November 23, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Warwick Prize for Women in Translation Winner 2023

Today the winner of the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation was chosen from eight books shortlisted. The full longlist of 16 titles and descriptions can be seen here.

The 2023 competition received a total of 153 eligible entries representing 32 languages; this was the largest number of submissions made to the prize to date. The longlist covered 11 languages and for the first time included a title translated from Vietnamese. Arabic, Chinese, Hungarian and Italian were represented more than once.

A Graphic Novel Debut From Egypt Wins

The winning novel by Deena Mohamed (Egypt) is the graphic novel Your Wish Is My Command, translated from Arabic by Deena Mohamed, published by Granta.

The illustrated novel imagines what might happen if you could buy and sell wishes. The book follows Shokry, a kiosk owner in Cairo, Egypt, as he tries to sell off three wishes he inherited from his father.

It combines fantasical elements alongside everyday realities in contemporary Cairo, as the characters cope with the challenges they face.

In the translation, on the opening page (which is at the back, the book reads from right to left, as it would in Arabic) is an inscription, from a reader:

“Shubeik Lubeik (Your Wish Is My Command) is easily the most subversive book I’ve read in decades, Deena Mohamed has much to say about the human condition, but she does so with effortless grace, superb cartooning, and brimming with intelligence both emotional and intellectual – all while maintaining an incredible sense of humour.” Ganzeer, author/artist of The Solar Grid.

A Special Commendation, Non Fiction Essays from Denmark

The judges have also selected a title for special commendation this year:

‘A Line in the World, A Year On the North Sea Coast’ by Dorthe Nors, translated from Danish by Caroline Waight and published by Pushkin Press – a year travelling along the North Sea coast—from the northern tip of Denmark to the Frisian Islands.

In 14 essays, it traces the history, geography, and culture of the places she visits while reflecting on her childhood and her family and ancestors’ ties to the region.

She writes of the ritual burning of witch effigies on Midsummer’s Eve; the environmental activist who opposed a chemical factory in the 1950s; the quiet fishing villages surfers transformed into an area known as Cold Hawaii in the 1970s.

She connects wind turbines to Viking ships, 13th century church frescoes to her mother’s unrealised dreams. She describes strong waves, sand drifts, storm surges, shipwrecks; nature asserting its power over human attempts to ignore or control it.

In Case You Missed It

In 2022, the prize was jointly awarded to Osebol by Marit Kapla, translated from Swedish by Peter Graves and published by Allen Lane/Penguin Random House, and to Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree, translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell and published by Tilted Axis Press.

November 9, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Time For Outrage, Indignez-vous! by Stéphane Hessel tr. Marion Duvert

Looking Beyond the Ordinary & Expected

On a recent visit to Paris, I accompanied friends on a day-trip to the town of Épernay in the North East of Paris, 30 kilometres south west of Reims. Like Reims, it is known for its champagne houses, vineyards and the close to 50 kilometres of underground tunnels built to store their wine, a veritable underground city.

The town sits on layers of chalk, which gives those underground tunnels their unique aspect that contributes to the uniqueness of their product and why the fierce protection over the use of the word ‘champagne‘. Champagne is only ‘champagne‘ if grown and cellared and produced in the Champagne region of France. If not, its crémant, prosecco, cava, sparkling …

The archbishops of Reims controlled the town of Épernay from the 5th-10th century, it then passed to the counts of Champagne and in 1642 to the Duke of Bouillon.

It was badly damaged during the Hundred Years’ War, and was burned by Francis I in 1544. Having been destroyed or burned more than 20 times, the town has few ancient buildings, the mansions you can see there today are mostly from the 1800’s.

The Champagne Hillsides, Houses and Cellars are on the World Heritage list for the Protection of World Culture and Heritage for all humanity.

The town also houses some 9th century manuscripts, a wine museum and archaeological artifacts.

Stéphane Hessel encourages youth to engage!

As we wandered along the famous Avenue Champagne with its palatial 19th century mansions, some of which can be visited for wine tastings, I looked for number 31 (a favourite number) to take a photo. At about the halfway point in the long, fairly sterile avenue, it was not a champagne house, but a 2,000 + student lycée (high school), named Lycée Stéphane Hessel.

I was intrigued and delighted to see the name of this institution, certain that it must have been named recently, I knew that Stéphane Hessel had died only 10 years ago.

The high school was named in 2013/2014 when the lycée Godart-Roger et lycée Léon-Bourgeois merged to become the lycée Stéphane Hessel, renamed in tribute to this inspirational author of a best-selling essay, written and directed specifically towards youth.

Discovering this lycée was one of the highlights of my visit, I found it brilliantly provocative that in the middle of this world famous avenue of procuring bubbles, sat a human rights activist, member of the Resistance, a voice for peace and equality, the author of a famous essay, written in his 93rd year, 3 years before his death in 2013.

It a short half hour read that has since been translated into numerous languages and sold 4.5 million copies worldwide.

I knew about it because at the Salon de Livre in Paris in 2014, there were massive queues of young people lining up to get their booklet signed by him or to listen to him talk. Journalists were intrigued and wanted to know why these young students were so interested in the words of a very old man. The response was “because he lived it” they said, unlike most who teach us about this era, this man actually lived through everything he has written about. He is authentic, we respect that.

The Essay

Stéphane Hessel wrote his essay in his 93rd year and considered himself fortunate to be able to reflect at that age on events that laid the foundation for his lifelong commitment to politics and human rights.

Born in Germany, he became French in 1939 and in 1941 fled to London and became part of Charles de Gaulle’s group of Resistance members.

He returned to France to organise communications, was captured and sent to Buchenwald, tortured and later sentenced to execution by hanging. He and two others managed to escape execution through an act of identity exchange.

He wrote of the declaration adopted by the National Council of Resistance in March 1944, a set of values and principles created to guide the nation’s modern democracy once it was freed from occupation. He reiterated the importance of many freedoms that came with the end of the war, demanding that they continue to be protected for the good of all.

It is the duty of us all to ensure that our society remain one of which we are proud, not a society wary of immigrants and intent on their expulsion or a society that disputes the welfare state or a society in which the media are controlled by the wealthy.

Find Your Reason

The basic motive of the Resistance was indignation. He addressed his young audience, reminding them of this and implores them to find their reason for indignation, to join the great course of history, to understand the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and if encountering someone who is robbed of these rights, to have empathy and them help them reclaim them.

