October to December 2022: Prize winners in their own language
DiscussionsReading Globally
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1thorold
Last year we had a Theme Read on "Translation prize winners" (https://www.librarything.com/topic/335649#). That led to the suggestion that we should move on to look at writers who have won prestigious awards in their own countries or language-regions. Many of those writers will have been translated into English (or other languages some of us can read), but maybe we weren't paying attention when the translation came out. And maybe the people giving those prizes had quite different criteria from what we would be looking for?
Rather than having a single "moderator" for the theme read, the suggestion was made that we should make this a team effort. So, it's up to you. Grab your prize, and tell us about
—how it's awarded,
—how it's seen in the region,
—pick out some interesting recent winners. (e.g. last five awards, books you've read, books you mean to read...)
I'll try to seed the discussion a bit by listing a few obvious big prizes, but please feel free to jump in.
We can refine parameters as we go, but maybe as a starting point we should say that we're looking at any award that has fairly wide recognition in its region and that is given for books (especially novels, but we needn't limit ourselves to that) or a body of literary work, in a language other than English.
If we get that far, maybe we can also consider looking at awards given for writing in English in regions that don't include the usual suspects of US/UK/IE/CA/AU/NZ.
Wikipedia's giant list of literary awards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_literary_awards
For extra background, there's a recent discussion of the general problems of prizes in Club Read (https://www.librarything.com/topic/337585#7943011), sparked by eternal the "who's going to get the Nobel?" question.
Rather than having a single "moderator" for the theme read, the suggestion was made that we should make this a team effort. So, it's up to you. Grab your prize, and tell us about
—how it's awarded,
—how it's seen in the region,
—pick out some interesting recent winners. (e.g. last five awards, books you've read, books you mean to read...)
I'll try to seed the discussion a bit by listing a few obvious big prizes, but please feel free to jump in.
We can refine parameters as we go, but maybe as a starting point we should say that we're looking at any award that has fairly wide recognition in its region and that is given for books (especially novels, but we needn't limit ourselves to that) or a body of literary work, in a language other than English.
If we get that far, maybe we can also consider looking at awards given for writing in English in regions that don't include the usual suspects of US/UK/IE/CA/AU/NZ.
Wikipedia's giant list of literary awards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_literary_awards
For extra background, there's a recent discussion of the general problems of prizes in Club Read (https://www.librarything.com/topic/337585#7943011), sparked by eternal the "who's going to get the Nobel?" question.
2LolaWalser
I've never paid much attention to literary prizes, but that may have been because the winners, especially of the most prestigious ones, would inevitably filter through the environment and into my sleepy consciousness anyway.
Apart from the Nobels (unavoidable), I was most aware of Italy's and Yugoslavia's highest prizes.
Italian: Strega, Bancarella, Campiello. Bagutta and Viareggio, older than the preceding, have the distinction of being instituted under fascism, so anyone intending to read the winners from the start, say, may want to be aware of that (which is not to say that all the awardees were fascists, or equally so...)
Yugoslav republics each had various literary prizes awarded by their academies or literary societies or magazines etc., and on the most important ones there were no restrictions on who could win (a Macedonian could get a Slovene prize etc.) The ones I remember (so presumably they really mattered) were Ninova nagrada (the prize awarded by the magazine NIN, based in Serbia), for the best novel. It had a great impact, was much talked about etc.
Then there were Goranov Vijenac (Goran's Wreath; in memory of Ivan Goran Kovačić) for poetry, and also for poetry, Zmajeva nagrada (in memory of Jovan Jovanović Zmaj. I just googled and apparently I'm missing oodles more, but there's probably little point to listing them as accessible translations are likely scarce.
However, I did come across an article by Miljenko Jergovic about the history of "Ninova nagrada", which seems interesting both for its topic and the general topic of politics around the prizes. I think I'll make an effort to translate it, could be my one contribution to the theme.
Apart from the Nobels (unavoidable), I was most aware of Italy's and Yugoslavia's highest prizes.
Italian: Strega, Bancarella, Campiello. Bagutta and Viareggio, older than the preceding, have the distinction of being instituted under fascism, so anyone intending to read the winners from the start, say, may want to be aware of that (which is not to say that all the awardees were fascists, or equally so...)
Yugoslav republics each had various literary prizes awarded by their academies or literary societies or magazines etc., and on the most important ones there were no restrictions on who could win (a Macedonian could get a Slovene prize etc.) The ones I remember (so presumably they really mattered) were Ninova nagrada (the prize awarded by the magazine NIN, based in Serbia), for the best novel. It had a great impact, was much talked about etc.
Then there were Goranov Vijenac (Goran's Wreath; in memory of Ivan Goran Kovačić) for poetry, and also for poetry, Zmajeva nagrada (in memory of Jovan Jovanović Zmaj. I just googled and apparently I'm missing oodles more, but there's probably little point to listing them as accessible translations are likely scarce.
However, I did come across an article by Miljenko Jergovic about the history of "Ninova nagrada", which seems interesting both for its topic and the general topic of politics around the prizes. I think I'll make an effort to translate it, could be my one contribution to the theme.
3SassyLassy
Just for a start:
Like everything else in China, literary awards are highly political. In 1949 the China National Literature Workers Association, under the umbrella of the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles was formed with Mao Dun as the chair until 1981. Lao She, Zhou Yang, and Ding Ling were also there at the start. Mao was succeeded by Ba Jin, then Tie Ning The organization is now known as the Chinese Writers Association. Many of the vice-chairs over the years are known in the west, having been translated into English, including Lao She, Ai Qing (poet), Lu Wenfu, Mo Yan and Jia Pingwa. It is this association which controls two of the major prizes including the
Lu Xun Literary Prize awarded every 3 years. There are seven categories, including the very Chinese sounding "National Excellent Prose Essay Prize". One insight into China is through the "National Outstanding Literary Translation Award" winners, which include an anthology of Wordsworth, one of Keats, Don Quixote, The Odyssey, the Divine Comedy, and among all these classics, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting - just an insight into the mindset of the committee.
The top award for novels is the Mao Dun Literature Prize awarded every 4 years since 1982. Books must be written by a Chinese national, published in mainland China, and be over 130,000 characters. The published in mainland China is the tricky part, for it automatically means the work has official approval, conforming to current thought.
More influence appears in the Lao She Literary Award, named after the author of Rickshaw Boy, and awarded to a Beijing writer. It has been awarded sporadically since 2000. Drama and screenwriting are also included, and Li Xiaoming is a past winner. Yan Lianke has won for The Joy of Living in 2004, yet his Dream of Ding Village has been banned.
------
In an effort to get away from party influence, the 10,000 USD Newman Prize for Chinese Literature, established at the University of Oklahoma, is awarded every 2 years for outstanding achievement in prose or poetry that best captures the human condition. Living authors writing in Chinese are eligible, which opens it to writers outside the PRC. The judging panel has included Chinese speaking westerners over the years. Winners of this prize are probably easiest to find. They include:
2009 Mo Yan Nobel Prize winner - Life and Death are Wearing Me Out
"It's nobody's fault... Everything is determined by fate and there's now way anyone can escape it"
2011 Han Shaogong - A Dictionary of Maqiao - a lyrical book I have only partially read, as it seems to still be in one of those boxes from my move
2013 Yang Mu - Diaspsis Patelliformi (a poetry year}
2015 Chu Ti'en-wen - Fin-de-siecle short fiction
2017 Wang Anyi - Reality and Fiction Nanjing and Shanghai
2019 Xi Xi - poet from Hong Kong
2021 Yan Lianke - Lenin's Kisses - one I will be reading after AnnieMod's review
NB Some titles are in italics as the touchstones are giving weird responses. Perhaps they don't translate well. I also have no idea how Pope Pius XI appeared (maybe some of the titles would be on the Index?!)
_____________________
as to the Nobel Prize, my perennial nominee is Ismail Kadare
Like everything else in China, literary awards are highly political. In 1949 the China National Literature Workers Association, under the umbrella of the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles was formed with Mao Dun as the chair until 1981. Lao She, Zhou Yang, and Ding Ling were also there at the start. Mao was succeeded by Ba Jin, then Tie Ning The organization is now known as the Chinese Writers Association. Many of the vice-chairs over the years are known in the west, having been translated into English, including Lao She, Ai Qing (poet), Lu Wenfu, Mo Yan and Jia Pingwa. It is this association which controls two of the major prizes including the
Lu Xun Literary Prize awarded every 3 years. There are seven categories, including the very Chinese sounding "National Excellent Prose Essay Prize". One insight into China is through the "National Outstanding Literary Translation Award" winners, which include an anthology of Wordsworth, one of Keats, Don Quixote, The Odyssey, the Divine Comedy, and among all these classics, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting - just an insight into the mindset of the committee.
The top award for novels is the Mao Dun Literature Prize awarded every 4 years since 1982. Books must be written by a Chinese national, published in mainland China, and be over 130,000 characters. The published in mainland China is the tricky part, for it automatically means the work has official approval, conforming to current thought.
More influence appears in the Lao She Literary Award, named after the author of Rickshaw Boy, and awarded to a Beijing writer. It has been awarded sporadically since 2000. Drama and screenwriting are also included, and Li Xiaoming is a past winner. Yan Lianke has won for The Joy of Living in 2004, yet his Dream of Ding Village has been banned.
------
In an effort to get away from party influence, the 10,000 USD Newman Prize for Chinese Literature, established at the University of Oklahoma, is awarded every 2 years for outstanding achievement in prose or poetry that best captures the human condition. Living authors writing in Chinese are eligible, which opens it to writers outside the PRC. The judging panel has included Chinese speaking westerners over the years. Winners of this prize are probably easiest to find. They include:
2009 Mo Yan Nobel Prize winner - Life and Death are Wearing Me Out
"It's nobody's fault... Everything is determined by fate and there's now way anyone can escape it"
2011 Han Shaogong - A Dictionary of Maqiao - a lyrical book I have only partially read, as it seems to still be in one of those boxes from my move
2013 Yang Mu - Diaspsis Patelliformi (a poetry year}
2015 Chu Ti'en-wen - Fin-de-siecle short fiction
2017 Wang Anyi - Reality and Fiction Nanjing and Shanghai
2019 Xi Xi - poet from Hong Kong
2021 Yan Lianke - Lenin's Kisses - one I will be reading after AnnieMod's review
NB Some titles are in italics as the touchstones are giving weird responses. Perhaps they don't translate well. I also have no idea how Pope Pius XI appeared (maybe some of the titles would be on the Index?!)
_____________________
as to the Nobel Prize, my perennial nominee is Ismail Kadare
4LolaWalser
>3 SassyLassy:
But prizes can't avoid being political, can we please not foster this liberal illusion? (Only the "extremes" are political, nice white middle class people are somehow above it all.) And seriously, an American prize awarded to Chinese authors, demonstratively pitting itself against PRC--it doesn't get more political than that.
But prizes can't avoid being political, can we please not foster this liberal illusion? (Only the "extremes" are political, nice white middle class people are somehow above it all.) And seriously, an American prize awarded to Chinese authors, demonstratively pitting itself against PRC--it doesn't get more political than that.
5labfs39
>3 SassyLassy: I picked up A Dictionary of Maqiao last year and have been meaning to get to it. The structure is interesting, but I haven't read any of it yet to know how well it works.
6thorold
I don't tend to watch prizes much, but I do keep at least half an eye on the top awards in French, because I only visit French-speaking countries at most once or twice a year, and I'm too lazy to read any French book review papers. Seeing that someone has won a Goncourt or something is at least a nudge to check whether I've missed something interesting.
The main literary awards in French (these are all open to people writing in French anywhere in the world. The frequency with which they are awarded to non-European writers ranges from low to very low.):
Prix Goncourt awarded since 1903 to works by "beginning authors", probably the most prestigious French award, even though the prize-money is purely nominal. They've got it right quite a few times, with previous winners including people like Proust and Simone de Beauvoir. https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Prix+Goncourt
Recent winners:
The Order of the Day by Eric Vuillard 2017
Leurs enfants après eux by Nicolas Mathieu 2018
Tous les hommes n'habitent pas le monde de la même façon by Jean-Paul Dubois 2019
The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier 2020
La plus secrète mémoire des hommes by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr 2021
Prix Renaudot awarded since 1926, at the same event as the Goncourt. It's awarded by a separate jury, but it's seen as the "runners-up" prize for those who just miss out on a Goncourt. https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Prix+Renaudot
Recent winners:
The Disappearance of Josef Mengele by Olivier Guez 2017
Le sillon by Valérie Manteau 2018
Deux sœurs by David Foenkinos 2019
La panthère des neiges by Sylvain Tesson 2019
Histoire du fils by Marie-Hélène Lafon 2020
Premier Sang by Amélie Nothomb 2021
Prix Femina awarded since 1904. Set up with an all-female jury by a women's magazine as a protest against the sexism of the Goncourt (probably justified: it took the Goncourt jury another forty years before they first gave their prize to a woman author). Despite the name it is open to books by both women and men. Famous winners include Vol de nuit by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1931). https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Prix+Femina
Recent winners:
La Serpe by Philippe Jaenada 2017
Le lambeau (Disturbance: Surviving Charlie Hebdo) by Philippe Lançon 2018
Par les routes by Sylvain Prudhomme 2019
Nature humaine by Serge Joncour 2020
S'adapter by Clara Dupont-Monod 2021
Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française awarded since 1915 by a jury of twelve academicians. https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Grand+Prix+du+Roman+de+l%27Académie+fran...
Recent winners:
Mécaniques du chaos: roman by Daniel Rondeau 2017
L'Été des quatre rois by Camille Pascal 2018
Civilizations by Laurent Binet 2019
La grande épreuve by Etienne de Montety 2020
Mon maître et mon vainqueur by François-Henri Désérable 2021
All these awards have various sub-awards for non-fiction, translated books, etc. A couple of them also have an award given by a jury of high-school students ("Goncourt des lycéens", etc.), and these also carry pretty high prestige.
A few notable winners I've read in fairly recent times:
Friday, or, The Other Island by Michel Tournier (Académie 1967) — a tree-hugging (adults only type!) sixties take on Robinson Crusoe
La place (A man's place) by Annie Ernaux (Renaudot 1984) — Annie Ernaux's most direct dissection of her social separation from her working-class parents
Texaco by Patrick Chamoiseau (Goncourt 1992) — amazing novel about the history and language of Martinique, seen from the point of view of a shanty-town dweller
Pas pleurer (Cry, mother Spain) by Lydia Salvayre (Goncourt 2016) — another linguistically inventive book, focussing on the memories of a Spanish Republican refugee in France
Civilizations by Laurent Binet (Académie 2019) — a fun alternative-history novel in which the Americans conquer Europe in the 16th century
The main literary awards in French (these are all open to people writing in French anywhere in the world. The frequency with which they are awarded to non-European writers ranges from low to very low.):
Prix Goncourt awarded since 1903 to works by "beginning authors", probably the most prestigious French award, even though the prize-money is purely nominal. They've got it right quite a few times, with previous winners including people like Proust and Simone de Beauvoir. https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Prix+Goncourt
Recent winners:
The Order of the Day by Eric Vuillard 2017
Leurs enfants après eux by Nicolas Mathieu 2018
Tous les hommes n'habitent pas le monde de la même façon by Jean-Paul Dubois 2019
The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier 2020
La plus secrète mémoire des hommes by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr 2021
Prix Renaudot awarded since 1926, at the same event as the Goncourt. It's awarded by a separate jury, but it's seen as the "runners-up" prize for those who just miss out on a Goncourt. https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Prix+Renaudot
Recent winners:
The Disappearance of Josef Mengele by Olivier Guez 2017
Le sillon by Valérie Manteau 2018
Deux sœurs by David Foenkinos 2019
La panthère des neiges by Sylvain Tesson 2019
Histoire du fils by Marie-Hélène Lafon 2020
Premier Sang by Amélie Nothomb 2021
Prix Femina awarded since 1904. Set up with an all-female jury by a women's magazine as a protest against the sexism of the Goncourt (probably justified: it took the Goncourt jury another forty years before they first gave their prize to a woman author). Despite the name it is open to books by both women and men. Famous winners include Vol de nuit by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1931). https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Prix+Femina
Recent winners:
La Serpe by Philippe Jaenada 2017
Le lambeau (Disturbance: Surviving Charlie Hebdo) by Philippe Lançon 2018
Par les routes by Sylvain Prudhomme 2019
Nature humaine by Serge Joncour 2020
S'adapter by Clara Dupont-Monod 2021
Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française awarded since 1915 by a jury of twelve academicians. https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Grand+Prix+du+Roman+de+l%27Académie+fran...
Recent winners:
Mécaniques du chaos: roman by Daniel Rondeau 2017
L'Été des quatre rois by Camille Pascal 2018
Civilizations by Laurent Binet 2019
La grande épreuve by Etienne de Montety 2020
Mon maître et mon vainqueur by François-Henri Désérable 2021
All these awards have various sub-awards for non-fiction, translated books, etc. A couple of them also have an award given by a jury of high-school students ("Goncourt des lycéens", etc.), and these also carry pretty high prestige.
