December 22, 2025 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Best Books of 2025 Top Reads in Translation

Apaprt from committing to read Women in Translation in August, I read less consciously and more by mood or whatever stood out on the shelf this year.

Though I read more books, I read from the same number of countries, but less in translation. In 2024, 33% (20 books) of the titles I read were in translation – a conscious effort. This year only 15%. It is also in part the effect of taking a subscription, I loved most of the Charco Press titles I read, but there were some I was less inclined to read; I would look at them and then choose something else.

It’s about discernment. So I remove those books from the shelf and more carefully research those I have no hesitation in wanting to read. I chose well this summer and so I here are the best seven titles I highly recommend. I’ll be making a more conscious effort to read more in translation in 2026, so please share with me your favorites from this year.

Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri

Cerebral Distractions or Healing Attractions

Whereabouts indeed. I have been absent this space and reading less, as I pursued another passion, the great jigsaw puzzle of building a family tree, which started out as an exercise in tracing my female lineage looking for a particular pattern, I felt called to heal and ended up as a series of unfinished mysteries seeking to be resolved. And it is so much fun, imagining and reclaiming these lives!

Well, all of that is another story, but interesting enough to have pulled me away from my regular habit of sharing my reading here. I miss this space, and the interactions, so here we are, sharing a few recent reads.

I picked up the reading again as the temperatures here rocketed into full summer heat and my brain asked, “Can’t we just read a book today?”, instead of spending my free time working like the dedicated closet researcher I had become.

A day at the beach with a Jhumpa Lahiri novel turned the tide.

A Gifted Book Returns Unread

Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri translated from Italian by the author

Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri is a novel that came back to me, one I gifted a friend from abroad who has a love affair with the city of Rome. Back in Europe to visit the city again, she brought this book I gave her halfway round the world, pulled it out of the suitcase and said:

‘I haven’t read it yet. I’m going to read it in Rome. Here. You have got two weeks to read it before I go. We can talk about it when I get back from Ireland.’

Challenge accepted and quietly delighted; I really wanted to read it too.

Now I have.

I loved it.

It felt like I was reading a work of creative non-fiction. In disguise. Autofiction perhaps?

Jhumpa Lahiri is a British-American author of Bengali parents, whose earlier novels have highlighted the immigrant experience. For some years now she has lived in Italy, learned the language and her last two books were written and published in Italian before being translated into English.

Whereabouts is a collection of short vignettes of one woman’s highly observational, contentedly solitary, existence in Rome. The epigram, a quote from Italo Svevo provides a clue to what follows.

‘Every time my surroundings change I feel enormous sadness.It’s not greater when I leave a place tied to memories, grief, or happiness. It’s the change itself that unsettles me, just as liquid in a jar turns cloudy when you shake it.’

Averse to Change, Loves Movement

Disliking change, but always on the move, her days capture aspects of the surroundings she has grown attached to, taking us right there. The chapter titles nearly all begin with the prepositions: On, In or At.

On the Sidewalk, In the Street, At the Trattoria, In the Piazza, At the Bookstore, On the Couch, On the Balcony, At the Beautician, In the Sun, At my House, In Bed, On the Phone.

Jhumpa Lahiri autofiction Whereabouts set in Rome Italy

Near the end, as I began to notice this pattern and list of locations, I asked myself, “What is this ‘Whereabouts?’ and I flicked back to the contents page and read through the list of destinations. I then turned the page and the only chapter that doesn’t start with a preposition, Nowhere, seemed to be speaking to me, responding to my question.

It began by saying:

‘Because when all is said and done the setting doesn’t matter: the space, the walls, the light. It makes no difference whether I’m under a clear blue sky or caught in the rain or swimming in the transparent sea in summer.’

This has come just after Up Ahead, a sign of change, something our protagonist does not like and spends the entire short chapter of In Spring pondering. A chapter I sent to another friend, one who shares the protagonist’s dislike of that season.

Transition, Change and Things that Stay the Same

In Spring, a chapter from Jhumpa Lahiri's novel of vignettes Whereabouts

Now, she contemplates a transition; both of the day, and of a life, observing the peripheral characters to this solitary existence she has created, people in movement, marking the end of a day.

‘They’ll keep walking along these sidewalks. They’re permanent fixtures in my mind, knotted up in the fabric of my neighbourhood just like the buildings, the trees, the marble woman. These are the faces that have kept me company for years, and I still don’t know the people they belong to. There’s no point saying goodbye to them, or adding, we’ll meet again, even though right now I’m overflowing with affection for them.’

Overall, it’s a reflective relatively smooth paced novel in which not much happens and yet you feel as though you have visited and lived for a short time in a city apartment in one of the squares of this major European city of Rome, a part of it not populated by tourists, but where the everyday life continues to unfold week after week, year upon year, following the same rhythms, with small changes a natural part of its existence.

‘Is there any place we’re not moving through? Disoriented, lost, at sea, at odds, astray, adrift, bewildered, confused, uprooted, turned around. I’m related to these related terms. These words are my abode, my only foothold.’

Brilliantly crafted. Could not put it down, read it in a day.

Highly Recommended.

