Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2012
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Winner
Blooms of Darkness
Alma BooksThe ghetto in which the Jews have been confined is being liquidated by the Nazis, and 11-year-old Hugo is brought by his mother to the local brothel, where one of the prostitutes has agreed to hide him. Mariana is a bitterly unhappy woman who hates what she has done to her life, and night after night Hugo sits in her closet and listens uncomprehendingly as she rages at the Nazi soldiers who come and go. When she's not mired in self-loathing, Mariana is fiercely protective of the bewildered, painfully polite young boy. And Hugo becomes protective of Mariana, too, trying to make her laugh when she is depressed, soothing her physical and mental agony with cold compresses. As the memories of his family and friends grow dim, Hugo falls in love with Mariana. And as her life spirals downwards, Mariana reaches out for consolation to the adoring boy who is on the cusp of manhood.
Blooms of Darkness
Aharon Appelfeld
Winner, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
The ghetto in which the Jews have been confined is being liquidated by the Nazis, and 11-year-old Hugo is brought by his mother to the local brothel, where one of the prostitutes has agreed to hide him. Mariana is a bitterly unhappy woman who hates what she has done to her life, and night after night Hugo sits in her closet and listens uncomprehendingly as she rages at the Nazi soldiers who come and go. When she's not mired in self-loathing, Mariana is fiercely protective of the bewildered, painfully polite young boy. And Hugo becomes protective of Mariana, too, trying to make her laugh when she is depressed, soothing her physical and mental agony with cold compresses. As the memories of his family and friends grow dim, Hugo falls in love with Mariana. And as her life spirals downwards, Mariana reaches out for consolation to the adoring boy who is on the cusp of manhood.
Publisher: Alma Books
Blooms of Darkness by Aharon Appelfeld and translated by Jeffrey M Green won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2012.
Read an exclusive interview with Aharon Appelfeld
On a rare visit to London, Appelfeld commented:
Blooms of Darkness is a work of fiction that includes my personal experience during the Second World War. I wanted to explore the darkest places of human behaviour and to show that even there, generosity and love can survive; that humanity and love can overcome cruelty and brutality. It is a joy to win the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize alongside Jeffrey M Green - he is a highly professional translator and I love his work.
Blooms of Darkness translator Jeffrey M Green commented:
Translators are humble people by nature, so it is astonishing and gratifying for translators to be honoured by the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Clearly, if Blooms of Darkness had not been excellent, even an excellent translation would not have won this Prize, but a bad translation would certainly have destroyed the excellence of the original. It has been a privilege to be Aharon's voice in English.
The novel is loosely based on Appelfeld's own experiences of the Holocaust as a boy, where he escaped from a prison camp. Blooms of Darkness is told from the perspective of 11-year-old Hugo who is taken in by Mariana, a prostitute, to keep him safe as the Second World War rages around them in the ghetto and Jewish people are forcefully sent to concentration camps.
Born in 1932 in what is now Western Ukraine, Appelfeld was deported to a labour camp at Transnistria when he was seven years old. He managed to escape, and was picked up by the Red Army in 1944, eventually making his way to Italy and finally reaching Palestine in 1946, aged 14. These formative years have been the focus of his writing for more than 40 years, during which he has produced over 40 books which have been translated into 25 languages.
While Appelfeld grew up speaking German he could not bring himself to write in it citing it as 'the language of the murderers'. Instead, he chooses to write in his 'mother language' of Hebrew which he learned to speak aged 14 and which he praises for its succinctness and biblical imagery.
At 80, Aharon is the oldest author to win the prestigious Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, following on from the youngest ever winner, Santiago Roncagliolo, who at 36 won the Prize last year.
Jeffrey on translating the book:
I have been translating Appelfeld for a long time, so the problem is always finding the right tone. In this book a major problem has to do with the different levels of time in the story and how to treat them with the rigid tense system of English, as opposed to the fluid tense system of Hebrew.
Aharon on his favourite book in translation:
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann is my favourite book of all time in translation. It is something very universal, very particular from one side and very universal from the other side, and it tries to surround human life and human beings from all sides - physical and metaphysical.
About the shortlist
Hephzibah Anderson, Freelance critic, feature writer, broadcaster and judge of the 2012 Prize commented:
The judging process so far has been an epic and exhilarating road trip - a journey crossing centuries and genres as well as continents. But as our shortlist of 6 titles shows, foreign fiction broadens the mind in a way that foreign travel can never match. Together, these authors and translators will enrich your world, taking you into the hearts and souls of people whose stories would otherwise be unimaginable. At the same time, they reinforce our shared humanity: while life's flavours, scents and textures are pungently local, its largest - and smallest - moments often prove universal.
More about the books
Alice by Judith Hermann, translated by Margot Bettauer Dembo (Clerkenwell Press)
Intimations of mortality draw Alice away from Berlin, to Tuscany and elsewhere. Her losses seem tangential and rooted in the past at first, but death eventually hits closer to home, with a bereavement which eclipses all previous ones.
