opinionated commentary on literary matters - from the complete review

       Omega Minor takes Independent Foreign Fiction Prize

       Paul Verhaeghen's Omega Minor has taken the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize; for full coverage see Boyd Tonkin's Independent Foreign Fiction Prize: Goodbye to Berlin in The Independent (with comments from the other judges, and the mention that "Daniel Kehlmann's Measuring the World (translated by Carol Brown Janeway; Quercus) ran the winner closest"). See also Verhaeghen's official statement on winning the prize, at his weblog.
       The prize goes to both author and translator -- and in Omega Minor's case he's one and the same, as Verhaeghen did his own translation.
       We've long, long been touting the breakout-potential of this title but -- vividly demonstrating our very limited clout -- don't seem to have been able to convince many people, and it'll be interesting to see whether this prize now gives it the necessary push for it to begin to really find an audience.
       This will also be an interesting test-case about the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize-effect in the US market: Omega Minor has been out here quite a few months now (past the usual review-cycle, in any case), while the American edition of last year's winner, José Eduardo Agualusa's The Book of Chameleons (which we very conviently just reviewed ...) is only coming out in a few weeks (from Simon & Schuster), making for an interesting sort of head-to-head competition. As we've mentioned before, we'd have figured Omega Minor had mass-market paperback potential (while still being a 'literary' book) -- and it looks to us as having potentially far wider appeal. But readers (and assigning book review editors ...) seem to have been hard to convince.

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       Luigi Malerba (1927-2008)

       Italian author Luigi Malerba has passed away; see, for example, Paolo Mauri's E' morto lo scrittore Luigi Malerba maestro di realtà deformate in La Repubblica.
       No English-language notice of his death yet -- and he doesn't seem to be widely known hereabouts, two William Weaver translations from some forty years ago (The Serpent and What is this buzzing, do you hear it too ?), both long out of print, seems the extent of his work to get published in translation ..... At least Words without Borders offers a small sample, Bakarak, in a translation by Lawrence Venuti.

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       Imagining Nabokov in Russia

       In Speak, Nabokov in The Moscow Times James Marson looks at Nikita Khrushcheva's book, Imagining Nabokov: Russia Between Art and Politics (see the Yale University Press publicity page, or get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk), now that it's come out in Russia (as В гостях у Набокова; see the Время publicity page) -- and where not everybody is thrilled by her approach.

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       Ni d'Ève ni d'Adam review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is our review of Amélie Nothomb's Ni d'Ève ni d'Adam.

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       Académie Goncourt fills jury slots

       The Académie Goncourt has elected Tahar Ben Jelloun and Patrick Rambaud to its ranks (or rather, to its table), so now all ten slots are filled. Among the other members who will be voting for the Prix Goncourt this fall -- choosing from an expected 700 titles -- : Jorge Semprun, Michel Tournier, and Bernard Pivot. (See also the previous couvert-holders -- that first group, with Joris-Karl Huysmans and Octave Mirbeau, must have been fun.)
       For French coverage, see Rambaud et Ben Jelloun, nouveaux visages du Goncourt by Mohammed Aïssaoui at Le Figaro and Un jury rajeuni pour le Goncourt by Alain Beuve-Méry in Le Monde.

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       French translation prize shortlist

       No press release at the French-American Foundation yet, but we've been inundated with reminders that:

The French-American Foundation and the Florence Gould Foundation announce today the finalists for their 21st Annual Translation Prizes for superior English translations of French works published in 2007.

       No one else seems to have posted the news yet, so we might as well (and we do have quite a few of the shortlisted titles under review -- and expect to get to more of them). Awards are given both in fiction and non, and the shortlisted titles were:

• Fiction:
  • Allah Is Not Obliged by Ahmadou Kourouma, translated by Frank Wynne
  • Ravel by Jean Echenoz, translated by Linda Coverdale
  • Solea by Jean-Claude Izzo, translated by Howard Curtis
  • Kick the Animal Out by Véronique Ovaldé, translated by Adriana Hunter
  • Place Names by Jean Ricardou, translated by Jordan Stump
  
  
• Non-fiction:
  • The Curtain by Milan Kundera, translated by Linda Asher
  • How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard, translated by Jeffrey Mehlman
  • Divagations by Stéphane Mallarmé, translated by Barbara Johnson
  • A Voice from Elsewhere by Maurice Blanchot, translated by Charlotte Mandell
  • Life Laid Bare by Jean Hatzfeld, translated by Linda Coverdale

       (It's like a who's-who of leading French translators .....)
       See also the information page about the prize.

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       Asterix v. Tintin ?