Have you read Whereabouts? Do you have a favourite by Jhumpa Lahiri? Tell us in the comments below.

February 12, 2025 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Second-class Citizen by Buchi Emecheta

I read Buchi Emecheta’s Joys of Motherhood (1979) in 2019, it is such a great novel, one of my all time favorites, not yet reviewed here. I have been looking forward to reading more of her work since then, I picked up Second-class Citizen (1974) knowing it was likely to be equally good. She is known for her themes confronting girls and women, of motherhood, female independence and freedom through education.

A Girl Determined to Realise a Dream

Adah is a fabulous, determined character, a girl who when her father dies, her mother is inherited by his brother. Like many girl-orphans (fatherless), Adah was sent to live with her mother’s elder brother to work as a servant; any money her father left would be used for her brother Boy’s education.

Even if she was sent to school, it was very doubtful whether it would be wise to let her stay long. ‘A year or two would do, as long as she can write her name and count. Then she will learn how to sew.’ Adah had heard her mother say this many many times to her friends.

Determined to get an education herself, having already been punished for taking herself off to school without permission, the family decide to let her go, not for her own benefit, but because they recognise how it might benefit themselves. If Adah gets more schooling, the dowry that her future husband will have to pay them will be even bigger.

Adah wants more than just school, she wants a higher education, however she does not have the money to pay for the entry examination, let alone the other costs.

She was aware that nobody was interested in her since Pa died. Even if she had failed, she would have accepted it as one of the hurdles of life. But she did not fail. She not only passed the entrance examination, but she got a scholarship with full board.

My Struggles Become My Strength

The combination of hard work for the household and an education made Adah strongly responsible for herself and strategic in ensuring she stayed in education and succeeded enough to get a scholarship with full board. But to go even further with her studies, she needed a home, she would need to marry.

Her plan is to get to the UK but now she has a husband and in-laws and her good job not only supports them all, but makes many dependant on her and less inclined to be independent.

A New Motivation, I Do This Not Just for Myself

1960’s England is not what she expects, the challenges are even greater because now she has a woman’s body whose reproductive rights are not under her control and a partner who is no longer how he was in their home country, he seems invested in keeping her from shining.

He lifted his hand as if to slap her, but thought better of it. There would be plenty of time for that, if Adah was going to start telling him what to do. This scared Adah a little. He would not have dreamt of hitting her at home because his mother and father would not have allowed it. To them, Adah was like the goose that laid the golden eggs. It seemed that in England, Francis didn’t care whether she laid the golden egg or not. He was free at last from his parents, he was free to do what he liked, and not even hundreds of Adahs were going to curtail that new freedom. The ugly glare he gave Adah made that clear.

However, taking responsibility is what she knows best, she is determined to provide for her growing family and negotiate the mounting injustices she faces, in pursuit of achieving her dreams and caring for her children.

She was going to live, to survive, to exist through it all. Some day, help would come from somewhere.She had been groping for that help as if she were in the dark. Some day her fingers would touch something solid that would help her pull herself out. She was becoming aware of that Presence again – the Presence that had directed her through childhood. She went nearer to It in her prayers.

An inspirational story of the girl that never gives up, written by the woman who lived much of that experience, raising her own five children on her own in a foreign country and becoming a successful author.

Total inspiration and still relevant today. Highly recommended.

Author, Buchi Emecheta

Buchi Emecheta OBE (1944 – 2017) was born in Lagos, Nigeria and moved to London with her student husband when she was eighteen. After her marriage broke up at the age of twenty-two, and while raising five children, she began writing and also obtained a degree in sociology from London University.

As well as writing numerous novels, she wrote plays for television and radio, and worked as a librarian, teacher, youth worker and sociologist, and community worker. She was one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 1983. Following her success as an author, Emecheta travelled widely as a visiting professor and lecturer.

She published over 20 books, including In the Ditch (1972), Second-Class Citizen (1974), The Bride Price (1976), The Slave Girl (1977) and The Joys of Motherhood (1979).

Her themes of child slavery, motherhood, female independence and freedom through education won her considerable critical acclaim. Emecheta once described her stories as “stories of the world…[where]… women face the universal problems of poverty and oppression, and the longer they stay, no matter where they have come from originally, the more the problems become identical.”

April 29, 2024 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Undiscovered by Gabriela Wiener tr. Julia Sanches

Undiscovered was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2024. I decided to read it because I did the quiz on their website which asked about 15 or so questions and then told you which book to read. Undiscovered was the result.

I was totally captivated from start to finish. Loved it.

Ancestral Threads

International Booker Prize longlist 2024 Peruvian literature autofiction

Gabriela Wiener is a Peruvian poet, journalist, writer who has lived in Spain for the last 20 years and her books to date (none of which I have read) seem to about body politics. This novel is about a search to unravel and understand her identity as a Peruvian woman now living in Spain, who has ties to both the coloniser and the colonised.

I was very intrigued to read this book for a few reasons, of course because it is written by a woman in translation, so that already interests me, because it is coming from outside the mainstream cultures that traditionally dominate publishing and also because of the interest in identity, in the influence of ancestry, of family mysteries uncovered.