A few notable winners I've read in fairly recent times:
Friday, or, The Other Island by Michel Tournier (Académie 1967) — a tree-hugging (adults only type!) sixties take on Robinson Crusoe
La place (A man's place) by Annie Ernaux (Renaudot 1984) — Annie Ernaux's most direct dissection of her social separation from her working-class parents
Texaco by Patrick Chamoiseau (Goncourt 1992) — amazing novel about the history and language of Martinique, seen from the point of view of a shanty-town dweller
Pas pleurer (Cry, mother Spain) by Lydia Salvayre (Goncourt 2016) — another linguistically inventive book, focussing on the memories of a Spanish Republican refugee in France
Civilizations by Laurent Binet (Académie 2019) — a fun alternative-history novel in which the Americans conquer Europe in the 16th century
7thorold
Major prizes for Dutch literature:
Predictably, it's all a bit more anarchic than France, without any stable pecking order. Important prizes include at least these:
Libris Literatuur Prijs since 1994, a Dutch clone of the Booker, sponsored by a big bookstore chain. The main prize is worth 50 000 euros. https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Libris+Literatuur+Prijs
Recent winners:
Wees onzichtbaar by Murat Isik 2018
De goede zoon by Rob van Essen 2019
Uit het leven van een hond by Sander Kollaard 2020
Cliënt E. Busken by Jeroen Brouwers 2021
Wormmaan by Mariken Heitman 2022
Boekenbon Literatuurprijs this started life as the AKO literatuurprijs in 1987, and has gone through numerous changes of name and sponsor since then. Sponsors have included both Dutch and Flemish companies. The current sponsorship deal runs out in two years... https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Boekenbon+Literatuurprijs https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/BookSpot+Literatuurprijs https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/ECI+Literatuurprijs
Recent winners:
De mensengenezer by Koen Peeters 2017 (ECI)
The Blessed Rita by Tommy Wieringa 2018 (BookSpot)
De hoogstapelaar by Wessel te Gussinklo 2019 (BookSpot)
Zwarte schuur by Oek De Jong 2020
Op weg naar De Hartz by Wessel te Gussinklo 2021
Fintro Literatuurprijs/Gouden Uil this was a Belgian-based prize for Dutch-language literature, awarded from 1995 until 2017, when it seems to have run out of sponsors. The last winner was WIL by Jeroen Olyslaegers https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Gouden+Uil
P.C. Hooft-prijs this is a prestigious "whole oeuvre" prize, awarded since 1947 to writers with Dutch nationality, irrespective of which language they write in (it was awarded to Elisabeth Eybers (1915-2007), a poet who lived in the Netherlands but wrote in Afrikaans).
Recent winners:
2018 – Nachoem Wijnberg
2019 – Marga Minco see e.g. Het bitter kruid (Bitter herbs) — there was a minor scandal because the president of the jury turned out to be a descendant of people who had robbed Minco's Jewish family during the war: they stepped down and someone else presented the prize
2020 – Maxim Februari see e.g. De literaire kring (The book club, written as Marjolijn Februari)
2021 – Alfred Schaffer
2022 – Arnon Grunberg see e.g. Blauwe Maandagen (Blue Mondays)
Predictably, it's all a bit more anarchic than France, without any stable pecking order. Important prizes include at least these:
Libris Literatuur Prijs since 1994, a Dutch clone of the Booker, sponsored by a big bookstore chain. The main prize is worth 50 000 euros. https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Libris+Literatuur+Prijs
Recent winners:
Wees onzichtbaar by Murat Isik 2018
De goede zoon by Rob van Essen 2019
Uit het leven van een hond by Sander Kollaard 2020
Cliënt E. Busken by Jeroen Brouwers 2021
Wormmaan by Mariken Heitman 2022
Boekenbon Literatuurprijs this started life as the AKO literatuurprijs in 1987, and has gone through numerous changes of name and sponsor since then. Sponsors have included both Dutch and Flemish companies. The current sponsorship deal runs out in two years... https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Boekenbon+Literatuurprijs https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/BookSpot+Literatuurprijs https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/ECI+Literatuurprijs
Recent winners:
De mensengenezer by Koen Peeters 2017 (ECI)
The Blessed Rita by Tommy Wieringa 2018 (BookSpot)
De hoogstapelaar by Wessel te Gussinklo 2019 (BookSpot)
Zwarte schuur by Oek De Jong 2020
Op weg naar De Hartz by Wessel te Gussinklo 2021
Fintro Literatuurprijs/Gouden Uil this was a Belgian-based prize for Dutch-language literature, awarded from 1995 until 2017, when it seems to have run out of sponsors. The last winner was WIL by Jeroen Olyslaegers https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Gouden+Uil
P.C. Hooft-prijs this is a prestigious "whole oeuvre" prize, awarded since 1947 to writers with Dutch nationality, irrespective of which language they write in (it was awarded to Elisabeth Eybers (1915-2007), a poet who lived in the Netherlands but wrote in Afrikaans).
Recent winners:
2018 – Nachoem Wijnberg
2019 – Marga Minco see e.g. Het bitter kruid (Bitter herbs) — there was a minor scandal because the president of the jury turned out to be a descendant of people who had robbed Minco's Jewish family during the war: they stepped down and someone else presented the prize
2020 – Maxim Februari see e.g. De literaire kring (The book club, written as Marjolijn Februari)
2021 – Alfred Schaffer
2022 – Arnon Grunberg see e.g. Blauwe Maandagen (Blue Mondays)
8cindydavid4
can I pick awards for childrens books?
9cindydavid4
>6 thorold: Civilizations sounds interesting, will need to find it (havent read Hhhh)
could you consider childrens book awards" ?
could you consider childrens book awards" ?
10AnnieMod
>9 cindydavid4: As long as they fit into the category (aka are given for books written in other languages than English) and not for translations, I don’t see why they would not be eligible.
11cindydavid4
got it, thx!
ETA well this is disappointing International children’s book awards lists American, Canadian, Australian, ans Sweden Any links that might serve me better?
ETA well this is disappointing International children’s book awards lists American, Canadian, Australian, ans Sweden Any links that might serve me better?
12SassyLassy
>4 LolaWalser: You're absolutely right. I should have highlighted more the intent behind the American awards. The Americans have quite a history of using authors from China for their own purposes, thinking here specifically of Pearl Buck (dreadful) and Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang) who at least can write. So, not trying to foster any ideas of nonpolitical, just emphasizing the tight criteria for some of the prizes for those who may not be familiar with them.
13thorold
>11 cindydavid4: There seems to be a bigger list on French Wikipedia: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catégorie:Prix_de_littérature_d%27enfance_et_de_...
14cindydavid4
>12 SassyLassy: well when I first read the good earth in jr high it opened up a whole world to me. As an adult I might think differently but I mustve reread that book a dozen or more times. Perhaps it didn't deserve the Noble, it greatly influenced my later interest in world history and countries around the world. Just sayin :)
15cindydavid4
>13 thorold: cool, and it allows me to read it in english Gracias!
16LolaWalser
>12 SassyLassy:
No problem, and sorry if I'm being Captain Obvious again... I'm afraid that can't be helped.
Aw, Pearl Buck... I devoured her novels on the cusp of adolescence--The pavillion of women; Mandala; East wind, South wind, The good earth (may have mangled some titles, been a long time). But I'm guessing those memories should probably be left "as is".
>11 cindydavid4:
In addition to the Danish "Hans Christian Andersen" prize, there is also the Italian Premio Andersen--couldn't find anything in English but there's a list of past winners at this link which ought to be clear enough. However, it's not limited to the Italians.
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premio_Andersen
No problem, and sorry if I'm being Captain Obvious again... I'm afraid that can't be helped.
Aw, Pearl Buck... I devoured her novels on the cusp of adolescence--The pavillion of women; Mandala; East wind, South wind, The good earth (may have mangled some titles, been a long time). But I'm guessing those memories should probably be left "as is".
>11 cindydavid4:
In addition to the Danish "Hans Christian Andersen" prize, there is also the Italian Premio Andersen--couldn't find anything in English but there's a list of past winners at this link which ought to be clear enough. However, it's not limited to the Italians.
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premio_Andersen
17cindydavid4
Ce message a été supprimé par son auteur
18AnnieMod
>17 cindydavid4: Interesting list but "Nominated titles must be primarily written in English (fully bilingual is okay) and available for purchase in North America." kinda makes it the opposite of what we are looking for this quarter I think... We are looking for books getting awards in the language they are written in (and that language cannot be English). Unless I am misreading something above.
19AnnieMod
Let's stay exotic for a bit with "International Prize for Arabic Fiction" aka The Arabic Booker Prize.
The prize is administered by the Booker Prize Foundation in London, and is currently funded by Department of Culture and Tourism, Abu Dhabi. The rules are here: https://www.arabicfiction.org/en/rules-of-submission. A short version of the:
- Literary novel.
- Published on paper with ISBN by an established publisher. No self-published books and vanity publishers
- The novel must be written in Arabic: Arabic translations of a book originally written in any other language are not eligible.
- Living authors only.
The list of judges is different every year and features people from different countries and often includes academics, translators and critics who do not live or work in Arabic speaking countries but work with or in Arabic. Wikipedia has the list of judges: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Prize_for_Arabic_Fiction#Winners_and...
LT has (some of) the winners here: https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/International+Prize+for+Arabic+Fiction
Complete list of nominees and winners: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Prize_for_Arabic_Fiction#Winners_and...
Note that the titles may not be the same as the titles of the books when they finally get translated into English (where is the fun in them matching -- for example the 2019 winner "The Night Mail" came out in English as Voices of the Lost.
I've read two of the winners: The Italian by Shukri Mabkhout (2015 winner; Tunisia) and Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi (2014, Iraq). Reviews are posted for both if someone is interested. They were both very good and very different and both were distinctly Arabian although the local flavor of their own country was also there and not just in the locales.
I had been meaning to get back to check on other winners so maybe this is the time.
The prize is administered by the Booker Prize Foundation in London, and is currently funded by Department of Culture and Tourism, Abu Dhabi. The rules are here: https://www.arabicfiction.org/en/rules-of-submission. A short version of the:
- Literary novel.
- Published on paper with ISBN by an established publisher. No self-published books and vanity publishers
- The novel must be written in Arabic: Arabic translations of a book originally written in any other language are not eligible.
- Living authors only.
The list of judges is different every year and features people from different countries and often includes academics, translators and critics who do not live or work in Arabic speaking countries but work with or in Arabic. Wikipedia has the list of judges: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Prize_for_Arabic_Fiction#Winners_and...
LT has (some of) the winners here: https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/International+Prize+for+Arabic+Fiction
Complete list of nominees and winners: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Prize_for_Arabic_Fiction#Winners_and...
Note that the titles may not be the same as the titles of the books when they finally get translated into English (where is the fun in them matching -- for example the 2019 winner "The Night Mail" came out in English as Voices of the Lost.
I've read two of the winners: The Italian by Shukri Mabkhout (2015 winner; Tunisia) and Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi (2014, Iraq). Reviews are posted for both if someone is interested. They were both very good and very different and both were distinctly Arabian although the local flavor of their own country was also there and not just in the locales.
I had been meaning to get back to check on other winners so maybe this is the time.
20cindydavid4
>18 AnnieMod: . As soon as I saw that I knew it wasn't right. Of course I didn't see it untill I spent a lot of time gathering info. ok Ill delete it
21AnnieMod
>20 cindydavid4: Nope, don't. Just edit it to mention that it is out of scope but as work was done and so on :) It is a good list - it just does not belong. Still - work done and all that -- so someone will find it interesting :)
22rocketjk
I bought a used book today called Agatha Moudio's Son by Camaroonian author and musician Francis Bebey which I thought would be of interest for this thread as it was the winner of the The Grand Prix Littéraire d'Afrique Noire.
According to Wikipedia: "The Grand Prix Littéraire d'Afrique Noire (one of the major literary prizes of Black Africa for Francophone Literature) is a literary prize presented every year by the ADELF, the Association of French Language Writers for a French original text from Sub-Saharan Africa. I don't think this prize has been mentioned yet here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_prix_littéraire_d'Afrique_noire
According to Wikipedia: "The Grand Prix Littéraire d'Afrique Noire (one of the major literary prizes of Black Africa for Francophone Literature) is a literary prize presented every year by the ADELF, the Association of French Language Writers for a French original text from Sub-Saharan Africa. I don't think this prize has been mentioned yet here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_prix_littéraire_d'Afrique_noire
23AnnieMod
And I managed to finish a book for this quarter, another winner (the 2019 one) of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction aka the Arabic Booker (2019) (details about the award in >19 AnnieMod:):
Voices of the Lost by Hoda Barakat, translated from Arabic by Marilyn Booth
Yale University Press, paperback with flaps, 45k words
Original publication: 2018 (in Arabic as بريد الليل (roughly translated as "The Night Mail"); 2021 in English (this translation)
A man writes a letter to his lover. But it is not a love letter - it is a letter about the man's feelings and past; about his hopes and his inner demons. And the further you read into this letter, the less you like the man - he is possessive and controlling; he seems to have expectations of his lover which would not apply to him. The letter is never finished and a lot of the passages in the letter remain unfinished. It reads more like a diary than like a letter and yet, it has a recipient and the recipient is often talked to in the text.
That's how this novel opens. But the novel is not the story of this man and the woman who he writes to. The letter never reaches her - instead we read a letter by the person who found and read that first letter. The second writer comments on the letter they found, explains how they found it and then tells a story of their own. And then 3 more people find the letter of the previous writer and write their own.
The 5 writers are all different. They write to different people - an old crush, a father, a mother, a brother. The stories they tell are different but they all are stories of longing to belong and of exile or immigration; they all talk about lost connections and the loss of their families and homes. I am not sure if it was a byproduct of the lack of gender in English but it takes awhile to figure out the gender of the writer in some of the letters. The author tries to keep the voices different but they all merge a bit, becoming an almost unified voice of the people who got lost in the world. And yet, there is some difference under it all - because the crimes and stories people confess to are different; the hardship they lived through had marked them. One of the writers was tortured and then became what he hated the most; one of them escaped a forced marriage; one of them was thrown out for what he was. The letters tell their stories the way they see them - how their own consciousness allows them to see the story. We only see the end of the story for one of those writers; the others remain open for now.
If the novel contained only these 5 letters, it would still be an interesting read - albeit an incomplete one. The author seemed to agree so these letters are just the first part of the novel. The second part revisits the same stories but from the other side - in some cases we see the recipient and their thoughts about the writer; in some cases we see someone who the writer talked about and way the writer influenced their life. Almost all of the stories get their resolutions - combine the respective sections of the two parts of the novel and you get an almost complete story. As is usually the case, the complete story is very different from the one side you see when you read the letters in the first part and it makes you wonder what the actual truth is - after all the second part is the viewpoint of another participant and not of a narrator who can see all sides.
And then there is the 5th letter, the last one in this chain of letters, the one which noone finds. Its story continuation in the second part does not resolve its story, neither we really learn a lot of new things because of how that part is structured. So how do we learn about it then? That's what the third part of the novel ties together - with a sixth letter - the only one to be written without a real recipient (or is the reader the recipient?) and by a man who is not away from home (or not too far away anyway). It ties the novel together and works almost as a summary of the whole novel - even though it does not really mention the fifth letter, the end of the story of that letter is there.
The country where everyone comes from and the countries they are in when they write their letters are never named. One of the letter-writers believes that the previous one in the chain was from Lebanon and some of the clues point in that direction as well - the author is also from Lebanon so even if invented, the country was probably based on Lebanon. But the country is never really named; neither is any of the character named. As much as the characters are individuals and come alive at the page of the novel, they are also "the lost" - the nameless and the country-less. And at the end it does not matter - their stories work without names and without locations - all you need to know that it is an Arab country which was at least partially taken over by Daesh - being invented or a real one is irrelevant for the stories.
Some of the letters contain very graphic description of torture - some of it named with its proper name, some if it not. It makes these section hard to read and while at the start the novel mostly hints at these, the later letters openly discusses them. They made sense - the writers were writing their own stories and having lived through the horrors, they had become somewhat used to thinking about them (and it is not surprising that the person who was the most graphic was also the one who had inflicted enough horrors on other people).
It is a novel about losing everything - family, country, yourself. And while its structure can be a bit scattered and the novel may be losing its coherence as a whole in places, it still works. Its original name translates as "Night mail" and I suspect that it carries connotations which I am not aware of and cannot recognize. Its English title is apt and tells you exactly what you get in the short novel. So even if I usually do not like creative translations of titles, I think that here it works better than the original one.
I don't think that the novel will work for everyone and the narrative style takes awhile to get used to (plus a lot of the letter writers are not people you would want to hang out with) but if you can get immersed into the story and you are not too bothered by the graphic language, it is a gem of a novel - an imperfect one but still worth reading.
===
This is the third winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (aka the Arabic Booker) I had read and all three are very different (the other two are the 2015 winner The Italian and the 2014 one Frankenstein in Baghdad). All 3 of them are very Arabian and yet very different.
Hoda Barakat is just the second woman to win the award (in 2019, the 12th year of the award existence - the first woman to win was Raja Alem in 2011 although it was also the only time when the award was split between two novels).
Voices of the Lost by Hoda Barakat, translated from Arabic by Marilyn Booth
Yale University Press, paperback with flaps, 45k words
Original publication: 2018 (in Arabic as بريد الليل (roughly translated as "The Night Mail"); 2021 in English (this translation)
A man writes a letter to his lover. But it is not a love letter - it is a letter about the man's feelings and past; about his hopes and his inner demons. And the further you read into this letter, the less you like the man - he is possessive and controlling; he seems to have expectations of his lover which would not apply to him. The letter is never finished and a lot of the passages in the letter remain unfinished. It reads more like a diary than like a letter and yet, it has a recipient and the recipient is often talked to in the text.
That's how this novel opens. But the novel is not the story of this man and the woman who he writes to. The letter never reaches her - instead we read a letter by the person who found and read that first letter. The second writer comments on the letter they found, explains how they found it and then tells a story of their own. And then 3 more people find the letter of the previous writer and write their own.