What the judges said:
These five linked stories all unfold in the shadow of death. Yet, with their pin-sharp precision and lyrical tenderness, they make you feel thrillingly alive. Exquisitely written, gracefully translated, Judith Hermann's everyday elegies might have proved depressing - in clumsier hands. They are just the opposite. All the more precious for their transience, these glimpses of love, beauty and happiness brim with the small joys of life.
Biographies:
Judith Hermann was born in Berlin in 1970. She is the author of The Summer House, Later and Nothing but Ghosts, and has received a number of literary awards including the Kleist Prize, the Bremer Förderpreis, Hugo Ball Förderpreis, Kleistpreis and Hölderlin-Preis.
Margot Bettauer Dembo has translated all three of Judith Hermann's novels, as well as books by Robert Gernhardt, Joachim Fest, Ödön von Horvath, Feridun Zaimoglu and Hermann Kant. She was awarded the Goethe-Institut/Berlin Translator's Prize in 1994 and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize in 2003. She has also been the translator for two feature documentary films, The Restless Conscience, which was nominated for an Academy Award, and The Burning Wall.
Blooms of Darkness by Aharon Appelfeld, translated by Jeffrey M Green (Alma Books)
Hugo is eleven, and his vivid dream life sustains his connection to his estranged family, as he finds himself caught up in the horror of a Ukrainan city seized by the Nazis. Bliss and terror intermingle as Marianna, a prostitute, befriends and shelters the child in the unlikely haven of a brothel.
What the judges said:
Jeffrey M Green's incantatory translation from the Hebrew does ample justice to a novel that meditates on the imagination, memory and language itself. As the relationship between Hugo and Marianna evolves, this deceptively simple narrative does something extraordinary, carrying the reader to a liminal territory in which deep sensuality exists alongside unfathomable brutality.
Biographies:
Aharon Appelfeld was born in Czernovitz, Bukovina (now in Western Ukraine) in 1932. He was deported to a labour camp at Transnistria, but soon escaped and spent three years in the forests, before being picked up by the Red Army in 1944. He served in field kitchens in Ukraine, and then made his way to Italy, reaching Palestine in 1946. He has written about the Holocaust for more than 40 years and has produced over 40 books, which have been translated into 25 languages. These include The Iron Tracks (winner of the National Jewish Book Award) and his memoir, The Story of a Life (winner of the Prix Médicis Étranger). He has also won the Giovanni Bocaccio Literary Prize, the Nelly Sachs Prize, the Israel Prize, the Bialik Prize, and the MLA Commonwealth Award and been honoured as a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He is Professor Emeritus of Hebrew literature at Ben-Gurion University at Beersheva. He is married and has three children.
Jeffrey M. Green was born in New York City. He attended Princeton for his first degree, and went on to Harvard Graduate School, where he took his doctorate in Comparative Literature in 1973. He moved to Israel shortly afterwards and taught at the Hebrew University and a high school. He then worked at the Jewish Agency, before becoming a freelance translator in 1979. He has translated other prominent Hebrew writers such as Mendele, Gnessin, Hazaz, Agnon, Amalia Kahana-Carmon and Dan Tsalka. He has also published two books in Hebrew and a book on translation with the University of Georgia Press. He is married and has four children.
Dream of Ding Village by Yan Lianke, translated by Cindy Carter (Constable & Robinson)
The 'spreading fever' of AIDS envelopes Henan province as a pernicious trade in blood in China in the 1990s has catastrophic consequences. Peasant farmers are cajoled into abandoning agriculture for a tragically dangerous enterprise.
What the judges said:
A brave, dark and poetic account of modern Chinese malaise. Through his description of the many lives touched by an AIDS epidemic sweeping a village, Yan Lianke proves himself not only as a writer of political vision, but also one with a unique narrative voice. Yan Lianke's true story based prose combines an oral storytelling tradition with daring experiment - something rare in contemporary Chinese literature.
Biographies:
Yan Lianke was born in 1958 in Henan province, where the blood-contamination scandal that Dream of Ding Village recounts happened. He is one of China's most established literary writers and his novels and story collections have won many of China's most prestigious literary prizes. He is also China's most controversial writer: his novel Serve the People! was banned for satirising the Cultural Revolution and became an underground internet sensation. In China Dream of Ding Village was stopped in its tracks with a 'no distribution, no sales and no promotion' order.
Cindy Carter is a Beijing-based translator of Chinese novels, film, essays and poetry. She studied Japanese at the University of California and lived in Osaka in Japan for three years before moving to China as a language student in 1996. Since beginning her translation career in 1999, she has translated over 40 independent Chinese films and documentaries, dozens of scripts, along with various works of fiction. Her translation of Xiaolu Guo's novel Village of Stone (2004) was shortlisted for the Dublin IMPAC Award and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.