The strangest thing about being alone here in Paris, in an anthropology museum gallery more or less beneath the Eiffel Tower, is the thought that all these statuettes that look like me were wrenched from my country by a man whose last name I inherited.

A Temporary Explorer

Gabriela is both fascinated and repelled by a ‘maybe ancestor’ Charles Wiener, an Austrian-Jew whose parents immigrated to France when he was sixteen. He became a German teacher in a French lycée, would convert to Catholicism and desired French nationality. He published an essay on the “communist empire” of the Incas;

a reign based on social equality and therefore, per his thesis, antithetical to freedom. In his writing he defended the delirious hypotheses that Louis XIV had been inspired by the Incas when he said “L’état, c’est moi.”

That publication resulted in the French government agreeing to send him on an expedition to South America in 1876. The studies he conducted and specimens collected would eventually be displayed in a large scale exhibit at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1878. He wrote a book Peru and Bolivia.

On his return to France he was naturalised, retired from exploration and became a diplomat. In the less than two years he was in Peru, he fathered a child to a young widow, Maria Rodriguez. Her son, the author’s great-grandfather, Carlos Wiener Rodriguez, was born in May 1877, by which time Charles Wiener, was already in Bolivia. And most likely oblivious to what he had left behind.

We know everything about him and nothing about her. He left us a book, she left us the possibility of imagination.

The Unfaithful Father

In Undiscovered Gabriela explores the writings of her ancestor and has conflicting feelings about him, as she has conflicting feelings about herself, and her own father. The first half of the book takes place while she is on a return trip to Lima for her father’s funeral. He had a second life and family that he lived simultaneously, one she tries to make sense of by meeting his mistress and asking her mother personal questions.

But really she is interrogating those outside of her to understand something within her. She is of a different generation and even within that she lives an unconventional life. Is she how she is because that is how she is, or is there something of the past that runs through her veins which makes it harder to be anything other than that? Even in her unconventionality, she continues to cross her own boundaries and disappoint herself. She seeks to understand why.

The irritation I feel at the cruel, colonial, and racist passages in the book Wiener wrote about my culture gives way to a sudden compassion for his unwittingly anti-academic, self-aggrandizing self.

A Polyamorous Woman

On an existential quest tracing a legacy of abandonment, jealousy and colonial exploitation, she considers the effect on her own struggles with desire, love and race in a polyamorous relationship. At the same time uncovering physical traces of her ancestor and searching for the small boy Juan he brought back to France with him.

Juan isn’t a ceramic piece rescued from the rubble, nor is he made of gold or silver; he isn’t even a shrivelled child mummy destined for a museum far away from the volcanoes. Yet he crosses the pond as the adventurer’s property. Juan is just another of Wiener’s small contributions to the transformation of the European concept of history. He is part of Wiener’s “expedition,” which is not like that of conquistadors or pioneers but like those of other scientific travellers who sought to “reignite the Incan sun, brutally extinguished by the Spanish cross.”

I was totally captivated by this narrative from start to finish. Each sentence and paragraph so carefully constructed, I often went back and reread them, because they often articulated something that asked to be considered.

I had read a few reviews that criticised the attention she gave to herself, but I didn’t feel as if this was done without context. It is a work of autofiction and the author puts herself as much under the spotlight as her ancestor, she is self aware and critical of her own behaviours, she exposes them and puts them on public display to be judged.

Wiener really is a fluid narrator, a chronicler of minor details and excesses, the kind of storyteller who knows when to set aside principles and literary convention for the sake of hooking his readers, who doesn’t think twice before using whatever’s within reach to spice up his adventures, changing the rules of the game in a context where he really shouldn’t be taking it that far. He is also, without a doubt, the creator of the story’s hero: himself. Had he lived in the twenty-first century, he might have been accused of the worst possible crime an author can be accused of today: writing autofiction.

Broken Memories, Finding Reparation

Towards the end she seeks help or healing and her solution is to join a group called ‘Decolonizing My Desire’. She reaches out to a researcher for help about the ancestor, but finds that invalidating.

Ultimately it is her imagination and poetry that perhaps provides her with answers, the blank page that she is capable of filling, the stories she is able to create, the endings she can provide herself. She controls the narrative, no one else does.

Undiscovered is a well researched inquisition of family and colonial history, ancestral threads and both modern and ancient cultural connections that reflects one woman’s attempt to better understand herself for the benefit of her close relationships. It is about looking at personal and cultural wounds and creating solutions that help a person to move forward.

Author, Gabriela Wiener

Gabriela Wiener is a Peruvian writer and journalist based in Madrid, Spain. Her books include Nine Moons, a memoir on pregnancy and reproduction, and Sexographies, a collection of first person gonzo journalism essays on contemporary sex culture, swingers clubs and ayahuascha.

Her work has appeared in numerous publications and has been translated into six languages. She is a regular contributor to El Público (Spain), Vice and New York Times en Español. Wiener won Peru’s National Journalism Award for her investigative report on violence against women.

