My favourite books in translation from 2011

The most striking thing about the best of last year's novels in translation was the labour of love which has gone into their very being. For the most part, books in translation don't exist because publishers believe they'll make enormous amounts of money (they almost certainly won't), but because they believe that the books are so good we ought to read them. It's taken up to a decade for some of the books below to come out: they've fought through fierce competition for limited budgets; they've beaten the odds. As a reader, that in itself is reassuring - the fact that a book exists in translation is a long, expensive recommendation.

And yet, 2011 also gave signs that things are starting to get a tiny bit easier for books published in translation. New publishers like And Other Stories and Open Letter are using technology to get closer to readers and authors, opening up the decision-making process and producing beautiful translated editions. Let's hope we see more of this in 2012.

At its best, reading in translation can be like pulling back the curtains of a global cultural stage which, as readers in English, we too often miss out on. Many of the books which make it into translation in English have won prizes and plaudits throughout the rest of the world, and their authors are minor celebrities elsewhere. As English readers, we have arrived late to this party, but we still can, and should, throw ourselves into it. Enjoy.

The Greenhouse by Audur Ava Olfasdottir, translated by Brian Fitzgibbon

Amazon Crossing, October 2011

On one date - the 7^th of August - three things happen to Lobbi: his mother's birthday; her death in a car crash amidst Iceland's 'russet heather'; and the accidental conception of his daughter, Flora Sol, the product of a chance encounter in a greenhouse.

Solemnly promising his 80-year-old father that he is not running away from anything, Lobbi leaves Iceland for a European monastery, where he restores the ancient rose garden.  

The Greenhouse is tinged with magical realism: a priest who spends his evenings knocking back limoncello and watching world cinema; Flora Sol's mysterious glow and her ability to cure the villagers of their ailments; a strange inn in the middle of a mystery forest. But what Lobbi most wants his baby daughter to understand is that 'reality can be approached in different ways'. This is a very modern fairy tale, as Lobbi and his family struggle to make sense of the chaos of ordinary life.

I didn't so much read The Greenhouse as devour it. This is a book which demands to be read on trains, on buses and late into the night. Seamlessly translated by Brian Fitzgibbon, it's rare to find a book that's so strange and so hauntingly beautiful, so hopeful and so everyday.

A New Finnish Grammar by Diego Marani, translated by Judith Landry.

Dedalus, May 2011

'In Finnish, the word for Bible is Raamattu, that is, Grammar. Life is a set of rules'.

A title this boring could only herald an interesting book. A New Finnish Grammar makes a convincing case for why grammar and language are, quite literally, the stuff of life. As Father Koskela, the novel's drug-taking priest tells the hero, language:        

        'is not stored in your memory....It is in your blood, your guts'.

Reminiscent of Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Française, A New Finnish Grammar tells the story of a man washed up on the docks in Trieste during World War II. Badly beaten, he can remember nothing and there is nothing to identify him - apart from the name 'Sampo Karjalainen' stitched inside the jacket he is wearing. Convinced that only hearing the language in which he was sung to as a baby can restore his memory, the doctor who rescued him sends him back to his presumed homeland.

Finnish is related to no other language apart from Hungarian - it is 'a language whose sounds are sweetish and soft...one single, unbroken song'. In war-torn Helsinki, 'Sampo' struggles to learn it, and piece together a past for himself.

What follows is a beautiful, elegiac meditation on language, identity, stubbornness, and what it means to be rescued.

Utopia by Ahmed Khaled Towfik, translated by Chip Rosetti.

Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing, September 2011

In 2011, all eyes were turned on the violence and upheaval in Egypt and across the Arab world. These events give a chilling edge to Ahmed Khaled Towfik's statement in the prologue to Utopia that he 'knows for certain that this place will exist soon.'

Rarely has a title been more ironic. The inhabitants of Utopia (Egypt in 2023) have built their sanitised world of helicopters, maids and limitless pharmaceuticals by outsourcing suffering and misery to Shubra, the land of the Others. Just outside the walls of Utopia, the poor eat rat liver sandwiches and queue up for work slaughtering chickens. Inside, the rich live in fear that this 'ocean of poverty will rise up'.

Utopia's antihero is bored of a world where 'death retreats behind barbed wires'. To relieve the torpor of life without danger, he sneaks out into the land of the Others to go 'hunting' (tracking down and killing poor people, bringing back a body part as a souvenir). Yet, in their shared penchant for sex, drugs and violent entertainment, the Utopians and the Others have far more in common than they ever realised.

Defiant in his unremitting bleakness, Towfik shows that it's only in Utopia that humans become wholly brutalised.  

My Two Worlds by Sergio Chefjec, translated by Margaret B. Carson

Open Letter, August 2011

Several days before his birthday, a writer has time to kill in an anonymous Brazilian city. So he walks. The walk, 'a kind of superficial archaeology,' takes him from the local history stand at a book fair, past ice cream sellers and swan-shaped pedaloes. All this via Germany, failure, loneliness, and how the internet has changed the way we think.

At the beginning of My Two Worlds, an anonymous critic chides the hero for writing 'novels which are not novels'. That is exactly what My Two Worlds is. Following in the footsteps of another Argentinian, Borges, Sergio Chefjec revels in working with the concept of fiction and pushing it to its very limits.  

The story of My Two Worlds is that there is no story. Instead of being a novel in the traditional sense, My Two Worlds is an invitation to spend several hours inside someone else's head, watching casual thoughts, small pleasures and neuroses flicker across their mind.

My Two Worlds is an odd, intense book; sometimes squirm-inducing in its realism and honesty, and often uncompromising in the way it challenges novelistic conventions. Yet it also has a rhythmic power which becomes hypnotic: this is a book which demands to be read in one long, enjoyable sitting.

Never Any End to Paris by Enrique Vila-Matas, translated by Anne McLean

New Directions Publishing, July 2011

Never Any End to Paris begins far away from Paris, at the Ernest Hemingway look-a-like contest in Key West, Florida. There, despite his best efforts and a fake beard, the author's lifelong ambition is shattered when he is disqualified for his 'absolute lack of any physical resemblance to Hemingway'.  

Part memoir, part novel, and part homage, this is another book which defies easy categorisation. Enrique Vila-Matas riffs on this theme of the Hemingway-a-like, looking back on his youthful time in Paris with an irony 'of the kind that vacillates between disappointment and hope'.

Back in the 1970s, the author lived the twentieth century bohemian dream: renting his garret from Marguerite Duras (whose French he resolutely fails to understand every time she tries to collect rent), climbing the Eiffel Tower fuelled by LSD, and lapping up cameo appearances from Roland Barthes, William Burroughs, Sonia Orwell and Paloma Picasso.

Delivered in the style of a mock three-day lecture, the result is a funny and romantic look in life's rear-view mirror.