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February/March 2009 - Translated novels

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The only son by Stéphane Audeguy ; translated from the French by John Cullen. (2008)
"Jean-Jacques Rousseau mentions his older brother Francois only two times in his classic “Confessions”. In "The Only Son", Stephane Audeguy resurrects Rousseau's forgotten brother in a picaresque tale that brings to life the secret world of eighteenth-century Paris. Instructed at an early age in the philosophy of libertinage by a decadent aristocrat and later apprenticed to a clock maker, Francois is ultimately disowned by his family and flees to Paris' underworld. There he finds work in a brothel that caters to politicians and clergy and begins his personal study of the varieties of sexual desire and its most arcane proclivities" (Amazon)

The creator's map by Emillo Calderón ; [translation, Katherine Silver]. (2008)
"Rome, October 1952. The architect Jos Maria Hurtado and his wife Montserrat open their newspaper to find that their friend Prince Junio Vivarini, Fascist and Nazi-sympathizer, has been found dead, decapitated in the Swiss Alps. In the event of his death, they had been told they would receive a mysterious package containing secrets he could not reveal while living. Who was the Prince? And why were Hurtado and his wife chosen as the repository of these documents? The answers lie in Rome, in the past, during the tumultuous period of the 1930s and 1940s from the beginning of the Spanish Civil War to the end of the Second World War. For there an exiled Spanish architect, a passionate and beautiful young aristocratic librarian and an elegant and influential Fascist prince became enmeshed in a web of political intrigue, love and deceit involving a fateful map with the power to destroy them all." (Amazon)

New lives : the youth of Enrico Türmer in letters and prose edited and with commentary and foreword by Ingo Schulze ; translated from the German by John E. Woods. (2008)
"East Germany, January 1990. Enrico Turmer; man of the theater, secret novelist, turns his back on art and signs on to work at a newly started newspaper. Freed from the compulsion to describe the world, he plunges into everyday life. This upheaval in our hero's life, mirrored in the vaster upheaval gripping Germany itself after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the birth pangs of a reunified nation, is captured in the letters Enrico writes to the three people he loves most: his sister, Vera; his childhood friend Johann; and Nicoletta, the unattainable woman of his dreams. As he discovers capitalism and reports on his adventures as a businessman, he peels away the layers of his previous existence, in the process creating the thing he has dreamed of for so long, the novel of his own life, in whose facets contemporary history is captured." (Book Cover)

Clash of civilizations over an elevator in Piazza Vittorio by Amara Lakhous ; translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein. (2008)
"A small, culturally mixed community living in an apartment building in the centre of Rome is thrown into disarray when one of the neighbours is murdered. As each of the victim's neighbours is questioned, the reader is offered an all-access pass into the most colourful neighbourhood in contemporary Rome. Each character recounts his or her story revealing the dramas of emigration, immigration, and the fears and misunderstandings of a life spent on society's margins, abused by mainstream culture's fears, preconceptions and insensitivities." (Amazon)

Blackout by Gianluca Morozzi ; translated by Howard Curtis. (2008)
"Set in Bologna in August, in unbearable heat, and an empty city. Claudia is a young student in a hurry to return home from her work as a waitress and get out of the skimpy uniform she hates. Tomas is a young man on his way to elope to Amsterdam with his girlfriend Francesca. Aldo is a husband and father with an uncanny resemblance to Elvis Presley, anxious to get to an apartment filled with guilty secrets. All three have an urgent need to be somewhere else. Instead they are trapped in a lift in a deserted building on a holiday weekend and one of the trio is a serial killer." (Amazon)

A certain woman by Hala El Badry ; translated by Farouk Abdel Wahab. (2008)
"Nahid is a woman searching for liberation, not from a repressive society or a male-dominated world, but from self-imposed taboos that inhibit a woman's ability to find fulfilment. In a narrative much excoriated by conservative critics, Nahid's adulterous affair becomes an occasion to explore the subtleties and contradictions that surround sexuality, desire and love. "A Certain Woman" was awarded the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature." (Amazon)

The pets by Bragi Ólafsson ; translated from the Icelandic by Janice Balfour. (2008)
"Emil returns home from a trip abroad to find that Harvard, a certifiable lunatic he shared a house in London with for a while a few years ago is looking for him. When Harvard turns up, Emil hides under the bed rather than let him in. What he doesn't bargain for is Harvard climbing in through the open window to wait for him, and then various other friends and acquaintances turn up and Harvard invites them all in and entertains them with Emil's record collection and liquor cupboard. Emil elects to stay under the bed, hoping they'll all go." (Amazon)

Gold dust by Ibrahim al-Koni. (2008)
"Rejected by his tribe and hunted by the kin of the man he killed, Ukhayyad and his thoroughbred camel flee across the desolate Tuareg deserts of the Sahara. Between bloody wars against the Italians in the north and famine raging in the south, Ukhayyad rides for the remote rock caves of Jebel Hasawna. There, he says farewell to the mount who has been his companion through thirst, disease, lust and loneliness. Alone in the desert, haunted by the prophetic cave paintings of ancient hunting scenes and the cries of jinn in the night, Ukhayyad awaits the arrival of his pursuers and their insatiable hunger for blood and gold." (Amazon)

Okei : a girl from the provinces by Mitsugu Saotome ; translated by Kenneth J. Bryson. (2008)
"Set in the midst of samurai warfare in the mountainous region of Aizu in the late nineteenth century, the novel recounts the coming of age of the young peasant girl Okei, who falls desperately in love with the fierce warrior Sanasuma Kingo, only to discover that the world she inhabits has no place for such passion. Okei must learn to understand both the nature of her hidden feelings and the arcane codes and honour system of the samurai." (Book cover)

The ancient ship by Wei Zhang ; translated by Howard Goldblatt. (2008)
"Wei's award-winning first novel is the story of three generations of the Sui, Zhao, and Li families living in the fictional northern town of Wali during the troubled years of China's post-liberation. In Wali, most people have made their livelihood by simply cooking and selling noodles. Once the home to large sailing ships that travelled along the Luqing River, Wali is now left with an unearthed hull of an ancient wooden ship. The ship stands as a metaphor for China, mirrored in the lives of the townspeople, who in the course of the narrative face such defining moments in history as the Land Reform Movement, the famine of 1959-1961, the Great Leap Forward, the Anti-Rightist Campaign, and the Cultural Revolution. This is a bold examination of a society in turmoil, a study in human nature, the struggle of oppressed people to control their own fate, and the clash between tradition and modernization." (Amazon)