April 19, 2024 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Why Did You Come Back Every Summer by Belén López Peiró (Argentina) tr. Maureen Shaughnessy

It’s been a good couple of weeks for Charco Press, with Not a River by Selva Almada (translated by Annie McDermott) on the shortlist for the International Booker Prize 2024 and Of Cattle and Men by Ana Paula Maia (translated by Zoë Perry) winning the Republic Of Consciousness Prize 2024.

An Unforgettable Summer

social legal justice #metoo voices silenced

This week I picked up Why Did You Come Back Every Summer from the 2024 Bundle, originally published in Spanish in 2018 as Por qué volvias cada verano and published in English for the first time in April 2024.

What a book.

A young woman experiences sexual abuse by a family member when she is a teenager. Some years later she reveals what happened. And there are all kinds of responses, reactions, accusations, procedures and legal processes.

Testimony or Treason

In this lucid text, a chorus of voices speak. Often they are speaking to her, only we do not hear her voice. We hear one side of conversations. We hear what they have all said. We see what they are all doing. We understand the selfish human inclination to protect one’s own. We become witness to observing a victim in need of love and support being hung out to dry.

In between the commentaries, are the affidavits. Short, streamlined, neutral texts presented in old fashioned type that all begin and end the same way, with their two or three salient points contained within.

The voices that speak are presented on the right hand page, the left hand page remains blank. It gives the text momentum, the pages pass quickly. The voices say so much more, they incriminate.

The legal texts are more dense, no white space between paragraphs and they cover consecutive pages. There is no space for reflection or consideration, as we read we can hear the sound of the keys typewriter striking the ribbon.

#MeToo Movement and the Sharing of Stories

The process for pursuing justice, rather than protect or bring about resolution, too often results in making the lives of women even worse. To pursue justice threatens exposure, judgement, scorn, rift, ostracism, it brings shame. It reached a tipping point in 2017 with the #MeToo movement. Frustrated, women began to share their stories, it was the only thing left to do and when it was done as a collective, it created community and support, if not justice. Long buried trauma rose to the surface, if not for justice, to begin to heal a wound of womanhood.

Reading Why Did You Come Back Every Summer reminded me of the recent documentary You Are Not Alone: Fighting the Wolf Pack, a Spanish feature film about a young woman seeking justice after a terrifying ideal at Spain’s iconic ‘running of the bulls’. Produced in secret, the film is told through the words of the victim survivors and recounts the mass protests the case sparked on account of the injustice experienced.

More than a million women and girls took to the streets chanting “Sister, I do believe you” and broke their silence on social media with #Cuéntalo (“Tell Your Story”).

There are many ways to share a story and Belén López Peiró has created a work of art that honours an experience that changed a young girls life forever, putting it into a form that has already become a literary, social and political phenomenon in her country and beyond.

It is a justice-seeking oeuvre narrated through a cacophony of voices that gives power to the unsaid, that allows the quiet to echo resoundingly, that shines a light on yet another shadow of humanity.

Highly Recommended.

Author, Bélen López Peiró

Belén López Peiró studied journalism and communication sciences in Buenos Aires University and has recently completed an MA in Creative Writing at the Barcelona’s Pompeu Fabra University. She currently coordinates non-fiction writing workshops with a gender perspective.

Why Did You Come Back Every Summer is her debut novel. In 2021 she published her second book Donde no hago pie (Nowhere to Stand) which narrates the legal process the author went through to bring her abuser to justice.

April 12, 2024 by Claire 'Word by Word'

The House on Via Gemito by Domenico Starnone (Italy) tr. Oonagh Stransky

That was quite an experience.

Starnone writes a work of fiction about the man his father was (we can assume it is autobiographical since his father’s name was Federico and he painted an artwork titled ‘The Drinkers’ which is in part featured on the cover). It is an attempt to tell the story of a man he spent his childhood in fear of and his adulthood trying not to be like.

Reconstructing a Life, Walking the Streets

In the novel, the narrator is the eldest son Mimi, who lives in Rome but has returned to Naples some time after the death of his father and is reconstructing memories, by walking the streets where they lived, visiting certain places to evoke other memories, like the hospital where his mother was when her husband could no longer deny her illness; the church where he made his first communion; the council offices, where he hopes to find some of his father’s paintings, including ‘The Drinkers’. Every location existed in service to his father’s existence and memories.

He was certain that both great and small events had a common thread: the mystery of his destiny. And he constantly tried to prove it to himself, his relatives, his friends, and to us children by weaving a vibrant pattern in which the only events that were true were the ones vitally connected to him. Consequently, all the names of cities and buildings and roads, all of geography, served merely to create a map of his needs, and this was how they were to be remembered.

Though the novel is about the man, the title refers to a street where they lived for a while and the use of street names rather than diary entries or even artworks, inscribes the neighbourhood into history, creating a different kind of legacy, one that will last longer than any man or work of art. A diary would be too intimate, a street map a kind of canvas.

Portrait of a Narcissist Father Via His Eldest Son

It is also about his own boyhood, however the character of the father overshadows the son, his wife, his wife’s family, in fact anyone in proximity to him. This is because he considers himself superior. According to himself. He makes it one of his main purposes in life to remind everyone around him of that fact. He can not be taken down or made to think he is anything less than how he perceives himself.

