Guardian's First Book Award 2009 - shortlist

• The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey (UK): also shortlisted for the Orange Prize and longlisted for the Booker Prize, it’s the story of an architect whose memories are being lost because of Alzheimer.
• The Selected Works of TS Spivet by Reif Larsen (USA): About a genius 12-year-old cartographer from Montana. Much of its story is told in the maps and diagrams supposedly drawn in the margins by Spivet.
• The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton (New Zealand): two linked narrative threads, one set in a girls' school in the aftermath of a pupil-teacher affair and the other in a drama school where details of the affair are used for the end-of-year production.
• An Elegy for Easterly by Petina Gappah (Zimbabwe): 13 short stories that show different aspects of Zimbabwean life from the shanty towns to the mansions but which also have universal resonances such as betrayal.
• A Swamp Full of Dollars by Michael Peel: the chaotic story of Nigeria and its oil written by a corrispondent of the Financial Times.

Last year’s winner was a non-fiction book, Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise (read this post). Mark Brown, The Guardian’s art correspondent, claims that in this year’s shortlist, fiction is resurgent.

Note:

The Guardian First Book Award is open to all first-time authors writing in English, or translated into English, across all genres.
The fact that, for the sake of diversity, there should be some non-fiction books, at least a collection of short stories or a poetry book is always underlined by the commentators of the shortlist. The fact that every now and then there should be a translated book in the shortlist is never mentioned. I wonder if some translated books enter the competition at all and if the jury (usually very British) even takes them in some consideration.

For the longlist of this year’s Guardian First Book Award, click here.

For posts covering last year’s award, click here and here.

By the way, this month the Guardian book culb has Kiran Desai's Inheritance of Loss as its choice! Click here to read how much Sam Jordison struggled with this novel and here to read John Mullan talking about divisions in the novel.

32. “Journal d’Hirondelle” by Amélie Nothomb

Year of first publication: 2006
Genre: novel
Country: the novel is set in France, but the author is from Belgium

In italiano: Diario di Rondine di Amélie Nothom, pubblicato da Voland nella collana Amazzoni (2006), €12,50

As far as I know, this book hasn’t been translated into English. I can’t help saying once again that they should translate more literature into English, at least from European languages.

Plot: A man decides to take up a job as a hit man after a love story gone wrong which left him unable to feel any emotion. He’s the best of killers: cold-blooded and meticulous. One day he’s hired to kill a Minister and his family, but when he enters the house the man’s daughter is about to kill her father because he has read her diary. Moved by the encounter with the girl, who he was obliged to kill nontheless, he decides not to hand in the diary she was keeping.

Some thoughts: This is a very short novel, only 92 pages. The style is crude, almost grotesque, and the characters are not fully introduced. In fact they hardly have names or a biography. The explanation is probably that the main character is everyman, potentially the reader himself after a failed love story. Amélie Nothomb is usually praised for the psychological depth of her novels: Journal d’Hirondelle (“diary of a swallow”) describes how a person would react if he/she is deprived of all emotions. It is a weird novel, I don’t know if all Nothomb’s novels are like this, but the situation and the plot twist are very unusual. She comes to me as an experimental writer more than a good story teller (most contemporary Anglophone or Italian writers are good story tellers but don’t experiment much with literature in the way that Nothomb does with this book). She reminds me of Frédéric Beigbeder* because of her crude minimalist style, her anecdotes and wittiness, but also because of her permanent resolution to stupefy and challenge the reader.

About the author: Amélie Nothomb was born in 1967 in Japan into an aristocratic family of Belgian diplomats and politicians. She has also lived in China, New York, Bangladesh, Burma and Laos. The itinerant life of her parents didn’t have a positive influence on her upbringing and she lived the distance from Japan almost as an exile. She didn’t live in Europe until she was 17, when she moved to Brussels. After some family tensions, she returned to Japan to work in a Japanese company. She remained there one year and after this disastrous experience she moved again to Belgium. Her first novel, Hygiène de l'assassin (The Hygiene of the Assassin in English) was published in 1992. Since then, she has published roughly one novel per year. Her most famous works are probably the autobiographical novels Métaphysique des Tubes (2000, strangely translated as The Character of Rain), which details her Japanese childhood, and Stupeur et Tremblements (1999, translated as Fear and Trembling in English), which recounts her experience as a translator in a Japanese company.