He wrote about the rise of fascism and his understanding of the origins of it, and how young people today will find their own reasons for expressing their outrage. His indignation was born less of emotion than a desire to engage. He was influenced by the words of Jean-Paul Sartre who said “You must engage – your humanity depends on it.”

The Worst Attitude is Indifference

There are unbearable things all around us, look for them he said:

This is what I tell young people: If you spend a little time searching, you will find your reasons to engage. The worst attitude is indifference. “There’s nothing I can do; I get by” – adopting this mindset will deprive you of one of the fundamental qualities of being human: outrage. Our capacity for protest is indispensable, as is our freedom to engage.

He highlights the challenges, of grievous injustices inflicted on people deprived of the essential requirements for a decent life, the widening gap between rich and poor and the violation of basic freedoms and fundamental rights, citing Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” and his own participation in the creation of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

I will never forget the crucial role played by Eleanor Roosevelt, whose great kindness and natural authority worked wonders to help reconcile the disparate personalities that comprised the commission. She was a vibrant feminist, and it is largely due to her that, for the first time, and on a global scale, the equality of men and women was inscribed without ambiguity in an official text.

His message is one of active engagement, nonviolence and hope, against injustice.

“TO CREATE IS TO RESIST.
TO RESIST IS TO CREATE.”

It is an inspiring short work, that I encourage everyone to read, its message could not be more appropriate at this time, given all that the world is currently facing.

Stéphane Hessel, Author

Stéphane Frédéric Hessel (20 Oct 1917–26 Feb 2013) was a French diplomat, ambassador, writer, concentration camp survivor, French Resistance member. Born in Germany, he became a naturalised French citizen in 1939. He became an observer of the editing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.

In 2011 he was named by Foreign Policy magazine in its list of top global thinkers. In later years his activism focused on economic inequalities, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and protection for the post-World War II social vision.

His book IndignezVous! (Time for Outrage! )sold 4.5 million copies worldwide. Hessel and his book were linked and cited as an inspiration for the Spanish Indignados, the Arab Spring, the American Occupy Wall Street movement and other political movements.

November 2, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg tr. Frances Frenaye

I’m planning on reading a few books by the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg, as mentioned on reviewing her excellent memoir Family Lexicon which I chose to start with, before diving into her fiction.

I start her fiction at the beginning with this brilliant, page turning feminist classic, originally penned in 1947, The Dry Heart.

Captivating right from the opening lines,

“Tell me the truth,” I said.
“What truth?” he echoed…
I shot him between the eyes.

Natalia Ginzburg’s debut novella starts with a shot and then goes into the domestic detail that preceded that moment.

Those first lines begin halfway down the page, just a couple of paragraphs before you turn the page, where not only is the husband shot, but in the last sentence before we turn the page, she tells us,

But for a long time already I had known that sooner or later I should do something of the sort.

She then leaves the house and over the course of the day, she recalls in minute detail how she met Alberto, her husband of four years, their long drawn out courtship, her wavering feelings for him that seesaw between love and hate but never indifference, before deciding what she ought to do now.

I put on my raincoat and gloves and went out. I drank a cup of coffee at the counter of a café and walked haphazardly around the city. It was a chilly day and a damp wind was blowing. I sat down on a bench in the park, took off my gloves and looked at my hands. Then I slipped off my wedding ring and put it in my pocket.

A school teacher living in a boarding house, surrounded by different characters on the periphery of her life, she had a vivid imagination and had fantasized about marriage. Alberto hadn’t fit that image but over time that had changed.

When a girl is very much alone and leads a tiresome and monotonous existence, with worn gloves and very little spending money, she may let her imagination run wild and find herself defenceless before all the errors and pitfalls which imagination has devised to deceive her.

The novel vivdly portrays the roller coaster of her young imagination, the frustration and desire she feels, the willingness to compromise and accept a less than perfect situation, the significant step forward their marriage takes when a child comes into it, until the day she snaps.

There is no mystery, all is laid bare in captivating, enticing prose, that is direct and insistent while exploring the dark aspect of a relationship that can’t be controlled, of characters who are ill-suited yet drawn towards one another, until that spontaneous combustion of their marriage.

It’s a novella, just over 100 pages, one to dive right in, highly recommended. A feminist classic.

Brilliant.

Also reviewed earlier this year by Jacqui at JacquiWine’s Journal and Kim at Reading Matters Blog.

Natalia Ginzburg Italian literature Family Lexicon

Natalia Ginzburg, Author

Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991) was born in Palermo, Sicily. She wrote dozens of essays, plays, short stories and novels, including Voices in the Evening, All Our Yesterdays and Family Lexicon, for which she was awarded the prestigious Strega Prize in 1963.

She was the first to translate Marcel Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann into Italian.

Her work explored family relationships, politics and philosophy during and after the Fascist years, World War II. Modest and intensely reserved, Ginzburg never shied away from the traumas of history, whether writing about the Turin of her childhood, the Abruzzi countryside or contemporary Rome—approaching those traumas indirectly, through the mundane details and catastrophes of personal life.

She was involved in political activism throughout her life and served in the Italian parliament between 1983 to 1987. Animated by a profound sense of justice, she engaged with passion in various humanitarian issues, such as the lowering of the price of bread, support for Palestinian children, legal assistance for rape victims and reform of adoption laws.

She died in Rome in 1991 at the age of seventy-five.

October 25, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

The Delivery by Margarita Garcia Robayo tr. Megan McDowell

The Delivery was next up to read from my 2023 Charco Press bundle and was published on 24 October. This year’s books have been so great, I couldn’t wait to get to this one. I haven’t read her previous translated book Fish Soup, but I had heard good things about it too.

Charco Press and Latin American Fiction On a Roll

One of the earlier Charco novellas I read this year, The Remains (see my review) by Mexican author Margo Glantz (translated by Ellen Jones) just made the longlist of the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2023. In the same week Two Sherpas (see my review) by Sebastian Martinez Daniell translated by Jennifer Croft was longlisted for the 2024 ALA Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Ana Paula Maia’s Of Cattle And Men, translated from the Portuguese by Zoë Perry made the 2023 Cercador Prize Finalists ( a bookseller-led prize for literature in translation).

Warning: Don’t Ignore Your Packages – The Review

A young, unapologetically self-absorbed woman lives alone, away from her family. Though loathe to form attachments, she is hyper observant of all that goes on around her; the neighbour into whose apartment she sees, the doorman sweeping below, the mother with her young son, the unreliable babysitter.

