Tag: #WITMonth

Wrapping up August: not the most productive month

Although August also brought a few weeks of relative quiet (the eye of the storm), it was not the most conducive month for ambitious reading or film watching or other events.

Seven books, of which only three were suitable for #WomeninTranslation Month. Not an impressive number of books, bearing in mind that at least three of these were very slim volumes, and that I got tricked into thinking that two of the books might have been in translation, but were actually written in English. I barely reviewed any books either, only five of them quite briefly: China Mieville, Hema Sukumar and MMilena Michiko Flašar altogether in one post and a quick paragraph each for Anais Nin and Claudia Pineiro.

The last two books I read were coincidentally both about complicated families and young women discovering and pursuing their identities as lesbians. Mamele by Gemma Reeves was set in contemporary Britain and therefore (perhaps unsurprisingly) had a thread about cultural identities and social class running through it, as well as a really fraught mother-daughter relationship. For Cecilia by K-Ming Chang, I had that ‘OMG what have I just read???’ reaction throughout. Although it captures that febrile state of obsession and possessiveness of teenage infatuation well, there is a little bit too much blood, gore and yuckiness for my taste. In its surreal approach and frankness, it reminded me of Gabriela Ponce’s Blood Red, but this one did not feel sexy, merely disgusting. Although it’s not a long book, I think I’d have liked it better as a short story.

I didn’t have the desire to focus on any long films either this past month, so my Letterboxd diary is looking rather bare. However, they reflect my interest: two things about Japanese rock bands, one a TV series about a fictional band, directed with a lot of passion and commitment by Sato Takeru, and the other a documentary about the rock band One OK Rock, that Takeru is friends with and probably helped to inspire the portrayal of the characters in the series. I also finally got to see the animated film Flow, although it was hard to watch a cat in peril at a time when I was separated from my darling Kasper. The last of the films was also a documentary at my beloved Bertha Dochouse (I will miss that place!), about professional teams in China who go about breaking a husband’s affair: amazingly candid conversations, but also a great opportunity as an anthropologist to notice cultural differences when it comes to ideas about love, family and kinship.

Above all, August and now the beginning of September were the times when my friends really stepped up for me and I’m so grateful for having so many wonderful, supportive and reliable people in my life.

Then, on Wednesday this week, I came over to Berlin with a suitcase and a backpack, much like I first arrived in the UK 30 years ago. (Except now I have a whole removal lorry that will follow me soon.) I’ve already been to see a film here, the Cannes Jury’s Prize winner Sound of Falling (in German: Looking at the Sun, In die Sonne schauen), an odd, slow-moving yet very atmospheric and sad look at the lives of four girls in an old farmhouse in a rural area of Germany over the course of a century (particularly their fascination with death and their burgeoning sexuality). Directed by a relative newcomer and female director, Mascha Schilinski, so I’ll be curious to see what she does next. I was also excited to see that a new Christian Petzold film will be out soon with the unusual title Miroirs No. 3 (based on a piano piece by Ravel), as will the Kafka biopic directed by Agnieszka Holland, and I’ll now have easy access to all of these ‘foreign language’ films.

Beautiful old-style cinema, looking like a proper theatre
And an atmospheric walk home to digest the film’s heavy content…

#20Books of Summer and #WITMonth: #16-18

I lost count a little bit while packing books, moving, finding books on my Kindle, but I think I’m nearing the end of my 20 Books of Summer (having read a few not on the original list as well). These three latest ones were all on my list, and had been buried on my Kindle for a couple of years at least. Don’t expect full-length reviews, however: my brain is still incapable of more than 10 minutes of coherent thought at a time.

#16: Milena Michiko Flašar: I Called Him Necktie, transl. Sheila Dickie

I was hugely impressed by this Japanese-Austrian writer when I read her book Oben Erde, unten Himmel, and when I saw her at the European Writers event at the British Library. This is an earlier book by her, drawing once again upon her Japanese heritage and set in Japan, exploring two widespread and sad phenomena in Japanese society: hikikomori (young people who shut themselves in their rooms) and the shame of aged salarymen who find themselves unemployed. A lot of the latter find themselves among the homeless camps in Ueno Park, as described in Yu Miri’s novel. Meanwhile, you can find more sinister, pitiful incarnations of the former in many contemporary Japanese manga and novels, including the two novels by Abe Kazushige that I read earlier this year, Mysterious Setting and Nipponia Nippon. This book also falls under the Women in Translation Month category.

Hiro is the young recluse, who lives in his parents’ flat but won’t eat with them (they have to leave food outside his door) and only comes out to shower when they are asleep. At some point, however, he decides to venture out of the house for the first time in two years, just walking in solitude and sitting in a park.

…it was about being by myself. I didn’t want to meet anyone. Meeting someone means getting involved. An invisible thread is tied. From person to person. Real threads. Back and forth. Meeting someone means becoming part of a web, and I wanted to avoid that.

As he sits on a park bench, he notices a middle-aged man in a suit and tie opposite him, who seems to fit the stereotypical image of the salaryman, yet for some inexplicable reason is spending the day just sitting in the park.

His well-pressed figure was like thousands of others who fill the streets day in and day out. They stream out of the belly of the city and disappear into tall buildings, whose windows break up the sky into separate pieces They are average, typical in their inconspicuousness, with smooth-shaven suburban faces, all of them interchangeable. He for example could have been my father. Any father. And yet here he was. Like me.

These two people, who feel out of step with the rest of the world, find each other and gradually develop an understanding of each other’s situation. They share the same need to find a brief respite from the anxieties of the burdens of social expectations and fear of other people:

The happiness of being freed for an indeterminate time from events and effects, from the interplay of causes and effects. Without an earthly aim before your eyes and without the need to reach one, to remain in a space where nothing happens. A ball lying still, off to the side and not colliding with any others.

Yet, as they share stories about their past friendships and relationships, the things they feel guilty about, they begin to wonder what effect their indifference to the world might be having on those nearest and dearest to them, and whether society really needs them and their contribution. It is a moving book about loneliness, grief, sense of displacement but also about finding connection, being listened to for the first time and finding some kind of hope. Above all, I resonated with these words, which could be the battle cry of all sensitive people everywhere, when they feel the world is crushing them:

Don’t be ashamed to be a person with feelings. No matter what it is, feel it tenderly and deeply. Feel it more tenderly, feel it more deeply. Feel it for yourself. Feel it for others. And then, let it go.