The 5 writers are all different. They write to different people - an old crush, a father, a mother, a brother. The stories they tell are different but they all are stories of longing to belong and of exile or immigration; they all talk about lost connections and the loss of their families and homes. I am not sure if it was a byproduct of the lack of gender in English but it takes awhile to figure out the gender of the writer in some of the letters. The author tries to keep the voices different but they all merge a bit, becoming an almost unified voice of the people who got lost in the world. And yet, there is some difference under it all - because the crimes and stories people confess to are different; the hardship they lived through had marked them. One of the writers was tortured and then became what he hated the most; one of them escaped a forced marriage; one of them was thrown out for what he was. The letters tell their stories the way they see them - how their own consciousness allows them to see the story. We only see the end of the story for one of those writers; the others remain open for now.
If the novel contained only these 5 letters, it would still be an interesting read - albeit an incomplete one. The author seemed to agree so these letters are just the first part of the novel. The second part revisits the same stories but from the other side - in some cases we see the recipient and their thoughts about the writer; in some cases we see someone who the writer talked about and way the writer influenced their life. Almost all of the stories get their resolutions - combine the respective sections of the two parts of the novel and you get an almost complete story. As is usually the case, the complete story is very different from the one side you see when you read the letters in the first part and it makes you wonder what the actual truth is - after all the second part is the viewpoint of another participant and not of a narrator who can see all sides.
And then there is the 5th letter, the last one in this chain of letters, the one which noone finds. Its story continuation in the second part does not resolve its story, neither we really learn a lot of new things because of how that part is structured. So how do we learn about it then? That's what the third part of the novel ties together - with a sixth letter - the only one to be written without a real recipient (or is the reader the recipient?) and by a man who is not away from home (or not too far away anyway). It ties the novel together and works almost as a summary of the whole novel - even though it does not really mention the fifth letter, the end of the story of that letter is there.
The country where everyone comes from and the countries they are in when they write their letters are never named. One of the letter-writers believes that the previous one in the chain was from Lebanon and some of the clues point in that direction as well - the author is also from Lebanon so even if invented, the country was probably based on Lebanon. But the country is never really named; neither is any of the character named. As much as the characters are individuals and come alive at the page of the novel, they are also "the lost" - the nameless and the country-less. And at the end it does not matter - their stories work without names and without locations - all you need to know that it is an Arab country which was at least partially taken over by Daesh - being invented or a real one is irrelevant for the stories.
Some of the letters contain very graphic description of torture - some of it named with its proper name, some if it not. It makes these section hard to read and while at the start the novel mostly hints at these, the later letters openly discusses them. They made sense - the writers were writing their own stories and having lived through the horrors, they had become somewhat used to thinking about them (and it is not surprising that the person who was the most graphic was also the one who had inflicted enough horrors on other people).
It is a novel about losing everything - family, country, yourself. And while its structure can be a bit scattered and the novel may be losing its coherence as a whole in places, it still works. Its original name translates as "Night mail" and I suspect that it carries connotations which I am not aware of and cannot recognize. Its English title is apt and tells you exactly what you get in the short novel. So even if I usually do not like creative translations of titles, I think that here it works better than the original one.
I don't think that the novel will work for everyone and the narrative style takes awhile to get used to (plus a lot of the letter writers are not people you would want to hang out with) but if you can get immersed into the story and you are not too bothered by the graphic language, it is a gem of a novel - an imperfect one but still worth reading.
===
This is the third winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (aka the Arabic Booker) I had read and all three are very different (the other two are the 2015 winner The Italian and the 2014 one Frankenstein in Baghdad). All 3 of them are very Arabian and yet very different.
Hoda Barakat is just the second woman to win the award (in 2019, the 12th year of the award existence - the first woman to win was Raja Alem in 2011 although it was also the only time when the award was split between two novels).
24cindydavid4
Wow! thats making me want to read this!
25cindydavid4
Ok last week I tried to post several international prizes in literature for children. Turns out, part of the eligibilty requirments that they written for the US market. So scratch that.
I tried to find some from Mexico. Both of these however are funded in the us for Hispanic American children.
https://labloga.blogspot.com/2020/09/salinas-de-alba-award-for-latino.html
https://news.txst.edu/inside-txst/2022/tomas-rivera-childrens-book-award-winners...
so doesnt Mexico have their own prize? Or would that be in Spanish and I just cant find it
26cindydavid4
ok took some google translation but i found one
The Chilean writer María Jose Ferrada wins the Cervantes Chico Iberocamericano2022 award
https://then24.com/2022/07/08/the-chilean-writer-maria-jose-ferrada-wins-the-cer...
Since 2019, the Cervantes Chico Prize has awarded the category of the Ibero-American Cervantes Chico Special Recognition, a mention promoted by the Organization of Ibero-American States (OEI) together with the Ibero-American Chair of Education of the University of Alcalá, which seeks to value the work of writers and writers of children’s and youth literature from the Ibero-American sphere within the framework of this renowned award.
The author has been recognized for her extensive work dedicated to children’s and youth literature, with more than fifty books published throughout the world and which have been translated into fourteen different languages.
His work, described as “exceptional” by the New York Times, includes themes such as the beauty of everyday childhood, but also other harsher ones such as the difficult processes that many children face in situations such as dictatorships or forced migrations.
Thus, titles such as “Children” stand out, dedicated to those under 14 years of age executed during the Chilean dictatorship; “The sadness of things”, which deals with the 3,000 arrested, disappeared and executed during that dictatorship; “Mexique, the name of the ship”, which tells the story of 456 sons and daughters of republicans who, in the midst of the Spanish civil war, embarked on an ocean liner bound for Mexico or “Kramp”, a novel that portrays the life of a girl in a dictatorship.
The Chilean writer María Jose Ferrada wins the Cervantes Chico Iberocamericano2022 award
https://then24.com/2022/07/08/the-chilean-writer-maria-jose-ferrada-wins-the-cer...
Since 2019, the Cervantes Chico Prize has awarded the category of the Ibero-American Cervantes Chico Special Recognition, a mention promoted by the Organization of Ibero-American States (OEI) together with the Ibero-American Chair of Education of the University of Alcalá, which seeks to value the work of writers and writers of children’s and youth literature from the Ibero-American sphere within the framework of this renowned award.
The author has been recognized for her extensive work dedicated to children’s and youth literature, with more than fifty books published throughout the world and which have been translated into fourteen different languages.
His work, described as “exceptional” by the New York Times, includes themes such as the beauty of everyday childhood, but also other harsher ones such as the difficult processes that many children face in situations such as dictatorships or forced migrations.
Thus, titles such as “Children” stand out, dedicated to those under 14 years of age executed during the Chilean dictatorship; “The sadness of things”, which deals with the 3,000 arrested, disappeared and executed during that dictatorship; “Mexique, the name of the ship”, which tells the story of 456 sons and daughters of republicans who, in the midst of the Spanish civil war, embarked on an ocean liner bound for Mexico or “Kramp”, a novel that portrays the life of a girl in a dictatorship.
27thorold
Dutch author Marga Minco (102 years old in the meantime) has clocked up quite a few prizes in her long career, including the Multatuli-prijs and Vijverbergprijs (now renamed F. Bordewijk-prijs) for Het bittere kruid when it first came out, and more recently the 2019 P.C. Hooft Prize for her whole oeuvre. (cf. >7 thorold: above)
This is her most famous book, much translated when it first came out:
Het bittere kruid: een kleine kroniek (1957;Bitter herbs: a little chronicle) by Marga Minco (Netherlands, 1920- )
This very sober and pared-down novella tells the story of a young Jewish girl's experiences during the German occupation of the Netherlands, in the simplest possible language and with the least possible explicit emotional input. It's the kind of book that has all its narrative power in the things it doesn't tell us, but which we know are there just under the surface. By not sharing anything about the narrator's fears and griefs, it takes us into them much more strongly than it would if everything had been spelled out.
The story is a lightly fictionalised version of Minco's own experiences — all her family were murdered in the Holocaust, but she was able to escape arrest by a stroke of luck and remained in hiding until the end of the war. She sharpens the focus a bit by making her narrator seem rather younger and more naive than she actually was herself (in reality she was already working as a journalist in May 1940). But it would be unfair to suggest that she was trying to ride in the slipstream of Anne Frank (although her publishers certainly were): this is a very different kind of book, clearly a highly sophisticated piece of literature with a strong message about the gulf that opened up under the ordinary, provincial life the Minco family and their neighbours were living, convinced that "it can't happen here," when it did.
This is her most famous book, much translated when it first came out:
Het bittere kruid: een kleine kroniek (1957;Bitter herbs: a little chronicle) by Marga Minco (Netherlands, 1920- )
This very sober and pared-down novella tells the story of a young Jewish girl's experiences during the German occupation of the Netherlands, in the simplest possible language and with the least possible explicit emotional input. It's the kind of book that has all its narrative power in the things it doesn't tell us, but which we know are there just under the surface. By not sharing anything about the narrator's fears and griefs, it takes us into them much more strongly than it would if everything had been spelled out.
The story is a lightly fictionalised version of Minco's own experiences — all her family were murdered in the Holocaust, but she was able to escape arrest by a stroke of luck and remained in hiding until the end of the war. She sharpens the focus a bit by making her narrator seem rather younger and more naive than she actually was herself (in reality she was already working as a journalist in May 1940). But it would be unfair to suggest that she was trying to ride in the slipstream of Anne Frank (although her publishers certainly were): this is a very different kind of book, clearly a highly sophisticated piece of literature with a strong message about the gulf that opened up under the ordinary, provincial life the Minco family and their neighbours were living, convinced that "it can't happen here," when it did.
28kidzdoc
My contribution to this theme will be four of the major literary awards from the Iberian Peninsula, two from Portugal and two from Spain, as I’ve visited both countries on numerous occasions and read a good amount of literature translated from Portuguese and Spanish.
First is the Prémio Camões (Camões Prize), the most important literary award in the Lusophone (Portuguese speaking) world, which is named after the 16th century Portuguese poet Luís de Camões and it "is awarded annually by the Portuguese Direção-Geral do Livro, dos Arquivos e das Biblioteca (National Book, Archive and Libraries Department) and the Brazilian Fundação Biblioteca Nacional (National Library Foundation) to the author of an outstanding oeuvre of work written in Portuguese. The monetary award is €100,000, making it among the richest literary prizes in the world."
Some recent and notable winners:
1989: Miguel Torga (Portugal): the initial winner of the Prémio Camões
1991: José Craveirinha: widely considered to be the greatest Mozambican poet, he was the first African to win the award
1994: Jorge Amado: One of the greatest Brazilian writers, who is best known for his novel Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands
1995: José Saramago (Portugal): Arguably the greatest Lusophone author of the 20th century, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998
2002: Maria Velho da Costa: One of the "three Marias" who were essential to the Portuguese Feminist Movement; their arrests, imprisonments and prosecution in 1972 directly led to the Carnation Revolution in 1974 and the overthrow of the Estado Novo, the Portuguese dictatorship that had been in power since 1926, and the installation of a democratic government.
2007: António Lobo Antunes: Another giant of 20th century Lusophone literature, whose works have been widely translated into English, including Fado Alexandrino, The Inquisitors' Manual, and What Can I Do When Everything's on Fire?.
2013: Mia Couto (Mozambique): One of Africa's best known and loved writers, who also won the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2014.
2021: Paulina Chiziane: The first woman in Mozambique to publish a novel; her superb book The First Wife was recently released in English translation by Archipelago Books in the United States.
"The José Saramago Literary Prize has been awarded since 1999 by the Circulo de Leitores Foundation to a literary work written in Portuguese by a young author in which the first edition was published in a Lusophone country. It celebrates the attribution of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998 to the Portuguese writer José Saramago. The prize has a biannual periodicity, and a monetary value of €25,000. The jury is composed of between five and ten members holding distinguished cultural roles."
Some recent and notable winners whose books have been translated into English:
2001: José Luís Peixoto (Portugal), Nenhum Olhar (The Implacable Order of Things)
2003: Adriana Lisboa (Brazil), Sinfonia em Branco (Symphony in White)
2005: Gonçalo M. Tavares (Portugal), Jerusalém (Jerusalem)
2013: Ondjaki (Angola), Os Transparentes (Transparent City)
2017: Julián Fuks (Brazil), A Resistência (Resistance)
First is the Prémio Camões (Camões Prize), the most important literary award in the Lusophone (Portuguese speaking) world, which is named after the 16th century Portuguese poet Luís de Camões and it "is awarded annually by the Portuguese Direção-Geral do Livro, dos Arquivos e das Biblioteca (National Book, Archive and Libraries Department) and the Brazilian Fundação Biblioteca Nacional (National Library Foundation) to the author of an outstanding oeuvre of work written in Portuguese. The monetary award is €100,000, making it among the richest literary prizes in the world."
Some recent and notable winners:
1989: Miguel Torga (Portugal): the initial winner of the Prémio Camões
1991: José Craveirinha: widely considered to be the greatest Mozambican poet, he was the first African to win the award
1994: Jorge Amado: One of the greatest Brazilian writers, who is best known for his novel Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands
1995: José Saramago (Portugal): Arguably the greatest Lusophone author of the 20th century, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998
2002: Maria Velho da Costa: One of the "three Marias" who were essential to the Portuguese Feminist Movement; their arrests, imprisonments and prosecution in 1972 directly led to the Carnation Revolution in 1974 and the overthrow of the Estado Novo, the Portuguese dictatorship that had been in power since 1926, and the installation of a democratic government.
2007: António Lobo Antunes: Another giant of 20th century Lusophone literature, whose works have been widely translated into English, including Fado Alexandrino, The Inquisitors' Manual, and What Can I Do When Everything's on Fire?.
2013: Mia Couto (Mozambique): One of Africa's best known and loved writers, who also won the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2014.
2021: Paulina Chiziane: The first woman in Mozambique to publish a novel; her superb book The First Wife was recently released in English translation by Archipelago Books in the United States.
"The José Saramago Literary Prize has been awarded since 1999 by the Circulo de Leitores Foundation to a literary work written in Portuguese by a young author in which the first edition was published in a Lusophone country. It celebrates the attribution of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998 to the Portuguese writer José Saramago. The prize has a biannual periodicity, and a monetary value of €25,000. The jury is composed of between five and ten members holding distinguished cultural roles."
Some recent and notable winners whose books have been translated into English:
2001: José Luís Peixoto (Portugal), Nenhum Olhar (The Implacable Order of Things)
2003: Adriana Lisboa (Brazil), Sinfonia em Branco (Symphony in White)
2005: Gonçalo M. Tavares (Portugal), Jerusalém (Jerusalem)
2013: Ondjaki (Angola), Os Transparentes (Transparent City)
2017: Julián Fuks (Brazil), A Resistência (Resistance)
29kidzdoc
The Premio de Literatura en Lengua Castellana Miguel de Cervantes (Miguel de Cervantes Prize) is "awarded annually to honour the lifetime achievement of an outstanding writer in the Spanish language" and is widely considered to be the most prestigious award in that language. The winner receives €125,000, making it another of the richest literary awards in the world. Of the 45 winners of the prize three have won Nobel Prizes in Literature, Octavio Paz, Mario Vargas Llosa and Camilo José Cela, and only six women have been chosen, who will all be listed below:
1979: Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina): A Universal History of Infamy; Labryniths; Ficciones
1981: Octavio Paz (México): The Labyrinth of Solitude; In Light of India
1987: Carlos Fuentes: (México): The Death of Artemio Cruz; Terra Nostra
1988: María Zambrano (Spain) (I have not yet found any of her books that have been translated into English)
1992: Dulce María Loynaz (Cuba): Absolute Solitude: Selected Poems
1994: Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru; probably my favorite living novelist): The War of the End of the World; The Time of the Hero; The Feast of the Goat
1995: Camilo José Cela (Spain): The Family of Pascual Duarte
2001: Álvaro Mutis (Colombia): The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll
2010: Ana María Matute (Spain): The Island; Soldiers Cry By Night
2011: Nicanor Parra (Chile): Antipoems: How to Look Better & Feel Great; After-dinner Declarations
2013: Elena Poniatowska (México): Here's to You, Jesusa!; Massacre in Mexico
2018: Ida Vitale (Uruguay): Byobu
2021: Cristina Peri Rossi (Uruguay): The Ship of Fools; State of Exile
The prize's Wikipedia page has a list of all winners of the Cervantes Prize; there were at least a dozen other authors who deserve mention and have books published in English:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_de_Cervantes_Prize
The Prince or Princess of Asturias Award for Literature is "aimed at recognizing the work of fostering and advancing literary creation in all its genres." Of note, not all of the winners write in the Spanish language, so I'll only include those authors.
Some notable winners:
1983: Juan Rulfo (México): Pedro Páramo
1986: Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru)
1987: Camilo José Cela (Spain)
1988: Carmen Martín Gaite (Spain): Behind the Curtains; The Back Room
1994: Carlos Fuentes (México)
2013: Antonio Muñoz Molina (Spain): Sepharad; Winter in Lisbon
2022: Juan Mayorga (Spain): Nocturnal; Way to Heaven
Although not Spanish, the Brazilian author Nélida Piñon (The Republic of Dreams; Voices of the Desert) was honored with this award in 2005.
