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This is the twelfth Reading the World 2008 title we’re covering. (Almost half-way!) Write-ups of the other titles can be found here. And information about the Reading the World program—a special collaboration between publishers and independent booksellers to promote literature in translation throughout the month of June—is available at the official RTW website. There’s also a podcast discussing RTW available from World Books.
According to Contemporary Japanese Writers, Vol. 1:
Yoko Ogawa is one of the stars of Japanese literature who is anticipated to be “the next Haruki Murakami.” Of her works, over ten have been translated into French. In France, she is as popular as her predecessors Junichiro Tanizaki, Yasunari Kawabata, and Yukio Mishima.
The Diving Pool is her first title to be published in English, and came out from Picador earlier this year. (I reviewed it a few months back.) This is a collection of three novellas, including “Dormitory,” which was my favorite for its creepy, ambiguous quality. (Even the flap copy description for this story is great: “A woman nostalgically visits her old college dormitory on the outskirts of Tokyo, a boarding house run by a mysterious triple amputee with one leg.”)
Stephen Snyder is one of the best Japanese translators working today, and he did a marvelous job with this book. I know that before leaving Picador, Amber Quereshi signed on a few of Ogawa’s titles, all of which Snyder will be translating.
The next one—The Housekeeper and the Professor—is due out in October, which is written up in Contemporary Japanese Writers:
Hakase no aishita sushiki (The Gift of Numbers) marked a transformation within Ogawa. It is a tale about the kind and affectionate relationship between a math professor—whose memory lasts only eighty minutes as a result of injuries he sustained in a car accident—and his housekeeper and her child. A beautifully written masterpiece, it attracted an overwhelming number of readers in Japan. The warmth with which the author runs her eyes over these characters, and the delicacy with which she portrays them, succeeded in making Ogawa’s world into something more expansive and enchanting.
The title of hers that sounds most interesting to me though is Hotel Iris:
Fans were split on the sensual, sadomasochistic world inhabited by an old man and a girl in Hotel Iris. It also proved controversial when it was translated into French; even the well-respected newspaper Le Monde criticized it as being merely erotic. In the story, the girl feels sorry for the old man’s deteriorating body bound for death, and motivated by a certain sense of masochism, she gives herself to him.
Reviewed by Rachael Daum
The Urdu word basti refers to any space, intimate to worldly, and is often translated as “common place” or “a gathering place.” This book by Intizar Husain, who is widely regarded as one of the most important living Pakistani writers,. . .
Reviewed by Vincent Francone
The Whispering Muse, one of three books by Icelandic writer Sjón just published in North America, is nothing if not inventive. Stories within stories, shifting narration, leaps in time, and characters who transform from men to birds and back again—you’ve. . .
Reviewed by Camila Santos
Luis Negrón’s debut collection Mundo Cruel is a journey through Puerto Rico’s gay world. Published in 2010, the book is already in its fifth Spanish edition. Here in the U.S., the collection has been published by Seven Stories Press and. . .
Reviewed by Grant Barber
“South”
To have watched from one of your patios
the ancient stars
from the bank of shadow to have watched
the scattered lights
my ignorance has learned no names for
nor their places in constellations
to have heard the ring of. . .
Reviewed by Larissa Kyzer
When Icelandic author Andri Snær Magnason first published LoveStar, his darkly comic parable of corporate power and media influence run amok, the world was in a very different place. (This was back before both Facebook and Twitter, if you can. . .
Reviewed by Tiffany Nichols
When starting Hi, This Is Conchita and Other Stories, Santiago Roncagliolo’s second work to be translated into English, I was expecting Roncagliolo to explore the line between evil and religion that was front and center in Red April. Admittedly, I. . .
Reviewed by Josh Billings
Christa Wolf’s newly-translated City of Angels is a novel of atonement, and in this way the work of art that it resembles most to me is not another book, but the 2003 Sophia Coppola film Lost in Translation. Like that. . .
Reviewed by Grant Barber
French author—philosopher, poet, novelist—de Roblès writes something approaching the Great (Latin) American Novel, about Brazilian characters, one of whom is steeped in the life of the seventeenth century polymath (but almost always erroneous) Jesuit Athanasius Kircher. Eleazard von Wogau, a. . .
Reviewed by Brendan Riley
A rich, beautifully written, consistently surprising satire, Yan Lianke’s Lenin’s Kisses boasts an elaborate, engrossing plot with disarming twists and compelling characters both challenged and challenging. It leads the reader on a strange pilgrimage—often melancholy but certainly rewarding—through a China. . .
Reviewed by Emily Davis
Maybe I’ve been watching too much Doctor Who lately, and I’m therefore liable to see everything through science-fiction-colored glasses. But when the pages of The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira refer to “the totality of the present and of eternity”. . .
Three Percent is supported in part by the New York State Council on the Arts.