#17: Hema Sukumar: Minor Disturbances at Grand Life Apartments

Set in Chennai, India, I have to admit that I expected this book to also fit the Women in Translation bill, but it was in fact written in English. Minor disturbances indeed – this is very much a comfort read, with the gentle humour and mild dangers. Or rather, even if the dangers are not all that minor, they are resolved relatively easily.

The residents at the Grand Life Apartments are: devoted mother Kamala, a dentist who is very proud of her daughter studying at Oxford but also wishing she could see more of her than just one week of annual visits; Reva, a software engineer who is being constantly reminded by her family and acquaintances that she is getting past the marriageable age; Jason, a shy young British man who came to Chennai to improve his knowledge as a chef after a traumatic breakup; and their landlord, who is fighting to keep the apartment block, which is being targeted by developers. Their stories intertwine in a charming way, reminiscent of Alexander McCall Smith’s style, while pointing out the differences in attitudes between generations or social classes in contemporary India:

What Reva had come to realise was that being a certain kind of liberal-minded person as an adult was usually the byproduct of having a childhood where mothers spoke fluent English and fathers ferried you around in air-conditioned cars to swimming lessons. This then manifested itself as online dating in adulthood, accompanied by complaints about old-fashioned parents who didn’t approve of live-in relationships.

There was also a little bit about cross-cultural misunderstandings, as Jason becomes more familiar with the local culture, and as Kamala travels to England to see her daughter. Nothing particularly ground-breaking in terms of plot or style, but it was a pleasant palate cleanser between more serious books.

#18: China Mieville: The City and the City

I knew this was going to be an interesting exercise in world-building, but I was not expecting it to be so full of historical and anthropological references. Set in a fantasy world somewhere in the Balkans, one that bears many similarities to ours, this book seems to be all about artificial divisions that we have created: I spotted allusions to the war in Yugoslavia (the same language in essence, but written in two different alphabets), or to the Wall in Germany, and Berlin in particular (being so close in certain streets, but having to ‘unsee’ the others), or Jerusalem of course. The difficulties and ‘training’ required for visitors to even gain access to the two cities of Beszel and UI Qoma are also reminiscent of Albania in the old days and North Korea (still). As for Breach, that much-feared unseen force sweeping in when people don’t conform to the rules, it reminded me of course of all the Stasi, KGB, Securitate forces… and that sometimes the fear of repercussions acted as more of a deterrent and led to self-censorship than anything they could actually do in reality.

I had to smile at the references to American imperialism and how they viewed these ‘crazy’ countries that they have to nevertheless pretend to respect for the sake of their economic interests:

Any explanation carried out in my presence would have to be moderately polite: alone with other Americans he could stress to them how ridiculous and difficult these cities were, how sorry he and his colleagues were for the added complications of a crime occuring in Besel, and so on. He could insinuate. It was an embarrassment, an antagonims to have to deal with a dissident force like Breach.

Aside from this fascinating backdrop, the plot itself is a mash-up of traditional murder mystery/police procedural, spy thriller and conspiracy novel (in the Dan Brown type of genre). It does get kind of messy towards the end, but for the most part it is mind-bendingly great fun, with enough social commentary and satire to keep me satisfied. I can see why it won so many awards, and I think it’s high time I returned to Embassytown, a book I attempted to read a long time ago but didn’t quite finish. I have the feeling he might be better in high-level concepts and premises, but not always quite land the execution of it in his novels.

#WITMonth: Claudia Piñeiro – Time of the Flies

Claudia Piñeiro: Time of the Flies, transl. Frances Riddle, Charco Press, 2024.

I no longer need to emphasise how much of a Claudia Piñeiro fan I am, as I’ve mentioned it on other occasions. I particularly like the way she takes common crime fiction tropes and turns them on their heads, allowing for a far broader social commentary, without ever becoming preachy or boring. It’s something I aspire to do in my crime fiction – but I have a long, long way to go still.

Time of the Flies is the longest novel by this author that I’ve read to date – and is in fact a sequel of sorts to the novella All Yours (published a long time ago in translation, in 2005, by Bitter Lemon Press). That novella (which I haven’t read) tells the story of Inés Pereyra, a self-satisfied wife and mother, who becomes obsessed with her husband’s infidelity and finally snaps. This novel opens 15-16 years later, when Inés has been released from prison for murdering her husband’s lover. She is now a reformed character, less chatty, more frozen, and she has started a business with another former inmate Manca, an agency called FFF, or Females, Fumigation, and Flies, dedicated to pest control and private investigation.

Life on the straight and narrow was never going to be easy, especially when a client suddenly asks for a deadly dose of pesticide (and for Inés’s expertise), ostensibly to kill her own husband’s lover. Inés is tempted by the money – and she also has unresolved business with her daughter Laura – but something about the client and her nefarious purposes doesn’t quite add up. And so the novel becomes something between a thriller and a romp, interspersed with comments from an Ancient Greek drama type choir, except the voices are not unified, but constantly disagreeing or debating.

Inés is a bitch, she never took care of Laura, only pretended to. Like mother like daughter. I don’t think either one of them is a bitch. I love my kids and I enjoy them, but I still ask myself every day what my life might’ve been like without them. I don’t ask myself that question because I don’t dare to consider the answer. In my case, I make a mental list of all the things I would’ve been able to do if I hadn’t had kids. Would you have actually done those things though? That’s counterfactual. It’s absurd and misleading, you’re just blaming them for your failure. Who said I was a failure? Your face says it all. Let’s keep it cordial, please.

Funny though these comments often are, they also underline the crimes committed against women – both the small ones (being judgmental, stereotyping women, demanding too much of them, double standards) as well as bigger ones such as violence, rape, mental abuse. Angry women such as Medea are mentioned, and a roster of feminist writers are quoted, but it always comes back to flies – of various shapes and sizes, each with their own characteristic. Flies, that are some of the most despised creatures on earth, yet Inés refuses to kill them. Instead, she has studied them during her time in prison and gives us a potted history of each type of fly and our relationship with them. But not before she suffers through an agonising story about the death of a fly by Marguerite Duras. (This made me laugh out loud).

The French author described how she sat on the floor and watched as a poor fly died. And then she had the revelation that when a fly dies, it dies (wow)… And she describes the fly as ‘polite’ even though it ’causes cholera and the plague’. A fly causes cholera and the plague? Really? She spent over fifteen minutes watching a creature die and the fly is the bad guy!

