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The Literary Saloon Archive

11 - 20 May 2018

11 May: Translating from the ... Nepali | Familiar Things review
12 May: Gérard Genette (1930-2018) | Peter Mayer (1936-2018) | French-American Foundation Translation Prizes | European Literature Night
13 May: Sunday Times Literary Awards shortlists | Mexican literature (not) in Iran | U.R. Ananthamurthy's Suragi
14 May: Daisy Rockwell Q & A | How to Rule the World review
15 May: 50 best New Zealand books | Rabih Alameddine on 'world literature' | The Order of the Day review | 'An Evening of World Literature'
16 May: Best Translated Book Award shortlists | Bulgarian National Literature Award | Tom Wolfe (1930-2018)
17 May: New Zealand Book Awards | Tbilisi International Festival of Literature | The Girl Who Wasn't There review
18 May: PEN Transmissions | Sophie Kerr Prize finalists
19 May: Translating ... Pramoedya Ananta Toer | Sophie Kerr Prize | Orwell Prize shortlist
20 May: The Dagger longlists | European up-and-comers ? | Sōseki review

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       The Dagger longlists

       The Crime Writers' Association has announced its longlists in various categories, including the CWA International Dagger.
       Last year's winner was Leif GW Persson's The Dying Detective; of this year's finalists, only Pierre Lemaitre's Three Days and a Life, in Frank Wynne's translation, is under review at the complete review (though Three Seconds by Roslund and Hellström is too -- a precursor to their longlisted-title, Three Minutes ...).

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       European up-and-comers ?

       In The Guardian they suggest The next Elena Ferrante ? The best European fiction coming your way.
       Quite a few of the titles 'coming your way' will only do so in 2019, while several of these authors are quite well established in English -- notably Juli Zeh, with half a dozen books out in English translation. But the selection includes Daša Drndić's Belladonna, so there's that.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       Sōseki review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of John Nathan's new biography of Modern Japan's Greatest Novelist, Natsume Sōseki, just out from Columbia University Press.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

       Translating ... Pramoedya Ananta Toer

       In the Jakarta Globe Diella Yasmine profiles Max Lane on How Not to Get Lost in Translating Pramoedya Ananta Toer.
       Pramoedya remains the best-known Indonesian author -- and certainly deserving of a large international audience. (I read the Buru-quartet before starting this site, which is why it isn't under review here; it was, of course, recommended in my The Complete Review Guide to Contemporary World Fiction.)
       Disappointing to hear:

Though Pram's books have now been translated into 42 languages, they still remain largely unread at home. According to Lane, this is because Indonesia is the only country in the world that does not teach its own literature in the classrooms.

       A shame -- Pramoedya's, and much other local writing, is something that they should take pride in and foster.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       Sophie Kerr Prize

       The winner of the ridiculously well endowed undergraduate writing prize -- worth US$63,711 this year --, the Sophie Kerr Prize, has been announced at Washington College, and it is Caroline Harvey.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       Orwell Prize shortlist

       They've announced the shortlist for this year's Orwell Prize, awarded: "for the work which comes closest to George Orwell's ambition 'to make political writing into an art'".
       Among those still in the running is Ali Smith's Winter -- the rare novel in a prize dominated by non-fiction.
       The winner will be announced 25 June.

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       PEN Transmissions

       English PEN has a new "online zine", PEN Transmissions (presumably the successor to the PEN Atlas ?); it looks promising.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       Sophie Kerr Prize finalists

       They've announced the finalists for the Sophie Kerr Prize, the ridiculously well-endowed (Washington College) undergraduate writing prize that pays out more than the Pulitzer, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle award combined -- worth US$63,711 this year (the amount varies slightly from year to year).
       All five finalists this year are women and English majors.
       The winner will be announced tonight; it will be live-streamed here at 19:30.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

       New Zealand Book Awards

       They've announced the winners of this year's New Zealand Book Awards; The New Animals by Pip Adam won the fiction prize; see the Victoria University Press publicity page, or get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       Tbilisi International Festival of Literature

       The fourth Tbilisi International Festival of Literature is on through the 19th -- good preparation for Georgia being guest of honour at this year's Frankfurt Book Fair.
       See also Lika Chigaldze's piece in Georgia Today, Tbilisi Int'l Festival of Literature Held for 4th Time.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       The Girl Who Wasn't There review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Ferdinand von Schirach's The Girl Who Wasn't There.