       In Asterix and His Secrets in The New York Sun versatile translator (of Asterix and W.G.Sebald, among others) Anthea Bell, compares the comics-legends, suggesting:

Do the same readers like both Tintin and Asterix ? Some prefer one to the other, but surely they don’t have to be rivals; there’s room for both.

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       Caine Prize shortlist

       They've announced the shortlist for the 2008 Caine Prize, the short story ("indicative length, between 3000 and 10,000 words") prize popularly but inexplicably known as the 'African Booker'.
       With 90 entries from 17 African countries it at least does cover quite a bit of the continent.
       See also, for example, Lindesay Irvine on Five make shortlist for 'African Booker' at The Guardian site.

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       Palestine Festival of Literature

       The Palestine Festival of Literature -- 'Palfest' -- starts today and runs through the 11th.
       A decent line-up, and certainly sounds like a worthwhile undertaking.
       See also Esther Addley reporting that Authors launch literary festival in cities of the West Bank in The Guardian.

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       Tony Wood on Daniil Kharms

        Yet another article on Daniil Kharms, as Tony Wood writes about him in the London Review of Books, in Art Is a Cupboard !

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       Born Yesterday review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is our review of Gordon Burn's effort to present The News as a Novel, Born Yesterday.

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       New Context (and updated RCF)

       A new issue of the Dalkey Archive Press-affiliated Context is up -- and, as usual, the whole thing is worth checking out. Among the goodies: Michael Casper's Letter from Lithuania, Nicholas de Lange and Ros Schwartz are Translators in Conversation, and Martin Riker has some Notes Regarding the Editing of Translated Literature.
       And of particular interest: John O'Brien continues his hard look at the business of publishing translations. He wonders, for example:

In the meantime, are foreign funding agencies getting any smarter about how to get more of their countries’ literary works translated into English ? The answer is “not much,” or not at all. The country that has made this easier, for Dalkey Archive at least, is Japan. Other countries are on a kind of cusp: Romania, Switzerland, Latvia, Estonia, Norway, Mexico, Lithuania, and Spain. The countries that remain nearly intransigent to changing old practices are France, Germany, Austria, and Italy. The latter group continues to fail to understand that paying for the cost of the translation (or part thereof) is of little help; nor does providing funds to send unknown authors to the States to do tours help at all unless there are substantial marketing funds made available that will help to promote the authors’ books before and after such tours.

       Yes, he really doesn't think the traditional (for some countries) approach is working out:

This past year, France and Germany co-sponsored one of those hopeless "group tours" for American editors to meet publishers. Do either of these countries ever evaluate the effects of such tours ? How many books get signed on as a result ? No. This too falls into the category of appearing to address a problem by having everyone back-slap each other. God only knows how much these tours costs (a lot), and one can speculate on how such money could be better spent.

       Meanwhile, they continue to fix up the Dalkey Archive Press site, and while they're still working on making The CONTEXT Blog a work in progress, they have updated the Review of Contemporary Fiction -- most notably and importantly making the book review-sections from the most recent editions accessible online. The RCF has among the most interesting selections of books they review; many of the reviews get recycled at Context, but it's worth working your way through these pages too.

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       Park Kyung-ni (1926-2008)

       As Chung Ah-young reports at The Korea Times, leading Korean writer Park Kyung-ni Dies at 82.
       She is best known for her multi-volume saga Toji (토지; 'Land'). The first part of this was published in translation in 1996 (as Land), and now Kegan Paul have re-issued that volume, and published a second one: see their publicity page for volume one (or get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk), as well as their publicity page for volume two (or pre-order your copy from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk); we very much hope to be able to get to these two books .....

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       Kertész coverage

       Kertész Imre isn't getting much attention in the US, despite two new translations, but the spring issue of The Hungarian Quarterly, now available online, devotes a decent amount of space to him.
       There's 'Imre Kertész in Conversation with Zsigmond Sándor Papp', discussing Why Won't He Tell a Proper Story?, while in All That Fall Kertész-translator Tim Wilkinson looks at the 'Upsides of the Shorter Fictions of Imre Kertész'.

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       Joseph Needham book

       One of George Steiner's 'unwritten books' described in his recent memoir was a study of the brilliant Joseph Needham; now Simon Winchester has had a go at the man.
       The book has come out as The Man Who Loved China in the US -- see the HarperCollins publicity page, or get your copy at Amazon.com -- but it's only coming out in September in the UK, and as Bomb, Book and Compass at that ... (pre-order your copy at Amazon.co.uk).
       Marjorie Kehe reviews it in the Christian Science Monitor; we have several of his books under review (see, for example, our review of The Meaning of Everything) and will certainly eventually get to this as well.

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       booksfromscotland.com a dud ?