From the Mouth of the Whale by Sjón, translated by Victoria Cribb (Telegram)
Jonas is in exile on a desolate island during the tumultuous seventeenth century from his homeland. Iceland is dominated by the conflict of superstition and science in this pre-Enlightenment allegory.
What the judges said:
This memorable, magical book tells the story of an Icelandic sage banished to exile on Gullbjörn's Island in 1635. Caught in the grip of superstition, Iceland's establishment has decided that the self-taught healer Jonas the Learned is a practitioner of the black arts and sent him away to a 'bird-fouled rock'. Sitting there with nothing more than a sandpiper for company, Jonas is then drawn into an epic adventure, by turns surprising and surreal. Sjón's remarkable tale imagines a delirious 17th century Iceland swithering between mysticism and a new scientific rationalism and it is rendered brilliantly into English in Victoria Cribb's exuberant translation.
Biographies:
Sjón was born in Reykjavik in1962. He is a poet, novelist and playwright and has received numerous literary awards, including the Nordic Council's Literature Prize for The Blue Fox, which was also longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2009. He was nominated for an Academy Award, a Golden Globe and a Brit Award for the music from the film Dancer in the Dark, which he collaborated on with Bjork. From the Mouth of the Whale is his second novel to be published by Telegram and his work has been translated into 22 languages.
Victoria Cribb has an MA in Icelandic and Scandinavian Studies from University College London and a BPhil in Icelandic from the University of Iceland. She has lived and worked in Iceland for a number of years as a publisher, journalist and translator from Icelandic to English.
New Finnish Grammar by Diego Marani, translated by Judith Landry (Dedalus)
A German medic treats a soldier found wounded on the Trieste quay in 1943. Without memory or name; his identity is traced through a handkerchief monogram. United with his presumed native Finland, Sampo struggles to recover himself, and a past lost in the chaos of war.
What the judges said:
New Finnish Grammar takes the form of a sequence of journal entries, with occasional interruptions from an editor. The journal is written by a Finnish sailor, Sampo Karjalainen. The editorial comments come from a doctor, Petri Friari who treated Sampo after his badly beaten body was found on the streets of Trieste. Sampo can remember nothing and has lost the powers of speech. Friari brings him back to life and to the Finnish language he believes Sampo has lost. This is the start of a journey that takes him back to the what he believes to be his home, the war-torn city of Helsinki. This subtle and moving novel shows how much of what we take to be ourselves depends upon the language that we speak and the identity it gives us. It also shows how suddenly that self can be taken away.
Biographies:
Diego Marani was born in Ferrara in 1959. He graduated from the University of Trieste with a degree in Simultaneous Interpretation and Translation in French and English and has worked as a translator and policy officer for the European Commission. He is currently in charge of international cooperation, training and support to universities for the Directorate General for Interpretation at the European Commission. New Finnish Grammar has received the Grinzane-Cavour Prize, and Marani has also been awarded the Campiello Prize, the Stresa Prize and the Bruno Cavallini Prize. He has published many other novels, along with various collections of essays and short stories, including Las Adventuras des Inspector Cabillot, which takes a humorous view of the EU through the eyes of a fictional detective. He invented the mock language Europanto, in which he has written columns in different European newspapers. He is married with two children.
Judith Landry studied French and Italian at Somerville College, Oxford. She established her translation career in London during the 1960s and specializes in fiction, art and architecture. She has worked on books on architecture by Leonardo Benevolo and others, and various works on fiction including The House by the Medlar Tree by Giovanni Verga, A Bag of Marbles, by Joseph Joffo and Playing for Time by Fania Fenelon, which was made into a film starring Vanessa Redgrave. She has also translated several books on Venice, film scripts for the British Film Institute and articles for FMR, an Italian art magazine. She has taught Italian at Courtauld Institute of Art and continues to teach part-time.
The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco, translated by Richard Dixon (Harvill Secker)
Nineteenth century Europe is awash with conspiracy theories - from Turin to Prague. The Dreyfus Affair, the notorious forgery of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the Jesuit plots, can all these be the work of one fiendishly clever, architect of destruction?
What the judges said:
The Prague Cemetery is a great mystery novel about paranoia, prejudice and forgery. What emerges out of the novel's richly informed historical imagination is a salutary insight: anti-semitism was part of the common currency of nineteenth century intellectual and popular culture. Out of it came one of the most sinister and influential modern fictions, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. With terse wit and engaging erudition, Eco shows us that the Holocaust was a catastrophe that was a long time in the making. Entertaining and disturbing in equal measure, The Prague Cemetery is Eco's best novel since The Name of the Rose.
Biographies:
Umberto Eco was born in 1932 in Alessandria in Italy. He has written works of fiction, literary criticism and philosophy. His first novel, The Name of the Rose, was a major international bestseller. His other works include Foucault's Pendulum, The Island of the Day Before, Baudolino, and The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana; he has also produced numerous collections of essays. Eco is currently President of the Scuola Superiore di Studi Umanistici at the University of Bologna and has written a multitude of academic texts, children's books and essays.