This novel is experimental enough to displease those who prefer more standard crime fiction fare, and possibly too page-turning and full of melodramatic flourishes to please fans of literary fiction. However, I found the streak of cruelty beneath the fun quite compelling, and enjoyed this stylistic mash-up.

#WITMonth: Gabriela Ponce (Ecuador)

Gabriela Ponce: Blood Red, translated by Sarah Booker, Dead Ink Books, 2024

You can see that many of my Women in Translation Month choices are left over from my not very prolific Spanish and Portuguese Literature Month in July. This is the first book I’ve ever read by an author from Ecuador, and I am in love with the rather fancy (double) cover by Dead Ink Books, a fellow member of the Indie Press Network; they always publish titles that are anything but mainstream, including some work in translation. This translation was first published in the US by Restless Books.

The nameless narrator is having what we might call a general breakdown at the age of thirty-eight or thereabouts: her marriage is ending, she is experimenting with drugs and sex and falling in love, she follows her impulses and instincts, determined not to repent later. Just like in my previous #WITMonth read by Clarice Lispector, what we witness here as readers is a mind obsessed by the physical, a woman exploring all the desires, fantasies and limitations that her body is capable of. There are a lot of gritty descriptions of sex and menstruation, particularly in the first third or even half of the book, which may put some readers off. These are not romantic, soft encounters: the place where these encounters take place are grotty – what the narrator calls a ‘cave’, with mounds of dirt, smelling of drugs and cat piss. Even I, as a reader of Latin origin, who is used to a bit more graphic sex in their literature, occasionally struggled with this sprinkling of the scenes of animal desire with repugnant surroundings and an obsession with holes and blood. Yet there are gems of description and intuition even in this unpromising landscape, while others are sensual without being gross, making the heart race a little.

There is a frenetic pace to the first part of the book, which mirror the narrator’s frenzied search for self through pleasure (and some pain). It is hard to distinguish at times what is real and what exists merely in her fantasy. I have to admit I far preferred the passages where she analyses and mourns the end of her marriage and the complex reality of ‘moving on’:

I knew then that it had ended, but that there was so much to do before it would really end… There’d be a few more years, or fours, which is how many are needed, experts say, for nothing to be left, not even the maddening nostalgia that in those days made me go from love to hatred with a cursed speed. But what I just said isn’t so simple because memory is impregnated with images that at the slightest touch appear with the devastating reality of the absence, what will always be missing. That nostalgia assaults you the rest of your life and the tuft of grass is a footprint the forest hides beneath your feet. There’s no peace that can be enough…’

There is a particularly moving passage in Chapter 19, where the divorcing couple meet one last time to sort out some administrative details, the soon-to-be-ex-husband says he’s met someone new, and they recall important episodes from their life together and organise their memories. As they part in their respective cars, the narrator’s car won’t start and suddenly she is in floods of tears.

What I really wanted to say was let’s not get divorced. But it was too late, and the pain from the certainty of that mistiming bore into me… I felt an enormous tiredness, a tiredness accumulated over years, and it felt like that tiredness came from the duration: all the time spent with this man who was now leaving in an instant, the paradox filled me with panic, so I stopped thinking.

Soon after, the narrator faces an even toughter decision, as she discovers she is pregnant – but this is no sudden conversion to the joys of motherhood. Instead, it is a far more realistic protracted period of uncertainty and the final decision, not taken lightly, not entirely unrepentant, may surprise readers but feels true to what we’ve learnt about the narrator.

What struck me most about reading this book immediately after finishing the memoir I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself by Glynnis MacNicol, which covers a similar theme of a woman pursuing hedonism (in her case after suffering along through pandemic lockdown in New York, rather than from a marriage breaking down), is that I find fiction much more palatable for handling this topic. In a memoir, it feels self-indulgent and boastful. In fiction, it feels worryingly transgressive but also poignant and liberating.

#WITMonth: Clarice Lispector

Clarice Lispector: The Besieged City, transl. Johnny Lorenz, Penguin, 2019.

I’ve always been slightly obsessed by Brazil as a country and culture (along with Norway and Japan), but had little access to its literature until I came to the UK as a postgraduate student. My department was just above the Department of Spanish, Portuguese & Latin American Studies, so I’d often sneak downstairs and borrow a book from their shelves. Although I greatly enjoyed Machado de Assis and Jorge Amado, it was Clarice Lispector who bowled me over. As a lifelong Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and Tove Jansson fan, this should come as no surprise, for it feels to me like Lispector has elements of each of those authors, as well as a sensibility and language which is all her own.

This book is one of her less well-known works, one of the few things by her that I’d not read. It was her third novel, written in her twenties, while she was living as an expat with her diplomat husband in Bern. By all accounts, she was not happy with Swiss life, nor with her expat status, so I fully expected this book to be an account of expat life. Instead, it is firmly set in a Brazilian city, or rather the sleepy little town of Sao Geraldo which transforms into a city over the course of the book. It is also set in the inner landscape of Lucrecia Neves’ mind, a typical vain, rather vacuous teenager who likewise grows up over the course of the book.

It is most certainly a book about ‘becoming’ but whether this ‘becoming’ is progress, or cyclical, or simply undefinable change, this is left unanswered. The author takes two rather unprepossessing starting points (she does not sugarcoat the sheer boredom of the town or the self-absorbed silliness of the girl), subjects them to the so-called forces of progress and allows us to draw our own conclusions as to whether this maturity and growth is good, bad, indifferent, or a mix of all the preceding things.

At the start Lucrecia is impatient with the quiet life or ‘mute existence’ that Sao Geraldo offers: the Sunday pilgrimage to the convent, the market place with the horse carts, the promenades on the edge of town, life with her mother Ana. She dreams of balls, she chooses her outfits and examines her face carefully, she flirts with boys and dreams of great love. She’s not fully formed, so she relies on the perception of others, especially the eyes of men, to define herself. ‘Without realizing it the girl took the shape that the man had perceived in her. That’s how things were built.’

There is one whole chapter entitled In the Garden which seems to me to be the crux of the book. In a drowsy, almost fugue state, Lucrecia is in her room but imagines herself lifted and carried through the city, seeing the familiar with fresh eyes and almost embarking upon a ritual of naming things, focusing on all their sensuous details.

Could this be a new way of seeing things? of an extrinsic beauty! she was clapping sleepy hands. While the sounds were getting more and more in tune, since the first objects were already trying to give themselves: whatever existed was explaining itself as best it could, and the best it could was the trembling of a flower in the pitcher… things arising and giving themselves in horror – and the best they could do was the serenity of a halted object.