* I just read by coincidence that yesterday Frédéric Beigbeder was awarded the Renaudot prize, one of the most important literary prizes in France, for his novel Un Roman Français (2009). Frédéric Beigbeder is a controversial writer in France, a sort of “enfant terrible, especially because of the depiction of drug abuse in his books (he admits that his characters are often autobiographical). In 2008, he was arrested for sniffing cocaine on the hood of a car one. In his new novel he takes his revenge on his prosecutor. However, the four offending pages disappeared from the book between the time some copies were sent to the press and the publication of the novel. Some say this was a marketing ploy, since Beigbeder used to work in advertising.

Aspettando la recensione del libro di Katherine Mansfield...

Qualche settimana fa, per la precisione il 17 ottobre, è uscita una puntata di "Che libro fa..." particolarmente gustosa, perché riguardava un paese di cui mi sono occupata qualche anno fa per la mia tesi, cioè la Nuova Zelanda. Qui le parti più interessanti della meravigliosa rubrica di Giovanna Zucconi:

"[...] È l’occasione per fare un giretto nei giornali di quell’altra Italia remota e capovolta. Sollievo: si parla d’altro, non c’è traccia delle nostre ossessioni collettive e neppure della vigente (qui) battaglia contro il «culturame». Si parla di libri, scrittori, e anche di cinema e delle arti, con toni normali, né spocchiosi né manganellanti, e con rispetto condiviso. È considerato naturale, laggiù, che esistano libri popolari e altri che popolari non sono: e che quelli che amano Dan Brown e quelli che amano Proust possono convivere pacificamente (talvolta nella stessa persona).

Agli antipodi, agli antipodi! La polemica più accesa, beati loro, sembra essere su questo tema: perché i Kiwi (nomignolo nazionale) leggono così poco la propria letteratura? Se esista o no una letteratura neozelandese non è il legittimo dubbio di chi come noi saprebbe citare sì e no Katherine Mansfield e Jane Campion: è la questione centrale, in un piccolo Paese ai margini dell’imperium angloamericano. Guardando alle classifiche: Diana Gabaldon è americana, Dan Brown pure, e fra Marian Keyes, Stieg Larsson, Ian Rankin, Clive Cussler eccetera, non ce n’è uno nato fra Wellington e Auckland.

Guardando invece ai dati (anche qui, invidia antipodea): il 44% degli adulti dichiara di avere acquistato almeno un libro nelle ultime 4 settimane, e il 39% è andato in biblioteca. Soltanto il 5% della fiction venduta è pubblicata in Nuova Zelanda, contro il 30% della saggistica e il 12% dei libri per bambini. Ancora più interessante il confronto con gli altri consumi culturali: il 34% dei contenuti televisivi nelle sei reti principali è nazionale, e anche il 19% della musica radiotrasmessa. Che cosa significa? Scrittori, editori, giornalisti, autori di alcune delle trasmissioni di libri (ce ne sono parecchie, nell’Italia alla rovescia), ne discutono in profondità. Il dibattito ci appassiona. Se non altro perché per qualche minuto ci distrae dal nostro, di dibattito."

La Stampa, 17 ottobre 2009

31. “Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter” by Mario Vargas Llosa

Year of first publication: 1977
Genre: novel, satirical novel, comic novel
Country: Peru

In italiano: La Zia Julia e lo Scribacchino di Mario Vargas Llosa, edito da Einaudi ET (1994), €11,50
En español: La Tía Julia y el Escribidor de Mario Vargas Llosa

Plot: Lima, 1950s. Pedro Camacho is a Bolivian-born, eccentric writer of radio soap-operas that have a tremendous success all over the country. The story of Pedro Camacho, told through his scripts, is intertwined with that of Mario, a student and a wannabe writer who works as a news bulletin editor for Radio Panamericana and falls in love with the divorced wife of a cousin, his Aunt Julia, thirteen years his senior.

