{"id":295906,"date":"2013-12-19T15:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-12-19T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2013\/12\/19\/the-genre-heap\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T14:39:27","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T14:39:27","slug":"the-genre-heap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2013\/12\/19\/the-genre-heap\/","title":{"rendered":"The Genre Heap"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michael Orthofer runs the Complete Review<\/a> \u2013 a book review site with a focus on international fiction \u2013 and its Literary Saloon<\/a> weblog.<\/em><\/p>\n

A common complaint leveled against the Man Booker Prize is that it ignores genre fiction \u2013 for a couple of years there was the obligatory Ian Rankin denunciation of how unfair it was that the jury always overlooked crime fiction, while more recently it\u2019s also science fiction authors that have registered complaints. (For an early overview of some of this, see Peter Preston’s 2005 piece, Genre specific<\/a>, in The Guardian<\/i>.) The Man Booker is, of course, specifically designed to be genre-unfriendly \u2013 the strict and absurd limits on what books can be submitted (in recent years, basically just two titles per publisher) pretty much ensure that publishers won\u2019t submit a genre title for the limited, coveted spots (unless the publisher publishes nothing but genre titles) \u2013 making these complaints rather futile tilting at windmills. (It seems near-certain that none of Ian Rankin\u2019s books were ever even submitted for the prize by his publishers (and hence could never even be considered by the jury).)<\/p>\n

The Best Translated Book Award doesn\u2019t have that excuse: we consider every<\/i> previously untranslated work of fiction published in the US in the relevant year. (Well, we try to \u2013 logistics do mean that the one or other title slips through the cracks because none of us manage to get our hands on a copy.) A significant number of books we consider are genre titles \u2013 not much Harlequin-type romance, and still surprisingly little science fiction, but a hell of a lot of mysteries and thrillers. Just piles and piles of them. The Nordic crime wave continues \u2013 there are three Jo Nesb\u00f8s alone to consider this year \u2013 but other countries are also churning them out (often in multiples, too \u2013 this year there are also two Andrea Camilleris, four Maurizio De Giovannis, two Pieter Aspes etc.). Yet over the years very little that even resembles genre fiction has made it past the first cut, onto the 25-title-strong longlists. The 2013<\/a> and 2012<\/a> longlists are entirely mystery\/thriller-free, and you have to go back to 2011<\/a> where, arguably, Mart\u00edn Solares\u2018 The Black Minutes<\/i> qualifies as such.<\/p>\n

I think there have been some reasonable genre (or at least genre-like) contenders for the longlist over the years. As far as mysteries\/thrillers go, I was disappointed that Nakamura Fuminori’s The Thief<\/a> didn\u2019t make the cut last year, and I think there has been a case to be made for Deon Meyer’s Trackers<\/a>, Leif G.W. Persson’s Another Time, Another Life<\/a>, and, for sheer hard-boiled punch, J.P.Manchette’s Fatale<\/a>, over the years.<\/p>\n

As far as science fiction goes, there have been titles with fantastical elements that have gotten serious consideration \u2013 Eric Chevillard’s Prehistoric Times<\/a> was shortlisted last year and Dung Kai-Cheung’s Atlas<\/a> made the longlist (it also won the Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Awards<\/a> last year); Michal Ajvaz’s The Golden Age<\/a> was shortlisted in 2010. But even these \u2013 or another book that stood a decent chance of getting longlisted, Kawamata Chiaki’s Death Sentences<\/a> \u2013 likely aren\u2019t found on the science fiction shelves of most bookstores (i.e. they generally aren\u2019t considered truly genre-books).<\/p>\n