After this sensual awakening, Lucrecia finds a way out of her hometown by marrying a rich man, Mateus, and tries to conform to his lifestyle and community. After that, whenever she comes back to visit Sao Geraldo, she feels her own personal connection with the town is lost, as it succumbs to expansion and gentrification.

Taking advantage of her absence, Sao Geraldo had advanced in some sense, and she was already not recognizing things. Calling them, they would not longer answer – accustomed to being called by other names. Other gazes, not hers, had transformed the township.

These are the passages where I believe I recognise the dilemma of the expat: upon returning to one’s home culture, you realise that places, things, people have moved on and that at best you are still grasping onto an outdated version that only exists in your memory – or perhaps in the hazy pink nostalgia of your imagination. Even the language is no longer quite your own, as it has evolved with new terminology and slang.

Lucrecia embarks upon an illicit affair in her hometown – but is it really a full-blown affair or merely the delightful frisson of walking with the married doctor Lucas whom she has known since her adolescence? Is she still chasing after joy and voluptuousness and the dreams of her youth? And is her return to her dying husband, and her hope for a second chapter after becoming a widow a sign of maturity or a simple reflection that she has learnt nothing much at all, that she takes the path of least resistance, that she is still incomplete in her ‘becoming’, as perhaps we all are for all of our lives?

It is difficult to be sure about my interpretation of this book: it is slippery and complex and disorientating. I can almost see why one of the first reviewers of the book back in 1948 described it as ‘a grueling novel to read. It requires tremendous effort to get through it. And the worst thing is that, having finished it, we don’t feel the effort was wroth it.’ But I certainly cannot condone that review.

Perhaps the best way to describe the reading experience is that you are trying to swim somewhere in the open sea, allowing yourself to be carried hither and thither by waves, occasionally smashed on a rock or being submerged in a bigger wave than usual, but it’s all worth it for those moments when you are at one with the rhythm of the sea and can discern all that nature is trying to tell you. It’s a book that has to be felt with your body, as well as read with your head. It fills me with all sorts of ideas – some beautiful, some ominous, but always interesting. While it may not be my favourite novel by Clarice, it certainly holds its place in the catalogue of her works.

This is my first book review for Women in Translation Month, and I hope to have at least one more review for you each week. If you are completely new to Clarice Lispector, I recommend starting with some of her short stories, or with her debut novel, Near to the Wild Heart, equally rich in sensuous detail.

#WITMonth and #20BooksOf Summer: ennui and search for identity

I started one of these books on the 31st of July, so it gets reviewed here alongside the two Women in Translation books, because it fits in with the subject matter. The two translations are brand new releases, which is not typical of my #WITMonth reading.

16. Kanai Mieko: Mild Vertigo, transl. Polly Barton, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2023. (In the US: New Directions Press, with an afterword by Kate Zambreno)

This is like a shorter, less overtly political version of Ducks, Newburyport set in Japan. I say that as someone who hasn’t actually read more than 50 pages or so of Ducks, Newburyport, so don’t hold me to this purely impressionistic view! It is the quiet story of the day-to-day life, minor disappointments, small satisfactions of a perfectly ordinary middle-class Japanese housewife, Natsumi, living in Tokyo with her husband and two sons. Except we find out that she is not quite ordinary: first of all, because the pure housewife role is no longer that commonplace and so she finds herself isolated among her friends; secondly, because there is a constant monologue running through her head and we are privy to it from the very first disorienting, dazzlingly long sentence with its endless flourish of commas.

This study of capitalist ennui may seem like a first world problem – we have seen it before in Sophie Divry’s work – but of course it is also a critique of a society where material culture and possessions are prioritised above everything else. Natsumi is not even able to articulate exactly what she finds unsatisfactory about her life, but she struggles to connect with her husband and children, to keep up with the neighbours’ gossip or with her girlfriends’ activities, to go about the daily business of shopping and cleaning. She feels she should be acquiring some other skills with the Lifelong Learning Programme at th elocal Cultural Education Centre: swimming, flower-arranging, blade-sharpening…

The novel itself contains layers. The most obvious superficial layer consists of that relentless piling on of repetitive domestic details and apparently random thoughts to convey the humdrum existence of this bored and alienated housewife. There are quite relatable and funny moments on trying to keep a conversation going with a non-responsive husband, supermarket shopping, keeping the peace with one’s neighbours. The second layer is that something more profoundly disturbing is going on – the sense of dizziness (the mild vertigo of the title, which is only mentioned with those precise words in the very last line of the book) is almost like a warning signal and it appears at various points throughout the book. There are other danger signals too – which never quite turn into something explosive, but have you as a reader slightly on edge: the woman who threw herself from the roof of the apartment-block, the dead cat which leads to a discussion about the folk belief in the curse of the cat, the uncle who died in a psychiatric ward, other couples getting divorced… I kept expecting any of those elements to turn into Chekhov’s gun at some point, but they never did. Then we have a third layer, with the seemingly unconnected essay about the street photography of Kineo Kubara (contrasted to the rather sadistic and shocking posed photography of Nobuyoshi Araki), which one of her friends gives her to read.

And yet the staggering number of Kuwabara photographs that so vividly capture these lost scenes and memories of passing moments cannot but bring about a peculiar silence, a peculiar surprise in their viewer. The act of casting their eyes on the great bustle formed by the lives of all the various unknown bystanders in these photographs, all the adults, children and women who here appear detached from the narratives of their own private lives and histories, which they of course all possess, and yet who seem, in spite of that detachment, as though their lives would not be so difficult to imagine, this all leaves the viewer with a sensation similar to a kind of vertigo.

Upon reading this, I felt I finally grasped something about the technique of this novel: detaching one particular woman whose life we can imagine all too well, especially given the amount of details we read about her, using her as an example for something that describes all of us, not just this particular place or particular time (although it does help a bit if you know something about Japanese culture and how women are viewed there). Written in 1997, and translated a quarter of a century later – should we feel nostalgic about that time, like people were feeling nostalgic in the 1990s about the time of Japanese economic boom in the 70s and 80s? Or is it true that no matter where we are or what we do, if we do not have a strong sense of purpose – and, let’s face it, most of us don’t – we can fall prey to a sense of overwhelm, depression, frustration and that sense of yearning for we don’t even know what.