It’s true, he was lazy. He was arrogant. He was blowhard. He was all those things, and the first to admit it. He felt he had the right to be lazy, arrogant, and a blowhard – to anyone who busted his balls. He was born to be a painter, not a railroader.

The son walks familiar streets of Naples, streets he never strolled with his father – but knew intimately from his adolescence – as a way to navigate anecdotes about the way his father lived his life, the things he said (mostly insults about everyone else), the things he did (working for the railroad as a clerk, beating his wife, painting artworks) and his opinions about various matters. He walks and remembers. He walks and imagines anew.

A Determined Artist Perseveres

historical fiction Paris 1939 Domenico Starnone House on via gemito — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Federi is passionate about art and believes he possesses great artistic talent, but the art world is full of shit people who nominate their friends for prizes, then their friends create prizes and nominate those friends, therefore keeping him out of these circles. He blames everyone for his lack of success that he continues to strive for. Beginning with his own father who refused to educate him, in fact his parents abandoned him at a young age and sent him to live with his grandmother.

He becomes a working class man, who sees the most beautiful woman who he takes for a wife, raises four sons and a daughter and spends his free time at home painting or pursuing opportunities to advance his art.

A Literary Triptych

The book is in three sections. The first section ‘The Peacock’ introduces the character and is the part of the book where you might abandon, because it isn’t yet clear why it might benefit any reader to be subject to this psychological demonstration of one of the most extreme versions of the societal system of domination at work. The patriarchy thrives under this system, as Riane Eisler showed in her work The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future and Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future and the portrait this novel creates shows how someone who lives according to this conditioning impacts those in his proximity. Cycles of trauma, neglect and narcissism eroding relationships in pursuit of validation, not love.

A Masterpiece Created at All Cost

Much of the source material is inspired by journals his father kept, which trigger memories and dates of events he participated in. The artworks themselves are a kind of journal, a record of themes in his life. Part Two ‘The Boy Pouring Water’ is the most compelling and significant section, it documents the process of creating the largest, most significant art work he would do. ‘The Drinkers’ required the son to pose as the boy pouring water, other members of the family sat for him and the local fruit and vegetable seller.

The anxiety the young son would feel when he realises that there is a problem in the image, between the character holding out the glass and where he is pouring from will cause contortions of magnitude in him, to try and avoid the disaster he sees coming. His father never sees it and we think for a moment that the drama has been averted, alas no – disaster arrives at the height of his short-lived pleasure.

So why do we want to read a novel about an egomaniac? And one that was originally published just over 20 years ago.

It is both a psychological example of the effect a man with no empathy and worse, a need to belittle, insult and induce fear in people, can have on a family. It is set against a backdrop of 1960’s Naples, post WWII, a place where allegiances often changed, both in the halls of power and on the street, depending on how ‘enemies or allies’ treated the people.

It is the historical context and the journey of a working class man trying to break into the establishment of artists, who despite his unruly personality, perseveres and participates as much as is possible for someone who won’t allow himself to be intimidated. Everything is a struggle, he will fight to the end. Art ‘wasn’t fun, it was war’.

Fortunately as the years passed, I developed a strategy for blocking out his words. Using this technique, which I perfected as a teenager, the angrier he grew when telling the stories of his life and the reasons for his actions, the thicker the fog grew in my head, allowing me to think about other things. It helped establish a distance between us. It curbed the desire to kill him.

Fatherhood in Another Era, Produce, Punish, Protect

In the final part ‘The Dancer’ the humiliation of the son comes full circle as he enters adolescence and tries to impress a girl Nunzia and his father gives him terrible advice about what to do with women. As if things couldn’t get any worse, we learn that young girl has been abused by an Uncle and the son lies waiting for his fathers verdict.

The book ends with a scene that makes the reader pause to reflect on how reliable the narrator is, like the father, he too has the ability to exaggerate, to curate anecdotes and perspective.

Once I got into this, which didn’t take very long, I found it both shocking and compelling to read, the dedication by a son to honoring the passage of a man who made his boyhood hell. Thus he provides a kind of validation beyond the grave, but doesn’t hold back from focusing on the many flaws alongside the talent. It is the many layers that make it something of a classic, the psychological profile and repeat patterns of the man, the making of an artist and the impact on family and the social history of a city.

Highly Recommended.

‘The House on Via Gemito is a marvellous novel of Naples and its environs during and after the Second World War. The prism for this exploration is the relationship between the narrator and his railway worker / artist father – an impossible man, filled with cowardice and boastfulness. His son’s attempt to understand and forgive him is compelling; we are held through the minutiae of each argument and explosion, each hope and almost-success.’ International Booker Judges

Author, Domenico Starnone

About the author

Domenico Starnone is an Italian writer, screenwriter and journalist. He was born in Naples and lives in Rome

He is the author of 13 works of fiction, including First Execution, Ties, a New York Times Editors Pick and Notable Book of the Year, and a Sunday Times and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year, Trick, a Finalist for the 2018 National Book Award and the 2019 PEN Translation Prize, and Trust.

The House on Via Gemito won Italy’s most prestigious literary prize, the Strega in 2001 and was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2024.