A large package arrives from her sister who told her via one of their infrequent video-calls, that she was leaving with her family on a cruise. The sisters have a complicated relationship, one she ponders.

When she notices my silence she goes quiet and sighs. I guess she, too, gets fed up with the weight of incomprehension. I guess that on top of seeming like a sister who is detached, dejected and discourteous, I also come off as an arrogant person. Kinship isn’t enough for her, either, of course it isn’t. In cases like ours, getting along isn’t a question of magic or chemistry or affinity, but of tenacity, toughness and torturous toiling.

The package, the size of a large crate stays in the hallway for two days until neighbours complain, knock on the door and push it into her seventh floor apartment. She continues to ignore it.

It’s noon; my sister must be aboard her cruise ship by now. I can just see her gazing excitedly at the array of interactive screens showing maps of the ship marked with little flags: ‘…over twenty stations of international food.’
I wonder: When my sister isn’t there, who takes care of my mother?

Farming Cows Personality Animals The Delivery On Writing — Photo by Flickr on Pexels.com

Working from home as a freelance copy writer, she meets her boss once a week. Currently working on a piece about a cow, while procrastinating over completing a grant for a writer’s residency in Holland. Here she questions whether her choice to be a writer is another act of avoidance.

And although writing is something I have done every day for years now, I again get the feeling that this thing I call ‘my job’ is nothing but another avoidance strategy. Compared to all other professions, writing is like the effort a tick makes to feed and survive among predators. I climb onto a branch, wait a long time until the herd passes, calculate the least risky distance to drop onto a fluffy mass and drink a minuscule ration of blood, which will allow me to maintain this limited but sufficient life.

Her attempts to avoid human contact threaten to overwhelm her, as increasingly she is drawn in to life around her and made to be present.

I felt I had the right to not be a trustworthy person. It was good to make that clear, even if it worked against my professional future; from now on you should be aware that assigning me a job includes the possibility that I’ll quit halfway through. That was more or less how I put it. It was the closest I would come in this business to an outburst of dignity.

The novel follows a week or so in her life and the people (and a cat) with whom she interacts, both willingly and unwillingly. Encounters that awaken memories, that cause her to explore her own responses and thoughts on them all, she avoids closeness but each situation contributes to the growing relationships between them all.

Her efforts to keep a distance stall, fail and slowly make her see her own role in running from herself, the inclination to self-sabotage.

Sometimes I feel like two people live inside me, and one of those people (the good one) keeps the other in check, but sometimes she gets tired and lowers her guard and then the other (evil) one stealthily emerges, with a mad desire to wound just for the sake of it.

It’s both introspective and funny, as her avoidance and inattention to things leads to consequences that surprise her and because we see everything from her perspective, we too have a somewhat clouded view of reality.

Her philosophical considerations and snippets of conversation give pause for thought. It’s entertaining in a surreal yet banal way, knowing that life’s reality is likely to burst the bubble she lives in eventually, yet it doesn’t stop her from continuing to ponder and escape from it.

How quickly the shell of a routine is shattered.
Any routine, however solid it may be, is obliterated by the unexpected.

Margarita García Robayo, Author

Margarita García Robayo was born in 1980 in Cartagena, Colombia, and now lives in Buenos Aires where she teaches creative writing and works as a journalist and scriptwriter.

She is the author of several novels, including Hasta que pase un huracán (Waiting for a Hurricane) and Educación Sexual (Sexual Education, both included in Fish Soup), Holiday Heart, and Lo que no aprendí (The Things I have Not Learnt). She is also the author of a book of autobiographical essays Primera Persona (First Person, forthcoming with Charco Press) and several collections of short stories, including Worse Things, which obtained the prestigious Casa de las Américas Prize in 2014 (also included in Fish Soup).

Her books have been published widely and praised in Latin America and Spain and have been translated into several languages, including Chinese, Hebrew, French, Danish and Turkish. The Delivery is her third book to appear in English after the very successful Fish Soup (selected by the TLS as one of the best fiction titles of 2018) and Holiday Heart (Winner of the English PEN Award).

October 24, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Warwick Prize for Women in Translation longlist 2023

16 titles have been longlisted for the seventh annual award of the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation.

The prize was established by the University of Warwick in 2017 to address the gender imbalance in translated literature and to increase the number of international women’s voices accessible to a British and Irish readership.

This year, there were 153 nominations representing 32 languages. The longlist spans 11 languages and for the first time includes a title translated from Vietnamese. Arabic, Chinese, Hungarian and Italian language books are represented more than once.

A Long Line of Classics by Women Coming into Translation

Knowing how few women authors have been translated into English until now, only confirms how many great books sitting waiting to be discovered and rediscovered, as the demand to read literature from elsewhere increases exponentially. Yes, we have been and are, starved for other voices, for universal connections, stories imagined and conceived in other languages.

I have read two from the list, both excellent novels that I recommend, click on the titles to read my earlier reviews. Forbidden Notebook by Italian-Cuban author Alba de Cespédes translated by Ann Goldstein is a rediscovered classic from 1952, a highly compelling read about a woman’s self discovery through the transgressive act (find out why) of writing in a notebook.

The Remains by Mexican author Margo Glantz translated from Spanish by Ellen Jones is an extraordinary novella of a woman who returns for the funeral of her ex-husband and relives aspects of their relationship while navigating the audience of mourners, uncertain to whom they should pass on their condolences.

The judges said of the 2023 longlist:

“From an exceptionally rich field of submissions we have chosen 16 remarkable books in first-rate translations. All of them deserve to find delighted readers everywhere.

Our contemporary picks span a dazzling rainbow of genres, cultures and voices – from an Egyptian graphic novel to a Vietnamese vision of migrant life in France; a Chinese fable of an alternative Hong Kong to a comic-epic Swedish novel of ideas; a Mexican musical elegy to a Yemeni documentary testament to the human costs of war.

But this year’s long list also honours a formidable cache of rediscovered gems from major 20th-century women writers: classic works given new life by the translator’s time-defying art.”

The full list of longlisted titles, in alphabetical order, with a summaries, is as follows:

Dorthe Nors, A Line in the World – A Year on the North Sea Coast (nonfiction) translated from Danish by Caroline Waight (Pushkin Press) – a year travelling along the North Sea coast—from the northern tip of Denmark to the Frisian Islands.