This book is a Keeper (I have it both on Kindle and in paperback, as I was planning initially to read it in Japan on Kindle).

17. Dana Shem-Ur: Where I Am, transl. Yardenne Greenspan, New Vessel Press, 2023.

On paper, this is the perfect book for me: a translator and expat spouse living in France, who is trying to find her identity among cultural and societal norms that are not her own, who feels some simmering discontent with married life, who is seeking for a place to call home. The main protagonist, Reut, is closer to my own biography, she is more ambitious, highly-educated, ironical than Natsumi – and yet I often felt like telling her to ‘stop whining’ in a way that I didn’t with the Japanese housewife.

Perhaps it is because, although both books are written in third person, the Japanese novel is a stream-of-consciousness style which takes us right into Natsumi’s mind, while with Reut we feel we are observing her from outside. We see her actions and even her feelings and thoughts are told to us in a way that invites little empathy – the sentences are short, staccato, they do not sound genuine to me, but like the author telling us what the protagonist is thinking. The reviewers talk about a stirring and beautifully written novel or mention its unfailingly elegant prose, but I didn’t see any of that. The prose felt flat and some of the scenes were awkward and seemed to be unnecessarily graphic – not just in terms of content (marital sex after a fight, what felt like lots of scenes of her in the bathroom), but the way they were written. I’m not sure I understood what they were meant to add to the story, what they conveyed about the protagonist or her life or her confused identity.

Both the books describe the minutiae of women’s lives, but in this one it felt like the author didn’t pick the most relevant details of her main character’s life, so it was just tedious instead of illuminating, yuck instead of ‘brave’. Verdict: Castaway.

18. Luke Brown: Theft, And Other Stories, 2020.

The narrator Paul in this novel is a well-educated white man from a relatively humble background leading a somewhat precarious existence in London, and so presents a bit of a contrast to the relatively comfortable lifestyles of the two women narrators in the books above. Nevertheless, he too is somewhat at odds with his life, without fully admitting it to himself, or seeking inspiration and aspiration somewhere beyond what is truly available to him. When he meets the popular author Emily Nardini, her wealthy and arrogant partner Andrew and his privileged daughter Sophie, and their social set, he tries to fit in with them, even though he despises much of what he sees – and lets them know that is the case. At the same time, he has very little in common with the people he left behind in the Lancashire town he grew up in.

Set around the time of the Brexit referendum, this book shows a country divided by class and wealth, envy and fear. While I am sometimes bemused by the British obsession with class, especially in literature, it’s undeniably a force to be reckoned with in politics, housing, the labour market. Paul gets his revenge on the loathsome privileged people… but in doing so becomes as despicable as they are. Even saying this much probably counts as spoilers, although the very first sentence of the novel is ‘What I did to them was terrible, but you have to understand the context. This was London, 2016.’ And at first, I completely understood and sympathised with Paul’s predicament. London is a city that chews up young people and then spits them out when they cannot afford to rent or buy or find a decent job anymore.

Paul’s descriptions of the hipster magazine he reviews for (books too, but mainly haircuts) and the London parties he attends are very funny, although the constant drug use and mutual insults did become a bit wearisome after a while. The observations about social differences were spot on but what I relished was that this was not superficial satire. It is easy to mock stereotypes, but almost every character that the author introduced showed some depth, some positives to counterbalance the obvious negatives. Here is Paul, for instance, talking about a temporary girlfriend of his, who comes from a wealthy Indian family and went to private girls’ schools:

Rochi had taken all the good things from her good school, she was so confident and curious, kind and unembarrassed, When I was next to her I believed that the rich were better than the poor. They hadn’t been deformed by envy and bitterness. They had been free to think and express themselves, to study under the guidance of the world’s best teachers. They were so good-looking and healthy. They had experienced the best of British cultural life. When they married each other it was more than wealth marrying wealthy – it was beauty and intelligence marrying beauty and intelligence. You couldn’t blame them for it.

I liked the fact that nothing was black and white in this book, that no one escapes the irony, but there is also much tenderness in some of the portraits. In a few years’ time, I think many of the cultural references may feel obsolete, that is always the danger with books that are so ‘of their time’. As a snapshot of a certain time and place, it feels honest and accurate, although it left me feeling slightly soiled and worried about my children’s future.

Verdict: I appreciated the book, but I don’t think I’d want to reread it, so it’s a Castaway.

#WITMonth: 9 years of recommendations

I came across the concept of Women in Translation Month in 2013/2014, almost immediately after book reviewer and scientist Meytal Radzinski and translator friend Alison Anderson started tweeting about the paucity of women being translated (in the already quite small proportion of translated literature reaching the Anglophone world). You can find more about the initiative and the impact it has had here.

If you would like to read some Women in Translation this month (or any other month, why not?), here are some of my favourite ones that I discovered thanks to this hashtag over the past nine years.

Virginie Despentes: Apocalypse Baby – I liked this earlier work much better than her celebrated Vernon Subutex trilogy. In that same post, I also review a book by Alice Quinn on similar themes about people on the margins of French society; I called her a ‘Despentes lite’.

Valeria Luiselli has now started writing in English, I believe, but I first started reading her work in translation and Faces in the Crowd probably remains my favourite by her. The title of the book in Spanish is ‘Los Ingravidos – The Weightless’ and that perfectly captures the sense of drifting in and out of lives, floating above and diving into our different selves (the imagined ones, the real ones, the discarded ones). You will occasionally have the impression, like the narrator, that you are ‘the only living girl in a city of ghosts’.

Judith Schalansky’s The Neck of the Giraffe was one of those novels that puzzled me a little to start with, with a very difficult main character, but then it really grew on me. Her story is in many ways the story of my parents’ generation, for whom the fall of Communism came too late and who will never be able to adapt to a new world they do not understand nor like very much.

Clarice Lispector is a force of nature, an outstanding and mysterious writer. I don’t quite know how she does it, but she touches something very deep within me and leaves me restless and wanting more. I’ve reviewed her debut novel Near to the Wild Heart and her short stories, but really you can’t go wrong with any of her works. For a more contemporary, but fun and high-octane take on Brazilian society, I also recommend Fernanda Torres: The End.

I find myself more and more drawn to South American writing, which feels closer in style and preoccupations with what I’ve been used to in Romania. The themes are indisputably tough, but it can be an exhilarating read, as with Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season (seldom has a book had a more fitting title, it’s a hurricane of a read)

Svetlana Alexievich is a must-read – straddling something between anthropological fieldwork and creative non-fiction. The Unwomanly Face of War explains perhaps better than most how ordinary Russians feel about war and why they mostly go along with the war in Ukraine also. As a complete contrast to this, you might enjoy the witty, clear-eyed accounts by Teffi of Russian society both inside the country and then in exile abroad in the first half of the 20th century.