       A lot that's interesting/weird about this publication -- including the fact that, despite the decent success of his previous book The Collini Case and the generally very good UK reviews for this one, The Girl Who Wasn't There apparently didn't find a US publisher (the copy I picked up at the New York Public Library is the UK Abacus edition, which seems to have gotten a bit of distribution in the US, but it didn't get US-reviewed, for example).
       Interesting also that the UK publishers opted for The Girl Who Wasn't There as the title -- not entirely inappropriate, but very, very different from the German original (which pretty much all the other foreign publishers opted for as well), Tabu.
       And, finally, also interesting the very different reception of the book in the UK v. Germany by the literary critics, suggesting the book was approached/reviewed very differently by reviewers: the UK print reviews were generally very positive, while most of the German ones were devastatingly bad. I think coming to the book with different expectations (influenced also by the title(s) ?) played a huge role, with British critics much more receptive to this as a variation on the traditional creative crime novel, while the Germans expected much deeper thought and meaning. (Anthea Bell's translation might have helped as well: the German critics hated Schirach's writing, while Bell's Englishing mostly reads very well.)
       (Critical v. popular reception is of course a different story: the German-book-buying public doesn't seem to have as much of a problem with the book -- he remains a very popular author -- while English-language reader commentary and reviews is generally considerably less enthusiastic than the broadsheet reviews were.)

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       Best Translated Book Award shortlists

       They've announced the finalists for the Best Translated Book Awards, and they're down to the top ten fiction titles:

• August, by Romina Paula, tr. Jennifer Croft
  
  
• Compass, by Mathias Énard, tr. Charlotte Mandell
  
  
• I Am the Brother of XX, by Fleur Jaeggy, tr. Gini Alhadeff
  
  
• The Invented Part, by Rodrigo Fresán, tr. Will Vanderhyden
  
  
• My Heart Hemmed In, by Marie NDiaye, tr.Jordan Stump
  
  
• Old Rendering Plant, by Wolfgang Hilbig, tr. Isabel Fargo Cole
  
  
• Remains of Life, by Wu He, tr. Michael Berry
  
  
• Return to the Dark Valley, by Santiago Gamboa, tr.Howard Curtis
  
  
• Suzanne, by Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette, tr.Rhonda Mullins
  
  
• Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller, by Guðbergur Bergsson, tr. Lytton Smith

       Some surprises here (including no Radiant Terminus -- my favorite among the titles that made the longlist), and quite a few titles that I have to check out; Suzanne was the one title I had really buried in my pile, but I've dug it up now for another look .....
       The winners will be announced 31 May.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       Bulgarian National Literature Award

       They've announced that Хавра, by Zachary Karabashliev (whose 18% Gray Open Letter has published in English; see their publicity page) has won this year's National Literature Award for Bulgarian Novel of the Year; see also the Ciela publicity page, and the BNR report, Writer Zachary Karabashliev: The only war worth fighting anymore is the war on ignorance.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       Tom Wolfe (1930-2018)

       As widely noted, American writer Tom Wolfe has passed away !
       See, for example, Deirdre Carmody and William Grimes' The New York Times obituary !
       Only two of his titles are under review at the complete review -- Hooking Up and A Man in Full -- and I never really took to his writing (much less the silly outfit ...); still, at his best he was certainly readable, and I have to acknowledge that while The Bonfire of the Vanities can't really be called a good novel, it does capture New York/Wall Street in the 1980s very well and will remain a turn-to work for the foreseeable future.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

       50 best New Zealand books

       Via I'm pointed to The Spinoff Review of Books' The 50 best New Zealand books of the past 50 years: The official listicle.
       Only two titles under review at the complete review are on the list -- Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones (26) and The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton (48) -- though I have read quite a few more (though this list drives home how little New Zealand fiction I've kept up with over the past two decades).
       Surprising/disappointing, too, that, despite having quite a few C.K.Stead titles under review, the two that made the list -- Smith's Dream (19) and All Visitors Ashore (36) -- are ones that I haven't ever even seen (and don't seem to have been US-available in ages).

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       Rabih Alameddine on 'world literature'

       In the June Harper's Rabih Alameddine writes on world literature, in Comforting Myths.
       Lots worth discussing here, and hopefully it will get some attention.
       Among his points:

What I'm saying is that there is more other, scarier other, translated other, untranslatable other, the utterly strange other, the other who can't stand you. Those of us allowed to speak are the tip of the iceberg. We are the cute other.

       Some of that 'other' -- or at least some of what approaches that 'other' -- does get translated, and I review what I can (never enough ...) -- but I'm always astonished (and disappointed, and disheartened) how little interest there is from readers in most of this stuff.
       Still, it's good for readers to be reminded that:

All of us on that world-literature list are basically safe, domesticated, just exotic enough to make our readers feel that they are liberal, not parochial or biased. That is, we are purveyors of comforting myths for a small segment of the dominant culture that would like to see itself as open-minded.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       The Order of the Day review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of the latest prix Goncourt-winner, Éric Vuillard's The Order of the Day -- coming (albeit only in September ...) in English from Other Press.

       An interesting, and horrifyingly timely not-quite-work-of-fiction.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       An Evening of World Literature

       I'm looking forward to appearing at An Evening of World Literature at my old K-(i.e. 'Jr.A')-to-12 alma mater, the United Nations International School in New York tomorrow at 18:00.
       Should be fun; come if you can !