Some thoughts: This is the third novel by Vargas Llosa that I read after The Way to Paradise (El Paraíso en la Otra Esquina in Spanish) and The Feast of the Goat (La Fiesta del Chivo in Spanish, read this post) and I was not disappointed. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is actually one of Vargas Llosa’s most popular novels and it is partly autobiographical, seen that Vargas Llosa also married one of his in-laws who was thirteen years his senior. This book was written some twenty years after Vargas Llosa’s first marriage, when the couple was already divorced. In fact, Julia Urquidi Illanes, the real Aunt Julia, published a novel called Lo que Varguitas no Dijo (What Varguitas didn’t say), telling her version of the love story. Half autobiographical account and half work of fiction, La Tía Julia is a very engaging and enjoyable novel. The author used raw material from his life in Lima in the 1950s as well as much imagination in order to give shape to the funniest character of the novel, Pedro Camacho. Almost a dwarf, obsessively dedicated to his job and with a profound and exaggerated hatred for Argentinians, Pedro Camacho writes radio serials full of clichés, but the ability of Vargas Llosa makes them as captivating as the rest of the novel. There’s a clash between the epic, tragic and surreal stories written by Pedro Camacho and what Mario attempts to do with his realistic fiction. Vargas Llosa certainly intends to make fun of the clichés of soap-operas and cheap literature, for example through Pedro Camacho’s confused and entangled plots, but he also pays homage to the act of writing, detailing the way in which the two writers, Pedro and Mario, write their stories (the former writes 10-12 hours per day without stopping, whereas the latter is never satisfied of his work and throws away every single story that he writes). They are both writers, though very different, and success comes to them at different times. Whether “the truly good writer”, if such a thing exists, is more like Pedro or Mario is left to the reader to judge.
Vargas Llosa’s usual device, that is to say telling two different stories in alternating chapters, works perfectly for this novel. Every second chapter is a story written by Camacho, thus it is completely independent from the narrative of the other chapters. What is amazing is that Vargas Llosa is able to give life to a character, Pedro Camacho, almost entirely through the stories that he writes.
Comical and satirical, but never gross nor boring, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter really was a joy to read. By the way, not many people know that the novel was made into a Hollywood feature film called Tune In Tomorrow (1990) starring Peter Falk as Pedro Camacho and Keanu Reeves as Mario.

About the author: see this post

If you want to know more about this book, listen to the podcast from BBC's World Book Club.

By the way, The Guardian celebrates another great Latin American writer and one that I love, Julio Cortázar, in this article from a series on short story writers.

(turbo) traduzioni

Ancora una volta ho trovato spunti incredibilmente interessanti nella rubrica “Che libro fa…”, curata da Giovanna Zucconi per La Stampa. Ormai sono tre le puntate che vi vorrei “passare”. Prima di tutto andiamo in Germania:

In Germania il nuovo Dan Brown non è ancora uscito, eppure è già in cima alla classifica. Perché in tantissimi lo comprano in inglese, senza aspettare che Das verlorene Symbol compaia in tedesco, a metà ottobre. Poveri traduttori. Sono sei, hanno avuto dieci giorni per tradurre 780 pagine, lavorando dalle sei del mattino, senza neanche aver potuto leggere tutto il libro prima di chinarsi a picchiettare freneticamente sulle tastiere, e la loro fatica è inutile, se tutti lo leggono in inglese. In un video su Internet si vedono due di loro, abbastanza affranti, ciascuno al suo computer, intorno a un lungo tavolo che sembra tanto una catena di montaggio, mentre spiegano i segreti della «turbotraduzione», la chiamano così. Spiritosamente, nel sito di lancio del libro, con tanto di conto alla rovescia neanche fossimo a Cape Canaveral, uno dei traduttori per spiegare quant’è difficile il suo lavoro prende ad esempio la frase «The secret is how to die». Come renderla in tedesco, ma soprattutto come evitare di applicarla ai forzati della traduzione?Chissà se la qualità sarà decente, vista la fretta. E dire che la Germania investe tantissimo sulle traduzioni. Per esempio, il più importante premio di translation in lingua inglese, cioè il «Foreign Fiction Prize» del giornale The Independent, assegna 10.000 sterline ai vincitori, mentre il neonato omologo tedesco, «Internationaler Literaturpreis», ha stanziato 25.000 euro per lo scrittore vincente e 10.000 per il suo traduttore. Fra 131 titoli tradotti in tedesco da 33 lingue diverse, ha vinto il peruviano-americano Daniel Alarcón con Lost City Radio nella versione di Friederike Meltendorf. Consegna il 30 settembre, San Girolamo, patrono dei traduttori. Inclusi quelli dei turbobestseller?[…]

Sabato 3 ottobre 2009 “La Stampa”

Memole scrive:
1) I tedeschi leggono romanzi in inglese, mitici! Dovremmo imparare da loro!
2) Come si può tradurre bene un romanzo in così poco tempo e soprattutto come può essere che un équipe di traduttori lavori allo stesso romanzo? Immagino che ogni traduttore abbia il suo stile e il suo metodo, il risultato potrebbe assomigliare paurosamente a Frankenstein (avete presente l’omonimo gioco a “Per un Pugno di Libri”?).

3) Ma in Italia esiste un premio per la miglior traduzione così prestigioso? Ne dubito.