1979: Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina): A Universal History of Infamy; Labryniths; Ficciones
1981: Octavio Paz (México): The Labyrinth of Solitude; In Light of India
1987: Carlos Fuentes: (México): The Death of Artemio Cruz; Terra Nostra
1988: María Zambrano (Spain) (I have not yet found any of her books that have been translated into English)
1992: Dulce María Loynaz (Cuba): Absolute Solitude: Selected Poems
1994: Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru; probably my favorite living novelist): The War of the End of the World; The Time of the Hero; The Feast of the Goat
1995: Camilo José Cela (Spain): The Family of Pascual Duarte
2001: Álvaro Mutis (Colombia): The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll
2010: Ana María Matute (Spain): The Island; Soldiers Cry By Night
2011: Nicanor Parra (Chile): Antipoems: How to Look Better & Feel Great; After-dinner Declarations
2013: Elena Poniatowska (México): Here's to You, Jesusa!; Massacre in Mexico
2018: Ida Vitale (Uruguay): Byobu
2021: Cristina Peri Rossi (Uruguay): The Ship of Fools; State of Exile
The prize's Wikipedia page has a list of all winners of the Cervantes Prize; there were at least a dozen other authors who deserve mention and have books published in English:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_de_Cervantes_Prize
The Prince or Princess of Asturias Award for Literature is "aimed at recognizing the work of fostering and advancing literary creation in all its genres." Of note, not all of the winners write in the Spanish language, so I'll only include those authors.
Some notable winners:
1983: Juan Rulfo (México): Pedro Páramo
1986: Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru)
1987: Camilo José Cela (Spain)
1988: Carmen Martín Gaite (Spain): Behind the Curtains; The Back Room
1994: Carlos Fuentes (México)
2013: Antonio Muñoz Molina (Spain): Sepharad; Winter in Lisbon
2022: Juan Mayorga (Spain): Nocturnal; Way to Heaven
Although not Spanish, the Brazilian author Nélida Piñon (The Republic of Dreams; Voices of the Desert) was honored with this award in 2005.
30thorold
>28 kidzdoc: >29 kidzdoc: Thanks for that — I was just thinking about looking them up and hoping that you would post something :-)
The Premio Alfaguara de Novela seems to be another pretty important one for a single novel in Spanish, with winners including books like Traveller of the century (2009) and The sound of things falling (2011).
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premio_Alfaguara_de_Novela
It’s interesting, if not altogether surprising, how the Iberian prizes that are notionally international are noticeably less Eurocentric than comparable French ones.
The Premio Alfaguara de Novela seems to be another pretty important one for a single novel in Spanish, with winners including books like Traveller of the century (2009) and The sound of things falling (2011).
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premio_Alfaguara_de_Novela
It’s interesting, if not altogether surprising, how the Iberian prizes that are notionally international are noticeably less Eurocentric than comparable French ones.
31AnnieMod
Staying with Arabic awards (this one caught my eye while looking at what else is available by Hoda Barakat).
The Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature is given to the best contemporary novel written in Arabic, but not available in English translation. The award is given by the American University in Cairo Press and part of the award is the translation and publication of the winner in English. The Tiller of Waters by Hoda Barakat won the medal in 2000 (her later novel Voices of the Lost won the Arabic Booker in 2019 and is reviewed above).
More information: https://aucpress.com/about-us/naguib-mahfouz-medal/
From the site: The 25 winners of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature since its inauguration include 10 women, 15 men; 12 Egyptians (2 posthumously), 3 Palestinians, 2 Algerians, 2 Lebanese, 1 Moroccan, 2 Syrians, 1 Iraqi, 1 Sudanese, and 1 Saudi Arabian:
The list of the winners:
1996: Ibrahim Abdel Meguid, The Other Place and Latifa al-Zayyat, The Open Door
1997: Mourid Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah and Yusuf Idris, City of Love and Ashes
1998: Ahlam Mosteghanemi, Memory in the Flesh
1999: Edwar al-Kharrat, Rama and the Dragon
2000: Hoda Barakat, The Tiller of Waters
2001: Somaya Ramadan, Leaves of Narcissus
2002: Bensalem Himmich, The Polymath
2003: Khairy Shalaby, The Lodging House
2004: Alia Mamdouh, The Loved Ones
2005: Yusuf Abu Rayya, Wedding Night
2006: Sahar Khalifeh, The Image, the Icon, and the Covenant
2007: Amina Zaydan, Red Wine
2008: Hamdi Abu Golayyel, A Dog with No Tail
2009: Khalil Sweileh, "The Scribe of Love" (published as Writing Love)
2010: Miral al-Tahawy, Brooklyn Heights
2011: Awarded to "the revolutionary creativity of the Egyptian people"
2012: Ezzat el Kamhawi, House of the Wolf
2013: Khaled Khalifa, No Knives in the Kitchens of This City
2014: Hammour Ziada, Shawq al-darwish The Longing of the Dervish
2015: Hassan Daoud, La Tareeq Ila Al-Jannah No Road to Paradise
2016: Adel Esmat, Hikayat Yusuf Tadrus Tales of Yusuf Tadros
2017: Huzama Habayeb, Velvet
2018: Omaima Al-Khamis, "Voyage of the Cranes in the Cities of Agate"
2020 (awarded in March 2021): Ahmed Taibaoui, "The Disappearance of Mr. Nobody"
The Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature is given to the best contemporary novel written in Arabic, but not available in English translation. The award is given by the American University in Cairo Press and part of the award is the translation and publication of the winner in English. The Tiller of Waters by Hoda Barakat won the medal in 2000 (her later novel Voices of the Lost won the Arabic Booker in 2019 and is reviewed above).
More information: https://aucpress.com/about-us/naguib-mahfouz-medal/
From the site: The 25 winners of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature since its inauguration include 10 women, 15 men; 12 Egyptians (2 posthumously), 3 Palestinians, 2 Algerians, 2 Lebanese, 1 Moroccan, 2 Syrians, 1 Iraqi, 1 Sudanese, and 1 Saudi Arabian:
The list of the winners:
1996: Ibrahim Abdel Meguid, The Other Place and Latifa al-Zayyat, The Open Door
1997: Mourid Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah and Yusuf Idris, City of Love and Ashes
1998: Ahlam Mosteghanemi, Memory in the Flesh
1999: Edwar al-Kharrat, Rama and the Dragon
2000: Hoda Barakat, The Tiller of Waters
2001: Somaya Ramadan, Leaves of Narcissus
2002: Bensalem Himmich, The Polymath
2003: Khairy Shalaby, The Lodging House
2004: Alia Mamdouh, The Loved Ones
2005: Yusuf Abu Rayya, Wedding Night
2006: Sahar Khalifeh, The Image, the Icon, and the Covenant
2007: Amina Zaydan, Red Wine
2008: Hamdi Abu Golayyel, A Dog with No Tail
2009: Khalil Sweileh, "The Scribe of Love" (published as Writing Love)
2010: Miral al-Tahawy, Brooklyn Heights
2011: Awarded to "the revolutionary creativity of the Egyptian people"
2012: Ezzat el Kamhawi, House of the Wolf
2013: Khaled Khalifa, No Knives in the Kitchens of This City
2014: Hammour Ziada, Shawq al-darwish The Longing of the Dervish
2015: Hassan Daoud, La Tareeq Ila Al-Jannah No Road to Paradise
2016: Adel Esmat, Hikayat Yusuf Tadrus Tales of Yusuf Tadros
2017: Huzama Habayeb, Velvet
2018: Omaima Al-Khamis, "Voyage of the Cranes in the Cities of Agate"
2020 (awarded in March 2021): Ahmed Taibaoui, "The Disappearance of Mr. Nobody"
32kidzdoc
>30 thorold: You're welcome, Mark. Thanks for mentioning the Premio Alfaguara; I can definitely recommend The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vásquez on a quick glance.
I agree that the Iberian literary awards are less Eurocentric than the French ones, but women writers have been vastly underrepresented, which is also the case in Spanish and Lusophone literature by them that has been translated into English. This was brought to my attention when I first met a formerly active Club Read member (deebee1) in the Livraria Bertrand in Lisbon, the oldest continuously operating bookstore in the world (since 1732, IIRC), and she showed me shelves of books by Portuguese women writers who I had never heard of.
I agree that the Iberian literary awards are less Eurocentric than the French ones, but women writers have been vastly underrepresented, which is also the case in Spanish and Lusophone literature by them that has been translated into English. This was brought to my attention when I first met a formerly active Club Read member (deebee1) in the Livraria Bertrand in Lisbon, the oldest continuously operating bookstore in the world (since 1732, IIRC), and she showed me shelves of books by Portuguese women writers who I had never heard of.
33AnnieMod
>32 kidzdoc: "Livraria Bertrand" in Lisbon
Did you get a stamp in a book when you were there? :) One of my friends went there this summer and came back with a gift for me - they only put stamps in books you buy IN the store and if you ask (obviously).
I know I know - offtopic. Sorry but... :)
Did you get a stamp in a book when you were there? :) One of my friends went there this summer and came back with a gift for me - they only put stamps in books you buy IN the store and if you ask (obviously).
I know I know - offtopic. Sorry but... :)
34kidzdoc
>32 kidzdoc: I didn't buy anything in Livraria Bertrand, unfortunately. The English language section was fairly sparse, and there was nothing that caught my eye at the time. I anticipated going back there, especially since I often had um bica e pastel de nata (a small coffee and a pastry) at the nearby Café a Brasileira, the famed café and literary haunt next to the Baixa-Chiado metro station which features a statue of Fernando Pessoa sitting at his own table in front, but I never did, for some reason. I guess I didn't want to weigh myself down with too many books, as I visited Porto and Barcelona for 10 days after I spent two weeks in Lisboa.
35thorold
>32 kidzdoc: I came past the Wagner’sche Buchhandlung in Innsbruck a couple of weeks ago (on a Sunday evening, rather bad planning there…). They claim to have been in business since 1639, but no doubt there are some subtleties about that term “continuously operating” that allow Bertrand to claim seniority.
36kidzdoc
>35 thorold: That's interesting! Apparently, and for what it's worth, the Guinness Book of World Records gave that title to Livraria Bertrand in 2011. I would question how long it was out of commission after the devastating earthquake of 1755, as it had to move to a temporary location, possibly a convent in the Bairro Alto that was relatively unscathed by the earthquake or subsequent fires and floods that destroyed most of the city, before the Bertrand brothers found a new home in their current location on Rua Garrett in the Chiado.
38kidzdoc
>37 ELiz_M: Thanks, Liz! You're absolutely correct, and I made that change.
I'm glad that you enjoyed those lists. I'll list some of my favorite books that would fit those awards tomorrow.
I'm glad that you enjoyed those lists. I'll list some of my favorite books that would fit those awards tomorrow.
39lilisin
JAPAN: Akutagawa Prize
There are quite a few literary awards in Japan but the most prestigious one, and the one to follow, is the Akutagawa Prize. It is awarded in January and July to the best serious literary story published in a newspaper or magazine by a new or rising author. The judges usually include contemporary writers, literary critics, and former winners of the prize.
The current judging committee is:
Amy Yamada
Hiromi Kawakami
Yōko Ogawa
Masahiko Shimada
Toshiyuki Horie
Hikaru Okuizumi
Shuichi Yoshida
Hisaki Matsuura
Keiichiro Hirano
These are huge names in the Japanese literary world and have been translated into languages around the world. In fact, this is why it is so important to follow the Akutagawa Prize in that it can almost guarantee you will get translated.
Here are just select examples of what's available in English (even more are available translated in French):
Natsuko Imamura : The Woman in the Purple Skirt
Sayaka Murata : Convenience Store Woman
Mieko Kawakami : Breasts and Eggs (although the English translation titled Breasts and Eggs is actually a translation of her longer book called Summer Story in Japanese)
Hitomi Kanehara : Snakes and Earrings
Hiroko Oyamada : Hole
Hikaru Okuizumi : The Stones Cry Out
Ryū Murakami : Almost Transparent Blue
Kenzaburō Ōe : Prize Stock (this is a rather short story but is frequently included in Japanese short story anthologies)
The wiki article lists all the previous winners if you wish to look at the list.
(I'd like to add a cynical note that Haruki Murakami is not an Akutagawa Prize winner.)
One thing to note is that there can be two winners at once as well as there can be no winners of the Prize is the judges can't come up with a unanimous decision on who the winner should be. This last session, the 167th, was the first time that all the nominees were women.
I should add that the prize is concurrently given along with the Naoki Prize which awards the best work of popular literature in any format by a new, rising, or (reasonably young) established author. This is where you'll have awards in any genre, even horror and mystery (although both these genres have their own representative prizes). You can see all the winners, the committee prize members, and the books available in English translation at the wiki article here.
I, personally, focus mainly on the Akutagawa Prize and admit to having read only two Naoki Prize winning books: The Devotion of Suspect X, and Natsuo Kirino's Out. I do have the French translation of Lady Boy on my TBR pile however.
There are quite a few literary awards in Japan but the most prestigious one, and the one to follow, is the Akutagawa Prize. It is awarded in January and July to the best serious literary story published in a newspaper or magazine by a new or rising author. The judges usually include contemporary writers, literary critics, and former winners of the prize.
The current judging committee is:
Amy Yamada
Hiromi Kawakami
Yōko Ogawa
Masahiko Shimada
Toshiyuki Horie
Hikaru Okuizumi
Shuichi Yoshida
Hisaki Matsuura
Keiichiro Hirano
These are huge names in the Japanese literary world and have been translated into languages around the world. In fact, this is why it is so important to follow the Akutagawa Prize in that it can almost guarantee you will get translated.
Here are just select examples of what's available in English (even more are available translated in French):
Natsuko Imamura : The Woman in the Purple Skirt
Sayaka Murata : Convenience Store Woman
Mieko Kawakami : Breasts and Eggs (although the English translation titled Breasts and Eggs is actually a translation of her longer book called Summer Story in Japanese)
Hitomi Kanehara : Snakes and Earrings
Hiroko Oyamada : Hole
Hikaru Okuizumi : The Stones Cry Out
Ryū Murakami : Almost Transparent Blue
Kenzaburō Ōe : Prize Stock (this is a rather short story but is frequently included in Japanese short story anthologies)
The wiki article lists all the previous winners if you wish to look at the list.
(I'd like to add a cynical note that Haruki Murakami is not an Akutagawa Prize winner.)
One thing to note is that there can be two winners at once as well as there can be no winners of the Prize is the judges can't come up with a unanimous decision on who the winner should be. This last session, the 167th, was the first time that all the nominees were women.
I should add that the prize is concurrently given along with the Naoki Prize which awards the best work of popular literature in any format by a new, rising, or (reasonably young) established author. This is where you'll have awards in any genre, even horror and mystery (although both these genres have their own representative prizes). You can see all the winners, the committee prize members, and the books available in English translation at the wiki article here.
I, personally, focus mainly on the Akutagawa Prize and admit to having read only two Naoki Prize winning books: The Devotion of Suspect X, and Natsuo Kirino's Out. I do have the French translation of Lady Boy on my TBR pile however.
40kidzdoc
These are books eligible for the four Iberian literary awards I listed yesterday, along with the one Mark mentioned, which I rated 4 stars or higher:
Camões Prize:
José Saramago: Blindness; The Gospel According to Jesus Christ; The Stone Raft; Death at Intervals; The Cave; The Elephant's Journey; Cain; The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
António Lobo Antunes: The Fat Man and Infinity: And Other Writings (hmm, there should be more than just this one...)
Mia Couto: The Tuner of Silences
Paulina Chiziane: The First Wife: A Tale of Polygamy
José Saramago Prize:
José Luís Peixoto: The Implacable Order of Things (alternate title: Blank Gaze)
Gonçalo M. Tavares: Jerusalem
Miguel de Cervantes Prize:
Jorge Luis Borges: Ficciones
Ernesto Sábato: The Tunnel
Dulce María Loynaz: Absolute Solitude: Selected Poems
Mario Vargas Llosa (*deep breath*): The War of the End of the World; The Feast of the Goat; Conversation in the Cathedral; Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter; The Time of the Hero; Making Waves: Essays; The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta; The Storyteller; Death in the Andes; In Praise of Reading and Fiction: The Nobel Lecture
Camilo José Cela: The Family of Pascual Duarte
Álvaro Mutis: The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll
Juan Marsé: Lizard Tails
Nicanor Parra: Antipoems: How to Look Better & Feel Great
Princess of Asturias Award for Literature:
Antonio Muñoz Molina: Sepharad
Alfaguara Prize:
Juan Gabriel Vásquez: The Sound of Things Falling
Camões Prize:
José Saramago: Blindness; The Gospel According to Jesus Christ; The Stone Raft; Death at Intervals; The Cave; The Elephant's Journey; Cain; The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
António Lobo Antunes: The Fat Man and Infinity: And Other Writings (hmm, there should be more than just this one...)
Mia Couto: The Tuner of Silences
Paulina Chiziane: The First Wife: A Tale of Polygamy
José Saramago Prize:
José Luís Peixoto: The Implacable Order of Things (alternate title: Blank Gaze)
Gonçalo M. Tavares: Jerusalem
Miguel de Cervantes Prize:
Jorge Luis Borges: Ficciones
Ernesto Sábato: The Tunnel
Dulce María Loynaz: Absolute Solitude: Selected Poems
Mario Vargas Llosa (*deep breath*): The War of the End of the World; The Feast of the Goat; Conversation in the Cathedral; Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter; The Time of the Hero; Making Waves: Essays; The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta; The Storyteller; Death in the Andes; In Praise of Reading and Fiction: The Nobel Lecture
Camilo José Cela: The Family of Pascual Duarte
Álvaro Mutis: The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll
Juan Marsé: Lizard Tails
Nicanor Parra: Antipoems: How to Look Better & Feel Great
Princess of Asturias Award for Literature:
Antonio Muñoz Molina: Sepharad
Alfaguara Prize:
Juan Gabriel Vásquez: The Sound of Things Falling
41AnnieMod
Another one that fits here (apparently I am in an Arabic mood...)