       In The Scotsman Tim Cornwell reports that Scottish literature website damned for 'bleeding cash', as:

The booksfromscotland.com site was launched in December 2005 with £100,000 from the Scottish Arts Council. It was billed as a "one-stop shop" for Scottish writing.

And this week its owner, Publishing Scotland, saw its SAC annual grant increased from about £200,000 to £260,000 for "further development" of the site.

But The Scotsman has learned that despite its reported target to sell 15,000 books annually, the site has sold books at only a fifth of that rate.

       And:

Marion Sinclair, Publishing Scotland's business development manager, said in the first year, booksfromscotland.com notched up no more than £12,000 in sales.

She insisted it is now selling "more, but not substantially more than £15,000" worth of books a year in between 200 and 250 transactions a month.

Ms Sinclair insisted booksfromscotland.com was more an information site than a sales site.

       Part of the problem might be that it looks more like a commercial site than an information site .....
       But to put things a bit in perspective: we shift considerably more via our links to the Amazons here at the complete review (and by the way: many thanks to all who do purchase books (and other things) that way -- it's very much appreciated). Of course we only get a small percentage of the cash-value amount shifted -- our Amazon commission -- but as far as the number of transactions and the value of these go we're far ahead of these folk.
       What gets us, of course, is the money they get to play with: our annual budget is about 1 per cent (yes one per cent) of the cash they got to launch the site with ..... Man, we really should start applying for some funding from some of these very generous local grant-giving organisations -- for just a couple of thousand pounds we'd gladly (and be able to) increase, say, our Scottish coverage by quite a bit .....

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       Reviewing alternatives

       In The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Bob Hoover has mixed feelings about One man's plan to rescue book reviewing, as:

Sandford Thatcher, director of the Penn State University Press and current president of the Association of American University Presses, is now arranging book reviews for the Centre Daily Times, State College's newspaper.

       It's mainly the conflict-of-interest issues that worry him -- but obviously there's some potential here.

       Meanwhile Emerging Writers Network points us to David Milofsky on the 'Book Beat' at the Denver Post, where he finds that Online reviewing boosts unsung authors.

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       Premier reading

       Former Australian premier Bob Carr has been getting quite a bit of attention down under for his new book on My Reading Life: Adventures In The World Of Books.
       As Susan Wyndham writes in A premier's challenge in the Sydney Morning Herald:

Books have been Carr's compensation for what he considered a crummy 1960s education, heavy on woodwork rather than Latin.

       It's certainly nice to see a reading-enthusiast politician:

"My equivalent of Bob Hawke's racing form or Paul Keating's absorption in antiques was opening a good reading copy like that one," he says, pointing to a sturdy, illustrated edition of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov on the meeting-room table in his Bligh Street offices.

       But in The Australian Rosemary Neill does note that he appears to be a somewhat Lopsided lover of literature.
       (See also the Penguin (Australia) publicity page for the book.)

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       Spring 2008 NBCC Good Reads List

       They've announced the Spring 2008 NBCC Good Reads List at the National Book Critics Circle weblog, Critical Mass.
       (Local barkeep M.A.Orthofer is an NBCC member but sat this one out, not finding any spring publication that he was sufficiently enthusiastic about to recommend (we also had none of the top vote-getters under review). The next season does, however, look a bit more promising.)

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       PEN World Voices: Conversation: Jeffrey Eugenides & Daniel Kehlmann report