In 14 essays, it traces the history, geography, and culture of the places she visits while reflecting on her childhood and her family and ancestors’ ties to the region. She writes of the ritual burning of witch effigies on Midsummer’s Eve; the environmental activist who opposed a chemical factory in the 1950s; the quiet fishing villages surfers transformed into an area known as Cold Hawaii in the 1970s. She connects wind turbines to Viking ships, 13th century church frescoes to her mother’s unrealised dreams. She describes strong waves, sand drifts, storm surges, shipwrecks; nature asserting its power over human attempts to ignore or control it.

Lalla Romano, A Silence Shared (historical fiction, WWII) translated from Italian by Brian Robert Moore (Pushkin Press) – Italian classic about the mysterious relationships between two partisan couples in German-occupied Italy in the wintry mountains of Piemonte.

Sheltering from the war in a provincial town outside of Turin, Giulia and her husband Stefano feel an instant affinity with Ada and Paolo: she a spontaneous, vibrant young woman, he a sickly intellectual, a teacher and partisan in hiding. As the Germans occupy Italy, a subtle dance of attractions between the couples begins, intensified by their shared isolation and the hum of threat over a long, hard winter.

Amanda Svensson, A System So Magnificent It Is Blinding (literary fiction) translated from Swedish by Nichola Smalley (Scribe UK) – A joyful family saga about free will, forgiveness, and connectedness that asks if we are free to create our own destinies or are just part of a system beyond our control?

As a set of triplets is born, their father chooses to reveal his affair. Pandemonium ensues. Two decades later, Sebastian has joined a mysterious organisation, the London Institute of Cognitive Science, where he meets Laura, a patient whose inability to see the world in three dimensions intrigues him. Meanwhile, Clara has travelled to Easter Island to join a cult, and the third triplet, Matilda, is in Sweden, trying to escape the colour blue.

An event forces the triplets to reunite. Their mother calls with news: their father has gone missing and she has something to tell them, a twenty-five-year secret that will change all their lives.

Krisztina Tóth, Barcode (short stories/literary fiction) translated from Hungarian by Peter Sherwood (Jantar) – a first substantial work in prose after 4 volumes of verse, consists of 15 short stories tied together by a poetic sensibility.

Whether about childhood acquaintances, school camps, of love or deceit, all take place against the backdrop of Hungary’s socialist era in its declining years. The stories are strung together, like jewels in a necklace, along metaphorical ‘lines‘, which nearly all include the word for ‘line, bar‘. The losses, disappointments, and tragedies great and small offer nuanced ‘mirrorings’ of the female soul and linger long in the memory.

Thuận, Chinatown (literary fiction) translated from Vietnamese by Nguyễn An Lý (Tilted Axis) – An exquisite and intense journey through the labyrinths of Hanoi, Leningrad, and Paris via dreams, memory, and loss

An abandoned package is discovered in the Paris Metro: local workers suspect it’s a terrorist bomb. A Vietnamese woman sitting nearby, her son asleep on her shoulder, waits and begins to reflect on her life, from her childhood in communist Hanoi, to studying in Leningrad during the Gorbachev period, to the Parisian suburbs where she now teaches English. Through it all runs her passion for Thuy, the father of her son, a writer from Saigon’s Chinatown, who, with the shadow of the China-Vietnam border war falling between them, she has not seen for 11 years.

Through her breathless, vertiginous, and moving monologue alongside the train tracks, the narrator attempts to face the past and exorcize the passion that haunts her.

Zhang Yueran, Cocoon (Historical Fiction) translated from Chinese by Jeremy Tiang (World Editions) – a unique voice from a generation of important young writers from China, shedding a different light on the country’s recent past – on the unshakable power of friendship and the existence of hope

Cheng Gong and Li Jiaqi go way back. Both hailing from dysfunctional families, they grew up together in a Chinese provincial capital in the 1980s. Now, many years later, the childhood friends reunite and discover how much they still have in common. Both have always been determined to follow the tracks of their grandparents’ generation to the heart of a mystery that perhaps should have stayed buried. What exactly happened during that rainy night in 1967, in the abandoned water tower?

Alba de Céspedes, Forbidden Notebook (literary fiction) translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein (Pushkin Press) – a classic domestic novel that centres the inner life of a dissatisfied housewife living in postwar Rome. Exquisitely crafted, Forbidden Notebook recognises the universality of human aspirations.

Italian feminist writing classic 1940s 1950s

Valeria Cossati never suspected how unhappy she had become with the shabby gentility of her bourgeois life – until she begins to jot down her thoughts and feelings in a little black book she keeps hidden in a closet. This new secret activity leads her to scrutinize herself and her life more closely, and she soon realizes that her individuality is being stifled by her devotion and sense of duty toward her husband, daughter, and son.

As the conflicts between parents and children, husband and wife, and friends and lovers intensify, what goes on behind the Cossatis’ facade of middle-class respectability gradually comes to light, tearing the family’s fragile fabric apart.

Dorothy Tse, Owlish (Science Fiction/Fantasy) translated from Chinese by Natascha Bruce (Fitzcarraldo) – Thrumming with secrets and shape-shifting geographies, this extraordinary debut novel is a boldly inventive exploration of life under repressive conditions.

In the mountainous city of Nevers, there lives a professor of literature called Q. He has a dull marriage and a lacklustre career, but also a scrumptious collection of antique dolls locked away in his cupboard. And soon Q lands his crowning a music box ballerina named Aliss who tantalizingly springs to life. Guided by his mysterious friend Owlish and inspired by an inexplicably familiar painting, Q embarks on an all-consuming love affair with Aliss, oblivious to the sinister forces encroaching on his city and the protests spreading across the university that have left his classrooms all but empty.

Marguerite Duras, The Easy Life (literary fiction) translated from French by Olivia Baes & Emma Ramadan (Bloomsbury) – For the first time in English, a literary icon’s foundational masterpiece about a young woman’s existential breakdown in the deceptively peaceful French countryside.

Francine Veyrenattes, a 25-year-old woman feels like life is passing her by. After witnessing a series of tragedies on her family farm, she alternates between intense grief and staggering boredom as she discovers a curious detachment in herself, an inability to navigate the world as others do. Hoping to be cleansed of whatever ails her, she travels to the coast. But there she finds herself unraveling, uncertain of what is inside her. Lying in the sun with her toes in the sand by day, dissolving in her hotel room by night, she soon reaches the peak of her inner crisis and must grapple with whether and how she can take hold of her own existence.

An extraordinary examination of a young woman’s estrangement from the world, a work of unsettling beauty and insight, a bold, spellbinding journey into the depths of the human heart.

