La Grande - Juan José Saer (translated by Steve Dolph) - 2015 Best Translated Book Award

Juan José Saer passed away in 2005, in Paris. During his final days in the hospital he worked on the book “La Grande” which was published posthumously in October of the same year.  In Amanda Hopkinson’s obituary published in The Guardian, she says:

Born outside the literary nexus of the capital, to parents of siriolibanes (Middle Eastern) origin, his writing had nothing to do with the world of tango and extravagant baroque, nor with the streets of Buenos Aires and Latin American magical realism.

Instead he wrote, in a strikingly spare style, of what he knew personally. He wrote of his home town, the provincial city of Santa Fe and its cast of often strange characters, and of his adopted home, Paris, a place of tower blocks and back alleys, inhabited by incomers and sadistic criminals, and by his fictitious maverick, Chief Inspector Morvan.

With a dozen novels, four volumes of short stories and a collection of poetry he was a celebrated part of the Argentine literary scene, even though he lived “in exile” in France. This last work, published by Open Letter Books, apparently contains numerous characters from earlier works, and was shortlisted for the US based Best Translated Book Award for 2015.

Our story opens with two men crossing a field, Gutiérrez, who mysteriously disappeared from Argentina thirty years before and who has just as mysteriously reappeared, buying a mansion. He is accompanied by a “friend” (they’ve met only twice before this day), Nula, a young wine salesman.

Our novel takes place over the space of a single week, split into seven sections, commencing with “Tuesday Water Sounds”, however it also takes place over thirty years, as our multi layered number of characters interact, question Gutiérrez’s disappearance and reflect on the literary movement “precisionism”.

Running at close to 500 pages there is plenty of room for our novelist to muse on a raft of themes, including the inner machinations of his main protagonists:

They – people from the rich countries he lived in for more than thirty years – have completely lost touch with reality and now slither around in a miserable sensualism and, as a moral consequence, content themselves with the sporadic exercise of beneficence and the contrite formulation of instructive aphorisms. He refers to the rich as the fifth column and the foreign party, and the rest, the masses, he argues, would be willing to trade tin their twelve-year-old daughter to a Turkish brothel for a new car. Any government lie suits them fine as long as they don’t have to give up their credit cards or do without superfluous possessions. The rich purchase their solutions to everything, as do the poor, but with debt. They are obsessed with convincing themselves that their way of life is the only rational one and, consequently, they are continuously indignant at the individual or collective crimes they commit or tolerate, looking to justify with pedantic shyster sophisms the acts of cowardice that obligate them to shamelessly defend the prison of excessive comfort they’ve built for themselves, and so on, and so on.

This is a very detailed work, although only over the course of a single week it contains musings on a raft of subjects, sometimes taking numerous pages to describe the natural environment and the surroundings in minute detail. For example, the effect of multiple raindrops on a river simply being single raindrops.

Our character development is of course detailed (Wednesday The Four Corners – section two) includes Nula’s family history, beginning with his grandfather who arrived in this Argentine village from Damascus. We also learn of Nula’s relationship with Lucía (as it transpires Gutiérrez’s illegitimate daughter) and their meeting. A coincidence, with long ruminations of space and time, chemical reactions that made “life” possible, to Nula’s delay at a cafe, to Lucía simply walking past at the time Nula leaves the cafe.

The fragments of each chanracter’s make-up, builds to a crescendo on the make up of relationships, you read wondering if all these pieces of the puzzle explain why Gutiérrez disappeared thirty years ago. As each day unfolds you know it is building to the invitations being handed out by Gutiérrez to a gathering at his mansion on the Sunday.

With a recurring motif of “ANOTHER MORO PROPERTY FOR SALE” and a mobile sign with the slogan “Visit HELVECIA, FOR THE GOLDEN DORADO” the puzzle has many layers. However the main theme is the passing of time (obviously within the seven day setting on the thirty year absence).

The sun has now begun to redden; its circumference is sharper and the flaming disc seems to have cooled and smoothed, losing its look of boiling metal and gaining a sort of gentleness. But the afternoon that is repeated on the plain has something solemn and disquieting about it, and an unmistakable impression comes suddenly and destroys every illusion, that the place we thought we were living is another, larger, and this destructive realization removes every known sense of the verb to live.