December 3, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux translated by Tanya Leslie

After reading Annie Ernaux’s Nobel Prize Lecture I Will Write to Avenge My People, I decide to read the slim titles Simple Passion (48 pages) and next I will read Shame (86 pages). I have already read A Man’s Place, and eventually I will get to her more lengthy masterpiece The Years.

Simple Passion was the #1 national bestseller in France for over three months when it was first published in 1991, and a celebrated scandal even in France’s liberal society. It was followed up ten years later by a second book Se Perdre (2001) (Getting Lost), which explores the affair through a series of diary notes.

In this book, Annie Ernaux observes herself throughout the life-cycle of an affair, the in-between moments of a conditional relationship, describing how that passion drew her in and ruled her, even when she took herself away from it.

She writes of this encounter with hindsight, as if observing something external to her, like a work of art, looking for some kind of truth or meaning behind the physical and mental experience, now that she has some distance from it. Her interest in writing is not to focus on the man (who could be any man) but on the obsession itself.

A Simple Passion Reveals a More Complex Humanity

The man, referred to as A, is from another country, he is married; the 18 months he is in her life, this ‘simple passion’ is depicted like an illness or a condition, she is able to see how it changes her. She studies it.

I am not giving the account of a liaison, I am not telling a story (half of which escapes me) based on a precise – ‘he came on 11 November’ – or an approximate chronology – ‘weeks went by’. As far as I was concerned, that notion did not enter the relationship. I could experience only absence or presence. I am merely listing the signs of a passion, wavering between ‘one day’ and ‘every day’, as if this inventory could allow me to grasp the reality of my passion.

A Life Suspended, Waiting for a Man

She observes this condition, though she is virtually powerless to overcome or stop it, it will run its course and she will create an honest, transparent account of it, documenting the range of emotions, behaviours and instinct that run through her.

She observes how this desire becomes the lens through which she sees everything around her, how she spends her time endlessly waiting; waiting for him to call, waiting for him to arrive, waiting for the inevitable end of their association.

This endless wait reduces every other experience, as if they were lived by someone else, while magnifying the space in her mind given to thinking about him, of their time together – amid brief lucid moments of realising the insignificance of him, of the exaggerated importance she has temporarily given him.

I often wondered what these moments of lovemaking meant to him. Probably nothing more than just that, making love. There was no point looking for other reasons. I would only ever be certain of one thing: his desire or lack of desire. The only undeniable truth could be glimpsed by looking at his penis.

Fulfilling Life’s Purpose, Finding Meaning

The passion passes through a cycle from its beginning, middle, near-end and end, passing through excitement, anticipation, acceptance, moving on, overcoming towards finding meaning.

Yet it is that surreal, almost non-existent last visit that gives my passion its true meaning, which is precisely to be meaningless, and to have been for two years the most violent and unaccountable reality ever.

Written in short fragments, paragraphs, it is a hypnotic read. I have never read anything quite like it, an introspective interrogation of the self, she is able to set aside society’s judgments and write in a way that is as intimate as a journal, but in a short succinct way that has her own purpose, to better understand the human condition.

I discovered what people are capable of, in other words, anything: sublime or deadly desires, lack of dignity, attitudes and beliefs I had found absurd in others until I myself turned to them. Without knowing it, he brought me closer to the world.

The author presses forward towards fulfilling that promise made to her 22 year old self, as we learned of in her novel lecture, to interrogate her own actions, her own mind in the life she has created, having ventured far from humble beginnings. In writing to avenge her people, she writes to avenge all.

He had said, ‘You won’t write a book about me.’ But I haven’t written a book about him, neither have I written a book about myself. All I have done is translate into words – words he will probably never read, which are not intended for him – the way in which his existence has affected my life. An offering of a sort, bequeathed to others.

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.

Natalia Ginzburg Italian literature Family Lexicon

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

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.

February 14, 2022 by Claire 'Word by Word'

A Man’s Place by Annie Ernaux tr. Tanya Leslie

A book that can be read in an afternoon, this is my first read of Annie Ernaux’s work, one I enjoyed and appreciated. I did find myself wondering why the French title La place was changed to A Man’s Place. I find the change in title unnecessarily provocative and limiting.

At only 76 pages, it is a brief recollection that begins in quiet, dramatic form as she recalls the day her father, at the age of 67, unexpectedly, quite suddenly dies.

Other memories arise as she recalls this shocking one and it is this same recollection she will end the book with, albeit alongside a few other now restored memories, once she has written her way through many others as she attempts to create a tableau of anecdotes that describe the man her father was, their family, social status and surroundings.

A child who will rise into and feel comfortable within a middle class environment, marrying into it, she then tries to look back, remember and understand the characteristics and desires of her family – her father in particular – now that she dwells on the other side, among the petite bourgeoisie.

Having decided she has no right to adopt an artistic approach to write about him (the novel), she embarks on a more neutral tone.

I shall collate my father’s words, tastes and mannerisms, the main events of his life, all the external evidence of his existence, an existence which I too shared.
No lyrical reminiscences, no triumphant displays of irony. This neutral way of writing comes to me naturally, it is the very same style I used when I wrote home telling my parents the latest news.