       The only Daniel Kehlmann-novel available in English is Measuring the World (though Ich und Kaminski is due out in translation in November); it doesn't seem to have been quite as successful here as elsewhere (30-some-odd weeks on the Taiwanese bestseller lists, he mentioned -- as well as topping the German lists for over a year), but at least that gave conversation-partner Jeffrey Eugenides a solid point of focus. And since Eugenides only has two (published) novels under his belt -- Middlesex and The Virgin Suicides -- they could concentrate on these few titles between them.
       Eugenides noted that they had met on a panel last year, but an overzealous moderator seems not to have let them get too many words in edgewise (that would be this panel, where even the German newspapers complained about how much Michael Naumann liked the sound of his own voice ...) so for this event they were flying solo, just two writers talking about writing. But they did come prepared: they opted for a format in which they alternated questions for each other, which worked out quite well.
       Eugenides began by asking about Kehlmann's choice to write an historical novel, wondering whether he didn't have doubts about the form and its inherent fraudulence. Kehlmann responded that he was, indeed, deeply suspicious of the historical form, and even had doubts about whether he could pull it off. The approach he chose was to try to to write the way non-fiction history is written, always maintaining a sense of distance -- and using a lot of indirect speech (which is more obvious in the German original than in the English translation). He wanted to maintain a serious tone, even when writing about things that aren't at all serious: he wanted to sound like a very serious historian who had gone mad .....
       Kehlmann also mentioned that, because of the reliance on indirect speech, he doesn't think a good movie can be made of Measuring the World (though they're having a go at it -- and he's said he's staying away from that).
       Asked whether Kehlmann saw his Gauss and Humboldt as opposites or spiritual brothers, he said: both. He elaborated: it's a book about two ways of doing science -- but did admit that by the end Gauss had probably emerged as the 'winner' (not that he tried to set it up that way, or even felt that's the way it was when he finished the book, but seeing all the reactions he's come to believe that).
       Noting that Ich und Kaminski is a very different novel, Eugenides asked about Kehlmann being a writer who changes with every book (which one would certainly think, considering also his other work). Kehlmann noted there are authors who write the same thing over and over again, but he doesn't quite do that. Still, he finds his underlying themes are the same again and again (though often far from obviously so), and even where there are differences, his own voice does always come through. But he noted he fights to stretch his limitations; given how young he is (born 1975) it'll be interesting to see how much more he can push his envelope.
       Kehlmann's first question for Eugenides was how much of an influence Gabriel Garcia Marquez was, with Eugenides acknowledging he was a great admirer, and that Chronicle of a Death Foretold was an influence on The Virgin Suicides. Kehlmann, too, considered 'magical realism' important -- especially in showing an alternative to the European fiction of the same time. He mentioned how, to some extent, he had used it dealing with Humboldt in South America -- though he had Humboldt react to the completely new and unbelivable things he saw there by ignoring them, a very German reaction of adapting them to his mindset.
       Kehlmann asked Eugenides about the narrative-voice -- the 'we' -- of The Virgin Suicides, and Eugenides revealed that at first he had had the whole town narrating the story, with an 'I'-narrator popping up on occasion, but when he saw most of the heat of the narrative came from the teenage boys he went with that. He noted that, despite having a chorus of narrators he never thought of Greek tragedy -- but gets asked that all the time (and wonders whether he would if his name were Abromowitz or something like that ...).
       The by comparison prolific Kehlmann asked Eugenides about only having published two novels, noting that one could divide the world into authors who publish a lot and accept a range of quality, and those who only publish a few, trying to achieve perfection -- and whether he thinks each necessarily envies the other; Eugenides did (and noted that he finds himself surprised that he's not more prolific, since he works at it every day, and has accumulated tons of stuff (admittedly all just for the drawer ...)). Kehlmann also asked whether he agreed that, unlike novels, short stories can be perfect. Eugenides did, and said he found them much harder to write than novels -- and notes it's sort of misguided that in creative writing courses students focus on the short story, which he considers technically more difficult.

       Both authors were in good form, and even if it was more of a question-and-answer session than a true discussion a lot of fairly interesting subjects were covered. Certainly it helped in introducing Kehlmann to an American audience -- which didn't seem very familiar with his work, but certainly knew their Eugenides.

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       PEN World Voices: Books That Changed My Life report

       It's a good idea for an author panel: round up a few writers and ask them to talk about Books That Changed My Life. It was an interesting variety of authors, too, from sex-book-author (The Secret Life of Catherine M.) Catherine Millet to Wolves of the Crescent Moon-author Yousef al-Mohaimeed, as well as Annie Proulx, Antonio Muñoz Molina (author of In her Absence), and Olivier Rolin (author of Hotel Crystal). (There were also translators -- into Arabic, and from and into French -- for the authors.)
       NYPL impressario Paul Holdengräber was very much in the mix too, holding the reins of the conversation; given the number of people involved it was probably good to have someone (relatively) firmly in control, though his style may not be to everyone's taste (i.e. mine).
       The first 'book that changed a life' wasn't actually a main selection, but rather one Muñoz Molina recommends to students: E.O.Wilson's Journey to the Ants (see the Harvard University Press publicity page) -- a science text that he feels shows students how something can be explained very beautifully and straightforwardly, without unnecessary embellishment, and showing self-absorbed students the potential in simply describing reality. Surprisingly, this basic idea -- of what a book and writing can offer -- came up repeatedly over the afternoon.
       As to the books themselves, this is what the authors came up with (with several wanting to suggest more than one and some thinking the idea of life-changing books a dubious proposition to start with ...):

• Antonio Muñoz Molina: Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner
• Catherine Millet: The Lily of the Valley by Honoré de Balzac
• Yousef al-Mohaimeed: first the Arabian Nights, then poetry (including haikus), and then, of all things Nikos Kazantzakis Zorba the Greek
• Olivier Rolin: Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
• Annie Proulx: Before Adam by Jack London (which you can read here)