Richard Dixon worked as a criminal barrister in London for ten years, before changing career in 1996 to work as a translator. He has contributed to the travel section of The Independent and written guidebooks on Italy. He has had a play broadcast by the BBC and is a member of the Society of Authors and of the Associazione Italiana Traduttori e Interpreti. His translation of Inventing the Enemy, Umberto Eco's recent collection of essays, is due to be published in the UK in September 2012. He is currently translating Roberto Calasso's latest book L'ardore. He runs a guesthouse with his partner in Italy's Le Marche region.
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Shortlist
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Blooms of Darkness
Alma Books
Blooms of Darkness
Aharon Appelfeld
Shortlisted, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
The ghetto in which the Jews have been confined is being liquidated by the Nazis, and 11-year-old Hugo is brought by his mother to the local brothel, where one of the prostitutes has agreed to hide him. Mariana is a bitterly unhappy woman who hates what she has done to her life, and night after night Hugo sits in her closet and listens uncomprehendingly as she rages at the Nazi soldiers who come and go. When she's not mired in self-loathing, Mariana is fiercely protective of the bewildered, painfully polite young boy. And Hugo becomes protective of Mariana, too, trying to make her laugh when she is depressed, soothing her physical and mental agony with cold compresses. As the memories of his family and friends grow dim, Hugo falls in love with Mariana. And as her life spirals downwards, Mariana reaches out for consolation to the adoring boy who is on the cusp of manhood.
Publisher: Alma Books
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The Prague Cemetery
Harvill Secker
The Prague Cemetery
Umberto Eco
Shortlisted, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
Nineteenth-century Europe, from Turin to Prague to Paris, abounds with the ghastly and the mysterious. Conspiracies rule history. Jesuits plot against Freemasons. Italian priests are strangled with their own intestines. French criminals plan bombings by day and celebrate black masses by night. Every nation has its own secret service, perpetrating forgeries, plots, and massacres. From the unification of Italy to the Paris Commune to the Dreyfus Affair to the notorious forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Europe is in tumult and everyone needs a scapegoat.
But what if, behind all of these conspiracies both real and imagined, lay just one man? What if that evil genius created the most infamous document of all?
Publisher: Harvill Secker
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Alice
Clerkenwell Press
Alice
Judith Hermann
Shortlisted, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
This is a work of exceptional power and beauty from one of Europe's finest writers. When someone very close to you dies your whole life changes. Everything is different. Alice is the central figure in these five inter-connected narratives, which tell of her life at times of loss. Suddenly it is no longer possible to say what the person looked like, how he spoke, cursed, smiled, how he lived his life. Objects are left behind, books, letters, pictures and every now and again you think you can see them in a crowd. Judith Hermann tells of days of transition, of waiting, of holding on and letting go and of how clear and dazzling such days can sometimes be. Alice is a book of extraordinary power and great literary beauty from one of Europe's finest writers.
Publisher: Clerkenwell Press
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Dream of Ding Village
Constable & Robinson
Dream of Ding Village
Yan Lianke
Shortlisted, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
Here, China's most controversial novelist takes as his subject the contemporary AIDS blood-contamination scandal in Henan province, where villagers were coerced into selling vast quantities of blood and then infected with the AIDS virus as they were injected with plasma to prevent anaemia. Whole villages were wiped out in this way, with no responsibility taken or reparation made. The Dream of Ding Village focuses on one village, and the story of one family, torn apart when one son rises to the top of the Party pile as he exploits the situation, while another is infected and dies. Narrated by a dead boy and written in finely crafted, affecting prose, the novel presents a powerful absurdist allegory of the moral vacuum at the heart of Communist-capitalist China as it traces the life and death of an entire community.
Publisher: Constable & Robinson
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New Finnish Grammar
Dedalus
New Finnish Grammar
Diego Marani
Shortlisted, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
One night at Trieste in September 1943 a seriously wounded soldier is found on the quay. The doctor, of a newly arrived German hospital ship, Pietri Friari gives the unconscious soldier medical assistance. His new patient has no documents or anything that can identifying him. When he regains consciousness he has lost his memory and cannot even remember what language he speaks. From a few things found on the man the doctor, who is originally from Finland, believes him to be a sailor and a fellow countryman, who somehow or other has ended up in Trieste. The doctor dedicates himself to teaching the man Finnish, beginning the reconstruction of the identity of Sampo Karjalainen, leading the missing man to return to Finland in search of his identity and his past.
Publisher: Dedalus
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From the Mouth of the Whale
Telegram
From the Mouth of the Whale
Sjón
Shortlisted, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
The year is 1635. Iceland is a world darkened by superstition, poverty and cruelty. Men of science marvel over a unicorn's horn, poor folk worship the Virgin in secret and both books and men are burnt. Jónas Pálmason, a poet and self-taught healer, has been condemned to exile for heretical conduct, having fallen foul of the local magistrate. Banished to a barren island, Jónas recalls his exorcism of a walking corpse on the remote Snjáfjöll coast, the frenzied massacre of innocent Basque whalers at the hands of local villagers, and the deaths of three of his children. From the Mouth of the Whale is a magical evocation of an enlightened mind and a vanished age.