Magda Szabó, The Fawn (literary fiction) translated from Hungarian by Len Rix (Maclehose) – Eszter Encsy, an accomplished actress, ponders her impoverished childhood and path to accomplishment on hearing news of a childhood acquaintance.

A series of internal monologues delve into the depths of the humiliation, isolation, poverty, social and emotional exclusion and despair she experienced, attempting to comprehend her experiences. At first she recalls them with a disturbing calmness and an indifferent detachment, outwardly remaining unperturbed and icy, but soon finds her manner of speaking and her demeanor slowly changing as it becomes more and more difficult for Eszter to choke down the intense feeling of hatred and resentment she has been allowing to ferment for years.

Bianca Bellová, The Lake (Science Fiction/Dystopia) translated from Czech by Alex Zucker (Parthian Books) – a dystopian page-turner, the coming of age of a young hero.

A fishing village at the end of the world. A lake that is drying up and, ominously, pushing out its banks. The men have vodka, the women troubles, the children eczema to scratch. Born into this unforgiving environment, Nami, embarks on a journey with nothing but a bundle of nerves, a coat that was once his grandfather’s and the vague idea to search for his mother, who disappeared from his life at a young age. To uncover this mystery, he must sail across and walk around the lake and finally dive to its bottom. A raw account of life in a devastated land and the harsh, primitive circumstances under which people fight to survive.

Grazia Deledda, The Queen of Darkness (short stories) translated from Italian by Graham Anderson (Dedalus) – The ancient traditions of Sardinia feature heavily in this early collection. The stories collected in The Queen of Darkness, originally published in 1902 shortly after Deledda’s marriage and move to Rome, reflect her transformation from little-known regional writer to an increasingly fêted and successful mainstream author. The two miniature psycho-dramas that open the collection are followed by stories of Sardinian life in the remote hills around her home town of Nuoro. The stark but beautiful countryside is a backdrop to the passions, misadventures and injustices which shape the lives of its rugged but all too human inhabitants.

Margo Glantz, The Remains (literary fiction) translated from Spanish by Ellen Jones (Charco Press) – The way you hold a cello, the way light lands in a Caravaggio, the way the castrati hit notes like no one else could–a lifetime of conversations about art and music and history unfolds for Nora Garcia as she and a crowd of friends and fans send off her recently deceased ex-husband, Juan.

Like any good symphony, there are themes and repetitions and contrapuntal notes. We ping-pong back and forth between Nora’s life with Juan (a renowned pianist and composer, an accomplished raconteur) and the present day, where she sits among familiar things, next to his coffin, breathing in the mix of mildew and lilies that overwhelm this day and her thoughts.

In Glantz’s hands, music and art access our most intimate selves, illustrating and creating our identities, offering us ways to express love, loss and bewilderment when words cannot suffice. As Nora says, “Life is an absurd wound: I think I deserve to be given condolences.”

Hanne Ørstavik, ti amo (literary fiction based on true life) translated from Norwegian by Martin Aitken (And Other Stories) – a harrowing novel, filled with tenderness, grief, love and loneliness.

A woman is in a deep and real, but relatively new relationship with a man from Milan. She has moved there, they have married, and they are close in every way. Then he is diagnosed with cancer. It’s serious, but they try to go about their lives as best they can. But when the doctor tells the woman that her husband has less than a year to live – without telling the husband – death comes between them. She knows it’s coming, but he doesn’t – and he doesn’t seem to want to know. Delving into the complex emotions of bereavement, it asks how and for whom we can live, when the one we love best is about to die.

Bushra al-Maqtari, What Have You Left Behind? (nonfiction) translated from Arabic by Sawad Hussain (Fitzcarraldo) – powerfully drawn together civilian accounts of the Yemeni civil war that serves as a vital reminder of the scale of the human tragedy behind the headlines.

In 2015, a year after it started, Bushra al-Maqtari decided to document the suffering of civilians in the Yemeni civil war, which has killed over 200,000 people according to the UN. Inspired by the work of Svetlana Alexievich, she spent 2 years visiting different parts of the country, putting her life at risk by speaking with her compatriots, and gathered over 400 testimonies, a selection of which appear here.

Purposefully alternating between accounts from the victims of the Houthi militia and those of the Saudi-led coalition, al-Maqtari highlights the disillusionment and anguish felt by civilians trapped in a war outside of their own making. As difficult to read as it is to put down, this unvarnished chronicle of the conflict in Yemen serves as a vital reminder of the scale of the human tragedy behind the headlines, and offers a searing condemnation of the international community’s complicity in the war’s continuation.

Deena Mohamed, Your Wish Is My Command (graphic novel) translated from Arabic by Deena Mohamed (Granta) – Shubeik Lubeik – a fairytale rhyme meaning ‘Your Wish is My Command’ is the story of three characters navigating a world where wishes are literally for sale; mired in bureaucracy and the familiar prejudices of our world, the more expensive the wish, the more powerful and more likely to work as intended. The novel tell the story of three first class wishes used by Aziza, Nour, and Shokry, each grappling with the challenge inherent in trying to make your most deeply held desire come true.

Deena’s mix of calligraphy and contemporary styles, brings to life a vibrant Cairo neighborhood, and cast of characters whose struggles and triumphs are deeply resonant. Shubeik Lubeik heralds the arrival of a significant new talent and a brave, literary, political, and feminist voice via the graphic novel.

The shortlist for the prize will be published in early November. The winner will be announced in London on Thursday 23 November.

October 6, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg tr. Jenny McPhee

Family Lexicon (Lessico Famigliare) is a unique memoir or work of autofiction of family life and by Italian author Natalia Ginzburg. She advises the reader to read it like a novel, the places, events and people are real, recalled in the way she knew them, most often by the way they used language.

This is the first of her books I have read and since life informs fiction, I thought I would meet the characters from her life before reading more of her novels.

Family Sayings & Life Lessons

Rather than speak of her life as a narrative from childhood onwards, of her own exploits, she focuses on the characters around her, building a picture of them through noting their tendencies and favoured expressions. The things they said most often, which creates impressions of attitudes and the force of personality, so that we come to know something of the household, from when they were all together, through the war and beyond.

I had little desire to talk about myself. This is in fact not my story but rather, even with gaps and lacunae, the story of my family.