       The surrounding circumstances and reasons for the choices were, of course, as interesting as the selections: Proulx discovering the obscure London as a seven-year-old child, or Yousef al-Mohaimeed listening to his sister read from the Arabian Nights (which seems almost too clichéd -- but when he follows that with Zorba the Greek it all sounds almost bizarrely believable again), or Millet drawn to Balzac after coming to recognize his style from readings on the radio.
       Rolin had the most doubts about any life-changing work (or at least was happy enough to be thrust into defending that position), and argued more for an orchestra of books; Proulx, too, had offered Holdengräber a longer list of mind-enlarging books (which she admitted wasn't quite the same thing).
       There was some discussion about why no one chose any non-fiction. Proulx argued that essays aren't transformative -- though Holdengräber suggested Nietzsche might be an exception that has occasionally captured a young mind (Marx, too, one would think -- but then all that's terribly out of fashion). And Muñoz Molina thought they should consider not only 'books that changed my life' for the implied better, but also for the worse .....
       Still, the best answer came from Catherine Millet who, before choosing the Balzac, noted that obviously the book that had most changed her life was the one she wrote.
       It was a decent, fairly entertaining discussion, with some decent cases made for these as (their) life changing works -- though this is the sort of exercise that probably lends itself more to written essayistic exposition, and only gained a bit from the mutual reactions to the various choices.

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       NYTBR selection criteria

       We certainly can't complain about today's issue of The New York Times Book Review as far as foreign-language (fiction) coverage goes, as it includes more reviews of translated works than in all the issues from the last two months combined. Sure, it's kind of China-heavy -- four Chinese novels each get their own full-length review -- but at least they're considering something in translation (and Marilyn Stasio's coverage of yet another translated title in her 'Crime'-round-up this week is longer than 29 words and actually offers some information about the title ...).
       Still, one can't help but notice a certain lack of ... enthusiasm -- and reviews that leave the door open to shutting translations out again in the future. "Can fiction be graded on a curve ? Are there extenuating factors that ought to be brought to bear ?" Liesl Schillinger asks in her review of Yan Lianke's Serve the People !, while Pankaj Mishra writes about Jiang Rong's Wolf Totem flat-out that: "The novel's literary claims are shaky".
       Translation: translations are often inferior works.
       Sure, the other two novels get a better reception -- and lots of not-translated works are also labelled (one way or another) as inferior. Still .....
       But what disturbs us about the 4 May issue is what it says about the selection criteria they seem to have at the NYTBR. That Wolf Totem was not likely to be a great read has surely long been obvious, but the tremendous buzz and publicity machinery around it (beginning with that 'record' (for a Chinese novel) English-language rights deal for it) seems to be the driving force behind it getting so widely reviewed -- and getting a spot in the NYTBR. Granted, this was predictable even for the translation-phobic NYTBR (yes, we noted some three weeks ago that they -- "as susceptible to hype as anyone" -- likely couldn't avoid it) -- and we'd rather have them review it than not. But it suggests that outside pressure, a feeling that they 'must' review particular works, plays a (too) significant role in their review criteria.
       It's not so much the Jiang Rong review that leads us to this conclusion, but another review from the 4 May issue: Troy Patterson's take-down of Mark Sarvas' Harry, Revised (reluctantly linked to at that registration-requiring site here). Patterson was not impressed: "Harry does not seem to have been reread, never mind revised", and he summed the book up:

The effect is of the Farrelly brothers shooting a remake of About Schmidt and leaving it to be cut together by an unemployably cynical editor.

       But what really shocked and disturbed us was to read that:

That you are reading a review of this novel in these pages is a testament to the author’s success as a blogger. Sarvas’s site, titled The Elegant Variation, has been remarking on the literary world for nearly five years, and though it lacks the righteous bile of Edward Champion’s Filthy Habits or the nourishing meatiness of Jessa Crispin’s Bookslut, it has made many worthy contributions to bookchat in that time