Publisher: Telegram
Longlist
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Blooms of Darkness
Alma Books
Blooms of Darkness
Aharon Appelfeld
Longlisted, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
The ghetto in which the Jews have been confined is being liquidated by the Nazis, and 11-year-old Hugo is brought by his mother to the local brothel, where one of the prostitutes has agreed to hide him. Mariana is a bitterly unhappy woman who hates what she has done to her life, and night after night Hugo sits in her closet and listens uncomprehendingly as she rages at the Nazi soldiers who come and go. When she's not mired in self-loathing, Mariana is fiercely protective of the bewildered, painfully polite young boy. And Hugo becomes protective of Mariana, too, trying to make her laugh when she is depressed, soothing her physical and mental agony with cold compresses. As the memories of his family and friends grow dim, Hugo falls in love with Mariana. And as her life spirals downwards, Mariana reaches out for consolation to the adoring boy who is on the cusp of manhood.
Publisher: Alma Books
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Seven Houses in France
Harvill Secker
Seven Houses in France
Bernardo Atxaga
Longlisted, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
The year is 1903, and the garrison of Yangambi on the banks of the River Congo is under the command of Captain Lalande Biran. The captain is also a poet whose ambition is to amass a fortune and return to the literary cafés of Paris. His glamorous wife Christine has a further ambition: to own seven houses in France, a house for every year he has been abroad.
At Lalande Biran's side are the ex-legionnaire van Thiegel, a brutal womaniser, and the servile, treacherous Donatien, who dreams of running a brothel. The officers spend their days guarding enslaved rubber-tappers and kidnapping young girls, and at their hands the jungle is transformed into a wild circus of human ambition and absurdity. But everything changes with the arrival of a new officer and brilliant marksman: the enigmatic Chrysostome Liège.
An outstanding new novel from the critically acclaimed and prizewinning author Bernardo Atxaga, Seven Houses in France is a blackly comic tale which reveals the darkest sides of human desire.
Publisher: Harvill Secker
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The Prague Cemetery
Harvill Secker
The Prague Cemetery
Umberto Eco
Longlisted, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
Nineteenth-century Europe, from Turin to Prague to Paris, abounds with the ghastly and the mysterious. Conspiracies rule history. Jesuits plot against Freemasons. Italian priests are strangled with their own intestines. French criminals plan bombings by day and celebrate black masses by night. Every nation has its own secret service, perpetrating forgeries, plots, and massacres. From the unification of Italy to the Paris Commune to the Dreyfus Affair to the notorious forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Europe is in tumult and everyone needs a scapegoat.
But what if, behind all of these conspiracies both real and imagined, lay just one man? What if that evil genius created the most infamous document of all?
Publisher: Harvill Secker
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Hate: a Romance
Faber
Hate: a Romance
Tristan Garcia
Longlisted, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
In a controversial first novel that took the French literary world by storm and won the Prix de Flore, Tristan Garcia uses sex, friendships and love affairs to show what happens to people when political ideals - Marxism, gay rights, sexual liberation, nationalism - come to an end. As Elizabeth Levallois, a cultural journalist, looks back on the decade and on the ravages of the AIDS epidemic in Paris, a drama unfolds - one in which love turns to hate and fidelity turns to betrayal, in both affairs of the heart and politics. With great verve and ingenuity, Garcia lays claim to an era that promised freedom as never before, and he paints an indelible, sharp, but sympathetic portrait of intellectuals lost in the age of MTV.
Publisher: Faber
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Alice
Clerkenwell Press
Alice
Judith Hermann
Longlisted, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
This is a work of exceptional power and beauty from one of Europe's finest writers. When someone very close to you dies your whole life changes. Everything is different. Alice is the central figure in these five inter-connected narratives, which tell of her life at times of loss. Suddenly it is no longer possible to say what the person looked like, how he spoke, cursed, smiled, how he lived his life. Objects are left behind, books, letters, pictures and every now and again you think you can see them in a crowd. Judith Hermann tells of days of transition, of waiting, of holding on and letting go and of how clear and dazzling such days can sometimes be. Alice is a book of extraordinary power and great literary beauty from one of Europe's finest writers.
Publisher: Clerkenwell Press
-
Dream of Ding Village
Constable & Robinson
Dream of Ding Village
Yan Lianke
Longlisted, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
Here, China's most controversial novelist takes as his subject the contemporary AIDS blood-contamination scandal in Henan province, where villagers were coerced into selling vast quantities of blood and then infected with the AIDS virus as they were injected with plasma to prevent anaemia. Whole villages were wiped out in this way, with no responsibility taken or reparation made. The Dream of Ding Village focuses on one village, and the story of one family, torn apart when one son rises to the top of the Party pile as he exploits the situation, while another is infected and dies. Narrated by a dead boy and written in finely crafted, affecting prose, the novel presents a powerful absurdist allegory of the moral vacuum at the heart of Communist-capitalist China as it traces the life and death of an entire community.