The character that looms largest in the family is her father, the patriarch. Devoid of sentiment, Ginzburg familiarises us with his brusque ways, his favourite insults, criticisms, judgments and orders. Taking the family on holiday to the mountains was a form of boot camp, compulsory hiking from dawn to dusk. His own mother, though joining them, refused to stay with him, preferring a less regimental nearby hotel. The children complaining of boredom elicited:

‘You lot get bored’, my father said, ‘because you don’t have inner lives.’

There were five children in the family, Natalia being the youngest, the quiet observer, the astute note-taker.

Though they live in different cities, countries and rarely see each other, it is the family lexicon that unifies them, that one word or phrase that causes them to fall back into old roles and relationships, into childhood and youth again.

Those phrases are our Latin, the dictionary of our past, they’re like Egyptian or Assyro-Babylonian hieroglyphics, evidence of a vital core that has ceased to exist but that lives on in its texts, saved from the fury of the waters, the corrosion of time. Those phrases are the basis of our family unity and will persist as long as we are in the world, re-created and revived in disparate places on the earth, whenever one of us says, ‘Most eminent Signor Lipmann’, and we immediately hear my father’s impatient voice ringing in our ears; ‘Enough of that story! I’ve heard it far too many times already!’

On her mother, who is the opposite to the father:

But my mother’s affections were as erratic as ever, her relationships inconstant. Either she saw someone every day or she never wanted to see them. She was incapable of cultivating acquaintances just to be polite. She always had a crazy fear of becoming ‘bored’, and she was afraid visitors would come to see her just as she was going out.

Her mother preferred the much younger company of new mothers then those her own age who she referred to as “old biddies”.

Notables or Nobodies, An Extended Family

While much of what she recalls is far from endearing, it resonates loudly as realistic, the phrases that stand and repeat through time, by their nature, they are those that mark in the memory, while others float away like debris.

New characters arrive unbidden and I find myself reading back a few pages to see if they have been mentioned before, knowing their significance, like Leone Ginzburg, the man who will become her husband. He enters the text with his friend Pavese and the publisher they worked for; Pavese wrote poetry, as many we meet on these pages do, while Leone’s true passion was politics, at one time jailed and perceived as a dangerous conspirator.

As time passes and Natalia moves from Turin, to the countryside during the war and eventually to Rome, different people are around or mentioned, connected to the family in some way and again. We see snapshots of them, as she observes or listens to them during a significant event, though never how she feels, it is as if her memory exists only in the face and words of those who witness.

Words: Weapons or Wisdom

When Leone is arrested and doesn’t return home, she is at a loss what to do.

Leone was arrested in a clandestine printer’s shop. We were living in an apartment neat the Piazza Bologna and I was home alone with my children. I waited, and as the hours went by and he failed to come home, I slowly realised that he must have been arrested. The day passed and then the night, and the next morning Adriano came over and told me to leave the lace immediately, because Leone had, in fact, been arrested and the police might show up at any moment.

When she recalls this terrifying moment, the imprint of her memory is all about Adriano, the relief in seeing him a balm to the more terrifying thoughts she must have had for herself and her children.

For the rest of my life, I will never forget the immense solace I took in seeing Adriano’s very familiar figure, one I’d known since childhood, appear before me that morning after so many hours of being alone and afraid, hours in which I thought about my parents far away in the north and wondered if I would ever see them again. I will always remember Adriano hunched over as he went from room to room, leaning down to pick up clothes and the children’s shoes, his movements full of kindness, compassion, humility and patience. And when we fled from that place, he wore on his face the expression that he’d had when he came to our apartment for Turati; it was that breathless, terrified, excited expression he wore whenever he was helping someone.

Poetry as Freedom

During fascism, novelists and poets were silenced, starved of words, forbidden to freely express themselves, having to choose carefully from a slim, censored collection. In the post-war period, there was initial exuberance, followed by a reckoning, as the language of poetry and politics mixed, then separated. Perhaps it is was this experience, as much as being the youngest child, often interrupted, that contributed to her writing style.

At the time there were two ways to write: one was a simple listing of facts outlining a dreary, foul, base reality seen through a lens that peered out over a bleak and mortified landscape; the other was a mixing of facts with violence and a delirium of tears, sobs and sighs…It was necessary if one was a writer, to go back and find your true calling that had been forgotten in the general intoxication. What had followed was like a hangover, nausea, lethargy, tedium. In one way or another, everyone felt deceived and betrayed, both those who lived in reality and those who possessed or thought they possessed a means of describing it. And so everyone went their own way again, alone and dissatisfied.

Tim Parks tells us in the introduction that many of the characters and names mentioned are well-known figures in Italian history, however Ginzburg writes of them all with egality, they are friends and family, ordinary humans, with quirks and foibles, whether they are written about elsewhere under their various labels or not, here they are written about purely in relation to their connection to her family. In the end pages however, there are notes on all the names, foreign language phrases, excerpts that expand on the references casually made in the text.

page 241 my mother said, “Many clothes, much honour!” : a parody of the facist slogan “Many Foes, Much Honour”.

While initially the style feels quite abrupt, direct and unflinching, over time it becomes like a jigsaw puzzle, the family and their friends, acquaintances and situation slowly emerge with greater clarity, depicting something greater than a mere memoir of one member, it becomes an historical document in itself, recording the voices, concerns and passions of a group of people that together gave Natalia Ginzburg a lifetime of writing inspiration.

Much is made elsewhere of this period in the 1930’s and 1940’s Italy being a hotbed of anti-Facist activity and this family being in the midst of it. Many of their friends were noted publishers, writers, professors, scientist -known to be anti-Fascist and Jewish.

I enjoyed the book all the more for not being aware of the labels and infamy of the characters while reading it, but it adds another layer of interest to read the end notes which give potted bio’s of those characters and further explanations to some of the phrases used or events written about.

Highly Recommended and I’m looking forward to reading her book of essays The Little Virtues and her debut novel The Dry Heart and more, coming soon!

Natalia Ginzburg, Author

She was the first to translate Marcel Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann into Italian.

She died in Rome in 1991 at the age of seventy-five.

July 20, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro tr. Frances Riddle

With A Little Luck now available in English, I’m catching up by reading the word of mouth sensation Elena Knows, which was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2022 and won the Premio Pepe Carvalho Prize for crime fiction in 2019. According to the newspaper La Nación, Claudia Piñeiro is the third most translated Argentinean author, after Borges and Cortázar.

Claudia Piñeiro does seem like an interesting author to watch, taking the convention crime fiction genre and giving it a shake up by focusing on social issues and ethical questions, in particular related to the way women’s bodies have been and are used and abused.