Brooklyn Heights by Miral Al-Tahawy, translated from Arabic (Egypt) by Samah Selim
The American University in Cairo Press, Hardcover, ?? words (50-60K range based on rough estimate); 192 pages
Original publication: 2010 (in Arabic as بروكلين هايتس); 2011 in English (this translation)
Read: October 21, 2022 - October 22, 2022 - 4 stars.
Hend grew up in one of the villages around Cairo as the only daughter and youngest child of a Bedouin family. When we meet her at the start of this novel, she had just immigrated to USA with her 8 years old son, sans her husband and with very little English and had rented a small apartment in a Muslim neighborhood in Brooklyn, some time in the autumn of 2008 (Obama winning the election is one of the first times we see her communicating with her son). But this is not the typical immigration story of perseverance and success against all odds. Or not entirely anyway.
Instead we walk the streets of Brooklyn with Hend and see her reactions to the city and its inhabitants. Most of the Brooklynites we meet are immigrants like her, mostly from the Muslim Arabian world but there are a few others as well - the Orthodox Jews, the dancing teacher neighbor. And while she walks the streets of this new city, she often thinks about her life before she moved - from her childhood to the end of her marriage. As the novel progresses, we start also hearing the stories of other inhabitants of her world - both in the new and in the old worlds.
And somewhere in all that jumble of stories, memories and new experiences emerges the longing for a home - the home some of the characters can never return to, the home another character is slowly forgetting, a place one can call home. Is your home where you were born? Or can you make your home elsewhere, away from the culture you are used to and belong to? Hend never figures these questions although she ends up pondering a lot of them when things happen around her. She is almost always a passive observer - it feels like she was always an observer of her own life, even in the passages about her past.
It works beautifully to a point. I appreciated that the new immigrant felt displaced and looking for her place in the new life and did not find friends even before arriving (while I know that some people are like that, my experience was closer to that of Hend when I moved). I wish the novel was longer - it is too short to support all the backstories and all the stories in the now and here - and because of that a lot of them feel incomplete. I am not sure if that was intentional - after all, all of these stories still continue after the end of the book but the novel felt incomplete.
The novel won the 2010 Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature (given to an Arabic novel which had not been translated into English yet) and was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (aka the Arabic Booker) in 2011. The author's personal story parallels her heroines to a certain extent - al-Tahawy is from a Bedouin family and her childhood was probably very similar to Hend's (writer's license notwithstanding). She also moved to USA around the same time as her character (although I am not sure if it is to Brooklyn initially).
This was the author's 4th novel and the other 3 are also translated into English so I plan to check them as well - despite my misgivings, it is a novel worth reading - if for nothing else, for the details of modern Bedouin lives. But the immigration part of the story also works, as banal and tired as this genre had become in recent years.
Brooklyn Heights by Miral Al-Tahawy, translated from Arabic (Egypt) by Samah Selim
The American University in Cairo Press, Hardcover, ?? words (50-60K range based on rough estimate); 192 pages
Original publication: 2010 (in Arabic as بروكلين هايتس); 2011 in English (this translation)
Read: October 21, 2022 - October 22, 2022 - 4 stars.
Hend grew up in one of the villages around Cairo as the only daughter and youngest child of a Bedouin family. When we meet her at the start of this novel, she had just immigrated to USA with her 8 years old son, sans her husband and with very little English and had rented a small apartment in a Muslim neighborhood in Brooklyn, some time in the autumn of 2008 (Obama winning the election is one of the first times we see her communicating with her son). But this is not the typical immigration story of perseverance and success against all odds. Or not entirely anyway.
Instead we walk the streets of Brooklyn with Hend and see her reactions to the city and its inhabitants. Most of the Brooklynites we meet are immigrants like her, mostly from the Muslim Arabian world but there are a few others as well - the Orthodox Jews, the dancing teacher neighbor. And while she walks the streets of this new city, she often thinks about her life before she moved - from her childhood to the end of her marriage. As the novel progresses, we start also hearing the stories of other inhabitants of her world - both in the new and in the old worlds.
And somewhere in all that jumble of stories, memories and new experiences emerges the longing for a home - the home some of the characters can never return to, the home another character is slowly forgetting, a place one can call home. Is your home where you were born? Or can you make your home elsewhere, away from the culture you are used to and belong to? Hend never figures these questions although she ends up pondering a lot of them when things happen around her. She is almost always a passive observer - it feels like she was always an observer of her own life, even in the passages about her past.
It works beautifully to a point. I appreciated that the new immigrant felt displaced and looking for her place in the new life and did not find friends even before arriving (while I know that some people are like that, my experience was closer to that of Hend when I moved). I wish the novel was longer - it is too short to support all the backstories and all the stories in the now and here - and because of that a lot of them feel incomplete. I am not sure if that was intentional - after all, all of these stories still continue after the end of the book but the novel felt incomplete.
The novel won the 2010 Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature (given to an Arabic novel which had not been translated into English yet) and was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (aka the Arabic Booker) in 2011. The author's personal story parallels her heroines to a certain extent - al-Tahawy is from a Bedouin family and her childhood was probably very similar to Hend's (writer's license notwithstanding). She also moved to USA around the same time as her character (although I am not sure if it is to Brooklyn initially).
This was the author's 4th novel and the other 3 are also translated into English so I plan to check them as well - despite my misgivings, it is a novel worth reading - if for nothing else, for the details of modern Bedouin lives. But the immigration part of the story also works, as banal and tired as this genre had become in recent years.
42thorold
This book was shortlisted for the Dutch Libris prize in 2008, and Februari won the P.C. Hooft Prize for his whole oeuvre in 2020. (He now uses the masculine forename Maxim, but previously published under gender-neutral and feminine forenames.)
De literaire kring (2008; The Book Club) by Marjolijn Februari {now Maxim Februari} (Netherlands, 1963- )
In a dormitory-village in the Dutch countryside, an exclusive book-club is pressured into reading a new novel by a young woman who grew up amongst them. And, naturally, old wounds are reopened, and the members of the club — mostly lawyers and top civil servants — find themselves confronted with the moral consequences of their own actions.
It's a fun idea to shake the book-club out of its normal role as passive consumer of literature, and Februari gets some mileage out of the moral ambiguities of liberal western society in the early 21st century, but this otherwise struck me as an oddly tentative book, that keeps stepping back on the brink of going deeply into any of the main characters. An enjoyable, but slightly odd, mix of moral critique and superficial society novel.
De literaire kring (2008; The Book Club) by Marjolijn Februari {now Maxim Februari} (Netherlands, 1963- )
In a dormitory-village in the Dutch countryside, an exclusive book-club is pressured into reading a new novel by a young woman who grew up amongst them. And, naturally, old wounds are reopened, and the members of the club — mostly lawyers and top civil servants — find themselves confronted with the moral consequences of their own actions.
It's a fun idea to shake the book-club out of its normal role as passive consumer of literature, and Februari gets some mileage out of the moral ambiguities of liberal western society in the early 21st century, but this otherwise struck me as an oddly tentative book, that keeps stepping back on the brink of going deeply into any of the main characters. An enjoyable, but slightly odd, mix of moral critique and superficial society novel.
43rocketjk
>33 AnnieMod: through >36 kidzdoc: I was in Livraria Bertrand just a little under two weeks ago. I bought the copy of Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet. The bookseller insisted that of the three English translations they had on hand, that Richard Zenith's (who also wrote a biography of Pessoa) was the only English translation worth reading. Sadly, that book got left behind in our rental car. Some lucky Avis employee has it, or perhaps has passed it on to a friend or customer who wants an English translation. I also bought Caleb Azumah Nelson's novel, Open Water, which as a Costa Award Winner in 2021,* it is at least tangentially connected to the "Prize Winners in Their Own Language" theme, though sans the translation element, as in this case the "own language" is English. Anyway, Annie, yes, I got them to stamp Open Waters. And the Pessoa book, too, for the good that did me.
* That 2021 Costa Award evidently makes Open Water a member of the final class of winners of this prize:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jun/10/costa-book-awards-scrapped-suddenl...
* That 2021 Costa Award evidently makes Open Water a member of the final class of winners of this prize:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jun/10/costa-book-awards-scrapped-suddenl...
44thorold
Another recent prize-winner I spotted in my local library. This won the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française (>6 thorold:) in 2020.
La grande épreuve (2020) by Etienne de Montety (France, 1965- )
A brisk, lightly-built novel based on the real events of the terrorist attack on a church in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray in June 2016, when two young men calling themselves Jihadists burst into the church during mass, killing the priest and seriously injuring one of his parishioners.
De Montety moves the action to a small town in South-West France and takes us separately through the "typically French" backgrounds of the various protagonists — the teenage boys (one rugby-playing middle-class, one juvenile-delinquent) who have grown up in non-religious families and been drawn into Islamic radicalism via their perception of their marginalised identity as Rebeus; the septuagenarian Algeria-veteran priest; the nun who has retired from long service in a children's home in Soweto; the policeman of Indochinese descent. He is at his best when he's telling us about the priest and the nun, with Bernanos always hovering in the background, but the touch is so light and the approach so objective and journalistic that it's hard to see where we get to the tipping point when the tragic and wasteful attack becomes inevitable, or how it could have been prevented. Maybe de Montety takes us as close as a white, middle-class reader could get to understanding how a young person with no Islamic background could be drawn into something like that, but it isn't very close.
La grande épreuve (2020) by Etienne de Montety (France, 1965- )
A brisk, lightly-built novel based on the real events of the terrorist attack on a church in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray in June 2016, when two young men calling themselves Jihadists burst into the church during mass, killing the priest and seriously injuring one of his parishioners.
De Montety moves the action to a small town in South-West France and takes us separately through the "typically French" backgrounds of the various protagonists — the teenage boys (one rugby-playing middle-class, one juvenile-delinquent) who have grown up in non-religious families and been drawn into Islamic radicalism via their perception of their marginalised identity as Rebeus; the septuagenarian Algeria-veteran priest; the nun who has retired from long service in a children's home in Soweto; the policeman of Indochinese descent. He is at his best when he's telling us about the priest and the nun, with Bernanos always hovering in the background, but the touch is so light and the approach so objective and journalistic that it's hard to see where we get to the tipping point when the tragic and wasteful attack becomes inevitable, or how it could have been prevented. Maybe de Montety takes us as close as a white, middle-class reader could get to understanding how a young person with no Islamic background could be drawn into something like that, but it isn't very close.
45thorold
We haven't looked at German yet, but I spotted the other day that our local library has quite a few recent prize-winners in its "German fiction" section.
German literature has a very extensive awards-culture, where practically every state, city, university and cat-breeding club in Germany, Austria and Switzerland awards its own book prize, to the extent that acceptance speeches have become a major component of any important writer's collected essays (sometimes they even become books in themselves, like the posthumous Thomas Bernhard collection Meine Preise (My prizes)).
The Deutscher Buchpreis, given each year since 2005 in association with the Frankfurt book fair, is the German publishing industry's main showpiece, consciously set up to mirror the glamour of the Goncourt and Booker.
Recent winners:
—The Capital by Robert Menasse — 2017
—Archipel by Inger-Maria Mahlke — 2018
—Where You Come From by Saša Stanišić — 2019
—Annette, ein Heldinnenepos by Anne Weber — 2020
—Blaue Frau: Roman by Antje Ravic Strubel — 2021
—Blutbuch by Kim de l'Horizon 2022
I've read and enjoyed Where You Come From, and also We Are Doing Fine by Arno Geiger (2005 winner), In Times of Fading Light by Eugen Ruge (2011) and
Landgericht by Ursula Krechel (2012).
https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Deutscher+Buchpreis
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutscher_Buchpreis
German literature has a very extensive awards-culture, where practically every state, city, university and cat-breeding club in Germany, Austria and Switzerland awards its own book prize, to the extent that acceptance speeches have become a major component of any important writer's collected essays (sometimes they even become books in themselves, like the posthumous Thomas Bernhard collection Meine Preise (My prizes)).
The Deutscher Buchpreis, given each year since 2005 in association with the Frankfurt book fair, is the German publishing industry's main showpiece, consciously set up to mirror the glamour of the Goncourt and Booker.
Recent winners:
—The Capital by Robert Menasse — 2017
—Archipel by Inger-Maria Mahlke — 2018
—Where You Come From by Saša Stanišić — 2019
—Annette, ein Heldinnenepos by Anne Weber — 2020
—Blaue Frau: Roman by Antje Ravic Strubel — 2021
—Blutbuch by Kim de l'Horizon 2022
I've read and enjoyed Where You Come From, and also We Are Doing Fine by Arno Geiger (2005 winner), In Times of Fading Light by Eugen Ruge (2011) and
Landgericht by Ursula Krechel (2012).
https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/Deutscher+Buchpreis
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutscher_Buchpreis
46thorold
And, not coincidentally, here is the first of the little pile of recent winners I brought home from my last library-raid, my second German verse-novel of 2022:
Anne Weber is a German-born translator and writer who lives in France. She has written both in French and in German: this book was one of those she wrote in German first, even though it has a French subject. It won the 2020 Deutscher Buchpreis.
Annette, ein Heldinnenepos (2020) by Anne Weber (Germany, France, 1964- )
Weber repurposes the classical form of the verse epic to tell the life-story of a real, modern, female hero, Anne Beaumanoir (1923-2022). As a young woman in France during WWII, Beaumanoir was a courier for the Resistance and helped to save the lives of Jews; subsequently she became a neurologist and carried on in the (clandestine) struggle to protect the rights of oppressed people in the Communist Party and later in the Algerian independence movement, the FLN. She escaped from France and was sentenced in absentia to ten years' imprisonment for "terrorist" activities in 1959, and worked in the Algerian Health Ministry after independence.
The book — which Weber describes as coming out of a friendship that developed from a chance meeting with the 96 year old Beaumanoir at a film festival — is written in rather understated free verse that often seems to shade into prose, but it has enough of a nod towards classical verse-forms that we can see what it is getting at. Weber looks especially at the way the kind of heroic, idealistic behaviour that seems to come naturally to Beaumanoir is constantly bumping up against the realities of political compromise in an unheroic world, where communists spend more time fighting deviation in their own ranks than opposing fascism, and socialist freedom fighters turn into military dictators and Islamists as soon as they get into power. And of course at the way the kind of life Beaumanoir has to lead refuses to fit itself in with the model of life as a wife and mother she has been brought up to expect.
An interesting little book, but probably not quite big enough to contain such a huge personality: it makes you feel you should be reading Beaumanoir's own autobiography instead...
---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Beaumanoir
Anne Weber is a German-born translator and writer who lives in France. She has written both in French and in German: this book was one of those she wrote in German first, even though it has a French subject. It won the 2020 Deutscher Buchpreis.
Annette, ein Heldinnenepos (2020) by Anne Weber (Germany, France, 1964- )
Weber repurposes the classical form of the verse epic to tell the life-story of a real, modern, female hero, Anne Beaumanoir (1923-2022). As a young woman in France during WWII, Beaumanoir was a courier for the Resistance and helped to save the lives of Jews; subsequently she became a neurologist and carried on in the (clandestine) struggle to protect the rights of oppressed people in the Communist Party and later in the Algerian independence movement, the FLN. She escaped from France and was sentenced in absentia to ten years' imprisonment for "terrorist" activities in 1959, and worked in the Algerian Health Ministry after independence.
The book — which Weber describes as coming out of a friendship that developed from a chance meeting with the 96 year old Beaumanoir at a film festival — is written in rather understated free verse that often seems to shade into prose, but it has enough of a nod towards classical verse-forms that we can see what it is getting at. Weber looks especially at the way the kind of heroic, idealistic behaviour that seems to come naturally to Beaumanoir is constantly bumping up against the realities of political compromise in an unheroic world, where communists spend more time fighting deviation in their own ranks than opposing fascism, and socialist freedom fighters turn into military dictators and Islamists as soon as they get into power. And of course at the way the kind of life Beaumanoir has to lead refuses to fit itself in with the model of life as a wife and mother she has been brought up to expect.
An interesting little book, but probably not quite big enough to contain such a huge personality: it makes you feel you should be reading Beaumanoir's own autobiography instead...
---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Beaumanoir
47thorold
Continuing through my library stack with the novel that won the 2017 Deutscher Buchpreis, and another writer I've vaguely heard of but never tried. The novelist and political essayist Robert Menasse is from Vienna, he's the son of a famous Austrian footballer and the half-brother of novelist Eva Menasse.
Die Hauptstadt : Roman (2017; The Capital) by Robert Menasse (Austria, 1954- )
When this came out, it was hailed as the first big, literary novel to focus on the inner workings of the EU bureaucracy. Given how many clever, imaginative people there must be sitting around in Brussels offices (or recently retired from them), it seems surprising that there aren't many more such novels: one is almost forced to conclude that the work they do there is so engaging that they don't have any energy left over to satirise it...
Be that as it may, as well as a core group of officials mostly working in the communication department of "DG Culture" of the European Commission, Menasse's cast includes an elderly Auschwitz survivor, an Austrian pig-farmer, an emeritus economics professor, a Brussels police inspector, a professional assassin employed by the Archdiocese of Poznań, and a possibly-imaginary, possibly-symbolic pig wandering through the streets of Brussels. The conventions of narrative tell us that the stories of all these people are going to fit together sooner or later, but Menasse enjoys teasing us by allowing their paths to cross repeatedly without anything happening. It's not for nothing that Kafka's name is dropped repeatedly: Menasse is clearly a fan of the absurd, and we look for logical connections at our peril.