Publisher: Constable & Robinson
-
New Finnish Grammar
Dedalus
New Finnish Grammar
Diego Marani
Longlisted, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
One night at Trieste in September 1943 a seriously wounded soldier is found on the quay. The doctor, of a newly arrived German hospital ship, Pietri Friari gives the unconscious soldier medical assistance. His new patient has no documents or anything that can identifying him. When he regains consciousness he has lost his memory and cannot even remember what language he speaks. From a few things found on the man the doctor, who is originally from Finland, believes him to be a sailor and a fellow countryman, who somehow or other has ended up in Trieste. The doctor dedicates himself to teaching the man Finnish, beginning the reconstruction of the identity of Sampo Karjalainen, leading the missing man to return to Finland in search of his identity and his past.
Publisher: Dedalus
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1Q84
Harvill Secker
1Q84
Haruki Murakami
Longlisted, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
A long-awaited treat for his fans, 1Q84 is also a thrilling introduction to the unique world of Murakami's imagination. This hypnotically addictive novel is a work of startling originality and, as the title suggests, a mind-bending ode to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. (The number 9 in Japanese is pronounced like the letter 'Q'). The year is 1984. Aomame sits in a taxi on the expressway in Tokyo. Her work is not the kind which can be discussed in public but she is in a hurry to carry out an assignment and, with the traffic at a stand-still, the driver proposes a solution. She agrees, but as a result of her actions starts to feel increasingly detached from the real world. She has been on a top-secret mission, and her next job will lead her to encounter the apparently superhuman founder of a religious cult. Meanwhile, Tengo is leading a nondescript life but wishes to become a writer. He inadvertently becomes involved in a strange affair surrounding a literary prize to which a mysterious seventeen-year-old girl has submitted her remarkable first novel. It seems to be based on her own experiences and moves readers in unusual ways. Can her story really be true? Both Aomame and Tengo notice that the world has grown strange; both realise that they are indispensable to each other. While their stories influence one another, at times by accident and at times intentionally, the two come closer and closer to intertwining.
Publisher: Harvill Secker
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Parallel Stories
Jonathan Cape
Parallel Stories
Peter Nadas
Longlisted, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
In 1989, the memorable year when the Wall came down, a university student in Berlin on his early morning run finds a corpse lying on a park bench and alerts the authorities. This classic police-procedural scene opens an extraordinary novel, a masterwork that traces the fate of myriad Europeans - Hungarians, Jews, Germans, Gypsies - across the treacherous years of the mid-twentieth century. The social and political circumstances of their lives may vary richly, their sexual and spiritual longings may seem to each of them entirely unique, yet Peter Nádas's magnificent tapestry unveils uncanny, reverberating parallels that link them across time and space.
Three unusual men are at the heart of Parallel Stories: Hans von Wolkenstein, whose German mother is linked to dark secrets of fascist-Nazi collaboration during the 1940s, Ágost Lippay-Lehr, whose influential father has served Hungary's different political régimes for decades, and Andras Rott, who has his own dark record of dark activities abroad. They are friends in Budapest when we eventually meet them in the spring of 1961, a pivotal time in the postwar epoch and in their clandestine careers. But the richly detailed, dramatic memories and actions of these men, like those of their friends, lovers and family members, range from Berlin and Moscow to Switzerland and Holland, from the Mediterranean to the North Sea, and of course, across Hungary. The ever-daring, ever-original episodes of Parallel Lives explore the most intimate, most difficult human experiences in a prose glowing with uncommon clarity and also with mysterious uncertainty - as is characteristic of Nadas's subtle, spirited art.
The web of extended dramas in Parallel Stories reaches not just forward to the transformative year of 1989 but back to the spring of 1939, with Europe trembling on the edge of war; to the bestial times of 1944-45, when Budapest was besieged, the final solution devastated Hungary's Jews, and the war came to an end; and to the cataclysmic Hungarian Revolution of October 1956. But there is much more to Parallel Stories than that: it is a daring, demanding, and very moving exploration of humanity at its most constrained and its most free.
Publisher: Jonathan Cape
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Scenes from Village Life
Chatto & Windus
Scenes from Village Life
Amos Oz
Longlisted, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
Amos Oz's new fiction presents a surreal and unsettling portrait of a village in Israel. A picture of the community takes shape across seven stories, in which a group of characters appear and return. Each villager is searching for something, yet in this almost dreamlike world nothing is certain, nothing is resolved. An old man grumbles to his daughter about the unexplained digging and banging he hears under the house at night. A stranger turns up at a man's door, to persuade him that they must get rid of his ageing mother in order to sell the house. A man goes to his neighbours for regular evenings of music and old pioneer songs, but is overwhelmingly drawn to the tragic heart of the house. Behind each episode is another, hidden story - a glimpse of what goes on beneath the surface of everyday existence. This book concludes with an eighth story, shocking and strange, from another place and a distant time. In beautifully simple, poetic language, Amos Oz peers into the darkness of our lives in this powerful, hypnotic work.