What happened whilst Gutiérrez was away? Returning “with the same economy of explanations as when he left”. What actually is the literary movement “precisionism” all about? For example, we have three pages explaining Gabriela threading a needle with cotton, is this precisionism?

A number of times I couldn’t help but recall Roberto Bolaño’s “The Savage Detectives” with multiple characters, a missing “artist” a literary movement and of course the South American feel. But in my mind this is no Bolaño.

To be honest this work made me feel like I was wading chest deep through a swamp of thick immutable treacle, the length and depth of passages that have no relevance (page after page to thread a needle?) and the banality of existence came to the fore. I can fully understand why Juan José Saer has a following, and I can fully appreciate the depth and breadth of his prose, it is just not my style. A work I wouldn’t have placed on the Best Translated Book Award shortlist, with a number higher raked in my opinion than this one.

Pushkin Hills - Sergei Dovlatov (translated by Katherine Dovlatov) - 2015 Best Translated Book Award

Sergei Dovlatov, Russian born and raised, had extreme difficulty in having his works published in his home country. His works were smuggled into Western Europe and published in foreign journals, as a result he was expelled from the Union of Soviet Journalists and the KGB even destroyed the typeset formes of his fist book. At 37 years of age he emigrated from the Soviet Union with his mother and lived in New York with his wife and daughter. Twelve books were published in the USA and Europe during his twelve years in exile, however he was to die in New York shortly before his 49^th birthday.

“Pushkin Hills” was originally published in 1983 but it has taken thirty years to be translated into English, with his own daughter Katherine Dovlatov, taking the reins to translate her late father’s work.

Sergei Dovlatov worked at numerous jobs, one including being a summer tour guide at the Pushkin Preserve (5 star rated on Trip Advisor”!!!) Therefore this work has a semblance of truth?

 

Our protagonist is Boris Alikhanov, an alcoholic, unpublished writer who we join on a bus on his way to Pushkin Hills to apply for a job as a tour guide. He is recently divorced and as our tale unfolds we get to learn more about his life leading to this crossroads in his existence

I led the life of an independent artist. That is to say I did not hold a regular job and earned money as a journalist and ghostwriter of some generals’ memoirs. I had an apartment with windows looking out onto a garbage dump. A writing table, a couch, a set of dumb-bells and a Tonus radiogram. A typewriter, a guitar, a picture of Hemmingway and several pipes, kept in a ceramic mug. A lamp, a wardrobe, two chairs of the brontosaurus period, and a cat named Yefim, whom I respected deeply for his tact. Unlike my close friends and acquaintances, he strived to be a human being…

This is a work richly populated with Russian literary and historical references, with over eight pages of notes at the conclusion detailing the people referenced throughout the book. Numerous references to Pushkin’s life, and death, are an obvious target of Dovlatov’s ire and sharp eye.

But it is not only the literary references which make this an interesting work, our lead man begins the journey in a drunken stupor and slowly sobers up as he takes on responsibility leading tourists through the Pushkin Museum.

My working day began at nine in the morning. We sat at the office, waiting for clients. The conversation was about Pushkin and about tourists. More often about tourists, about their inconceivable ignorance.

“Can you imagine, he asked me, ‘Who is Boris Godunov?’”

Personally, I did not feel annoyed in similar situations. Or rather, I did, but I suppressed it. The tourists came here to relax. Their union committee forced these cheap destinations on them. By and large, these people were indifferent towards poetry. To them, Pushkin was a symbol of culture. What was important to them was the sensation that they were there. To tick a mental box. To sign the book of spirituality…

It was my responsibility to bring them this happiness without tiring them out. And to receive seven roubles sixty and a touching mention in the guestbook:

“Pushkin came alive thanks to such-and-such tour guide and his humble insight.”

But it is not just the acerbic views of Russian culture we have on display here, there is rich characterisation, with fellow tour guides with photographic memories, general laziness and an alcohol problem, and his landlord, a hopeless aggressive drunk who cannot speak properly and who rents out a room in his slum to our anti-hero.