Naturally, this isn't just a book about the peculiarities of living in Brussels, with its constant rain, building sites, demonstrations no-one pays any attention to, inexplicable police blockades, and baffling bilingualism, nor is it merely a detailed study of the sophisticated methods international bureaucracies can deploy to resist dangerous new ideas, although it does both of those things very elegantly. What Menasse really seems to be doing here is arguing that we have lost track of the great European Idea of the 1940s, the notion that if we want a world in which we can say "never again" to Auschwitz we have to get rid of racism and nationalism and move on to a post-national democracy. The institutions of the EU are arranged in such a way that it is almost impossible for anyone to take a decision that goes against the self-interest of any of the member states, and it often seems as though the only truly radical things the EU has ever done have been those needed to serve the prevailing ideology of liberal capitalism and the free market. Obviously there are holes to pick in this: the founders of the predecessor organisations of the EU were arguably more interested in industrial competition with the US than in preserving the postwar peace, and no-one ever seems to have come up with a workable way to create truly democratic European institutions. But I'm sure that Menasse is right in identifying the legacy of Auschwitz as the thing that is at the core of the way large numbers of Europeans — especially of the immediate post-war generations — have looked at the European Idea, and the reason why so many of us view the rise in populist nationalism in the last decades with such horror. But he's clearly also right about the difficulty of communicating that idea to people who've come to see "Europe" negatively.
An interesting and very clever book, in which I recognised a lot of types and professional manoeuvres I'm very familiar with(!), but also a rather sad and frustrating one. He ends with "à suivre", but it's not at all obvious at present where the story should go next, either in fiction or in real life.
Die Hauptstadt : Roman (2017; The Capital) by Robert Menasse (Austria, 1954- )
When this came out, it was hailed as the first big, literary novel to focus on the inner workings of the EU bureaucracy. Given how many clever, imaginative people there must be sitting around in Brussels offices (or recently retired from them), it seems surprising that there aren't many more such novels: one is almost forced to conclude that the work they do there is so engaging that they don't have any energy left over to satirise it...
Be that as it may, as well as a core group of officials mostly working in the communication department of "DG Culture" of the European Commission, Menasse's cast includes an elderly Auschwitz survivor, an Austrian pig-farmer, an emeritus economics professor, a Brussels police inspector, a professional assassin employed by the Archdiocese of Poznań, and a possibly-imaginary, possibly-symbolic pig wandering through the streets of Brussels. The conventions of narrative tell us that the stories of all these people are going to fit together sooner or later, but Menasse enjoys teasing us by allowing their paths to cross repeatedly without anything happening. It's not for nothing that Kafka's name is dropped repeatedly: Menasse is clearly a fan of the absurd, and we look for logical connections at our peril.
Naturally, this isn't just a book about the peculiarities of living in Brussels, with its constant rain, building sites, demonstrations no-one pays any attention to, inexplicable police blockades, and baffling bilingualism, nor is it merely a detailed study of the sophisticated methods international bureaucracies can deploy to resist dangerous new ideas, although it does both of those things very elegantly. What Menasse really seems to be doing here is arguing that we have lost track of the great European Idea of the 1940s, the notion that if we want a world in which we can say "never again" to Auschwitz we have to get rid of racism and nationalism and move on to a post-national democracy. The institutions of the EU are arranged in such a way that it is almost impossible for anyone to take a decision that goes against the self-interest of any of the member states, and it often seems as though the only truly radical things the EU has ever done have been those needed to serve the prevailing ideology of liberal capitalism and the free market. Obviously there are holes to pick in this: the founders of the predecessor organisations of the EU were arguably more interested in industrial competition with the US than in preserving the postwar peace, and no-one ever seems to have come up with a workable way to create truly democratic European institutions. But I'm sure that Menasse is right in identifying the legacy of Auschwitz as the thing that is at the core of the way large numbers of Europeans — especially of the immediate post-war generations — have looked at the European Idea, and the reason why so many of us view the rise in populist nationalism in the last decades with such horror. But he's clearly also right about the difficulty of communicating that idea to people who've come to see "Europe" negatively.
An interesting and very clever book, in which I recognised a lot of types and professional manoeuvres I'm very familiar with(!), but also a rather sad and frustrating one. He ends with "à suivre", but it's not at all obvious at present where the story should go next, either in fiction or in real life.
48Dilara86
>47 thorold: This sounds very interesting. I hadn't heard of this novel before today, but it looks like my library has two copies ! I wonder whether the writers of Parlement (the comedy series set in the European parliament) read it.
49LolaWalser
It seems like a joke to talk about the EU getting set up to compete with the US when we must endure Americans and their military bases in Europe.
The older I get the more bitter it is that fascist Germany (including Vichy France) that started the wars and championed annihilation of entire "races" came out of it all strong and prosperous and actually ON TOP--in the main thanks to the Americans-- while those who paid the highest price in lives and resources are still suffering.
The older I get the more bitter it is that fascist Germany (including Vichy France) that started the wars and championed annihilation of entire "races" came out of it all strong and prosperous and actually ON TOP--in the main thanks to the Americans-- while those who paid the highest price in lives and resources are still suffering.
50cindydavid4
>49 LolaWalser: and the ones that caused it all got away safely and lived their lives in south america
51LolaWalser
Yes, far too many.
52thorold
>49 LolaWalser: those who paid the highest price in lives and resources are still suffering
Well, Stalin has to take a lot of the blame for that, I suppose.
>50 cindydavid4: >51 LolaWalser: Even more simply stayed in Germany and absolved each other from their past sins after a decent interval.
But better not to get into "what if" discussions about the postwar settlement. Almost all the alternative scenarios I can think of would have had the minor by-product of my parents never meeting, which might have been good for the world, but not for me...
----
...and another short one: the 2012 Goncourt winner, which I picked up mostly on the strength of the intriguing title. Ferrari grew up in Paris, but is from a Corsican family and has spent time teaching philosophy in Corsica.
Le sermon sur la chute de Rome: roman (2012; The sermon on the Fall of Rome) by Jérôme Ferrari (France, 1968- )
Matthieu and his best friend Libero drop out of college to run a bar in the Corsican village where Matthieu's parents come from and where Libero has grown up. With plentiful supplies of sunshine, alcohol, music, girls and high-quality charcuterie, what could possibly go wrong? Well, just ask St Augustine...
Ferrari's stylish, compact and philosophically-charged look at the transience of the worlds we build for ourselves almost feels like a parody of everything we expect to find in French literature, which is perhaps what made it such a natural Goncourt winner, but there's an astonishing amount packed into 200 pages: both World Wars, French colonialism, Paris vs. Corsica, rural poverty, violence, and of course the Bishop of Hippo himself, whose church (in modern Algeria) Matthieu's archaeologist sister is busy excavating.
---
It's anybody's guess what they were thinking about with the cover image (photo by Josh Wool): the girl in the photo doesn't really suggest either an archaeologist or a Corsican waitress, and there aren't many other female characters in the book.
Well, Stalin has to take a lot of the blame for that, I suppose.
>50 cindydavid4: >51 LolaWalser: Even more simply stayed in Germany and absolved each other from their past sins after a decent interval.
But better not to get into "what if" discussions about the postwar settlement. Almost all the alternative scenarios I can think of would have had the minor by-product of my parents never meeting, which might have been good for the world, but not for me...
----
...and another short one: the 2012 Goncourt winner, which I picked up mostly on the strength of the intriguing title. Ferrari grew up in Paris, but is from a Corsican family and has spent time teaching philosophy in Corsica.
Le sermon sur la chute de Rome: roman (2012; The sermon on the Fall of Rome) by Jérôme Ferrari (France, 1968- )
Matthieu and his best friend Libero drop out of college to run a bar in the Corsican village where Matthieu's parents come from and where Libero has grown up. With plentiful supplies of sunshine, alcohol, music, girls and high-quality charcuterie, what could possibly go wrong? Well, just ask St Augustine...
Ferrari's stylish, compact and philosophically-charged look at the transience of the worlds we build for ourselves almost feels like a parody of everything we expect to find in French literature, which is perhaps what made it such a natural Goncourt winner, but there's an astonishing amount packed into 200 pages: both World Wars, French colonialism, Paris vs. Corsica, rural poverty, violence, and of course the Bishop of Hippo himself, whose church (in modern Algeria) Matthieu's archaeologist sister is busy excavating.
---
It's anybody's guess what they were thinking about with the cover image (photo by Josh Wool): the girl in the photo doesn't really suggest either an archaeologist or a Corsican waitress, and there aren't many other female characters in the book.
53thorold
Authors called Jerome obviously hunt in packs, like buses. Here's another one, an audiobook that I've been too busy to finish until the last couple of days. This won the Belgian Fintro Literatuurprijs in 2017, and was shortlisted for the Libris prize as well.
Wil (2016; Will) by Jeroen Olyslaegers (Belgium, 1967- ) audiobook read by the author
Angry old man Wilfried Wils, retired Antwerp policeman and underappreciated poet, rages against old age, the modern world, his family and friends, and — as we soon start to see — more than anything else against himself and the way he acted during the German occupation of the city.
Through the French teacher his father fixed him up with in his teens, he learnt to appreciate Rimbaud, but he has also been drawn into the fringes of the Flemish fascist movement, and — even though he is plainly disgusted by their ideas — he weakly allows himself to take advantage of these connections when the Germans arrive, and is inevitably drawn into more and more damaging compromises.
Olyslaegers cleverly doses Wils's self-contempt against his clear-sighted view of what was going on in the city during the occupation and his passionate love (clearly shared with the author) of Antwerp's cultural and linguistic heritage. Whilst we are clearly meant to disapprove of Wils's entanglement with the SS and SD, Olyslaegers also obviously suspects that no-one could really survive for five years under those conditions without making some kind of compromises somewhere along the line, and that those who proclaimed their ideological purity after the war were either hypocrites or self-deceivers.
The audiobook is a tour-de-force: Olyslaegers plainly loves playing the curmudgeonly old Wils, and he puts a great deal of feeling and humour into it, even if it's occasionally difficult to follow if you don't come from Antwerp...
Wil (2016; Will) by Jeroen Olyslaegers (Belgium, 1967- ) audiobook read by the author
Angry old man Wilfried Wils, retired Antwerp policeman and underappreciated poet, rages against old age, the modern world, his family and friends, and — as we soon start to see — more than anything else against himself and the way he acted during the German occupation of the city.
Through the French teacher his father fixed him up with in his teens, he learnt to appreciate Rimbaud, but he has also been drawn into the fringes of the Flemish fascist movement, and — even though he is plainly disgusted by their ideas — he weakly allows himself to take advantage of these connections when the Germans arrive, and is inevitably drawn into more and more damaging compromises.
Olyslaegers cleverly doses Wils's self-contempt against his clear-sighted view of what was going on in the city during the occupation and his passionate love (clearly shared with the author) of Antwerp's cultural and linguistic heritage. Whilst we are clearly meant to disapprove of Wils's entanglement with the SS and SD, Olyslaegers also obviously suspects that no-one could really survive for five years under those conditions without making some kind of compromises somewhere along the line, and that those who proclaimed their ideological purity after the war were either hypocrites or self-deceivers.
The audiobook is a tour-de-force: Olyslaegers plainly loves playing the curmudgeonly old Wils, and he puts a great deal of feeling and humour into it, even if it's occasionally difficult to follow if you don't come from Antwerp...
54LolaWalser
>52 thorold:
My bad for introducing this digression--but no doubt I'll come back to it, somewhere better suited. :)
Amazingly, a book I read--Salut Galarneau!--has actually been awarded prizes--two, according to LT--the Governor General's (of Canada) in 1967 and in 1968 the Prix Valentine de Wolmar de l'Académie française, defunct since 1990. It used to be "Prix annuel, créé en 1960, destiné au plus beau roman paru dans l'année ou au plus beau recueil de poésie".
I'll rush this through because the more I write the more I'm liable to show how pitiful is my knowledge of Canadian history--and the history here concerns the still-ongoing (deepening? shallowing? who knows? not I!) rift between the Anglos and the French--but not all that centrally, it's more of a background hum to the main character's hopelessly boring (in his assessment) life. He's a young man fresh out of school and knocking about dismally from one low level job to another, dreaming of someplace else--France?--and excoriating all things Canadian (Cochon de pays. Tu gèles ou tu crèves, jamais de milieu, tempérez vos jugements! J'emmerde Jacques Cartier! Je rêve de voir Johnson ou Lesage empalés, c'est tout ce qu'ils méritent, je veux dire, c'est une baptême de folie de rester ici. Je les ferais empaler sur une croix copte, et, encore, je ne suis pas méchant.)
This construction "baptême de..." and the copious blaspheming curses--sacrement, crisse etc. made me feel very much at home, especially "sti" (from "hostie", the holy wafer), which is "oštija" in Dalmatian and used in just the same constructions and with the same notable frequency.
Religion weighed heavily on Québécois culture, so the hero's rather tame rebellions, seen in the context of unforgiving provincialism, assume somewhat larger significance.
I liked this, I was entertained, I'd read more Godbout.
My bad for introducing this digression--but no doubt I'll come back to it, somewhere better suited. :)
Amazingly, a book I read--Salut Galarneau!--has actually been awarded prizes--two, according to LT--the Governor General's (of Canada) in 1967 and in 1968 the Prix Valentine de Wolmar de l'Académie française, defunct since 1990. It used to be "Prix annuel, créé en 1960, destiné au plus beau roman paru dans l'année ou au plus beau recueil de poésie".
I'll rush this through because the more I write the more I'm liable to show how pitiful is my knowledge of Canadian history--and the history here concerns the still-ongoing (deepening? shallowing? who knows? not I!) rift between the Anglos and the French--but not all that centrally, it's more of a background hum to the main character's hopelessly boring (in his assessment) life. He's a young man fresh out of school and knocking about dismally from one low level job to another, dreaming of someplace else--France?--and excoriating all things Canadian (Cochon de pays. Tu gèles ou tu crèves, jamais de milieu, tempérez vos jugements! J'emmerde Jacques Cartier! Je rêve de voir Johnson ou Lesage empalés, c'est tout ce qu'ils méritent, je veux dire, c'est une baptême de folie de rester ici. Je les ferais empaler sur une croix copte, et, encore, je ne suis pas méchant.)
This construction "baptême de..." and the copious blaspheming curses--sacrement, crisse etc. made me feel very much at home, especially "sti" (from "hostie", the holy wafer), which is "oštija" in Dalmatian and used in just the same constructions and with the same notable frequency.
Religion weighed heavily on Québécois culture, so the hero's rather tame rebellions, seen in the context of unforgiving provincialism, assume somewhat larger significance.
I liked this, I was entertained, I'd read more Godbout.
55SassyLassy
>54 LolaWalser: Hail Galarneau! was an assigned book in one of my university courses, a course dealing with the Quiet Revolution - a fascinating time. There was definitely some good reading there. I haven't read any more Godbout since, but would like to read Une histoire américaine
Interesting about the comparison with Dalmatian constructions.
Interesting about the comparison with Dalmatian constructions.
56LolaWalser
>55 SassyLassy:
Thanks for that ref, looks very interesting. I need to get more pro-active with finding good Canadian books, I leave everything to chance in secondhand bookshops. Stie!
Thanks for that ref, looks very interesting. I need to get more pro-active with finding good Canadian books, I leave everything to chance in secondhand bookshops. Stie!
57thorold
>55 SassyLassy: >56 LolaWalser: …and another one, (but many of us have already read it) is Pélagie-la-charette, which was the first Canadian (also the first non-European) Goncourt winner in 1979. Of course Maillet had already won a string of Canadian awards by that time.
58SassyLassy
>57 thorold: That was a wonderful book, also on a university course, but read again since.
59thorold
>58 SassyLassy: Yes, I enjoyed it very much when I read it six months ago.
----
Another Deutscher Buchpreis winner from the library, in this case the 2021 winner, which doesn't seem to have been translated yet:
Blaue Frau : Roman (2021) by Antje Rávik Strubel (Germany, 1974- )
There are two alternating stories going on here, both set in Helsinki a few years ago, but without any other very obvious connection until quite a long way into the book: in one, a young woman — Adina/Sala/Nina — who has grown up in a Czech ski resort is holed up on her own in a suburban apartment trying to work out how to take the next step in her life after being raped; in the other, a writer who grew up in East Germany is trying to recalibrate her ideas about East-West relations in the light of the rather different Finnish experience of being caught between two systems, and starts to find the germ of a novel in a series of encounters with the enigmatic Blue Woman.
At the centre of the book is Strubel's exploration of the way we seem to construct artificial competitions between different types of victimhood, where people who suffered under Stalinism can come to feel that they are getting less attention than those in other places who suffered under fascism, or vice-versa; or violence against women somehow gets left out when we are talking about politically or racially motivated violations of human rights. The rapist in the novel is a politician who has built his career on fighting for the rights of minorities; the victim likes to identify herself with the fictional figure of the Last of the Mohicans.
But there's a lot more going on here, especially on the subtleties of "East vs. West" as it plays out in Germany, Finland, Estonia and the Czech mountains. And on all sorts of other forms of exploitation, sexual, economic, or literary. A clever, poetic book, full of subtle touches, but somewhat frustrating to read at first because it takes such a long time to switch from atmosphere-building to actual narrative.