Publisher: Chatto & Windus
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Next World Novella
Peirene Press
Next World Novella
Matthias Politycki
Longlisted, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
Hinrich takes his existence at face value. His wife, on the other hand, has always been more interested in the after-life. Or so it seemed. When she dies of a stroke, Hinrich goes through her papers only to discover a totally different perspective on their marriage. Thus commences a dazzling intellectual game of shifting realities.
Publisher: Peirene Press
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The Emperor of Lies
Faber
The Emperor of Lies
Steve Sem-Sandberg
Longlisted, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
In February 1940, the Nazis established what would become the second largest Jewish ghetto in the Polish city of Lódz. Its chosen leader: Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, a sixty-three-year-old Jewish businessman and orphanage director, and the elusive, authoritarian power sustaining the ghetto's very existence. From one of Scandinavia's most critically acclaimed and bestselling authors, The Emperor of Lies chronicles the tale of Rumkowski's monarchical rule over a quarter of a million Jews. Driven by a titanic ambition, he sought to transform the ghetto into a productive industrial complex and strove to make it - and himself - indispensable to the Nazi regime. Drawing on the chronicles of life in the Lódz ghetto, Steve Sem-Sandberg captures the full panorama of human resilience, and questions the nature of evil. He asks the most difficult questions: Was Rumkowski a ruthless opportunist, an accessory to the Nazi regime driven by a lust for power? Or was he a pragmatic strategist who managed to save Jewish lives through his collaboration policies?
Publisher: Faber
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Please Look After Mother
Weidenfeld & Nicholson
Please Look After Mother
Kyung-Sook Shin
Longlisted, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
Please Look After Mother is the story of So-nyo, a wife and mother, who has lived a life of sacrifice and compromise. In the past she suffered a stroke, leaving her vulnerable and often confused. Now, travelling from the Korean countryside to the Seoul of her grown-up children, So-nyo is separated from her husband when the doors close on a packed train. As her children and husband search the streets, they recall So-nyo's life, and all they have left unsaid. Through their piercing voices, we begin to discover the desires, heartaches, and secrets she harboured within. And as the mystery of her disappearance unravels, we uncover a larger mystery, that of all mothers and children: how affection, exasperation, hope and guilt add up to love. Compassionate, redemptive and beautifully written, Please Look After Mother will reconnect you to the story of your own family, and to the forgotten sacrifices that lie at its heart.
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicholson
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From the Mouth of the Whale
Telegram
From the Mouth of the Whale
Sjón
Longlisted, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
The year is 1635. Iceland is a world darkened by superstition, poverty and cruelty. Men of science marvel over a unicorn's horn, poor folk worship the Virgin in secret and both books and men are burnt. Jónas Pálmason, a poet and self-taught healer, has been condemned to exile for heretical conduct, having fallen foul of the local magistrate. Banished to a barren island, Jónas recalls his exorcism of a walking corpse on the remote Snjáfjöll coast, the frenzied massacre of innocent Basque whalers at the hands of local villagers, and the deaths of three of his children. From the Mouth of the Whale is a magical evocation of an enlightened mind and a vanished age.
Publisher: Telegram
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Professor Andersen's Night
Harvill Secker
Professor Andersen's Night
Dag Solstad
Longlisted, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
It is Christmas Eve, and 55-year-old Professor Pål Andersen is alone, drinking coffee and cognac in his living room. Lost in thought, he looks out of the window and sees a man strangle a woman in the apartment across the street.
Professor Andersen fails to report the crime. The days pass, and he becomes paralysed by indecision. Desperate for respite, the professor sets off to a local sushi bar, only to find himself face to face with the murderer.
Professor Andersen's Night is an unsettling yet highly entertaining novel of apathy, rebellion and morality. In flinty prose, Solstad presents an uncomfortable question: would we, like his cerebral protagonist, do nothing?
Publisher: Harvill Secker
Dream of Ding Village, a novel banned by the Chinese Government has made the longlist forthe Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2012. Yan Lianke's novel, which tells the story of a blood-selling scandal in contemporary China, was given a "three nos" order - no distribution, no sales and no promotion - in 2005. The translation into English by Cindy Carter is joined on the 15 strong longlist by The Prague Cemetery, Umberto Eco's sixth novel, as well as the million-selling Please Look After Mother by Korean author Kyung-sook Shin, and the first volume of Murakami's 1Q84.
The longlist features Dag Solstad, one of Norway's leading contemporary authors, who has previously been shortlisted for this Prize for Shyness and Dignity (in 2007) and Novel 11, Book 18 (in 2009). Independent publishers make a strong showing this year with seven different houses represented on the list. Random House imprints take six of the 15 slots on the longlist for the Prize, which features books translated from 12 different languages including Japanese, Hebrew and Icelandic.