Given that \u2013 at least as far as mysteries and thrillers go \u2013 genre titles make up such a large percentage of the titles we consider, I\u2019m a bit disappointed that they fare so poorly. But honestly: few really stand out. As Man Booker Prize judge Stuart Kelly recently pointed out<\/a>, a prize-deserving book should read well on re-reading, too \u2013 and crime novels, where much of the point is often learning whodunit (and how), generally rely so much on plot that once that has been revealed and resolved there\u2019s just not enough left to the book for a reader to go out of his or her way to return to it. (That doesn\u2019t have to be the case, of course: there are classic mysteries that it\u2019s a pleasure to return to (I\u2019ll pick up any of those Raymond Chandlers or Jim Thompsons I\u2019ve already read any day), and there are books eligible this year that come with mystery-like surprises and twists that still impress mightily even when one is aware of them (I mention, yet again, Arnon Grunberg\u2019s Tirza<\/a> \u2026).)<\/p>\n

Many of the crime novels in the running for the BTBA<\/span> are also part of a series, featuring the same cast of detecting characters \u2013 Nesb\u00f8\u2019s Harry Hole, Camilleri\u2019s Montalbano, etc. \u2013 and it\u2019s generally hard for an individual title from a series to really stand out (and stand separately). (The fact that US\/UK publishers perversely continue to publish crime fiction series in translation out of sequence \u2013 one of the Nesb\u00f8s published this year is the first in his Harry Hole series, while the third in the series was the first published in English, way back in 2006 \u2013 doesn\u2019t help matters at all, either.)<\/p>\n

Crime fiction tends to be more formulaic than most, too \u2013 more likely to follow a predictable path and pattern \u2013 which again makes it difficult for such books to really stand out \u2013 at least against the competition, which includes a lot of very creative work, a lot of great writing (which, it has to be said, does not always appear to be a top priority for many of the mystery authors whose work we see), and even a lot of plots that are as exciting as any well-turned thriller.<\/p>\n

Finally, it also has to be noted that the translations of genre fiction are \u2026 let\u2019s say less consistently of the highest quality. The translator-names generally aren\u2019t the best-known (though many high profile translators do dabble in genre fiction, too), and there\u2019s perhaps a bit less care and attention paid in the entire translation process when it comes to this sort of fiction. (That\u2019s also why it\u2019s so exciting to see Penguin\u2019s new translations of Simenon\u2019s Maigret-novels starting (in the US) next year (sadly ineligible for the BTBA<\/span>, since they\u2019ve all been translated before) \u2013 a great roster of translators bringing their A-game to works where the previous translations seem to have been \u2026 less than ideal (and that was Simenon !).)<\/p>\n

So how does it look for this year\u2019s crop? Well, I still have a lot of books to go through, but so far nothing has leapt out at me from the mystery\/thriller pile. A lot of this stuff is decent beach reading, but really not much more (and I suspect some of my fellow judges are even less receptive to much of this sort of thing). Something like Alexander Lernet-Holenia\u2019s I Was Jack Mortimer<\/a> benefits from being a product of a different era, which gives it a different feel from most of what we come across, but that\u2019s not quite enough. And as far as the much-touted contemporary thrillers go, none that I\u2019ve read so far has even come close to living up to its promise. (Meanwhile, I\u2019m holding out hope for Mai Jia\u2019s Decoded<\/i> come 2014 \u2026..).<\/p>\n

The one genre-esque title that has stood out: Ofir Touch\u00e9 Gafla\u2019s The World of the End<\/a>, which is the sort of clever science fiction I\u2019d like to see more. It\u2019s not entirely successful \u2013 those big ideas can be hard to neatly tie together \u2013 but it\u2019s still damn good, a title I could see on the longlist.<\/p>\n

Still, there are a lot more books to get to \u2013 including Frank Sch\u00e4tzing’s massive Limit<\/i> \u2026 \u2013 and I haven\u2019t given up hope yet.
\n \u2026..<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael Orthofer runs the Complete Review \u2013 a book review site with a focus on international fiction \u2013 and its Literary Saloon weblog. A common complaint leveled against the Man Booker Prize is that it ignores genre fiction \u2013 for a couple of years there was the obligatory Ian Rankin denunciation of how unfair it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[35996,7736,1646],"class_list":["post-295906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-btba","tag-michael-orthofer","tag-review"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=295906"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295906\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":317866,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295906\/revisions\/317866"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=295906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=295906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=295906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}