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

       Daisy Rockwell Q & A

       At Scroll.in Trisha Gupta has a Q & A with translator Daisy Rockwell (of Upendranath Ashk's Falling Walls, among other works), Meet the American who translates some of India's finest Hindi writers into English.
       Well worth a read -- including the depressing observation:

English is the power language and the link language, so much so that readers and publishers often show little interest in works translated from other languages. In fact, I have never published a book-length translation in the United States because there is simply no interest.

       Come on folks -- why no interest ? There is so much deserving stuff out there .....

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       How to Rule the World review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Tibor Fischer's new novel, How to Rule the World.

       (This is the thirteenth 'How to"-title(d book) under review at the complete review; like most of the others, it can't quite live up to that title .....)

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

       Sunday Times Literary Awards shortlists

       They've announced the (South African) Sunday Times Literary Awards shortlists.
       Among the five finalists for the Barry Ronge fiction prize is one translated title -- The Camp Whore, by Francois Smith (translated by Dominique Botha) --; SJ Naudé is perhaps the best-known-abroad of the shortlisted authors.
       Among the longlisted authors whose books didn't make the cut were Achmat Dangor and Ingrid Winterbach.
       The winners will be announced 23 June.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       Mexican literature (not) in Iran

       IBNA reports that Mexican literature unknown in Iran due to translator scarcity.
       Unsurprisingly, this is a two-way (non-)street:

Elsewhere in his remarks, Salazar said that unfortunately the Persian books published in Mexico are very few and there is a slight literary interaction between the two countries of Iran and Mexico.

       But at least there's some awareness of the situation.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       U.R. Ananthamurthy's Suragi

       Bharathipura and Samskara-author U.R.Ananthamurthy's autobiography, Suragi, is now available in English, and at Scroll.in Souradeep Roy reports that Like all good autobiographies, UR Ananthamurthy's 'Suragi' is delicious literary gossip.
       I do hope to get my hands on this sometime ... meanwhile, see the Oxford University Press publicity page, or get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

       Gérard Genette (1930-2018)

       Leading French literary theorist Gérard Genette has passed away; see, for example, the (French) report in Le Point.
       I have to admit never quite making it through ... his work (despite that well-worn copy of Palimpsests ...); but Paratexts certainly sounds worth a go; see the Cambridge University Press publicity page, or get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       Peter Mayer (1936-2018)

       The Overlook Press-publisher Peter Mayer has passed away; see, for example, Neil Genzlinger's obituary in The New York Times, Peter Mayer, Publisher of the Incendiary 'Satanic Verses,' Dies at 82.
       (Good call, by the way: as cringe-worthy as recent Rushdie novels have been, he did write several truly great works, and the fall-out surrounding The Satanic Verses has unfortunately overshadowed its incontestable literary worth.)

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       French-American Foundation Translation Prizes

       They awarded the French-American Foundation Translation Prizes yesterday, at the Century Association, at a nice ceremony (I was fortunate enough to be in attendance) that included Marc Levy in fine form in a Q&A (with some choice anecdotes about the manhandling of his into-English-debut, the book that was made into the film, Just Like Heaven -- and the interesting observations that his publishers (suspiciously) try their best to thwart any and all communication with his translators ...).
       They award prizes for best translation from the French in both fiction and non categories, and this year both prizes were shared:

• Fiction:
  • Melville, by Jean Giono, translated by Paul Eprile
  • The Principle, by Jérôme Ferrari, translated by Howard Curtis
• Non-fiction:
  • The Years, by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison L. Strayer
  • Bark, by Georges-Didi Huberman, translated by Samuel E. Martin

       (Melville is a wild, fun one, but of course The Years is the stand-out here.)

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       European Literature Night

       They're holding European Literature Night at the Czech Center in New York city tonight, and if you're in the neighborhood, it's worth checking out.
       First off, the Czech Center itself is pretty impressive -- but it's also a packed, fun program.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

       Translating from the ... Nepali

       At Himal Southasian they have a Q & A with Prawin Adhikari about The art of translating Indra Bahadur Rai.
       Prawin Adhikari translated the collection of stories Long Night of Storm -- see the Speaking Tiger publicity page --, while Manjushree Thapa recently translated Rai's novel, There's a Carnival Today (a(n e-)copy of which I have, and hope to get to, sooner rather than later ...).
       Among Adhikari's observations:

Southasia is at a strange phase of literary translation -- as more and more middle-class children grow up with a weakening grasp of their mother tongues and with greater ease with English, they are having to read literature from their native cultures in English translations.

       And, yes, let's hear it for:

I hope more writers translate.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       Familiar Things review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Hwang Sok-yong's Familiar Things.
       This Scribe title came out in the UK and Australia last year, and it's great to see some of their books (like this one ...) are now also going to be distributed in the US.

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