 

According to our notes Dovlatov never repeated a word that started with the same letter in the same sentence. This was apparently, according to daughter translator Katherine, “To slow himself down. It was meant to be a self-editing mechanism.” This editing has not been replicated in our English translation, however as you can see form the quotes above, the short sharp sentences capture the style.

Later in our book, Boris’ ex-wife turns up at Pushkin Hills to advise him that she is emigrating, with their daughter and is asking him to join them. It is then that Boris begins to question why he is remaining sober.

 

A comic novel full of dark humour about the Russian and communist disposition which contains a large number of laughs at the expense of a rich bunch of characters. A worthy inclusion on the Best Translated Book Award shortlist.

On a side note – what is it with the cover? Looks like a poor Snapchat!!! Not really relevant to the work inside, but I can tell you I am not a fan, and personally would never randomly pick up a book with such a design!!!

The Woman Who Borrowed Memories (Selected Stories) - Tove Jansson - translated by Thomas Teal and Silvester Mazzarella - 2015 Best Translated Book Award

What I am about to write may seem exaggerated, but the cornerstone of what I have to relate is really my single-minded devotion to objectivity. In truth, I am not telling a story, I am recounting facts. I am known for my detachment and precision. And what I am trying to covey is intended for me alone, to help me make sense of certain events.

Unlike a number of reviews I publish here, I think it is imperative that I include some basic background information on our writer, Tove Jansson. Daughter of a sculptor and a graphic designer and illustrator, Jansson, at an early age, was a published illustrator. Her creation “Moomintroll” was a long running comic strip and became a series of children’s books, films, television serries, an opera and even theme parks in Finland and Japan!!. Choosing to live on a secluded island and in a small cottage (with windows on all sides), with her artist partner, Jansson also wrote eleven novels and short story collections.

This collection is taken from five published works and contains twenty six short stories. Our collection opens with “The Listener”, a tale about the mental deterioration of a loved one from old age, this is first noticed through the change in her letters:

Letters, gifts, and affection’s glossy greetings are important. But the ability to listen face-to-face is even more important, a great and rare art. Aunt Gerda had always been a good listener, aided perhaps by her difficulty in expressing herself and by her lack of curiosity. She had been listening to friends and relatives ever since she was young, listening while they talked about themselves and each other, carrying them with her in a huge, artfully constructed mental  map of crisscrossing lives. She listened with her whole large, flat face, unmoving, leaning slightly forward, with downcast eyes, though she would occasionally look up, quickly and in obvious distress. She didn’t touch her coffee and let her cigarette burn down. Only in the short pauses that even a tragic tale leaves open for trivial but necessary explanations did she permit herself a lungful of smoke and a deep swallow of coffee before replacing the cup on its saucer carefully and without a sound. In essence, Aunt Gerda was not much more than silence. Afterward, it was difficult to reconstruct what she had said, maybe only a breathless questioning – Yes? Really? – or a quick expression of sympathy.

The story “Black-White (Homage to Edward Gorey)” tells the tale of Stella and her unnamed husband. She inhabits a glass house, all exposed, her husband is an artist who only wants to draw in stark lines, black and white, Reminiscent of Simon Mawer’s “The Glass House” from 2009, we have a tale of introversion versus exposure.

The fifth story, “The Wolf” is the first time a male name is mentioned in the collection. The story of a Japanese artist visiting to draw a dangerous creature. Throughout the work the majority of our characters are simply “she” or “he”, pointing not to specifics but the generalistic human condition.

“The Cartoonist”, tells of the fears of not being good enough to take over a daily cartoon strip, even though our artist is anonymous, the burden of taking on a popular comic strip leads to anxiety, self-doubt. The fear of burn out and an inability to fulfil the seven year contract bubbling along in the background.

The opening quote I used was taken from the story “The Locomotive”, a tale which switches from the 1^st person to the  3^rd person intentionally: “”He” is more objective than “I”. It seems to me.” A story of a single man, obsessed by drawing locomotives, who has never travelled, nor given any of his inner feelings away, is slowly lured to reveal himself to a woman who is attracted to railway platforms.