Neither fiction or nonfiction, this work has been described as an autosociobiographical text, one that explores their lives and the social milieu within which they are surrounded, dwell and evolve.

Though she only met her grandfather once, she sketches him through overheard comments, a hard man that no one dared quarrel with, a carter for wealthy landowning farmers.

His meanness was the driving force which helped him resist poverty and convince himself that he was a man. What really enraged him was to see one of the family reading a book or a newspaper in his house. He hadn’t had time to learn how to read or write. He could certainly count.

Ernaux’s father was fortunate to remain in education until the age of 12, when he was hauled out to take up the role of milking cows. He didn’t mind working as a farmhand. Weekend mass, dancing at the village fetes, seeing his friends there. His horizons broadened through the army and after this experience he left farming for the factory and eventually they would buy a cafe/grocery store, a different lifestyle.

Ernaux shares memories, observing her father and her own growing awareness of the distance between his existence and way of being and that witnessed at the homes of friends she becomes acquainted with, as she straddles the divide, living in one world, familiar with the other, neither judging or sentimentalising the experiences as she notes them down.

In front of people whom he considered to be important, his manner was shy and gauche and he never asked any questions. In short, he behaved intelligently. Which consisted in grasping our inferiority and refusing to accept it by doing everything possible to conceal it.

They are a snapshot in time and of a place and way of life of a certain social class and milieu, one she is able to preserve by collecting these memories in a kind of obituary to both her father and the places he lived and worked, the people he loved, the mannerisms and behaviours he engendered.

His greatest satisfaction, possibly even the raison d’être of his existence, was the fact that I belonged to the world which had scorned him.

Annie Ernaux, Author

Born in 1940, Annie Ernaux (née Duchesne) was born in Lillebonne and grew up in Yvetot, Normandy, where her parents ran a café and grocery store. She was educated at a private Catholic secondary school, encountering girls from more middle-class backgrounds, and experiencing shame of her working-class parents and milieu for the first time. After studying at Rouen University she became a school teacher.

Her books, in particular A Man’s Place (La Place) and A Woman’s Story (Une femme) have become contemporary classics in France.

One of France’s most respected authors, she has won multiple awards for her books, including the Prix Renaudot (2008) for The Years (Les Années) and the Marguerite Yourcenar prize (2017) for her entire body of work. The English translation of The Years (2019) was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize International and won the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation (2019).

The main themes threaded through her work over more than four decades are: the body and sexuality; intimate relationships; social inequality and the experience of changing class through education; time and memory; and the overarching question of how to write these life experiences.

Fitzcarrraldo Editions have now translated and published seven of her works into English.

February 13, 2021 by Claire 'Word by Word'

The Great Fortune by Olivia Manning

Fortunes of War The Balkan Trilogy I’ve been aware of The Balkan Trilogy for a while and curious to discover it because of its international setting (Romania in the months leading up to the 2nd World War) though equally wary of English ex-pat protagonists living a life of privilege cosseted alongside a population suffering economic hardship and the imminent threat of being positioned between two untrustworthy powers (Russia and Germany).

This is the first of three books that make up Olivia Manning’s semi-autobiographical Fortunes of War or The Balkan Trilogy, there are another three that make up A Levant Trilogy.

The story is chiefly about a young couple and their first year of marriage in Romania on the eve of war. Guy, a young English literature professor returns to Bucharest after a summer in England, with his new wife Harriet, a woman he met and married within a month. We know nothing about that month, their romance, or why/how they came together so impulsively.

Supposing she had known him for a year and during that time observed him in all his other relationships? She would have hesitated, thinking the net of his affections too widely spread to hold the weighty accompaniment of marriage.

Displacement Heightens Perceptive Ability

Over the course of the novel we get to know through Harriet’s perceptive observations and awareness of her own flaws and Guy’s, their characters, why they act in the way they do and the effect they have on each other, due to their differences. These aspects of personality are reflected through the way they interact and respond to others around them.

Guy’s natural warmth towards everyone could easily be misinterpreted. She herself had taken it for granted that it was for her alone.

It took a little while initially to overcome my reluctance in be among this crowd, (averse to novels where purposeless woman follow their husbands around wondering why they are unhappy with life), many of the characters and their behaviours in the set-up stage of the novel are tiresome, but the ability of Harriet to see through each of them, in an effort to better know her husband, after a while becomes more and more engaging.

Finding an Ally in Foreign Territory

She finds company in Guy’s friend Clarence, the similarity in their perceptions is both a comfort and an admission of her own more selfish inclinations.

The difficulty of dealing with Guy, she thought, lay in the fact that he was so often right. She and Clarence could claim that their evening had been spoilt by the presence of Dubedat. She knew it had, in fact, been spoilt not by Guy’s generosity but by their own lack of it.

Harriet lacks purpose and so it’s no surprise that her energy and focus turns towards analysing and judging others. In a way she reminded me of Hadley Richardson in Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife and Zelda Fitzgerald in Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler, women who find themselves in the shadows of the larger player, their husband’s lives, men whom other people are drawn too and seek attention from, leaving the wife as a companion and bed warmer for the few hours he finds himself solitary.

