and there is more than a little violence, is visceral but not overdone (similar to how it is used in the movie Sicario). The prose is rich, but restrained. Howard Curtis’ translation is a pleasure to read. Below is a quote chosen at random from the many passages I marked while I was reading, just because it felt both beautiful and real.

Waiting, waiting . . .

The day is marked out with floating buoys you have to make an effort to reach: lunch, dinner, sleep, breakfast. Anyone who waits—this text is full of unbearable waits—feels the passing of time and its speed in a physical way. It is slow and laborious.

I don’t know who felt the weight of this stillness most, Manuela or me; what is certain is that by always being in the house—except for my brief morning excursion for provisions, which Manuela denied herself for fear that someone might recognize her—each of us ended up marking our territory, and she practically imprisoned herself in her room.

Challenging. Haunting. Readable. Written by an author and craftsman of undeniable skill, this is a book that expands or contracts in scope depending on its reader. That kind of adaptability and universality in an author—combined with such skillful and creative storytelling—should be celebrated. Which is why I believe Return to the Dark Valley should win.

As long as the Best Translated Book Award long list is (twenty-five books—which is pretty long) the majority of the books in translation published in 2017 won’t be on it. Yes, I’m stating the obvious, but it still merits consideration. I’m one of those people who calculates how many books I’ll read before I die, so this is the kind of thing that keeps me up at night.

Bringing attention to those books that could otherwise be forgotten or overlooked in the onslaught of titles published every year is one of the most important things this award does. As a judge I’ve read so many good books that it’s hard to accept a limit on how many we can talk about and promote in the context of the prize. So, I decided to throw a few extra recommendations out there. Here are three completely random books I enjoyed, found interesting, thought worth talking about and which may or may not make it onto this year’s long list.

by Richard Ali A Mutu, translated by Bienvenu Sene Mongaba, has the distinction of being the first novel translated from Lingala, a language spoken by approximately ten million people residing in the Democratic Republic of Congo and neighboring countries, into English. Which means that when it was originally written the likelihood was that it was intended exclusively for non-Western readers. That alone, in an increasingly homogenized literary landscape, makes it worth reading. But, curiosity factor aside, Mr. Fix-It is like an episode in a daytime soap. The protagonist drags us with him on his romantic misadventures and it’s all surprisingly amusing and incredibly sappy and just fun. (Phoneme Media)

by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell. I was hesitant to include this book if only because it gotten a ton of press, from Lithub to the New Yorker—but I found it so quirky that it felt more wrong not to write about it than to add my voice to the choir. The premise is deceptively simple: a dying woman lays in her hospital bed and has a conversation with her friend’s son. Together they attempt to retrace the events that have brought her to the present moment in which they are speaking. The immediacy of the two voices creates an eerie, searching, out-of-time quality similar to A Scanner Darkly (that 2006 movie with Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey, Jr., and Winona Ryder) or 12 Monkeys. Or, better yet, Rick Moody’s novella The Albertine Notes. Which, if you haven’t read it, go do that and then feel free to DM me on twitter. (Riverhead Books)

by the Haitian writer René Depestre and translated by Kaiama L. Glover, is the most traditional of the three books I’ve listed here. Set in the 1930s, it’s the story of a young bride who seemingly dies at the altar from a heart attack, but is actually the victim of zombification. I’d describe the writing as more ribald than erotic, which actually helps to balance and make bearable the magical realism Depestre incorporates into the plot. Hadriana In All My Dreams is narrated from the perspectives of both the bride and her godbrother, a young boy at the time of the wedding who grows into manhood haunted by Hadriana’s fate. This story sprawls outward. The author has created a huge cast of characters, human and otherwise, all of whom he seems to feel real affection for. He writes convincingly about the tension and contrast between Catholicism and Voodoo. And has given us what might be the greatest description of a Haitian Carnival ever written. (Akashic Books)