The first half of our collection is translated by Thomas Teal and the second half by Silvester Mazzaretta, as a collection which is chronologically based this is an interesting approach, with our translators taking different stages in Jansson’s writing career.

Our title story has a strong claustrophobic edge, with an artist returning to her “home” after fifteen years absence and her room is inhabited by an old “acquaintance” from her youth, but so are her memories. What has the intruder taken from the artist’s life and melded into her own?

Besides a recurring theme of “art”, through painting, drawing, sketching or writing, we have a strong element of “detachment”, our characters wanting to be left alone, they want nobody to interput their thoughts, no distractions from their singular mission, however an all pervading failure where they fall into the trap (subconsciously of course) of “connecting” with another. There is a strong correlation here to Tove Jansson’s own life, living as an artist on a secluded island!

One of the later stories “Shopping” has a futuristic setting, where it is implied that we have reached the “end of the world”, with two people trapped after an unexplained catastrophe in a devastated city. She goes out to “shop” (ie. Find) food at 4am each day, he forgets to wind his watch, they are now unable to tell her “shopping” time. And there are two strangers who have been spotted in the distance....

A work of introversion, looking at seclusion, creation of art through self reflection, this is a nice collection of stories to take you to an isolated place.

Faces In The Crowd - Valeria Luiselli (translated by Christina MacSweeney) - 2015 Best Translated Book Award

As regular visitors to this blog would know, I enjoy literature which pushes the boundaries, makes me think hard, questions me, and this can be in a number of ways. Format, style, language, art or content, all shaping the work in front of me. I can categorically state that through reading works from the Best Translated Book Award longlists, for the past couple of years, I have come across a number of works which really push the boundaries, some have not been to my liking, however anything which challenges the norm I am more than willing to give it a try.

“Faces in the Crowd” is one such work, a stunning debut by Valeria Luiselli, not your normal novel by any stretch of the imagination, and if you’ve read any reviews or comments on this work, surely you would have heard the “debut” comments, with this year’s Best Translated Book Award judges praising it “for the exceptional promise it demonstrates as a debut novel”. Possibly means my review will be clichéd.

To be 100% honest I don’t know how to review this work, it is written in small bite like chunks and starts with our writer writing. As she works as a Spanish/English translator, she delves into obscure South American writer’s works to find the next Bolano, explains to her husband that what she is writing is fiction, has “the boy” (her son) christen their ghost “Without” and that’s possibly the first 15 pages!!!

I go back to writing the novel whenever I’m not busy with the children. I know I need to generate a structure full of holes so that I can always find a place for myself on the page, inhabit it; I have to remember never to put in more than is necessary, never overlay, never furnish or adorn. Open doors, windows. Raise walls and demolish them.

As a reader you feel implicit in the story unfolding, and as our writer slowly becomes the writer she is translating, or inventing, the novel moves towards his life experiences in the 1930’s. Broken marriages, children, literature, falsehoods and of course ghosts are all to the fore here.

Novels need a sustained breath. That’s what novelists want. No one knows exactly what it means but they all say: a sustained breath. I have a baby and a boy. They don’t let me breathe. Everything I write is – has to be – in short bursts. I’m short of breath.

As our “short bursts” start to form a whole wall that is then demolished in front of us, we begin to see a work of art appearing and disappearing in front of our eyes. An imagined world, an imagined work, deployed in short breaths.

In One Thousand and One Nights the narrator strings together a series of tales to put off the day of her death. Perhaps a similar but reverse mechanism would work for this story, this death. The narrator discovers that while she is stringing the tale, the mesh of her immediate reality wears thin and breaks. The fibre of fiction begins to modify reality and not vice versa, as it should be. Neither of the two can be sacrificed. The only remedy, the only way to save all the planes of the story, is to close one curtain and open another: lower one blind so you can unbutton your blouse: unwrite a story in one file and construct a different plot in another. Change the characters’ names, remember that everything is or should be fiction. Write what really did happen and what did not. At the end of each day’s work, separate paragraphs, copy, paste, save; leave only one of the files open so the husband reads it and sates his curiosity to the full. The novel, the other one, is called Philadelphia.

