So here it is, the sharp sudden close of 2015. When we all take stock and decide what the year was worth. Which for me, of course, means tallying the books I’ve read.
And 2015 was a very good year. Another year when I was distracted from serious books by the shiny covers of Young Adult novels. A year for beefing up on the megaliths of science fiction. And a year of reading foreign.
Maybe not as much foreign (ie works in translation) as I should have, given that my New Year’s resolution was to read more and they make up only 22 percent of my final tally. Still, that’s nearly three times as many I read in 2014.
It was enough to decide that every year should be a year of reading foreign. They made up some of the best, deepest and most inventive novels I read this year. I’ve discovered my life would be irreversibly poorer if it didn’t include works in translation.
Works like Ingrid Winterbach’s “Book of Happenstance” which is beautiful, delicate, crushing all at once. The book follows a woman who works as research assistant compiling obscure Afrikaans words as she struggles to come to terms with the grief and loss of her life, going on madcap adventures after her stolen shells with a church-raised atheist coworker and South Africa’s version of Kafka’s K, “wet behind the ears and of mixed descent.”
“The universe is not well disposed towards us,” Winterbach writes. “You will notice that, if you concern yourself even a little with evolution. Evolution teaches us that everything could have been different — one different move and we wouldn’t have been here now.”
Or like Jang Eun-Jin’s “Nobody Writes Back.” The quirky tale of a man who sets out to travel South Korea with nothing more than his dog, an MP3 player and a novel in his backpack. He assigns the people he meets numbers and writes each of them a letter. His journey will be over, he thinks, when someone writes back.
“Words penned while traveling do not lie,” Jang writes. “I dare say that in life, it is when we travel that our minds and hearts are the most open. It’s a time when we think more than at any other time in our lives. We may even think of something that we would never have thought of in all our lives. And so, it would be the loss or mistake of a lifetime not to write down in words those thoughts which may never have occurred to us. You can always go back and take pictures, and buy as many souvenirs as you want. But the thoughts that came to you while you travel will not come back.”
FINDING THE BOOKS
The hardest part of the Year of Reading Foreign was not just finding translated books, but finding translated books I actually wanted to read. I started, somewhat naively, by scouring the shelves of Friends of the Library Amazing Bookstore for funny sounding names — only to discover the truly amazing diversity of American letters. And maybe three books from other countries.
The easiest books to find are French and Russian classics and those by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Good books, don’t get me wrong, but not everybody’s cup of tea. Murder mysteries (especially Scandinavian ones) and Nobel Prize winners make up the next biggest group but I still wanted more.
So I spent countless hours on amazon.com “world literature” section following ever more obscure links deeper into the unseen world of translation.
The best way to find a book I wanted to read, was to first read one I liked and then research the publisher. Small and academic presses like Open Letter, Melville House and Dalkey Archive Press became my saviors.
The books are out there, you just have to do the work to find them.
The final tally
France — 5
Russia — 5
Arabic — 4
South Korea — 2
Estonia, China, Turkey, Iran, Argentina, Former Yugoslavia, Slovenia, Norway — 1 each