I always recommend contemporary Japanese women writers, who are always so much more interesting, imaginative and experimental than the better-known male ones. Here are some short story recommendations. One of my favourite discoveries of recent years, however, is Mieko Kawakami. Breasts and Eggs was the book that got her most attention, but I was more moved by Heaven and Ms Ice Sandwich.

Olga Tokarczuk is an amazing writer and I’m pacing myself so that I don’t run out of her books that have been translated into English. For those new to her work I’d particularly recommend Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead .

When I read Lucy Fricke’s Daughters, it had not yet been translated into English, but thanks to V&Q publishers, it has now. A sort of middle-aged Thelma and Louise road trip with a lot of humour and tenderness.

I tend to read most German language books in November for German Lit Month, but one author I discovered during #WITMonth and who has become an absolute favourite of mine, to the point where I am dying to translate even the smallest scrap of writing by her, is Marlen Haushofer. I started with The Wall and then got everything by her I could lay my hands on. Not everything has been translated and most of the books are out of print, but I’d recommend The Loft too.

Finally, let me share some Women in Crime Fiction Translation recommendations with you, as featured in our most recent Corylus Books newsletter:

  • From Barcelona, Spain: Teresa Solana’s collection of dark and humorous short stories The First Prehistoric Serial Killer. If you like Teresa Solana, watch out for the start of a new series by her which we will be publishing in autumn 2024.
  • From the Basque country, Spain: Dolores Redondo’s atmospheric Baztan trilogy, starting with The Invisible Guardian. If you are fascinated by borders in that region, you might like Antonia Lassa’s Skin Deep.
  • From France, the always enigmatic and atmospheric prose of Fred Vargas, including personal favourite Seeking Whom He May Devour (because it’s set in the mountains)
  • From Argentina, crime fiction by Claudia Pineiro that was shortlisted for the International Booker Elena Knows. Watch out for another author from Argentina, Elsa Drucaroff, whose novel about a political assassination we will be publishing in early 2024.
  • From the frozen Arctic Circle, the last in the Rebecka Martinsson series by Asa Larsson, The Sins of Our Fathers
  • If you like psychological twisters from Japan, you’ll love Natsuo Kirino’s Out or Kanae Minato’s Penance
  • If you like unconventional, strong women investigators, you will be riveted by Simone Buchholz’s Chastity Riley; start with the first in the series Blue Nights. Delighted to say that one reviewer has already compared Tony Mott’s Gigi Alexa to Chastity in terms of their intelligence, desire for independence and sometimes bad choice in men!
  • Lastly, if you like historical crime fiction, you might enjoy the portrayal of dangerous, complicated life in 1930s Leningrad by Yulia Yakovleva, Punishment of a Hunter. Just as complicated as life in Berlin in 1961 when the Wall came up, so watch out for news about our latest acquisition – a German crime novel set during that period (details to come in the September newsletter – you can sign up to the newsletter here)

Well, I hope I’ve contributed at least a little bit to filling in the bingo-sheet below. Happy to suggest any more if you have specific questions!

Reading Summary for July 2023

Reading

It has not been the best reading month, and not just because I was quite busy (and happy-exhausted, but nevertheless exhausted, during one week of Bristol Translates Summer School at the beginning of the month). For some reason, I struggled and none of the books really enthralled me to the extent that I could not put them down and wanted to spend all my time with them. None of them were bad, a few of them were quite good, and most of them were enjoyable, but perhaps I was just a reading slump.

My 20 Books of Summer reading continued apace (8 of the 11 books I read fell into this category), although I once again swapped out a couple of books.

  • I brought in latecomer Delphi because it fitted well with the other ‘pandemic’ novel I read, Severance. I reviewed the two of them together.
  • Travellers was on the original list and I’m glad I finally got to read it – in a way, it provides an interesting contrast to Gospodinov’s Time Shelter (which was also a swap), but both of them have very valid viewpoints on contemporary Europe
  • I was less enthusiastic about the love triangle/friendship gone sour books I read and reviewed together, If We Were Villains and One Scheme of Happiness (both titles are quotations), but that is probably because the themes don’t excite me that much.
  • Fantasy is not really my thing, but City of Stairs was more about politics and crime, while The Murdstone Trilogy makes fun of that literary genre and also the whole publishing world around it.
  • The three remaining books which are not part of the #20Books challenge are all crime novels: Sarah Pearse’s The Retreat is for the Virtual Crime Book Club (I wasn’t a fan of The Sanatorium, although it is set in one of my favourite places, so I was a bit reluctant to read this), while Mari Hannah and Susi Holliday are authors I know, who can reliably provide me with a good yarn, entertainment and escapism.
  • There’s also a book that I was really looking forward to, but then didn’t finish. I’ve loved previous books in Martin Walker’s Bruno Chief of Police series, but I think it’s become too much of a tourist guide of Dordogne’s quaint villages, customs and gastronomy. Understandable perhaps that it should feed our Continental nostalgia after Brexit (and the author has a cookery book coming out soon), but it was too rich for my taste.

Events

There have been some lovely literary events this month, but it’s all too easy to forget about them when you are feeling a bit overwhelmed and gloomy. It has felt like a very long month though, and those events seem to have taken place a long time ago.

I was both fascinated and very viscerally moved by the Hilma af Klint and Mondrian exhibition at the Tate Modern and would love to go again if I have time before it closes on the 3rd of September.

I also saw Gaslight at RADA in their smallest theatre, which made me feel like I was in someone’s drawing room and witnessing that sinister domestic control as a family friend. Needless to say, the student actors were excellent, many of them in very different roles to the ones they played in Company. I wish them every success in the future!

I attended two week-long online events. The Bristol Translates Summer School was a fantastic experience, so much fun working in a group who are all translating from the same language – we attempted Schubert lieder, a Grimm fairytale, a satirical sketch by Loriot, as well as a longer text written by a German writer of Persian origin. The following week, I also attended the Being a Writer Festival organised by The Literary Consultancy, which was approximately one event per day, usually in the evening or at lunchtime, so it was compatible with doing my day job as well.