If you are after your standard narrative structure and a start, middle, end then you should possibly avoid this one, however you are at this blog, so you possibly prefer something which will challenge you, therefore jump at this. Veleria Luiselli, born in Mexico City in 1983 (yes 1983!!!) surely a future star if she can pull off a debut like this and get a publisher to believe in her boundaries and then to have the work translated into English, followed up by a “runners-up” commendation at the Best Translated Book Awards and surely there will be more accolades to follow.

I don’t want to give away too much of the plot, nor spoil the journey the reader takes whilst being involved with this work, therefore it is a struggle to write a review – maybe I should raise the walls and demolish them???

The prose is lyrical, poetic in places, simple and stripped back to reveal the core of our writer’s journey. Put simply, if you want to try something different, but something that won’t disappoint then give this work a workout.

Things Look Different In The Light - Medardo Fraile (translated by Margaret Jull Costa) - 2015 Best Translated Book Award

This year eight of the twenty-five longlisted titles come from the Spanish, four of them making the final ten on the shortlist. A predisposition to Spanish works? Maybe not as obvious as it first seems with works coming from Mexico, Argentina, Guatemala and of course Spain itself. Today I look at one from Spain and translated by somebody whose translations I have reviewed before, Margaret Jull Costa (Javier Marias’ “The Infatuations” from last year’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and Best Translated Book Award longlists).

 

I have also been quite partial to the Pushkin Press Collection Series, having previously reviewed three of Yasushi Inoue’s works (“Bullfight”, “The Hunting Gun” and “Life of a Counterfeiter”), Paul Fournel’s “Dear Reader” and recently the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize shortlisted “In The Beginning Was The Sea” by Tomas Gonzalez”. I’m building up a nice collection of the beautifully presented works, on crisp paper, hand stitched and a delight to hold.

 

But none of that has anything to do with the words on the page – and Medardo Fraile received many awards for his words. As our sleeve explains it was through his short story writing that he became most well-known. Born in 1925 he lived through the siege of Madrid and through his work in Scotland as a Professor at the University of Strathclyde from the 1960’s he was a champion of the Spanish language.

 

Pushkin Press have put together an anthology of his short stories, a collection of twenty-nine works. A few running to only three pages, most less than ten.

 

Our collection opens with “Berta’s Presence”, the story of a one year olds birthday party and the resulting tension of one of the guests wanting and waiting to talk to the child. Whilst the content may seem banal, we are immediately exposed to the journey ahead, our story is full of reality, awkwardness, shame as well as enlightenment:

 

A bottle on the table reflected the branches of the chestnut tree outside the window. It was a warm evening, the windows open, full of the distant murmurs and melodies set in motion by the departing sun. One of those evenings when the scented, rustling countryside suddenly enters the city, as if the countryside had left itself behind for a few hours in order to set the city-dweller humming a tune, whether at a birthday party, in a bar or at home. One of those evenings when the factory siren sounds like a moan of a large, friendly animal gone astray and where the frank, rustic kisses of the soldier and his sweetheart sound like pebbles in a stream. One of those evenings of high, long, tenuous mists, so that when the stars first come out, they will not appear too naked.

 

These are stories dripping in metaphor, but unlike terms you’ve ever heard before, but equally as creative. Another story “A short” tells a simple tale of a fisherman, Fermin Ulia, falling in love:

 

They entered the so-called Modern Warehouse, which was actually very old and smelt of the customs and fashions of yesteryear. The assistants yearned for lost refinements and it would have taken only the pricking of a rose thorn for them to die. Fermin and Mari exchanged a first kiss behind a mannequin carrying an umbrella. Mari’s lips were as tasty as the anchovies caught by night fishermen in fine mesh nets. They strolled through the warehouse, and she chose for him a tartan shirt in subtle shades. With a knowing wink, Fermin showed the assistant the bottle he had with him. Mari stepped in to prevent the exchange and held out a few coins instead. Fermin Ulia understood her meaning. They drank the bottle of brandy together in a small room with blue painted walls. And there he first put on that subtle shirt, which was all the colours of a cuttlefish on heat.