       On the one hand, of course, we should be thrilled: maybe all the books we have planned will similarly find themselves automatically added to the to-be-reviewed piles at the NYTBR and elsewhere. (Well, maybe not -- blogging success is relative, after all, and we may not quite have attained such august reputations as these bloggers.) But we don't really like the idea that just because someone is a 'literary figure' in some way that automatically means their book is a must-review title.
       We've seen another of these in recent weeks, an even more obvious example, with Keith Gessen's All the Sad Young Literary Men, which seems to have been reviewed everywhere by now (with the NYTBR getting to it very quickly too). Gessen certainly is a significant 'literary figure' -- as n + 1 editor, literary commentator, translator, etc. Why that should make his fiction worth reading or reviewing isn't clear. Not that it isn't necessarily worth reviewing -- almost everything is worth a look, after all --; it's just that the attention it has received has been so all out of proportion to its possible interest and worth (especially considering all the works (especially translated works ...) that don't get any review coverage).
       In the case of the Gessen one can understand the interest reviewers (by and large: sad young literary wo/men themselves) might have in it, leading to such an overkill of coverage (though we wonder why the surely sager book review editors put up with it). To his credit Mark at least wrote something completely different, without the obvious littérateur-connexions. But if the only reason the NYTBR ran a review of Harry, Revised is because of his "success as a blogger" ... well, that's just a terrible selection criteria. (Note that Mark has also been a reviewer for the NYTBR -- something for which his success as a blogger is obviously more of a qualification.)
       It may well be a tough balancing act for book review editors, between covering what's 'important' and what's actually any good. We understand -- sort of -- that Wolf Totem is hard to avoid (though honestly, with the other Chinese books they cover this week, and assuming they'll do the forthcoming Ma Jian, we would have gladly absolved them from dealing with this one), and maybe the Gessen shows enough potential (or, since he's a literary figure tackling literary figure-issues (or at least lifestyles) in his fiction) it can readily pass. But they can't be covering books just because someone has had blogging-success. (There: we're handing Tanenhaus an excuse on a platter to toss the next complete reviewer book aside unread -- but given the subject-matter we're pretty sure he would have been dismissive anyway.)

       Note: We've been long-time acquaintances of Mark's, but while we have a copy of Harry, Revised we haven't cracked it open yet (and hence have no idea of whether or not it's any good); we're not particularly comfortable in reading books by friends etc. (though we admit that's also a poor selection-criteria).

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       Translation in India

       The Literary Review section of The Hindu has two articles devoted to translation in India this week:
       In A fruitful dialogue Ziya Us Salam finds that: 'Finally, because of translations, India and Bharat are beginning to talk to and enrich each other'. And it sounds pretty good:

There are 50 Indian languages in which regular publishing is taking place. And newspapers come out in 101 languages! Indeed, writing in Indian languages is on the ascendant, with a boom in Malayalam, Marathi, Bengali, Urdu and even Sanskrit writing. Besides the original works, there is money to be made -- and new readers to be found -- through translations. And book publishers, market savvy as ever, are entering unexplored territories. Of course, due to globalisation, most are foreign players.

       Meanwhile, Mini Krishnan finds that 'Translation offers a multiplicity of complex worlds, all waiting to be interpreted, understood and absorbed' in New worlds.

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       Literary fiction funding in Scotland

       In The Observer Brian Morton looks at the latest funding cuts and shifts and explains Why literary fiction is Scotland's latest endangered species.

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       Books in Tanzania

       At The Valve Aaron Bady offers Some Uneducated Speculations on the "The African Novel" in Tanzania, as he writes that:

When I was in Arusha, Tanzania -- doing other things -- I greedily purchased the few African novels that were available for purchase. This meant frequenting bookstores that sold novels to two very distinct markets: novels for white people and novels for Tanzanian students.

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       P.D.James profile

       In P D James, crime writer behind bars in The Telegraph William Langley profiles P.D.James, revelling in how: "her dislike for the liberal refashioning of society has become steadily more pronounced". So, of course, we get comments such as:

"The problem," she argues, "starts with the family. Or, rather, the breakdown of the family. Too often there are no male figures to set an example, and by the time the children are eight or nine they are in gangs and the mothers are helpless.

"I think it is terribly difficult to be a parent today, because the influences that are brought to bear on children are so pernicious. Not only the violence and pornography, but the worship of money and materialism. It's very hard for parents and they should get a lot more support than they do."

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       PEN World Voices: Private Lives, Public Lives, Other Lives, New Lives report

       Ingo Schulze and Eliot Weinberger got together to discuss Private Lives, Public Lives, Other Lives, New Lives at the Goethe Institut, in front of a good-size audience. It turned out to be pretty much an introduction to Schulze, covering his career trajectory and especially his recent (2006) novel, which will be coming out as New Lives in the fall from Knopf, in a translation by John E. Woods (pre-order your copy at Amazon.com), from which he also read an excerpt.
       Schulze was born in what was then still East Germany, in 1962, and did not publish until after the fall of the wall; the East-West contrast was a recurring subject in the conversation. Schulze actually went east in the 1990s, to St.Petersburg -- his business-man (as newspaperman) years -- and noted generally that the East German 1990s seemed to him much like at least the European 1950s, a time of rapid change and rise of living standards (with the new-found possibilities of discretionary spending, travelling abroad, etc.). Still, when Weinberger suggested that his books were like a documentation of private lives (in keeping with the festival theme ...) in East Germany, he said he never thought of that (though he seemed inclined to agree).
        Among the points raised were the English-- or rather German-versions-of-English-words of some of his titles: Simple Storys ('Simple schtorries' as he gave the 'Saxon' pronunciation, published in English as Simple Stories), or his new novel, Handy (which, as a bemused Weinberger noted, is the German term for cellphone -- allowing, he observed, English-speakers to go around asking folks in Germany if they have their handy handy, etc.)
       Of interest, too, the German authors Schulze praised -- most notably Wolfgang Hilbig, whom he holds in particularly high regard. When asked to named other authors he though highly of he named: Hans Joachim Schädlich, Katja Langen-Müller, and Marcel Beyer .
       Overall: a decent, fairly informative introduction to the author.