---
I was a little bit puzzled by the cover, but it turns out to be a detail of the Sibelius Monument in Helsinki. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sibelius_Monument
----
Another Deutscher Buchpreis winner from the library, in this case the 2021 winner, which doesn't seem to have been translated yet:
Blaue Frau : Roman (2021) by Antje Rávik Strubel (Germany, 1974- )
There are two alternating stories going on here, both set in Helsinki a few years ago, but without any other very obvious connection until quite a long way into the book: in one, a young woman — Adina/Sala/Nina — who has grown up in a Czech ski resort is holed up on her own in a suburban apartment trying to work out how to take the next step in her life after being raped; in the other, a writer who grew up in East Germany is trying to recalibrate her ideas about East-West relations in the light of the rather different Finnish experience of being caught between two systems, and starts to find the germ of a novel in a series of encounters with the enigmatic Blue Woman.
At the centre of the book is Strubel's exploration of the way we seem to construct artificial competitions between different types of victimhood, where people who suffered under Stalinism can come to feel that they are getting less attention than those in other places who suffered under fascism, or vice-versa; or violence against women somehow gets left out when we are talking about politically or racially motivated violations of human rights. The rapist in the novel is a politician who has built his career on fighting for the rights of minorities; the victim likes to identify herself with the fictional figure of the Last of the Mohicans.
But there's a lot more going on here, especially on the subtleties of "East vs. West" as it plays out in Germany, Finland, Estonia and the Czech mountains. And on all sorts of other forms of exploitation, sexual, economic, or literary. A clever, poetic book, full of subtle touches, but somewhat frustrating to read at first because it takes such a long time to switch from atmosphere-building to actual narrative.
---
I was a little bit puzzled by the cover, but it turns out to be a detail of the Sibelius Monument in Helsinki. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sibelius_Monument
60LolaWalser
How deliciously relativistic. No one need care that Stalinism was being actively eradicated almost two decades before the author was even born, while the victims of fascism are being actively added to even now in the third decade of the 21st century. Sickening.
61thorold
>60 LolaWalser: I don’t think that’s quite fair to the book: sorry if that’s what my review implied. She’s quite clear that preventing and putting right actual current oppression/violence/exploitation is always more important than historical arguments about past wrongs.
The character who complains about the way “Europe” prioritises Holocaust commemoration and plays down the victims of Stalinism (so as not to offend Russia) is an Estonian, and we’re encouraged to work out for ourselves how much special pleading there is going on there. He’s also one of the men who tries to play down the main character’s rape accusations.
The character who complains about the way “Europe” prioritises Holocaust commemoration and plays down the victims of Stalinism (so as not to offend Russia) is an Estonian, and we’re encouraged to work out for ourselves how much special pleading there is going on there. He’s also one of the men who tries to play down the main character’s rape accusations.
62LolaWalser
The Balts could do worse than STFU about "prioritizing" the Holocaust given how many of them embraced Nazis with open arms and exterminated their own Jewish populations with the highest "efficiency" in whole of Europe.
63thorold
And yet another Deutscher Buchpreis book from the library, this time the 2016 winner, a 200-page novella as a change from the usual 450-page doorstep. It's from a well-established writer I haven't tried before. Kirchhoff originally comes from the Lake Constance region, and has been writing fiction since the seventies:
Widerfahrnis : eine Novelle (2016) by Bodo Kirchhoff (Germany, 1948- )
This feels like a very old-fashioned kind of book, partly from the way the author gives his characters a cigarette to play with whenever he's not sure what they should do next, partly from the echoes of the Ur-German romantic longing for the land where the lemon trees bloom, and also from the plot, which has a lot of echoes of all those lovely British films in which two distinguished elderly actors — let's say Bill Nighy and Dame Judi — go off on an irresponsible adventure together, romance blossoms, and they confront mortality in the last reel.
It's not quite a re-run of that cliché. The spontaneous and tentative relationship that builds up between depressed apartment-complex neighbours Reither (retired small-press publisher) and Leonie (retired hatter) during their impulsive road-trip from Bavaria to the Warm South is more complicated and subtle than that, and the ending, which brings them together with some of the migrants trying to make the same journey in the opposite direction, develops in unexpected ways.
I liked the concept in the end, but I got a bit fed up with all the smoking-business and the endless recycling of holiday detail. I felt it would have worked better as a 100-page novella.
Widerfahrnis : eine Novelle (2016) by Bodo Kirchhoff (Germany, 1948- )
This feels like a very old-fashioned kind of book, partly from the way the author gives his characters a cigarette to play with whenever he's not sure what they should do next, partly from the echoes of the Ur-German romantic longing for the land where the lemon trees bloom, and also from the plot, which has a lot of echoes of all those lovely British films in which two distinguished elderly actors — let's say Bill Nighy and Dame Judi — go off on an irresponsible adventure together, romance blossoms, and they confront mortality in the last reel.
It's not quite a re-run of that cliché. The spontaneous and tentative relationship that builds up between depressed apartment-complex neighbours Reither (retired small-press publisher) and Leonie (retired hatter) during their impulsive road-trip from Bavaria to the Warm South is more complicated and subtle than that, and the ending, which brings them together with some of the migrants trying to make the same journey in the opposite direction, develops in unexpected ways.
I liked the concept in the end, but I got a bit fed up with all the smoking-business and the endless recycling of holiday detail. I felt it would have worked better as a 100-page novella.
64birder4106
After the German Book Prize (>45 thorold:), Kim de l'Horizon also won the Swiss Book Prize 2022 with Blutbuch.
Kim de l'Horizon is a self-identified non-binary person.
He uses different storytelling techniques and even languages in his autobiographically influenced story. In addition to the main language, German, there are also Swiss German expressions and passages in English. The author succeeds in interweaving these naturally and fluently with the text. The English parts in the appendix of the book are also translated into German. The Swiss German parts of the text are also simply explained to the reader "By the Way" so that they can also be understood by readers who only speak standard German.
A great book from the life of a person who feels differently and is different than most of society.
Some passages may be disturbing because of their "exciplicity".
Kim de l'Horizon is a self-identified non-binary person.
He uses different storytelling techniques and even languages in his autobiographically influenced story. In addition to the main language, German, there are also Swiss German expressions and passages in English. The author succeeds in interweaving these naturally and fluently with the text. The English parts in the appendix of the book are also translated into German. The Swiss German parts of the text are also simply explained to the reader "By the Way" so that they can also be understood by readers who only speak standard German.
A great book from the life of a person who feels differently and is different than most of society.
Some passages may be disturbing because of their "exciplicity".
65thorold
>64 birder4106: Thanks, I'm definitely looking out for that. It sounds like an interesting follow-up to the books by Dutch non-binary authors Marieke Lucas Rijneveld and Tobi Lakmaker I've read lately.
---
Here's another, on audio this time, the Deutscher Buchpreis winner from 2018. Inger-Maria Mahlke is from Lübeck, and spent a lot of her early life with relatives on Tenerife. She was an academic criminologist before writing her breakthrough novel, Silberfischchen, in 2010 (that won an important prize too):
Archipel (2018) by Inger-Maria Mahlke (Germany, 1977- ) audiobook read by Eva Gosciejewicz
(Author photo from Wikipedia)
This novel takes us backwards through the history of Tenerife from 2015 to 1919, following the lives of multiple generations of a group of interconnected families. Mahlke looks at the way the big historical events affect the lives of ordinary people in different socio-economic classes, from modern scandals of Spanish regional politics and EU-subsidy-milking, via the end of fascism and the 23rd of February 1981, the sclerosis of Franco's rule, the fall of José Antonio, the coup and Civil War, the 1920s when the islands were a military base for colonial ventures in North-West Africa, and right back to the early 20th century when Spain had little to say in the islands, which were run as de facto colonies by British shipping and fruit companies.
There are one or two characters who run through almost the whole novel, but, particularly because of the reverse-timebase, it's hard to make connections between the things that happen to them, and it feels as though the real main character is the island itself, with its constant geography and weather offset by ever-changing street-names and émigré populations. Mahlke clearly has a lot of sympathy for the characters at the lower end of the social scale, in particular, but really there is too much going on for us to be able to focus n any of their problems for long. More interesting than satisfying, perhaps.
---
Here's another, on audio this time, the Deutscher Buchpreis winner from 2018. Inger-Maria Mahlke is from Lübeck, and spent a lot of her early life with relatives on Tenerife. She was an academic criminologist before writing her breakthrough novel, Silberfischchen, in 2010 (that won an important prize too):
Archipel (2018) by Inger-Maria Mahlke (Germany, 1977- ) audiobook read by Eva Gosciejewicz
(Author photo from Wikipedia)
This novel takes us backwards through the history of Tenerife from 2015 to 1919, following the lives of multiple generations of a group of interconnected families. Mahlke looks at the way the big historical events affect the lives of ordinary people in different socio-economic classes, from modern scandals of Spanish regional politics and EU-subsidy-milking, via the end of fascism and the 23rd of February 1981, the sclerosis of Franco's rule, the fall of José Antonio, the coup and Civil War, the 1920s when the islands were a military base for colonial ventures in North-West Africa, and right back to the early 20th century when Spain had little to say in the islands, which were run as de facto colonies by British shipping and fruit companies.
There are one or two characters who run through almost the whole novel, but, particularly because of the reverse-timebase, it's hard to make connections between the things that happen to them, and it feels as though the real main character is the island itself, with its constant geography and weather offset by ever-changing street-names and émigré populations. Mahlke clearly has a lot of sympathy for the characters at the lower end of the social scale, in particular, but really there is too much going on for us to be able to focus n any of their problems for long. More interesting than satisfying, perhaps.
66thorold
And, would you believe it, another Deutscher Buchpreis winner set on an island. This one also fits in with the Robinson Crusoe reworkings in our Q2 "Outcasts and Castaways" theme.
Lutz Seiler grew up in Gera, in Thuringia, and was a construction worker for a while before going on to study literature (...and do a summer job in a restaurant on Hiddensee). He published several poetry collections and edited a literary magazine before shooting to fame with this debut novel.
There's a 2017 English translation of this novel by Tess Lewis under the same title.
Kruso (2014) by Lutz Seiler (Germany, 1963- )
Seiler paradoxically sets his reworking of the Robinson Crusoe story on the popular Baltic holiday island of Hiddensee, to the west of Rügen, crowded in the summer of 1989 with holidaymakers, seasonal hotel and restaurant workers, people hoping to leave the DDR illegally via the tantalisingly short sea-crossing to the Danish island of Møn, and heavily-armed border-guards.
Literature student Ed, his Friday-character, arrives on the island after the death of his girlfriend provokes a kind of nervous breakdown. He finds a job washing-up in the kitchen of the Klausner restaurant in the north of the island (a real place that is still in business; Seiler worked there himself in 1989). And he soon forms a kind of spiritual bond with his colleague Alexander Krusowitsch — "Kruso" — the acknowledged leader of the seasonal workers on the island and organiser of their clandestine assistance to the "shipwrecked mariners", the growing body of people who have come to the island because they have in one way or another been swept overboard from the sinking East German state.
The result is a fascinating and quite unique kind of book, part darkly-realistic behind-the-scenes accounts of restaurant work, part dream-laden allegorical account of liberation and redemption against the background of the collapsing state, part tribute to the many brave people who died or ended up in prison as a result of attempting to leave the DDR. The Robinson Crusoe parallel works much better than you might expect. And I was left with an urge to go and see Hiddensee for myself...
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Another excellent novel I read a few years ago about someone escaping the DDR via the sea-crossing from Hiddensee to Møn: Der Spaziergang von Rostock nach Syrakus by Friedrich Christian Delius.
Lutz Seiler grew up in Gera, in Thuringia, and was a construction worker for a while before going on to study literature (...and do a summer job in a restaurant on Hiddensee). He published several poetry collections and edited a literary magazine before shooting to fame with this debut novel.
There's a 2017 English translation of this novel by Tess Lewis under the same title.
Kruso (2014) by Lutz Seiler (Germany, 1963- )
Seiler paradoxically sets his reworking of the Robinson Crusoe story on the popular Baltic holiday island of Hiddensee, to the west of Rügen, crowded in the summer of 1989 with holidaymakers, seasonal hotel and restaurant workers, people hoping to leave the DDR illegally via the tantalisingly short sea-crossing to the Danish island of Møn, and heavily-armed border-guards.
Literature student Ed, his Friday-character, arrives on the island after the death of his girlfriend provokes a kind of nervous breakdown. He finds a job washing-up in the kitchen of the Klausner restaurant in the north of the island (a real place that is still in business; Seiler worked there himself in 1989). And he soon forms a kind of spiritual bond with his colleague Alexander Krusowitsch — "Kruso" — the acknowledged leader of the seasonal workers on the island and organiser of their clandestine assistance to the "shipwrecked mariners", the growing body of people who have come to the island because they have in one way or another been swept overboard from the sinking East German state.
The result is a fascinating and quite unique kind of book, part darkly-realistic behind-the-scenes accounts of restaurant work, part dream-laden allegorical account of liberation and redemption against the background of the collapsing state, part tribute to the many brave people who died or ended up in prison as a result of attempting to leave the DDR. The Robinson Crusoe parallel works much better than you might expect. And I was left with an urge to go and see Hiddensee for myself...
---
Another excellent novel I read a few years ago about someone escaping the DDR via the sea-crossing from Hiddensee to Møn: Der Spaziergang von Rostock nach Syrakus by Friedrich Christian Delius.
67thorold
Just for a change, a recent Goncourt winner, also plucked from the library shelves without looking too closely at what it was about.
L'anomalie (2020; The Anomaly) by Hervé Le Tellier (France, 1957- )
This seems to be either a philosophical novel cast as a pastiche of a science-fiction disaster thriller, or a science-fiction disaster thriller that is making fun of the French tendency to turn everything into philosophy. Or possibly both. Something strange happens to an Air France flight from Paris to New York when it passes through a storm cloud in March 2021, and there are repercussions on the individual lives of the passengers and crew, a good dozen of whom are named characters in the novel.
I found the initial exposition of the characters' back-stories quite engaging, and the working out of the consequences for them in the closing chapters a little bit less so, but I got rather fed up with the middle section, where Le Tellier brings in every Hollywood cliché he can think of and then tries to excuse it by making fun of himself (one "top scientist" summoned to discuss the problem can't stop giggling when she realises that she is sitting with a bunch of generals at the famous conference table from Doctor Strangelove; another character is charmed to find himself being debriefed by an FBI psychologist using the actual interview script from Close encounters of the third kind...).
It is all very French: we never find out for sure what the anomaly means or what caused it, and all is not put right at the end; similarly, many of the characters have stories that are resolved in ways that are deliberately messy and unsatisfying. We are supposed to reflect on questions of mortality and identity, the reality of the world and the irreversibility of time, not on heroes and villains. And we are quite likely to wind up asking ourselves whether it was really worth being put through all those red herrings about wormholes and quantum physics and weak jokes about Trump and Macron just for that. Maybe, just maybe, because Le Tellier is a competent and efficient storyteller even when he's trying to deny that there is a story to tell, but I'm not really convinced.
Whatever else, it's also a nice demonstration of the risks of setting a book on a well-defined date in the near future. When he was writing (in 2019?) and when the book came out in August 2020, Le Tellier obviously never thought that Covid-19 would still be the only disaster we would be talking about in early 2021, or that the idea of 240 "normal" people simply getting on a plane from Paris to New York and being allowed to disembark without endless health formalities would itself seem like science-fiction...
L'anomalie (2020; The Anomaly) by Hervé Le Tellier (France, 1957- )
This seems to be either a philosophical novel cast as a pastiche of a science-fiction disaster thriller, or a science-fiction disaster thriller that is making fun of the French tendency to turn everything into philosophy. Or possibly both. Something strange happens to an Air France flight from Paris to New York when it passes through a storm cloud in March 2021, and there are repercussions on the individual lives of the passengers and crew, a good dozen of whom are named characters in the novel.
I found the initial exposition of the characters' back-stories quite engaging, and the working out of the consequences for them in the closing chapters a little bit less so, but I got rather fed up with the middle section, where Le Tellier brings in every Hollywood cliché he can think of and then tries to excuse it by making fun of himself (one "top scientist" summoned to discuss the problem can't stop giggling when she realises that she is sitting with a bunch of generals at the famous conference table from Doctor Strangelove; another character is charmed to find himself being debriefed by an FBI psychologist using the actual interview script from Close encounters of the third kind...).
It is all very French: we never find out for sure what the anomaly means or what caused it, and all is not put right at the end; similarly, many of the characters have stories that are resolved in ways that are deliberately messy and unsatisfying. We are supposed to reflect on questions of mortality and identity, the reality of the world and the irreversibility of time, not on heroes and villains. And we are quite likely to wind up asking ourselves whether it was really worth being put through all those red herrings about wormholes and quantum physics and weak jokes about Trump and Macron just for that. Maybe, just maybe, because Le Tellier is a competent and efficient storyteller even when he's trying to deny that there is a story to tell, but I'm not really convinced.
Whatever else, it's also a nice demonstration of the risks of setting a book on a well-defined date in the near future. When he was writing (in 2019?) and when the book came out in August 2020, Le Tellier obviously never thought that Covid-19 would still be the only disaster we would be talking about in early 2021, or that the idea of 240 "normal" people simply getting on a plane from Paris to New York and being allowed to disembark without endless health formalities would itself seem like science-fiction...
68thorold
This is what the library happened to have by the 2021 Cervantes Prize winner (cf. >29 kidzdoc: >40 kidzdoc:), Cristina Peri Rossi. Many of her books, including the most famous, The ship of fools (1984), have been translated into English, but this one doesn't seem to have been yet:
Por fin solos (2004) by Cristina Peri Rossi (Uruguay, 1941- )
In fifteen short stories and a couple of linking essays, Peri Rossi dissects the stages of falling in love and out of it again, with "alone at last" serving as a key-phrase (in different senses) for both processes. Infatuation, cohabitation, the interference of children and rival lovers, and the frustrated quest for the full-stop at the end of a relationship are all illustrated from ironic and slightly offbeat perspectives. Witty and often perceptive in unexpected ways. I think my favourite was "Ulva lactuca" (Sea lettuce) — a story that turns out to be all about the journey of a spoonful of soup towards the firmly-closed mouth of a reluctant toddler.