 

Our title story, “Thing Look Different In The Light”, is the humorous story of a tradesman, having inadequate instructions but still proceeding in painting a directional sign in the Metro underground. “Restless Eyes” tells of a couple who go to the cinema, there’s their Saturday night gone. The mundane is so richly bought to life, in eight pages the lack of intimacy, the inner desires are all bought to the fore, even though nothing implicit is actually said.

 

This is a collection of scant beauty, a collection where the less said the richer the picture becomes, as Ali Smith says in her Foreword “ so little is said and so much is conveyed”.

 

“The Cashier” tells of Rosita who works the till in a bar:

 

For Rosita, the bar was a place where anything could happen, a music box full of surprises, with the advantage that she was inside that great music box and could subtly change the melody with just a glance or a word. In the mornings, the customers, drenched in light, seemed to Rosita to have a golden glow about them, they talked loudly and there hung in the air the aroma of those autumnal brown cigars that make one think of strong, swarthy men with money and expensive cars. In the afternoons, in the long hours until the lights were turned on, the customers changed in appearance, allowing themselves to be filled right down to the bottoms of their pockets with a glittering, greenish light, an aquarium light, like a sauce that eases the digestion and gently dissolves ideas. Then came the vulgar, ecstatic, dizzying hour of the young couples. And at night, the shrill yellow light, the yellow of funerals, liquorice root and brass cymbals, clung to the flesh of the various night owls and suspect couples, who emerged from the tunnel of night looking new and elastic, confident and free, and filled with a somewhat malign spirit.

 

We have stories describing the inanimate, “The Car” and “The Armchair”, their lives and the memories whilst using these objects the central theme.

 

Our book is presented in chronological order and I felt as we got further into the work some of the splendour and awe became a little trite. Not saying the stories later in the work are poor by any stretch of the imagination, I just enjoyed the earlier, raw writing a little more.

 

Slightly reminiscent of my recently reviewed “A Useless Man” by Sait Faik Abasiyank, short stories exploring the minutiae of everyday life. Another fine work on the Best Translated Book Award list, one I’m glad to have come across, although I’m not convinced it is the winner – more on one of my favourites in the coming days – although with the winner announced tomorrow I could be behind the eight ball with my reading and reviews!!!

Fantomas Versus the Multinational Vampires - Julio Cortazar (translated by David Kurnick) - 2015 Best Translated Book Award

Here is one thing I can assure you of, if it wasn’t for the Best Translated Book Award I would have never in my lifetime have picked up this book, it is quite possible I would never have known of its existence without the award longlist announcement. An overseas publisher, sixty-nine pages of text blended with comic book and pop art is not something I would have been searching for, even if I’d read Julio Cortazar’s works beforehand.

In January 1975 the “Second Russell Tribunal” was held in Brussels. Created by British thinker Bertrand Russell, initially to investigate crimes by US troops in Vietnam a “second” tribunal was “dedicated to investigate the current situation in various Latin American countries” and investigate “multiple violations of the human rights of the people of Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay, and other countries of the continent.” Julio Cortazar participated in the tribunal, along with eleven other panel members, a President and four Vice-Presidents, including Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Also in 1975 Cortazar was gifted edition 201 of the Mexican comic book series Fantomas, la amenaza elegante (‘Fantomas: The Elegant Menace’) and so our story of “Fantomas Versus the Multinational Vampires” was born.

The Brussels meeting of the Second Russell Tribunal had ended at noon, 1 and the narrator of our fascinating story needed to return home to Paris, where a tough job awaited him that he was not eager to get back to; hence his inclination to linger in cafes and look at the girls strolling through the city’s squares, to hover like a fly instead of making his way to the station.

1. The reader interested in learning the details of this Tribunal will find them in the Appendix, pages 71-79. A friendly piece of advice: read the appendix last, why rush things when we’ve gotten off to such a good start?

Once you read the full work, and the appendix (I chose to take Cortazar’s advice and not read it until the end), the lid is blown off the whole work. The systematic human rights abuses by Governments, the United States, the multinationals plundering the resources and peoples of Central and South America becomes the all pervading theme.