Also reading this for #20booksofsummer23 and getting a head start on August’s #WITMonth, reading women in translation, because that’s my favourite corner of the reading world to be looking for literary gems!

What Does Elena Know That No One Else Seems to?

Elena has just learned her daughter Rita is dead. That it occurred on the same afternoon she booked Elena into her boyfriend’s mother’s salon for “the works”.

It was a rainy afternoon and this is the main reason Elena knows there was foul play. Because her daughter was afraid of lightning and because a mother just knows.

No one knows as much about her daughter as she does, because she’s her mother, or was her mother. Motherhood, Elena thinks, comes with certain things, a mother knows her child, a mother knows, a mother loves.That’s what they say, that’s how it is.

A Rigid Point of View

We see everything from her ‘eyes cast downward’ viewpoint, as she heads out one day to get answers from someone she hasn’t seen in 20 years.

Elena’s body is debilitated by Parkinson’s, so in between pills, she can move more easily.

Rita was there when he first explained the disease. Rita, who’s now dead. He told them that Parkinson’s was degradation of the cells of the nervous system. And both she and her daughter disliked that word. Degradation.And Dr Benegas must’ve noticed, because he quickly tried to explain. And he said, an illness of the central nervous system that degrades, or mutates, or changes, or modifies the nerve cells in such a way that they stop producing dopamine. And then Elena learned that when her brain orders her feet to move, for example, the order only reaches her feet if the dopamine takes it there. Like a messenger, she thought that day. So Parkinson’s is Herself and dopamine is the messenger.

The novel is told over the course of one day, in three sections: Morning (second pill), Afternoon (third pill) and Evening (fourth pill). The absence of the first pill in the narrative is a reminder as to how dependent she is on the medication and how controlling it is over her every movement, how it restricts her freedom, her vision, her ability to do anything. She is enslaved to those pills and that body.

As the pill begins to wear off, the risk of her becoming stuck increases, as her body becomes less manageable, there is no room for error or miscalculated judgement, if she is to make the journey she has planned. There are moments when she has to wait for the pill to take effect, these must be carefully timed.

Proprietary Attitudes Over Humans

She is off to get help in her attempt to investigate her daughter’s death, thinking she can use the ‘able body’ of someone she sets out on this day to meet. There is a reason why she believes that this person will help her, where no other can, and she will go to all kinds of lengths, despite the debilitating obstacles of her own body, in order to have an audience with them.

She won’t be able to do it by herself because she doesn’t have a body. Not now that the dethroned king and Herself are in charge. Even if she uses all the tricks in the book, she won’t be able to uncover the truth unless she recruits another body to help her. A different body that can act in her place. That can investigate, ask questions, walk, look directly into people’s eyes. A body that will obey Elena’s orders.

The novel explores this idea of how people impose or claim agency over another’s body and what they sentence them to, in so doing; or how they believe they “know” another just because they gave birth to or mothered them, or that God gave them some kind of right to be so knowing.

Elena’s body is in the end stages, but in her mind, she is still coming-of-age.

Claudia Piñeiro, Author

Claudia Piñeiro is best known for her crime novels, which are bestsellers in Argentina, Latin America and around the world. Four of her novels have been adapted and made into films.

As an author and scriptwriter for television, Piñeiro has already won numerous national and international prizes, among them the renowned German LiBeraturpreis for Elena Knows and the prestigious Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize for Las grietas de Jara (A Crack in the Wall).

Her 8 episode series The Kingdom (2021) currently showing on Netflix, sparked controversy in 2021 for its portrayal of the Evangelical church in Argentina.

More recently, Piñeiro has become a very active figure in the fight for the legalisation of abortion in Argentina and for the legal recognition of writers as workers. Her fiction stems from the detective novel but has recently turned increasingly political, taking a broader, more critical gaze at corruption, injustice, community divisions and other dysfunctions of contemporary society.

Permafrost by Eva Baltasar tr. Julia Sanches

A Poet’s Prose

On the back page in the first sentence that describes the author, it says Eva Baltasar has published ten volumes of poetry. Permafrost is her debut novel, the first in a triptych which aims to explore the universes of three different women in the first person. It clear from the beginning this is the prose of an assured poet.

Julia Sanches triptic #1 catalan translation

I love the title, Permafrost. That deep, but necessary layer in the earth, cold and hard, it creates a foundation layer and stability, as long as conditions remain the same. Kathleen Jamie writes about it in her excellent essay collection Surfacing.

The narrator of Permafrost destabilises the reader on the opening page, with these opening lines…

It’s nice, up here. Finally. That’s the thing about heights: a hundred metres of vertical glass. I’ve settled on an edge, I live on this edge and wait for the moment when I’ll leave the edge, my temporary home.

Not only thinking about heights, but observing all the minutae that surrounds her. It seems like a suicide attempt, a theme that recurs throughout the 122 page novella, only she appears to be distracted by an ever present curiosity around the details of the new experience, something that seems incongruent with wishing to take a life.

I’ve settled on an edge, I live on this edge and wait for the moment when I’ll leave the edge, my temporary home.

Living On the Edge Creates Curiosity

The Thomas Bernhard epigram warns us ‘To be born is to be unhappy, he said, and as long as we live we reproduce this unhappiness.’

So I am surprised by the humour. Despite her melancholy nature and existential awareness, the living in the shadow of family, she makes us laugh.

She tells us her family all self-medicate. Not her, she prefers the edge.

Not for me though – best to keep moving wildly to the edge, and then decide. After a while, you’ll find that the edge gives you room to live, vertical as ever, brushing up against the void. Not only can you live on it, but there are even different ways of growing there. If surviving is what’s it all about, maybe resistance is the only way to live intensely. Now, on this edge, I feel alive, more alive than ever.

A promising child, her first crisis is graduation, after five years, there’s nowhere to go, few clues as to how to put this learning to use. So she lives in her Aunt’s apartment and rents out rooms to different women, providing herself an income and an effortless source of lovers. She spends her days reading, observing, pondering death, too curious to pursue it.

Birth and Children are Grounding

Her meandering is interrupted by her pregnant sister and her mother, their insistence to stay close, involved, drawing her back in, keeping her that person she was. The Aunt’s phone call, she’s selling the apartment.

An au pair in Scotland, a marriage proposal in Belgium, childhood memories, fantasies, churning through relationships, occasionally one that lasts a chapter, dialogue with the sister, the mother.

A mole grows and changes form, she makes a doctor’s appointment then cancels it for a year, then follows up.

