{"id":297626,"date":"2014-04-15T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-04-15T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2014\/04\/15\/why-this-book-should-win-the-10-fiction-finalists\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T14:39:26","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T14:39:26","slug":"why-this-book-should-win-the-10-fiction-finalists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2014\/04\/15\/why-this-book-should-win-the-10-fiction-finalists\/","title":{"rendered":"Why This Book Should Win: The 10 Fiction Finalists"},"content":{"rendered":"

Now that the ten finalists for the 2014 BTBA<\/span> in Fiction have been announced,<\/a> it’s worth taking a look back at the reasons “why these books should win” according to the judges and other readers. Below is a list of all ten finalists, with links to their individual write ups along with a key quote from each. <\/p>\n

Horses of God<\/em> by Mahi Binebine,<\/a> from the French by Lulu Norman (Morocco; Tin House)<\/b><\/p>\n

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Horses of God is narrated from beyond the grave by one of four childhood friends who wrench an existence in the Sidi Moumen slums in Casablanca. They form a soccer team that competes with teams from the other slums and dream of a soccer as a vehicle to escape from the squalor, violence, and unemployment. However, their fate is changed when they are attracted to a religion that offers them guidance and purpose, and training in martial arts.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Their choices and decisions transform them from lives of despair to religious extremism, and ultimately to become suicide bombers. The book is based on the 2003 suicide bombings at Casablanca\u2019s Hotel Farah.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Blinding<\/em> by Mircea C\u0103rt\u0103rescu,<\/a> translated from the Romanian by Sean Cotter (Romania; Archipelago Books)<\/b><\/p>\n

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In a year of stiff competition, including from Archipelago\u2019s other leading candidate for the BTBA<\/span>, Karl Ove Knausgaard\u2019s My Struggle: Book Two<\/i>\u2014Blinding<\/i> stands apart as a work that transcends the intimate thoughts of the central male narrator and expands a vision of reality to include all dimensions of time and space. Seriously, it\u2019s a wild read. And it\u2019s weird to see Knausgaard compared to Proust, when Knausgaard\u2019s My Struggle<\/em> reminds me far more of Dave Eggers\u2019s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius<\/em>, you live fully inside the minutiae of mundane daily existence wherein the narrator making his way through the world. C\u0103rt\u0103rescu is far more akin to Proust in that he traces out the full extents of what the human mind and its capacity for memory can contain and create at once: the brain is a dangerous tool, and the weapon of memory can destroy us even as it liberates us out of the mundanity of our existence. Memory is everything, and you have the power to create memories out of nothing. Blinding is an experiment in memory-creation. Mythmaking is memory-creation. Memory is power. Memory is existence.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The Story of a New Name<\/em> by Elena Ferrante,<\/a> translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (Italy; Europa Editions)<\/b><\/p>\n

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There is something about Elena Ferrante as a writer that is difficult to ignore. She never misses a beat. Her novels, as varied as they are, don\u2019t waver; they are consistently thoughtful, provocative, smothering and honest. This novel was my personal pick to be put on the longlist. She has been brilliant for so long and deserves the Oscar. Her brilliance isn\u2019t limited to her mechanics, her finesse or her creativity as a writer, but it\u2019s her willingness to continually address the psychological machinations of women who have very unfeminine feelings.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Tirza<\/em> by Arnon Grunberg,<\/a> translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett (Netherlands; Open Letter Books)<\/b><\/p>\n

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How to describe a book as affecting and unusual as Tirza<\/em> I could cobble together a few puffed-up jacket blurb superlatives\u2014something like, \u201cHilarious Disturbing Subtle Horrific Masterpiece,\u201d or maybe \u201cPsycho-Cultural Familial Catastrophic Tour-De-Force.\u201d But no, the best way to proceed in this instance is to accept that, confined to this meager space, I won\u2019t be able to do justice to this irreducible book.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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So I should start by admitting that I was totally unprepared for Tirza<\/em>. To be honest, I would be scared to meet the person who is prepared for it. Two paragraphs in, I understood the caliber of writer I was dealing with. By the second page I had already laughed out loud. And from then on I was hopelessly immersed in the pathetic, compelling world of J\u00f6rgen Hofmeester.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

My Struggle: Book Two<\/em> by Karl Ove Knausgaard,<\/a> translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett (Norway; Archipelago Books)<\/b><\/p>\n

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I\u2019ve read three volumes of My Struggle<\/em> so far, and I\u2019m almost certain that I like Vol 2 the best. I hate comparisons of My Struggle<\/em> to Proust because they always end up being purely superficial, but I\u2019m going to make another superficial comparison for reasons that I hope will be evident: I kind of liken this volume to the second volume of Proust. Nine out of ten people adore Within a Budding Grove<\/em> the most of all volumes of Proust because it\u2019s the love volume. Proust is using all of his talents to describe love at its most rapturous and incandescent phase, and he\u2019s processing it through his own memory, which of course makes it even more romantic and memorable. Not to mention, love stories tend to make for great narratives, another thing that makes the second volume of Proust much easier to read and more memorable than other volumes. There\u2019s a certain sort of immediacy there that\u2019s hard to match with any other kind of story.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Seiobo There Below<\/em> by L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Krasznahorkai,<\/a> from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet (Hungary; New Directions)<\/b><\/p>\n