        Bonus Wolfgang Hilbig-links:

• His story The Abandoned Factory, in Agni
• Excerpts from his work at The Drunken Boat
• new books in german introduces his book, Das Provisorium

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

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       PEN World Voices: African Wars report

       Despite the heavyweight-panel -- Nuruddin Farah, Chenjerai Hove, and Abdourahman Waberi -- African Wars was the most disappointing of the events I've been to so far. It's also the first (of the ones I've attended) where the audience was charged for their tickets (though my press pass meant I didn't have to pay).
       Farah and Hove are from countries very much in the news -- Somalia and Zimbabwe, respectively -- and between them one might have expected -- if nothing else -- some insight into the volatile present-day situations there. There was a bit of that, but overall things ranged far too far afield in what was an unfocussed and ultimately pretty messy sort of discussion.
       Moderator Violaine Huisman's introduction of the panelists was informative if somewhat drawn-out, but in trying to jump-start discussion with a quote from Ryszard Kapuscinski, that 'Africa does not exist', she definitely got off on the wrong foot. "Where is that man coming from ?" Hove asked (and noted then that he had once met Kapuscinski and told him that he was mixing fiction and journalism -- and should put a disclaimer in his books).
       Waberi sensibly tried to put the proper spin on the contentious words, noting that by the same token one could say 'Europe doesn't exist', and that Kapuscinski's statement is obviously a simplification, and that cultural differences exist in all these areas (Greece and Lithuania are both part of Europe, but very different, and it's the same with the African countries, etc.). But from there it was still hard to rein in the conversation.
       Farah and Hove have apparently jousted frequently, and Hove smilingly said early on that they disagreed on a great deal. Their very different personalities -- Hove tends a bit to anecdotal rambling, and readily offers up his opinion at any point, while Farah is more of an elder (literary) statesman type, his speech much more measured and carefully worded -- could probably play well off each other, but it didn't work out that well here. (Among the interesting potential in the personal dynamics: Waberi wrote his thesis on Farah and Hove recounted wanting to write his PhD on Farah as well.)
       Getting the conversation back to the ostensible subject repeatedly proved difficult, but Farah at least spiced things up by suggesting more context must be allowed in considering war in Africa: after all Africa did not have civil wars at the time when you had them in Europe or America. The natural development in Africa, he said, was interrupted for over a hundred years, by colonization; cultural development (in its broadest sense) was frustrated by the arrival of other people, with other interests. And he suggested that, for example, the Thirty Years War in Germany was remarkably comparable to the situation in the Congo.
       Hove disagreed, arguing against the idea that it was just Africa's turn to go through such a war-cycle (and, presumably, sort of get it out of their system). He said: "Wars in Africa are simply about the distribution of power and its benefits."
       (The two positions, at least as to the limited extent they were expounded on, don't seem entirely irreconcilable, and Farah did agree that economics and power drive all wars.)
       Another interesting aside of contention was a project that Waberi took part in but Hove declined to, where authors were sent to Rwanda to write, in some form, about what had happened there. Hove worried generally a great deal about the danger of authors being co-opted on the side of the victimizer, and he did not think the Rwandan project offered the necessary guarantees of independence; Waberi disagreed -- and while an interesting issue in and of itself, it also got the discussion off track. Still, Hove's points about the ease with which the author can be co-opted were interesting, and he recounted that he had been offered the position of Minister of Culture in Zimbabwe some years ago; he turned it down, saying he'd only accept the Ministry of Finance (because that was something he knew nothing about and could learn a great deal at, while he already knew everything about culture ... certainly, it's hard to imagine he could have done any worse with Zimbabwe's economic policy than the current regime).
       The question-and-answer session was a complete disaster, with Huisman losing any remaining control over the proceedings, as audience members failed to grasp the basic concept of succinctly directing a (possibly relevant) question at the authors. A few stray comments of interest came up, and Farah did manage to stir things up by saying that they were not fighting for democracy in Zimbabwe right now (because democracy is something only arrived at at the end of a very long process, which begins with regaining one's dignity and one's integrity -- Farah also noting that while the US was much farther along on the road to democracy, it was also still far from truly achieving it), but things were far from neatly tied up.
       Not too much about any specific African wars, and what generalities there were also strayed far too far, making for an unsatisfying afternoon. Too bad, because all three writers did seem to have some ideas worth exploring -- but under Huisman's moderation it remained an oil-and-vinegar combination that just wouldn't mix.