Por fin solos (2004) by Cristina Peri Rossi (Uruguay, 1941- )
In fifteen short stories and a couple of linking essays, Peri Rossi dissects the stages of falling in love and out of it again, with "alone at last" serving as a key-phrase (in different senses) for both processes. Infatuation, cohabitation, the interference of children and rival lovers, and the frustrated quest for the full-stop at the end of a relationship are all illustrated from ironic and slightly offbeat perspectives. Witty and often perceptive in unexpected ways. I think my favourite was "Ulva lactuca" (Sea lettuce) — a story that turns out to be all about the journey of a spoonful of soup towards the firmly-closed mouth of a reluctant toddler.
69thorold
And another Goncourt winner by an author new to me that I found in the library: the 2019 winner. There's an English translation of this by Paul Homel, published in March this year.
Tous les hommes n'habitent pas le monde de la même façon (2019; Not everybody lives the same way) by Jean-Paul Dubois (France, 1950- )
Paul Hansen, a former apartment-building supervisor, is sharing a cell in a Montreal prison with the notoriously scary Hell's Angels gang-leader Patrick Horton. We're not told the nature of Hansen's offence until the end of the book, but he's clearly quite a different type from his cellmate, and a lot of the interest of the book is in watching the development of a friendship between the two men. Meanwhile, Hansen delves into his memory and looks back at those who mattered to him: his French mother, who ran an independent cinema in Toulouse; his Danish father, protestant pastor and descendant of a long line of Skagen fishermen; his wife Winona, an Irish-Algonquin bush pilot; his friend Kieran Read, an insurance adjuster whose job is to find out bad things about deceased people; and his dog Nouk. All of them existing at different angles to the universe.
There's a lot of information here. We learn a good deal about French cinema of the fifties and sixties, Harley-Davidsons and eccentric European cars, about flying the DHC-2 Beaver, the maintenance of lawns and swimming-pools, prison food, asbestos mining, Skagen sand-dunes, organ music, casinos and race-courses, and much else. And it's not always easy to see what it all adds up to, or how it maps onto the inner lives of the characters. In the end, I think it was a kind of French/Canadian take on Nevil Shute's Trustee from the toolroom, a novel about a man who seems to be fully wrapped up in the mechanical world, but who turns out to have a limit to the amount of senseless destruction of human happiness he can tolerate.
Tous les hommes n'habitent pas le monde de la même façon (2019; Not everybody lives the same way) by Jean-Paul Dubois (France, 1950- )
Paul Hansen, a former apartment-building supervisor, is sharing a cell in a Montreal prison with the notoriously scary Hell's Angels gang-leader Patrick Horton. We're not told the nature of Hansen's offence until the end of the book, but he's clearly quite a different type from his cellmate, and a lot of the interest of the book is in watching the development of a friendship between the two men. Meanwhile, Hansen delves into his memory and looks back at those who mattered to him: his French mother, who ran an independent cinema in Toulouse; his Danish father, protestant pastor and descendant of a long line of Skagen fishermen; his wife Winona, an Irish-Algonquin bush pilot; his friend Kieran Read, an insurance adjuster whose job is to find out bad things about deceased people; and his dog Nouk. All of them existing at different angles to the universe.
There's a lot of information here. We learn a good deal about French cinema of the fifties and sixties, Harley-Davidsons and eccentric European cars, about flying the DHC-2 Beaver, the maintenance of lawns and swimming-pools, prison food, asbestos mining, Skagen sand-dunes, organ music, casinos and race-courses, and much else. And it's not always easy to see what it all adds up to, or how it maps onto the inner lives of the characters. In the end, I think it was a kind of French/Canadian take on Nevil Shute's Trustee from the toolroom, a novel about a man who seems to be fully wrapped up in the mechanical world, but who turns out to have a limit to the amount of senseless destruction of human happiness he can tolerate.
70thorold
Back to the Deutscher Buchpreis, with the 2022 winner, by gender-fluid Swiss author Kim de l'Horizon, who playfully gives a date of birth in the author bio at the front of the book as "2666" — de l'Horizon has previously worked on stage adaptations of Bolaño — but Wikipedia has the more prosaic date of 1992.
birder4106 and a couple of others have already posted about this book, which turns out to be the third or fourth auto-fiction novel I've read this year by someone who doesn't accept "traditional" models of gender (following on from Dutch authors Marieke Lucas Rijneveld and Tobi Lakmaker).
Blutbuch : Roman (2022) by Kim de l'Horizon (Switzerland, 1992- )
Through the lives of the narrator and their mother and grandmother, Kim de l'Horizon explores different kinds of experience of gender, factoring in the peculiarly Swiss experience of existing in a culture where the language of everyday speech is quite different from that of most written discourse.
De l'Horizon has a lot of fun with the way that Bernese-German uses the French-derived Meer/Grossmeer and Peer instead of standard German Mutter/Großmutter and Vater — Meer being a homonym for the standard German word for sea/ocean, so the narrator has grown up speaking die Meersprache, which can be read as both "mother tongue" and "ocean language". And what else would they speak in a landlocked country?
The central image in the first part of the book is the copper beech (Blutbuche, a near-homonym of the "blood-book"/"family tree" of the title) in the garden of Grossmeer's house. The narrator digs into horticultural history to look at the way the fashion for that particular type of beech-tree developed, and how it got mixed up (as most things did) with German nationalist iconography.
The narrator chronicles various adventures with Grindr, and the ups and downs of their relationship with Meer, embarking on a new relationship herself, and Grossmeer, who is showing signs of an imminent decline into dementia. And also discovers a family-history in which Meer has been documenting ancestors in the female line back to medieval times, all of them strong women who refused to conform to gender stereotypes in one way or another — healers, midwives, cross-dressers, lesbians, outlaws, targets of witchcraft accusations, etc.
The book is written in standard German, with frequent intrusions of Bernese-German, but then in the final chapter it suddenly switches to German-accented International English (with an appended machine-translation(!) into German), because the narrator comes to feel that German is inadequate to deal with the things that need to be said about gender and identity, which they have learnt about mostly through American academic and literary writings in English. But then it turns out that the author most cited in that final chapter is Annie Ernaux...
This felt like a very messy book, where it was difficult to pick out what you were really supposed to be focussing on. Overall, what it says about gender is mostly rather familiar territory (but of course everyone has to discover these things in their own way, in their own lives, so maybe it is worth saying them over and over again). It also belongs to that school of autofiction where the narrator keeps popping up to tell you that what was in the last chapter wasn't quite true, and what actually happened was this, which can be frustrating. But there are a lot of very interesting passages, and I enjoyed all the language experimentation, so I'm glad I read it.
birder4106 and a couple of others have already posted about this book, which turns out to be the third or fourth auto-fiction novel I've read this year by someone who doesn't accept "traditional" models of gender (following on from Dutch authors Marieke Lucas Rijneveld and Tobi Lakmaker).
Blutbuch : Roman (2022) by Kim de l'Horizon (Switzerland, 1992- )
Through the lives of the narrator and their mother and grandmother, Kim de l'Horizon explores different kinds of experience of gender, factoring in the peculiarly Swiss experience of existing in a culture where the language of everyday speech is quite different from that of most written discourse.
De l'Horizon has a lot of fun with the way that Bernese-German uses the French-derived Meer/Grossmeer and Peer instead of standard German Mutter/Großmutter and Vater — Meer being a homonym for the standard German word for sea/ocean, so the narrator has grown up speaking die Meersprache, which can be read as both "mother tongue" and "ocean language". And what else would they speak in a landlocked country?
The central image in the first part of the book is the copper beech (Blutbuche, a near-homonym of the "blood-book"/"family tree" of the title) in the garden of Grossmeer's house. The narrator digs into horticultural history to look at the way the fashion for that particular type of beech-tree developed, and how it got mixed up (as most things did) with German nationalist iconography.
The narrator chronicles various adventures with Grindr, and the ups and downs of their relationship with Meer, embarking on a new relationship herself, and Grossmeer, who is showing signs of an imminent decline into dementia. And also discovers a family-history in which Meer has been documenting ancestors in the female line back to medieval times, all of them strong women who refused to conform to gender stereotypes in one way or another — healers, midwives, cross-dressers, lesbians, outlaws, targets of witchcraft accusations, etc.
The book is written in standard German, with frequent intrusions of Bernese-German, but then in the final chapter it suddenly switches to German-accented International English (with an appended machine-translation(!) into German), because the narrator comes to feel that German is inadequate to deal with the things that need to be said about gender and identity, which they have learnt about mostly through American academic and literary writings in English. But then it turns out that the author most cited in that final chapter is Annie Ernaux...
This felt like a very messy book, where it was difficult to pick out what you were really supposed to be focussing on. Overall, what it says about gender is mostly rather familiar territory (but of course everyone has to discover these things in their own way, in their own lives, so maybe it is worth saying them over and over again). It also belongs to that school of autofiction where the narrator keeps popping up to tell you that what was in the last chapter wasn't quite true, and what actually happened was this, which can be frustrating. But there are a lot of very interesting passages, and I enjoyed all the language experimentation, so I'm glad I read it.
71thorold
Another Goncourt winner, from 2009 this time. Marie NDiaye grew up in France, with a French mother and a Senegalese father. Her brother, Pap Ndiaye, is a prominent academic recently appointed as education minister by President Macron. Marie NDiaye has been writing novels and screenplays since the 1980s. Several of her books, including this one, have been translated to English. Apart from the Goncourt, she's also won the Académie theatre prize, the Prix Femina — for Rosie Carpe — and the Nelly Sachs Prize.
Trois femmes puissantes (2009; Three strong women) by Marie NDiaye (France, 1967- )
(I don't know why I bother showing covers for French novels...)
On the face of it, this is a similar sort of deal to Gertrude Stein's Three lives: three novella-length pieces, each involving a strong female character. But it's also a kind of novel, as the three stories intersect in ways that aren't entirely straightforward and logical, and in places verge on the mystical. All three straddle the physical and cultural space between France and Senegal: in the first, Paris lawyer Norah is summoned to Senegal by her estranged father to deal with the aftermath of a family tragedy; in the second, we are in a small French town watching the life of disgraced schoolteacher Rudy unravel as his Senegalese wife Fanta remains enigmatically offstage; in the third, the young widow Khady Demba gets caught up in the horrors of the illegal migration trail across the Sahara to Europe.
NDiaye's women are "strong" not in the conventional sense of being able to exercise power, but in the more particular sense that they have to have the moral strength to deal with more than their fair share of other people's (read: men's) problems without unravelling themselves. It's a book that's packed with anger at the injustices of the world and the selfishness of men and Europeans, and occasionally it seems to lose its direction in all that rage, but most of the time NDiaye's writing is sharp and devastating: it's well worth hanging in there through the woolly patches.
Trois femmes puissantes (2009; Three strong women) by Marie NDiaye (France, 1967- )
(I don't know why I bother showing covers for French novels...)
On the face of it, this is a similar sort of deal to Gertrude Stein's Three lives: three novella-length pieces, each involving a strong female character. But it's also a kind of novel, as the three stories intersect in ways that aren't entirely straightforward and logical, and in places verge on the mystical. All three straddle the physical and cultural space between France and Senegal: in the first, Paris lawyer Norah is summoned to Senegal by her estranged father to deal with the aftermath of a family tragedy; in the second, we are in a small French town watching the life of disgraced schoolteacher Rudy unravel as his Senegalese wife Fanta remains enigmatically offstage; in the third, the young widow Khady Demba gets caught up in the horrors of the illegal migration trail across the Sahara to Europe.
NDiaye's women are "strong" not in the conventional sense of being able to exercise power, but in the more particular sense that they have to have the moral strength to deal with more than their fair share of other people's (read: men's) problems without unravelling themselves. It's a book that's packed with anger at the injustices of the world and the selfishness of men and Europeans, and occasionally it seems to lose its direction in all that rage, but most of the time NDiaye's writing is sharp and devastating: it's well worth hanging in there through the woolly patches.
72Tess_W
Late to the party, here! I'm always very unsure exactly the requirements to fit the category, so if this isn't what is meant, let me know! For example, this author was born in Russia, but defected to France. He writes in French, but I'm sure since he taught in Russia that could also be considered "his" native language. P.S. I also hate to write reviews, although I love reading them!
I read Dreams of My Russian Summer by Andrei Makine. This book won two top French awards, the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Médicis. (1995, 1997). This is the fictional story of a young Russian boy and his sister, who visit their grandmother every summer. Grandmother Charlotte lives on the edge of the Siberian steppe. Charlotte reads to her grandchildren, anything she can get her hands on: old newspaper articles, magazines, etc. She also goes through family pictures by the hours. Her goal is to overwhelm them with a love for French culture. It was unclear to me, how the family ended up in Russia. With the death of the grandmother also comes the death of what the young man considers "civilized and graceful" France. The young boy is the narrator of the story and remains nameless, except for two episodes in the story; once when his school friends call him "Frantsuz", the Russian word for Frenchman and once his grandmother utters the name "Alyosha."
A second story line revolves around the harshness of the Stalinist regime and how often brutal choices had to be made to stay alive.
I'm not ready to say if the book is pretentious or more Proust-like. Time and perhaps a re-reading will answer that question. I understand this is book one in a series, but I've been unable to substantiate that.
It's interesting to note that the author was a Russian school teacher who participated in a teacher exchange program and was sent to France, where he defected.
I read Dreams of My Russian Summer by Andrei Makine. This book won two top French awards, the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Médicis. (1995, 1997). This is the fictional story of a young Russian boy and his sister, who visit their grandmother every summer. Grandmother Charlotte lives on the edge of the Siberian steppe. Charlotte reads to her grandchildren, anything she can get her hands on: old newspaper articles, magazines, etc. She also goes through family pictures by the hours. Her goal is to overwhelm them with a love for French culture. It was unclear to me, how the family ended up in Russia. With the death of the grandmother also comes the death of what the young man considers "civilized and graceful" France. The young boy is the narrator of the story and remains nameless, except for two episodes in the story; once when his school friends call him "Frantsuz", the Russian word for Frenchman and once his grandmother utters the name "Alyosha."
A second story line revolves around the harshness of the Stalinist regime and how often brutal choices had to be made to stay alive.
I'm not ready to say if the book is pretentious or more Proust-like. Time and perhaps a re-reading will answer that question. I understand this is book one in a series, but I've been unable to substantiate that.
It's interesting to note that the author was a Russian school teacher who participated in a teacher exchange program and was sent to France, where he defected.
73SassyLassy
CHINA: Shuang Xuetao: Blossoms Literary Prize, Wang Zengqi Short Story Prize, Blanc- Imaginist Leterary Prize for best Chinese Writer under 45
Rouge Street by Shuang Xuetao translated from the Chinese by Jeremy Tiang (2022)
first published separately in Chinese: Moses on the Plain (2016), The Aeronaut (2017) and Bright Hall (2017)
finished reading August 3, 2022
Shenyang, China, is probably not on many people's vacation list. Once a thriving industrial city, it has now become part of China's Rust Belt. It's also Shuang Xuetao's hometown.
Shuang grew up in the already declining city, so tales of its glory days to him were just old people talking. What he saw in its future appeared to be utter hopelessness, with random moments of grace.
In her Foreward Madeleine Thien says Rouge Street (Yanfen Street)
These are the people who inhabit these three novellas. Each interweaves past and present. Family members appear and disappear, sometimes in an incarnation in the next generation, still carrying the burdens of the last. Resentment and revenge are never far from the surface. Some commit terrible crimes and seek redemption, others have no remorse. There's a dream like quality to much of the writing, allowing the narratives to ebb and flow.
Shuang Xuetao has been compared to Hemingway and Murakami. However, to me he most recalls another great writer from north eastern China, Mo Yan, with a gallows humour that adds an earthiness and richness to a distinctly Chinese voice.
Rouge Street by Shuang Xuetao translated from the Chinese by Jeremy Tiang (2022)
first published separately in Chinese: Moses on the Plain (2016), The Aeronaut (2017) and Bright Hall (2017)
finished reading August 3, 2022
Shenyang, China, is probably not on many people's vacation list. Once a thriving industrial city, it has now become part of China's Rust Belt. It's also Shuang Xuetao's hometown.
Shuang grew up in the already declining city, so tales of its glory days to him were just old people talking. What he saw in its future appeared to be utter hopelessness, with random moments of grace.
In her Foreward Madeleine Thien says Rouge Street (Yanfen Street)
was settled by people thrown unceremoniously together - alleged class enemies and their equally despised children, former felons, hooligans, peasants, migrant workers, and the poor. Together, they formed a vast labour pool, disappearing into mines, smelters, and machine factories, ...building tractors or transformers, cleaning toilets or making cigarettes.... All must settle, and attempt to thrive, in jobs they have not chosen.
These are the people who inhabit these three novellas. Each interweaves past and present. Family members appear and disappear, sometimes in an incarnation in the next generation, still carrying the burdens of the last. Resentment and revenge are never far from the surface. Some commit terrible crimes and seek redemption, others have no remorse. There's a dream like quality to much of the writing, allowing the narratives to ebb and flow.
Shuang Xuetao has been compared to Hemingway and Murakami. However, to me he most recalls another great writer from north eastern China, Mo Yan, with a gallows humour that adds an earthiness and richness to a distinctly Chinese voice.