I then met my course tutor from Bristol Translates, the lovely Ruth Martin, and we went to see the delayed launch of Love in the Big City at Libreria, with both the author Sang Young Park and the translator Anton Hur being present. I already knew Anton and appreciated the points he made about how translation itself is not hard (it can be challenging, but it’s fun and exciting) – it’s all the pitching and selling and promoting around the translation which is hard work. Wouldn’t it be lovely if translators had agents as well? (However, like poets, we don’t earn enough to make it worthwhile for an agent to collaborate with us)

I also attended a Murder in the Library event in the library of the Institute of Classical Studies in Senate House, an event designed and run by the energetic and incredibly warm and generous author and event curator So Mayer. It was a great opportunity to reflect on my writing blocks and free myself of some of the self-talk holding me back. I also discovered that the poet A.E. Stallings (now Oxford Professor of Poetry) had been the ‘tea intern’ at the library in her younger days and wrote a poem about those days when she visited them recently.

I also finally went to the cinema to watch two films. Not Oppenheimer, despite being a big Cillian Murphy fan, because Christopher Nolan is a bit hit and miss for me, plus my Japanese professor was from Hiroshima and only managed to survive the bomb because he was sent to help out an aunt on the other side of the mountains on the 5th of August 1945. I really enjoyed Barbie, however, although it is anything but subtle – but apparently you cannot serve an angry feminist message unless you wrap it up in plenty of pink candy-floss (and have Mattel approve the exact amount of corporate bashing that is allowable and makes them look like good sports) – and was pleased that my sons also wanted to watch it and appreciated it (although my older son said that we feminists should demand more!). We also watched Asteroid City

[At this point, I realised after publishing this post that I forgot to finish the sentence above. So, just in case you thought I hated Asteroid City or something, I thought it was beautiful and oddly haunting, an exploration of feeling lost and grieving. Not quite up there with my favourite Wes Andersons – Moonrise Kingdom, Grand Hotel Budapest and Fantastic Mr Fox – but still quite good. Except I missed the teeny-tiny Jarvis Cocker cameo as part of the cowboy band.]

Plans for August

With so much left to do before the Japan trip in the latter part of the month, I don’t know how much reading I will be able to do for #WITMonth and as part of my #20BooksOfSummer. I’ve swapped things around quite merrily, but hope to get to read at least some of the following (most are on Kindle, a few in paperback):

  • The Torso by Elisabeth Langgässer, transl. Gabriele Popp – Germany (the translator was on my summer school course and is on a mission to rescue undeservedly-forgotten women writers from the early part of the 20th century)
  • Book of Beijing by Comma Press – China
  • Mild Vertigo by Kanai Mieko, transl. Polly Barton – Japan
  • The Stillborn (Notebooks of a Woman from the Student Movement Generation in Egypt) by Arwa Salih, transl. Samah Selim – Egypt
  • The Sins of Our Fathers by Åsa Larsson, transl. Frank Perry – last in the Rebecka Martinsson series – Sweden
  • The Cheffe by Marie NDiaye, transl. Jordan Stump – France
  • The Censor’s Notebook by Liliana Corobca, transl. Monica Cure – Moldova
  • A Little Luck by Claudia Pineiro, transl. Frances Riddle – Argentina
  • Where I Am by Dana Shem-Ur, transl. Yardenne Greenspan – Israel
  • Tears in Rain by Rosa Montero, transl. Lilit Zekulin Thwaites – Spain

I think that even a few of these will take me comfortably past the 20 Books mark! I also plan to have a complete break from social media and blogging while I am in Japan. Instead, I’ll treat myself to one of their beautiful notebooks and keep a travel diary.

Cute Japanese notebooks from Asetheticer, Harajuku.

August and #20BooksofSummer Summary

I did really well with my August reading – perhaps a combination of less busy period at work and the boys spending the second half of August in Greece. So I did no cooking and the bare minimum of cleaning or gardening, and instead just read a lot and watched films.

So this month I read no less than 14 books, of which the majority (eight) were for #WITMonth, and seven of them also fell into the original #20BooksofSummer plan. Eleven of the books were by women writers, four were crime or crime-adjacent genres and three were non-fiction (this last is probably a record for me, as I tend to read very little non-fiction).

In case you missed any of the #WITMonth review posts, here they are again:

In addition to the #WITMonth reading, I also read and reviewed Stamboul Train by Graham Greene and a memoir of Eton College.

However, it was very disappointing to realise that although I did get to read all of my 20 Books of Summer (with a couple of last-minute swaps), all of them on Kindle (which I still see as very much a second-rate kind of reading experience) in an effort to bring down my formidable TBR amount on Netgalley… my feedback ratio has only gone up two percentage points – from 53% to 55%. So I would say it was definitely not worth it! I also made it more difficult on myself by sticking to a different theme each month: the latest releases for June, the oldest on my Netgalley pile for July, and Women in Translation for August.

This strictly regimented approach over the past three months had me very nearly losing my pleasure of reading. There were two books I abandoned, which is still a rare occurrence for me. Throughout this predominantly Kindly experience (22 out of the total of 34 books read since the start of June), I had to alternate with some physical books, either from my own bookshelves, or more frequently random ones picked up from the library, to ease my restlessness and mounting rebellion.

Therefore, September will be a month of rest and relaxation, reading whatever I please, at whim. If the library books I fancied when seeing them on the shelves there fail to grip my imagination once I get home, I will return them unread, without a guilty conscience. My beautiful new edition of the Cazalet Chronicles is winking at me from the bookshelf in the hallway, so I might plunge into that. But am I ready for six books in a row? There are a couple of books I want to read (in the original languages) for Corylus purposes, but other than that, I’ll be free to roam…

Well, I say that, but I will be reading Andrey Kurkov’s Grey Bees for the London Reads the World Book Club (@LdnReadstheWorld on Twitter) and Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River for the Virtual Crime Book Club run by @RebeccaJBradley, plus I want to read a lighter book set in Durham, as if in preparation for my older son going there to university… etc etc. Or, as the French would call it, et patati et patata!

#WITMonth: Minae Mizumura and Mireille Gansel

Also #20BooksofSummer No. 18 and 19 (with a bit of cheating – I did not have the Gansel originally on my list, as it is not an e-book, but after attending the BCLT Summer School, I had to get it)

Now that I’ve written at length about all the soul searching these two books provoked in me, it’s time to actually engage with them as a reviewer. I am a bit sorry that they don’t get a review each, but I have left it too late to get all the reviews done for #WITMonth.