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Krasznahorkai, like Beckett, writes like a pilgrim whose temple has been destroyed, who owns nothing but the bruises on his feet. To our astonishment, he shows us that the concerns we thought we had left behind \u2014 how to make art as an offering and a plea to the gods, for example \u2014 are in fact terribly modern. As we journey through the seventeen chapters of Seiobo There Below \u2014 each of which displays remarkable erudition, pathos, and humor \u2014 we come to understand the urgency of our spiritual predicament, the poverty and despair that we have chosen and that is beyond our power to undo.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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But even there at the edge of the apocalypse, Krasznahorkai offers us two beaten pearls of hope.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A True Novel<\/em> by Minae Mizumura,<\/a> translated from the Japanese by Juliet Winters (Japan; Other Press)<\/b><\/p>\n

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In her prologue (which, by the way, contains what is probably the best piece of writing about writing I\u2019ve ever read), Mizumura outlines her intent in A True Novel<\/em> to execute a sprawling epic in the tradition of western classics\u2014what in Japanese is called honkaku shosetsu, loosely translated as \u2018true novel\u2019. This form is presented in contrast to shishosetsu, or \u2018I-novel\u2019, the more traditionally Japanese novelistic form of autobiographical narrative. To this end, she employs none other than Wuthering Heights<\/em>, reimagining Bront\u00eb\u2019s classic in postwar Japan.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The African Shore<\/em> by Rodrigo Rey Rosa,<\/a> translated from the Spanish by Jeffrey Gray (Guatemala; Yale University Press)<\/b><\/p>\n

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In that narration, what impresses me most is the ambiguous specificity of the writing. Rey Rosa demonstrates a profound mastery of negative capability, all the more impressive given the diversity of his subject matter. He manages to evoke a world of complexity\u2014Latino tourists and unquestioning locals, economic migrants and drug peddlers, and even French residents not all too far removed from their colonialist fore-bearers\u2014with the sparsest of prose. His depiction of post-colonial Tangier, significantly evolved from the Tangier of his mentor Paul Bowles, is pitch perfect and rings true to my years in Morocco. For an author relating a story about the mutual incomprehension of cross-cultural encounters, Rey Rosa shows just how much he really gets people from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds. Occasionally, a quarter page exchange will distill the essence of hour-long conversations I\u2019ve had with French people or Hispanics, or Moroccans.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Leg Over Leg Vol. 1<\/em> by Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq,<\/a> translated from the Arabic by Humphrey Davies (Lebanon; New York University Press)<\/b><\/p>\n

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That\u2019s already one reason why this book should win the BTBA<\/span>: it blows our (pre-)conceptions of Arabic literature out of the water. It certainly did mine. Sure, I\u2019ve made my way through Naguib Mahfouz and Elias Khoury, and a variety of the translations of Arabic novels from the past decades, but I never managed to get much of a sense of anything earlier than, say, Tawfiq al-Hakim. Sure, there\u2019s always the Arabian Nights<\/em>, but that stands so distant and apart from everything else that it feels entirely separate. Arabic fiction \u2013 in translation \u2013 always seemed to be twentieth (generally later-twentieth) and twenty-first century fiction, much of it strongly shaped by so-called Western influences. And then I pick this up and get an electrifying jolt, finding a mid-nineteenth century literary work that is as radical and inventive as any modern novel. I thought I had a decent sense of modern Arabic literature, and suddenly I found myself exposed to a whole new layer underlying it all, throwing a whole new light on all of it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The Forbidden Kingdom<\/em> by Jan Jacob Slauerhoff,<\/a> translated from the Dutch by Paul Vincent (Netherlands; Pushkin Press)<\/b><\/p>\n

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In its rough outlines, Jan Jacob Slauerhoff\u2019s The Forbidden Kingdom<\/em> (translated by Paul Vincent) sounds like the a great genre novel\u2014time-travel! possession! conspiring monks! But like other great modernist works\u2014this one was originally published in 1932\u2014it uses its subject matter as a means to play with expectation and certainty. It is a strange book, at times difficult to follow as it shifts between characters and centuries, but it is also something of a page-turner. It brings to mind Joseph Conrad, but without quite the same ponderousness, and somewhat remarkably, David Mitchell\u2019s Cloud Atlas.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Now that the ten finalists for the 2014 BTBA in Fiction have been announced, it’s worth taking a look back at the reasons “why these books should win” according to the judges and other readers. Below is a list of all ten finalists, with links to their individual write ups along with a key quote […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[12946,42666,54356,48776,12416,55866,55886,55896,55436,55426,53376,55876,39746,1486,53816,52936,53256],"class_list":["post-297626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-ann-goldstein","tag-arnon-grunberg","tag-blinding","tag-don-bartlett","tag-elena-ferrante","tag-horses-of-god","tag-karl-over-knausgaard","tag-laszlo-krasznahorka","tag-lulu-norman","tag-mahi-binebine","tag-mircea-cartarescu","tag-my-struggle-book-two","tag-sam-garrett","tag-sean-cotter","tag-seiobo-there-below","tag-story-of-a-new-name","tag-tirza"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=297626"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297626\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":334916,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297626\/revisions\/334916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=297626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=297626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=297626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}