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

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       PEN World Voices: Day six preview

       Sunday is the final day of the PEN World Voices festival, and there are only a few more events.
       We're aiming for Conversation: Jeffrey Eugenides & Daniel Kehlmann (14:00), and then Books That Changed My Life (16:00), with Yousef Al-Mohaimeed, Catherine Millet, Antonio Muñoz Molina, Annie Proulx, and late (but welcome) addition Olivier Rolin, moderated by Paul Holdengräber
       Of course, the big, final event is the annual Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture, where Umberto Eco will speak 'On the Advantages of Fiction for Life and Death' -- but we'll pass on that.

(Posted by: complete review)    - permanent link -

       'Faber Finds'

       The new Faber Finds-project -- 'Bringing Great Writing Back Into Print. Coming Soon.' -- sounds like it has some potential:

Faber Finds is a groundbreaking new imprint whose aim is to restore to print for future generations a wealth of lost classics.

       The Guardian also asks a number of authors what they'd like to see back in print, in Back - due to popular demand. And readers are welcome to make suggestions too.
       It could lead to good things .....

(Posted by: complete review)    - permanent link -

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       Open Letter mention

       New publisher Open Letter gets some local attention, as Mark Hare describes how 'Open Letter' to make foreign literature accessible in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle.

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       The Book of Chameleons review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is our review of José Eduardo Agualusa's The Book of Chameleons.
       This came out in the UK in 2006, and won the 'Independent' Foreign Fiction Prize last year -- and is now finally making it to the US (as a trade paperback original).

(Posted by: complete review)    - permanent link -

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       PEN World Voices: Bookforum: Political Engagement report

       Asli Erdogan could not make it to the festival, due to illness, so Bookforum: Political Engagement was a two-man show, with Nuruddin Farah and Elias Khoury, moderated by Albert Mobilio.
       Farah and Khoury come from perhaps the two places in the world that have been most seriously and violently unsettled for the longest, Somalia and Lebanon. Farah has lived in exile for decades, while Khoury -- though he currently teaches at NYU -- says he has never been an exile. For Khoury, Beirut has always been central to his writing, while Farah said he found exile helped his writing: "distance distills", he said, allowing him to get at the pure essence of the place, as he has continued to live in the 'country of his imagination'.
       For Khoury the language to write in was never a political choice: he only knew how to write in Arabic he said (though he completed his graduate studies in Paris (i.e. is presumably fluent in French) and certainly speaks English well enough). For Farah the situation was more complicated: raised in the Somali-speaking part of Ethiopia, he learned a number of languages but faced various hurdles -- most notably, at least with Somali, the fact that the Somali language had no written script until 1972 ..... With Somali, Amharic, Arabic, and English to choose from -- and trying his hand at it seems like all of them -- he claimed that it was the typewriters that decided it: English had the strong, dependable Royal typewriters. Later he also wrote in Italian, but those Olivettis kept breaking down ..... (He also noted that he wrote the first seven chapters of Maps in Somali and published them in serial form, only to be hauled before the censors, who demanded changes he was not willing to agree to; publication was suspended, and he switched to English.)
       Politics seems almost inevitably to play a role in these authors' writings, but there was also some discussion of their activity beyond just writing -- including Farah's role in trying to help broker peace in Somalia, and Khoury's opposition to a Holocaust-denying event and then his response to an Israeli ambassador lauding him for that action (he did not particularly appreciate it, suggesting that denouncing some of the Israeli treatment of Palestinians would be the better response).
       Farah, in particular, has a nice way of mixing anecdotes into his answers to make his points, but both authors were in good form, making for a fairly interesting event.

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

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       PEN World Voices: Day five preview

       Saturday is loaded with events -- 22 of them.
       Once again,the overlap makes it hard to pick and choose, but we'll probably aim for Private Lives, Public Lives, Other Lives, New Lives with Ingo Schulze in conversation with Eliot Weinberger (13:00),and then African Wars with Nuruddin Farah, Chenjerai Hove, and Abdourahman Waberi, moderated by Violaine Huisman (15:00) -- Farah showed us he's worth paying attention to, and given the catastrophic situation these very days in Zimbabwe we're interested in what Hove can tell us (and Waberi's In the United States of Africa is one of the translations we're most eagerly anticipating).
       So we'll miss Olympic Voices: A Celebration of New Literature from China, which is too bad (though with Flora Drew, Xiaolu Guo, and Ma Jian it's more like a China-in-the-UK event anyway).

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