In a nut-shell our story is written by a nameless narrator (Cortazar) who buys a comic book at Brussels train station (the booth only sells Mexican language papers!!!) and as he reads the tale of all the world’s libraries losing their literature, Fantomas comes to the rescue. Our story and the comic all melds into one.

They’d threatened to kill Moravia, and the narrator too – but only the latter had they specified that they’d slit his throat. Preparing himself to read about Fantomas’s final phone call, the narrator thought with vague horror about this specification, about his country’s past and its present, about the return to a state of affairs in which the worst tortures were nothing out of the ordinary. Far back on the elongated screen of the last century, he could see Juan Manuel de Rosa’s thugs, the mazorqueros, galloping by, in the foreground they held their long knives to the throats of the liberals they’d taken prisoner, performing the slow dance of death described by Esteban Echeverria and Hilario Ascasubi, the knife’s point making its way into the flesh little by little while the executioners held the victim upright so he could witness his own horrible death, so he could hear them say, “Don’t complain, my friend, your mother suffered more giving birth to you.” Such things were now occurring daily in Buenos Aires and in the provinces, a radio turned up to cover the creams, the newspapers gagged by a fear which made them reduce everything to terms like “emergencies” and “hazing”, Mazorca himself eulogized publicly, his barbarism presented as the vindication of a homeland into which the knoves of disgrace and contempt had been sunk ever deeper. But these reflections were cut short by that technological decapitation known as the telephone – Fantomas was speaking in grave tones to someone seated at a broken glass window.

Besides our narrator and the various famous writers mentioned in the comic book (Brecht, Paz, Fuentes) we also have Susan Sontag as a central character, references to Un Chien Andalou.

Our story moves from text to the comic book, which highlights various prominent writers (including Cortazar himself), to pop art, back to text about people reading the comic, onto diagrams of seating plans. This is a menagerie of art forms. At only sixty-nine pages (not including the appendix) this is a very short work indeed when you take into account the artwork.

A reflection on crimes against humanity, a satire on art, on prominent outspoken citizens and the role of external Governments and multinationals in the politics of less economic nations, this is a worthy read.  A work which brought the Second Russell Tribunal’s findings back to life after 40 years of neglect, an artistic melting-pot with a vision of an “attainable utopia”. Thanks Best Translated Book Award judges for bringing this to my attention.

Best Translated Book Award Shortlist 2015 & Man Booker International Prize Winner

As you may know I’ve been offline for quite a few weeks, organising and participating in a huge charity event in the Central Australian desert. Having no access to technology of any description it’s meant I’ve fallen a little behind with the Best Translated Book Award announcement.

On 5 May the judges announced their shortlist for the 2015 Best Translated Book Award, culling the original twenty-five titles down to ten. I have already read and reviewed three of the works so links to my reviews are contained in the listing below, I’ll be doing my best to get to the other seven but it will not be before the announcement of the winner on 27 May:

The Last Lover by Can Xue (tr. Annelise Finegan Wasmoen)

The Author and Me by Eric Chevillard (tr. Jordan Stump)

Fantomas Versus the Multinational Vampires by Julio Cortázar (tr. David Kurnick)

Pushkin Hills by Sergei Dovlatov (tr. Katherine Dovlatov)

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante (tr. Ann Goldstein)

Things Look Different in the Light by Medardo Fraile (tr. Margaret Jull Costa)

Harlequin's Millions by Bohumil Hrabal (tr. Tracey Knecht)

The Woman Who Borrowed Memories by Tove Jansson (tr. Thomas Teal and Silvester Mazzarella)

Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli (tr. Christina MacSweeney)

La Grande by Juan José Saer (tr. Steve Dolph)

Overnight we also had the announcement of the Man Booker International Prize, an award announced every two years to a living author who has published fiction either originally in English or whose work is generally available in translation in the English language. It is for their achievement in fiction. In seeking out “literary excellence, the judges consider a writer’s body of work rather than a single novel.”

Laszlo Krasznahorkai was announced s the winner of the Man Booker International Prize for 2015 on 19 May 2015.

As the winner of the 2013 AND 2014 Best Translated Book Award for "Satantango" and "Seiobo There Below" respectively it was a timely announcement.