Nick Barley, judge of the 2012 Prize and Director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival commented:
From 98 entries we have selected a longlist of 15 novels that reflect the fast-growing appetite for high quality fiction from around the world. From Judith Hermann's succinct book of linked stories to the 1100-page tome by Peter Nadas, this year's list couldn't be more diverse - both in sheer scale and in subject matter. And while it has been a strong year for the established literary imprints, I was delighted that several titles from smaller independent publishers also shone out. Among these 15 titles there's a treasure trove of unforgettable treats for readers.
Judges
The Director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival Nick Barley, and Xiaolu Guo, who wrote the Orange shortlisted A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, have joined the panel of judges for the £10,000 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2012.
The judges for this year's Prize are:
- Freelance critic, feature writer and broadcaster Hephzibah Anderson
- Nick Barley, Director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival
- Jon Cook, Professor of Literature and Director of the Centre for Creative and Performing Arts at the University of East Anglia, and Chair of Arts Council England, East
- Novelist, short story writer and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo
- Boyd Tonkin, Literary Editor of the Independent
Nick Barley commented:
I'm very excited and honoured to have been invited to judge the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize this year. I am proud of the Edinburgh International Book Festival's history of welcoming writers from around the world but I am also aware that there are countless authors working in other languages who have not yet been given the attention they deserve in the UK. I look forward to relishing the courageous work of so many adventurous publishers and I'll be delighted to play my part in helping them bring unique stories from other languages to a wider English-speaking audience.
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Hephzibah AndersonHephzibah Anderson read English literature at the University of Cambridge and is a book columnist for Bloomberg Muse, the arts and culture division of Bloomberg News. A former Fiction Editor of the Daily Mail, she reported monthly on debut fiction for the Observer for five years and has reviewed widely for publications from the New Statesman to Standpoint, as well as internationally in the New York Observer and the National. Her broadcast credits encompass television shows in France as well as the UK and the US, and she regularly guests on BBC Five Live. Anderson also tutors at the Arvon Foundation and is the author of a memoir, Chastened (2009). Her judging experience includes the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize and the Betty Trask Awards.
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Nick BarleyNick Barley worked in London as a publisher and editor of arts books and magazines throughout the 1990s. The magazines under his stewardship included Blueprint (for architects and designers) and he was responsible for the launch of Tate, the art magazine in 1992. During this period he also edited books including Breathing Cities and Lost and Found: Critical Voices in new British Design. Nick moved to Scotland to become editor of the cultural magazine The List in 2003, and he was winner of the PPA Editor of the Year Award in 2005. In 2006 he was appointed as director of The Lighthouse - Scotland's Centre for Architecture, Design and the City. Since October 2009 he has been director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, which takes place each August. Under his direction the Book Festival has launched a series of innovations including Unbound, a free mini-festival of literary performances, and the Newton First Book Award.
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Jon CookJon Cook is Professor of Literature and Director of the Centre for Creative and Performing Arts at the University of East Anglia and played an active role in establishing the Writers' Centre in Norwich. He has taught at universities in the United States, Europe and India, most recently as a Hurst Visiting Professor at the University of Washington. He is a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council Peer Review College and a literature advisor to the British Council. He is Chair of Arts Council England, East and a member of the national Arts Council. His recent publications include Poetry in Theory and a biographical study, Hazlitt in Love. He was a judge for the Caine Prize for African Fiction in 2008/9 and 2009/10.
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Xialou GuoXiaolu Guo was born in China in 1973. She received an MA in Literature at the Beijing Film Academy and the UK National Film School, and published six books in China before she moved to London in 2002.
The English translation of Village of Stone was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2004 and nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her first novel written in English, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and was translated into 25 languages. Her recent novels include 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth and UFO in Her Eyes, both written in English. Xiaolu is also a renowned filmmaker with her successful feature She, A Chinese (2010) winning the Golden Leopard award at the Locarno Film festival. Her new feature film, UFO in Her Eyes, an adaptation of her novel, premiered at the Toronto Film Festival earlier this year and is currently touring the world. Her latest book was the short story collection, Lovers in the Age of Indifference, published in 2010. She lives in London and Berlin.
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Boyd TonkinLiterary editorBoyd Tonkin is Literary Editor of The Independent. He studied English and French literature at the University of Cambridge and taught literature in higher and adult education before becoming an award-winning magazine journalist, as feature writer and features editor of the magazine for social services professionals, Community Care. Already a freelance writer for the Observer, he became Social Policy Editor of the New Statesman, and then Literary Editor, before moving to the The Independent.
He has reported on literary and artistic issues from more than 20 countries on four continents, and his cultural essays have been published widely in books and journals in the UK and abroad. In addition to judging the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize since 2000, he has judged the Man Booker Prize, the Whitbread Biography Award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the David Cohen Prize for Literature and in 2010, the Prix Cevennes in France.
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