They too, are stories of the lives of young internationals, professors, diplomats, journalists, the locals they fall in with, the cafes, restaurants and hotels they frequent, the political background constantly a source of conversation, the lack of family and a rootlessness that drives them to seek each other out in this environment that throws people together, who wouldn’t otherwise cross paths. Harriet however, due to her lack of involvement in events, becomes the detached witness, the reliable narrator, of character(s) and of this twentieth century war.

It is precisely her position as a civilian external to the public sphere and to the war effort, together with her apparent lack of faith in politics, that validates her as a detached witness. Carmen Andrés Oliver

Shakespeare Foretells All

Shakespeare Troilus and Cressida The novel becomes even more interesting and ironic when Guy decides to produce an amateur production of the Shakespearean play Troilus and Cressida, deliberately diverting the attention of his fans and followers, young and old, at a time when war is creeping ever closer and everyone else not involved in his amateur dramatics is frantic with worry. The play is the tragic story of lovers set against the backdrop of war.

Photo by Monica Silvestre on Pexels.com

Harriet is embarrassed by the idea of the play, sure it’s an endeavour that will fail, hoping it will, despite the fervour with which everyone invited to participate has responded.

Now she was beginning to realise she might be wrong. Contrary to her belief, people were not only willing to to join in, they were grateful at being included. Each seemed simply to have been waiting the opportunity to make a stage appearance.

Dropped as one of the players, Harriet is upstaged by Sophie, a woman whose affection for Guy and history that precedes her, adds to the tension of their marriage.

The Great Fortune is Life

As the novel ends, they take a look inside the window outside the German Bureau, where a map is updated daily and what they see leaves us wondering what will happen next, as Europe itself is a bed of tension and danger, depending on where one’s loyalties lie.

When they reached the window, they saw the dot of Paris hidden by a swastika that squatted like a spider, black on the heart of the country.

They stood staring at it for a while. Soberly, Guy asked: ‘What do you think will happen here? What are our chances?

Harriet responds:

We’ll get away because we must. The great fortune is life. We must preserve it.’

It is a unique novel in its close observation of the response to pending war of a small community of English people thrown together by circumstance, viewing the approaching war from inside a part of Europe that is less well traversed in English literature, given less attention at the time of writing and being rediscovered again now.

Olivia Manning, OBE (1908-1980)

Manning met her husband when he was on leave for a month in July 1939 from his first British Council post in Romania. They married in August and nine days later he was ordered back to Bucharest, so the couple left London as war was looking likely to commence. During the war, they lived in Romania, Greece, Egypt and Palestine.

She returned to England in 1945. She wrote novels, short stories, sketches, screenplays, nonfiction books, essays and reviews. She was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1976, and died four years later.

The Great Fortune was first published in 1960.

N.B. This book was a review copy ebook, kindly provided by the publisher via Netgalley.

Top 7 Reads in Translation

The Runner Up Outstanding Read of 2025

Somebody is Walking On Your Grave: My Cemetery Journeys, Mariana Enriquez (Argentina) tr. Megan McDowell

Far by Rosa Riba (Spain) tr. Charlotte Coombe

The Body Where I Was Born by Guadalupe Nettel (Mexico) tr. J.T. Lichenstein

All That Remains by Virginie Grimaldi (France) tr. by Hildegarde Serle (French)

The Brittle Age (L’età fragile) by Donatella Di Pietrantonio (Italy) tr. Ann Goldstein

All Our Yesterdays, Natalia Ginzburg (Italy) tr. Angus Davidson, Intro Sally Rooney

Brandy Sour by Constantia Soteriou (Cyprus) tr. Lina Protopapa (Greek)

Cerebral Distractions or Healing Attractions

A Gifted Book Returns Unread

Averse to Change, Loves Movement

Transition, Change and Things that Stay the Same

A Girl Determined to Realise a Dream

My Struggles Become My Strength

A New Motivation, I Do This Not Just for Myself

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Author, Buchi Emecheta

Ancestral Threads

A Temporary Explorer

The Unfaithful Father

A Polyamorous Woman

Broken Memories, Finding Reparation

Further Reading

Author, Gabriela Wiener

An Unforgettable Summer

Testimony or Treason

#MeToo Movement and the Sharing of Stories

Author, Bélen López Peiró

Reconstructing a Life, Walking the Streets

Portrait of a Narcissist Father Via His Eldest Son

A Determined Artist Perseveres

A Literary Triptych

A Masterpiece Created at All Cost

Fatherhood in Another Era, Produce, Punish, Protect

Further Reading

Author, Domenico Starnone

About the author

A Simple Passion Reveals a More Complex Humanity

A Life Suspended, Waiting for a Man

Fulfilling Life’s Purpose, Finding Meaning

Family Sayings & Life Lessons

Notables or Nobodies, An Extended Family

Words: Weapons or Wisdom

Poetry as Freedom

Further Reading

Natalia Ginzburg, Author

Annie Ernaux, Author

Displacement Heightens Perceptive Ability

Finding an Ally in Foreign Territory

Shakespeare Foretells All

The Great Fortune is Life

***All Our Yesterdays*, Natalia Ginzburg (Italy) tr. Angus Davidson, Intro Sally Rooney**