Life Can Be Insistent

Each chapter is less than two pages, sometimes the narrative skips a chapter and picks up the thread again later on. It’s an inner voyage of discovery and an outer journey of experiences to unravel what was formed by others and discover the essence of, to know who she is. As that realisation occurs, life throws an even greater challenge and responsibility her way.

I’ve realised I know myself by heart…

It is a unique work, recognisably the work of a poet, unruly, impulsive, it makes light of heavy subjects, never quite proselytising, both giving into and resisting convention, forging a way through, trying different things on, breaking out and being pulled back in. One is left wondering if she is floating with the tide or pushing through it.

Permafrost received the 2018 Premi Llibreter from Catalan booksellers and was shortlisted for the Prix Médici for Best Foreign Book in France (2020).

Next up, book 2 in the triptych, Boulder, which was recently shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2023.

July 13, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Whale by Cheon Myeong-Kwan tr. Chi-Young Kim

Whale is a clever satirical novel that is written in a fable-like way, using an all-seeing, all-knowing omniscient narrative voice, along with occasional interjections by the author, as he pauses the narrative and talks to the reader.

International Booker Prize shortlist 2023

Set in a remote village in South Korea, it follows the interconnected lives of a series of unfortunate women, who go through various highs and lows, having experiences that the author tells us depict certain universal laws.

What is supposed to come always ends up coming, even without a harbinger. This was the law of fate.

It begins with Chunhui, a female brickmaker who learned her profession from her stepfather. She could also communicate with an insightful elephant. We learn that a fire burned the brickyard to the ground killing eight hundred souls and that she was charged with arson, imprisoned and tortured. She has just been freed and returned to the derelict site as the story begins.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Cocooned by the morning fog, the town faintly reveled its shape, mike a once prosperous ancient city fallen into ruin. Even at a distance she could see the remnants of the movie theatre looming up among the buildings, resembling a large whale breaching the surface for a breath. This whale-inspired theatre had been designed by Geumbok, Chunhui’s mother.

In effect, we start at the end and the novel then goes back in time, to how the brickyard came to be, starting with a woman who sold her daughter to a passing beekeeper for two jars of honey, another who built a cinema in the shape of a whale and the many reinventions of their lives as they embrace and discard different people, occupations and places, in pursuit of their desires.

Geumbok has a knack for spotting an opportunity, for seeing business potential and no fear of taking risks. Every idea she has makes her and those around her wealthy, until it doesn’t.

Geumbok’s understanding of ideology was very simplistic, but her convictions were firm, as most people’s are. This was the law of ideology.

A satire on Korean history and society, and perceived by some as ‘magical’, I found the relentless abuses and sexism towards the female characters wore me down and slowed the pace of reading. Perhaps it was the ‘knowing’ that things rarely ever come right, that any overcoming of obstacles or even resilience is eventually met with yet another example of tragedy, betrayal, seduction or disappointment.

I did enjoy the novel for the most part and I understand why it might have been a bestseller in Korea in the day (published 20 years ago), however it didn’t fit right for me, reading it in 2023, and had me craving for signs of social justice, improvement or anything that might leave the reader believing in some aspect of humanity.

I think that narratives are beginning to challenge that historical status quo of abuses towards women, the down-trodden and the poor and I find I have less tolerance and patience towards those that do little to redeem it.

Whale was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2023.

‘The characters have the power of archetypes – they’ll haunt your dreams. Geumbok, the protagonist, is an irrepressible entrepreneur and individualist, but with contradictions – she is sly and gullible, loving and violent, dedicated and treacherous. You can’t take your eyes off her. The story, however, really belongs to Chunhui, her daughter, who is a tragic saint and a survivor.’ International BookerJudges

Further Reading

Read an Extract from the book

N.B. Thank you to the publisher Europa Editions for providing me a copy of the book to read.

May 23, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

International Booker Prize Winner 2023

The winner of the International Booker Prize 2023 has been announced tonight in London.
Here are the six books on the shortlist, that were under consideration for the prize.

International Booker Prize shortlist 2023

The winner is the Bulgarian novel Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov translated by Angela Rodel.

Blurb

Winner of the International Booker Prize 2023

A ‘clinic for the past’ offers a promising treatment for Alzheimer’s sufferers: each floor reproduces a decade in minute detail, transporting patients back in time.

An unnamed narrator is tasked with collecting the flotsam and jetsam of the past, from 1960s furniture and 1940s shirt buttons to scents, and even afternoon light. But as the rooms become more convincing, an increasing number of healthy people seek out the clinic as a ‘time shelter’, hoping to escape the horrors of modern life – a development that results in an unexpected conundrum when the past begins to invade the present.

Intricately crafted, and eloquently translated by Angela Rodel, Time Shelter cements Georgi Gospodinov’s reputation as one of the indispensable writers of our times, and a major voice in international literature.

Judges’ Verdict

Here’s what the judges had to say about the winning novel:

‘Our winner, Time Shelter, is a brilliant novel, full of irony and melancholy. It is a profound work that deals with a very contemporary question: What happens to us when our memories disappear? Georgi Gospodinov succeeds marvellously in dealing with both individual and collective destinies and it is this complex balance between the intimate and the universal that convinced and touched us.

‘In scenes that are burlesque as well as heartbreaking, he questions the way in which our memory is the cement of our identity and our intimate narrative. But it is also a great novel about Europe, a continent in need of a future, where the past is reinvented, and nostalgia is a poison. It offers us a perspective on the destiny of countries like Bulgaria, which have found themselves at the heart of the ideological conflict between the West and the communist world.

‘It is a novel that invites reflection and vigilance as much as it moves us, because the language – sensitive and precise – manages to capture, in a Proustian vein, the extreme fragility of the past. And it mixes, in its very form, a great modernity with references to the major texts of European literature, notably through the character of Gaustine, an emanation from a world on the verge of extinction.

‘The translator, Angela Rodel, has succeeded brilliantly in rendering this style and language, rich in references and deeply free.

‘The past is only ever a story that is told. And not all storytellers have the talent of Georgi Gospodinov and Angela Rodel.’

Time Shelter wasn’t on my radar, but I may have to consider it now.

I have read and really enjoyed Still Born by Mexican author Guadalupe Nettel and I am currently reading Whale by South-Korean author Cheon Myeong-kwan and I’m planning to read Boulder by Catalan author Eva Baltasar.

Have you read any from the shortlist? Any thoughts on Time Shelter?