30. "Snow" by Orhan Pamuk

Year of first publication: 2002
Genre: novel, political novel
Country: Turkey

Nobel Prize for Literature 2006

In italiano: Neve di Orhan Pamuk, edito da Einaudi (2004), €12,80

Plot: Ka, a renowned Turkish poet who has been living in Germany for some 12 years, decides to go back to his home country. A friend suggests that he should go to Kars, a town on the border with Georgia and Armenia, and pose as a journalist there. In Kars a number of women have committed suicide because they didn’t want to take off their head scarves in the university buildings. The fact has caused a lot of debate in the country, as suicide is notoriously forbidden in Islam. In the small snowy town of Kars, Ka reunites with Ipek, a woman whom he once had feelings for, and finds himself in the middle of the tensions between political Islamists and secular nationalists. Ka becomes increasingly involved in many-sided intrigues in an incredible and absurd whirlwind of events.

Some thoughts: In the light of Turkey’s desire to join the European Union, this is a good novel to read if you wish to have an idea of some of the problems of Turkey, which is a secular country with a large Muslim majority. As a result of its position between Europe and Asia and of its troubled history, in Turkey there are both firm believers and atheists, religious extremists and secularists. Pamuk shows that even inside the same family there can be very different opinions on religion: for example Ipek and Kadife, two sisters, have opposite views of religion (one wears hijab as a flag of her religious beliefs, whereas the other doesn’t wear it and has extramarital sex). Religion and politics are the big topics of this novel, with their complexities and contradictions. The main character, though, doesn’t even know if he believes in God or not: when asked if he is an atheist he cannot answer. He doesn’t care for politics or religion and this makes him profoundly different from every one else in town. All he wants is Ipek: he childishly dreams of taking her with him to Germany where they would be happy forever after.

You can easily spot two obvious literary influences in the book: the first one is Franz Kafka (the absurdity of the farcical situations experienced by Ka, whose name is a reference to K, the main character of The Castle) and the second one is Dostoevsky (the introspection, the snow, the wanderings around town, the political commitment of the characters are all reminiscent of his works). There is also some postmodernism in the fact that the novel is largely seen from the point of view of Ka but it is written by one of his closest friends, Orhan, who may or may not be the same Orhan who is writing the actual book. Ka, like the author, comes from a bourgeois, wealthy family of Istanbul and he is a political exile in Germany, thus he’s very different from the inhabitants of Kars, who, according to Orhan, are poor, isolated and provincial. Orhan, who’s reporting Ka’s story, at a certain point apologizes if he has portrayed them in a simplistic way, assuring his readers that he has done his best to avoid this. I’m unsure if this is a small flaw in the book, or if it’s rather a very nice way of being honest about writing of a place you don’t belong to.

Snow is not an easy read, with all its politics and intrigues, but it is certainly worth a try. It is a novel in which poetry plays an important role: not only is Pamuk's style poetic, but he uses Ka's poems as an important device to keep the novel going.

About the author: Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul in 1952 into a bourgeois family. He studied architecture in Istanbul, but left the career and then graduated in journalism. Popular success came in 1990, when his novel Kara Kitap (The Black Book) became one of the most controversial and popular readings in Turkish literature, due to its complexity and 1995 publication and became the fastest-selling book in Turkish history. By this time, Pamuk had also become a high-profile figure in Turkey, due to his support for Kurdish political richness. Pamuk's international reputation continued to increase when he published Benim Adım Kırmızı (My Name is Red) in 2000. My Name is Red is set in 1591, during the reign of Ottoman Sultan Murat III. As many of Pamuk’s novels, it explores the relationships and the tensions between East and West. Pamuk's next novel was Kar in 2002 (Snow), which takes place in the border city of Kars and explores the conflict between Islamism and Westernism in modern Turkey. In 2005 he made a statement regarding the mass killings of Armenians and Kurds in the Ottoman Empire and a criminal case was opened against him for insulting Tukey and Turkishness. The charges were finally dropped in 2006. In that same year he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature with this motivation: "In the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city, [Pamuk] has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures”. His newest novel is Masumiyet Müzesi (The Museum of Innocence).

On Snow you can also read

“Anatolian Arabesques”, John Updike’s review in The New Yorker. And here’s a link to a short story by Orhan Pamuk if want to “taste” him (also from The New Yorker).

Guarda le interviste a Orhan Pamuk a Che Tempo Che Fa del 16 maggio e del 10 ottobre 2009 (due volte da Fazio!).

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The Danger of a Single Story

I am currently reading The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Needless to say, I'm enjoying it very much. Everything that this young Ningerian novelist writes is a blessing.

As a quick snack, I would like to share this video with you. Adichie speaks about the danger of falling into stereotypes if you have only one story as reference.

By the way, Half of a Yellow Sun by Adichie has been chosen for this month's Guardian book club and there is a beautiful article by John Mullan, the man behind this book club, about the crossing of Igbo and English in the novel. Make sure you click on the links provided!