Minae Mizumura: An I-Novel, transl. Juliet Winters Carpenter (in collaboration with the author), Columbia University Press.

It helps that Juliet Winters Carpenter is one of my favourite translators from Japanese currently working; it also helps that I had already fallen in love with Mizumura via her longer, later work A True Novel. Add to that the very relatable subject matter, and this has the potential to become a classic on my shelves. The author is a linguist and academic, and shares much of the biographical detail with the protagonist (also called Minae Mizumura) in this novel. Of course, ‘I-novels’, where it is difficult to disentangle what is fiction and what is memoir, have a long tradition in Japan, and this was published in Japanese in 1995, long before the current crop of popular ‘autofiction’ titles in English.

The story takes place over the course of a day, mostly through telephone conversations between two Japanese sisters, Nanae and Minae, sparked by the realisation that it’s the twentieth anniversary since they first arrived in the United States with their parents as 14 and 10 year olds respectively. The older sister Nanae did her best to become Americanised and blend in, while Minae mythologised the country she left behind, reading only Japanese literature, never quite mastering the English language, longing to return for more than a holiday at some point.

The format of the book was revolutionary at the time: it was printed in the style of the Latin alphabet (horizontally and from left to right), as well as being liberally sprinkled with English words and expressions, to the point where it was even considered a ‘bilingual novel’. In the English translation, these English originals are highlighted in the text by using a different typeface.

As the sisters talk, they discover new things about each other, beyond the assumptions they had about how they felt between two cultures and their relationship with their parents. Aside from the personal search for cultural identity, however, the book is also full of sharp and very candid obervations of cultural differences and racism. The Japanese tend to think of themselves as culturally and materially superior to the other East Asian nations, so it is a huge shock to the girls to discover that they are simply mistaken for other Asians.

I was forced to realize something that had never before entered my mind: I was Asian. In this country, a Japanese girl of privilege was above all Asian. To remain a Japanese girl of privilege, I would have had to stay at home on the Japanese archipelago, insulated from the rest of the world. In the wider world, only white people could be truly privileged – people who, if they were thoughtful, might bear a sense of guilt over their unearned privilege or at least feel it to be a burden.

The gradual discovery that I was Asian wasn’t shocking in and of itself. The shock I felt came from being lumped together with people whom Westerners regarded as Others – as did I… To be lumped together with those whom in some hidden corner of my mind I had always blithely congratulated myself on being distinct from was worse than shocking. It was humiliating.

There are likewise some thought-provoking scenes about what the West expects from other cultures (i.e. stereotpes, most frequently). For example, in one of her English classes with a very supportive teacher, Minae writes an essay about her favourite autumn moments, in which she relies heavily not so much on her personal experience of Japan (which she can barely remember, and which was more urban than rural), but on what she has gleaned from reading Japanese literature:

That compostion Mr Keith praised so highly might well have been a mere string of Japanese platitudes. Could commonplace emotions and unoriginal expressions… transform into something more remarkable when rendered in a different language?

Is this what is appreciated in the Western world because this is what we expect and want to see of Japan, rather than messiness, a variety of styles, Western influences and so on?

At some point, Minae starts wondering about her own almost perverse stubbornness in wanting to write in Japanese, a much less significant language than English on a global scale. You cannot help but think the author herself is expressing her own surprise at her choice, but also reiterating her commitment to her mothertongue.

The book was written at the time of Japanese economic boom, when many young Japanese were studying or living abroad. As the sisters discuss Minae’s ‘need’ to return to a Japan which may be nothing like what she remembers or desires, it felt at times like the author was laying out the pros and cons of moving back to the country for all of those young people. She points out the irony that the Japanese word for ‘hometown’ (furusato) evokes old temples and picturesque rural landscapes, but that in fact the rice paddies have been paved over and converted into cheap housing in rapid urbanisation.

Before my eyes there emerged a vision of ugly cities all alike and small towns dismal in their sameness. A nation that as it rose to become a major economic power had become more and more stunted in spirit; a nation without a soul; a nation of little people… or was my negativity toward Japan only defensive, a hedge against the predictable anticlimax of my return?

Mireille Gansel: Translation as Transhumance, transl. Ros Schwartz, Les Fugitives.

Gansel grew up in France, in a family of Jewish refugees who spoke many languages and had experienced many shifts in borders over their lifetime: German, Yiddish, Hungarian, Czech, Hebrew and of course French. The German she instinctively gravitated towards was a global sort of German of the 19th and early 20th centuries, rather like the global English of today. The German of a world that is no more – word of warning perhaps to those who think that English will be the world language forever.

This is the German that has been punctuated by exiles and passed down through the generations, from country to country, like a violin whose vibratos have retained the accents and intonations, the words and the expressions, of adopted countries and wasy of speaking. This is the German that has no land or borders. An interior language. If I were to hold on to just one word, it would be innig – profound, intense, fervent.

In the 1960s and 70s, Gansel translated poets from East Germany and Vietnam, to help the world to understand what was going behind walls or behind reports of war. She spent two years learning Vietnamese and went to Vietnam to immerse herself in the culture, as well as working with a Vietnamese poet to fully absorb the subtexts. I was just so impressed by her humility as a translator, by her willingness to always learn more, her ability to admit to making mistakes in the effort to be as truthful and loyal to the original as possible.

At that moment, I understood translation both as risk-taking and continual re-examination, of even a single word – a delicate seismograph at the heart of time.

Translation came to mean learning to listen to the silences between the lines, to the underground springs of a people’s hinterland.

The third experience she writes about in this far too brief work is her attempt to retrace the steps of Eugenie Goldstern, an Austrian-Jewish anthropologist who conducted research into Alpine cultures, centred mainly on Switzerland, but in fact transcending borders and cross-pollinating, being open to all sorts of different interpretations and complementary knowledge. This is where she has her most profound insight into what it means to be a translator:

… it suddenly dawned on me that the stranger was not the other, it was me. I was the one who had everything to learn, everything to understand, from the other. That was perhaps my most essential lesson in translation.

I wonder if both Mizumura and Gansel demonstrate (through their biographies and their works) that the best kind of translator or cultural bridge-builder is someone who never quite fits into any of the cultural skins that they might put on. There is always a slight gap, a slight feeling of otherness and strangeness. Is it possible that, when you cease to be uncomfortable, when the skin fits too snugly, you become somewhat insensitive to nuance, blinded, and unable to convey that inner core where both similarity and difference reside?