Tag: Independent Foreign Fiction Prize

Shiny New Books: Janice Galloway and the IFFP

19th July 2015 / / 0 Comments

A new issue of Shiny New Books went up earlier this month, so this is a quick post to tell you about two pieces of mine…

JellyfishThe first is a review of Jellyfish, the new short story collection by Janice Galloway:

[Jellyfish] takes as its starting point an observation by David Lodge: “Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children; life’s the other way round.” The twelve stories in Jellyfish don’t disprove Lodge exactly, but they do approach the topics of sex and parenthood – or, to take a more general view, heightened moments of feeling and the longer-term experience of living – from a variety of angles, bringing more nuance to the straightforward opposition of Lodge’s statement…

The full review is here.

You can also read my report on the IFFP ceremony, which includes photographs by my fellow shadow judge Julianne Pachico. On that subject, there’s also an article by Tony Malone on the IFFP shadow jury. As it turns out, this year’s IFFP was also the last, as it is now being merged into the reformatted Man Booker International Prize. I’m sure we’ll still be shadowing, though.

IFFP 2015: and the winner is…

28th May 2015 / / 3 Comments

The winner of the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize was announced at a ceremony in London last night. I was there, along with Julianne from the shadow panel, and you can expect a write-up from us in the next issue of Shiny New Books. For now, though the result…

The judges gave a special commendation to In the Beginning Was the Sea by Tomás González (translated by Frank Wynne), but the actual prize went to a rather familiar book:

EndofDays

The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated from the German by Susan Beronofsky

Yes, for the first time, the same book has won both the shadow and the official IFFP. And it’s a well deserved winner!

That’s my IFFP blogging done for this year. A final thanks to my fellow shadow jurors, and I look forward to doing it all again next year.

Read my other posts on the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize here.

IFFP 2015: the shadow winner

27th May 2015 / / 4 Comments

The shadow journey is over. Eleven bloggers (the biggest IFFP shadow panel yet) based on four continents read sixteen books. Between us, we posted more than a hundred reviews. We scored the books to produce our own shortlist. Now, after a week of email discussions and two rounds of voting, we have our shadow winner. It is…

EndofDays

The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated from the German by Susan Beronofsky

It’s an excellent book, my personal favourite from this year’s IFFP, and I recommend it to you wholeheartedly.

We want to give a special mention here to our runner-up, Mathias Enard’s Zone (translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell). We called Zone in at the outset because several of us who’d read it felt strongly that it deserved to be in the mix – and it rose to second place in our overall considerations. If you want to see how good contemporary fiction in translation can be, these two novels will show you.

But we’re not finished with the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize quite yet. The official winner will be announced tonight, and The End of Days is in contention. Will it win ‘the double’? I hope so.

Read my other posts on the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize here.

IFFP 2015: The official shortlist

10th April 2015 / / 0 Comments

After the shadow selection, we now have the official IFFP shortlist:

I think this is an interesting list, I can’t quite choose between this selection and ours, because my favourite titles cross both lists. But my favourite title on the longlist – The End of Days – is common to both. I’ll be very pleased if it takes the prize; I think it stands a good chance, too.

I’d also, though, have my eye on By Night the Mountain Burns as a wildcard contender. In any event, it’s wonderful to see the publisher And Other Stories make the IFFP shortlist (long overdue, if you ask me). But congratulations to all, and I look forward to the announcement of the winner on 27 May. Of course, we’ll be revealing our shadow winner shortly before then.

Read my other posts on the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize here.

IFFP 2015: The shadow jury's shortlist

8th April 2015 / / 4 Comments

The scores are in, the numbers have been crunched, and we can now reveal our shadow shortlist for this year’s IFFP:

We decided to ‘call in’ Zone as a sixteenth title, because a number of us felt strongly that it should have been longlisted for real – and now here it is on our shortlist. Last year’s shadow winner (The Sorrow of Angels) didn’t appear on the actual shortlist; this year, we could have a shadow winner that’s not even on the longlist, which would be an interesting situation…

But we’ll find all that out in due course. First up is the official shortlist, which will be announced tomorrow. I think we in the shadow jury have come up with a strong selection here; I wonder how the ‘real’ jury’s will compare.

Read my other posts on the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize here.

IFFP 2015: Bannerhed and Lee

3rd April 2015 / / 7 Comments

RavensTomas Bannerhed, The Ravens (2011)
Translated from the Swedish by Sarah Death (2014)

The Ravens is narrated by Klas, who lives on his family farm in the 1970s. He watches his father Agne toiling away, and dreams of a different life for himself. Klas loves nature, but has no wish to inherit the farm; he can see what the work has done – is doing – to his father, and doesn’t want to fall into that trap of obsession and despair; though at times it seems that something similar might be happening to him. The arrival of a city girl, Veronika, offers Klas a glimpse of what life could be; though the reality of Veronika’s life may not be as golden as Klas’ perception of it.

In terms of the IFFP longlist, Boyhood Island is the most obvious comparison to The Ravens; Bannerhed’s prose comes across as more ‘crafted’ than Knausgaard’s, but I like some of the effects Bannerhed creates. Agne’s perspective remains distant from us, even as he becomes more and more troubled; which makes those moments when we do see how much he has been affected by his illness all the more forceful. Klas’ descriptions of the natural world stand out among his narration as the moments when he is most at peace. I think there’s a good chance that The Ravens will make an appearance on the IFFP shortlist, and I wouldn’t mind if it did.

Investigation

Jung-myung Lee, The Investigation (2014)
Translated from the Korean by Chi-Young Kim

In 1944, a guard, Sugiyama Dozan, is found hanged inside Fukuoka Prison; a more junior guard, Watanabe Yuichi, is tasked with investigating the death. All is not quite as it first seems: Sugiyama’s lips have been sewn shut, and this feared individual has a poem tucked in his pocket. What’s going on? Watanabe’s investigation comes to centre on one of the prisoners, the Korean poet Yun Dong-ju (a real-life historical figure); gradually, Watanabe uncovers the extent of what has been happening at Fukuoka, and why Sugiyama lost his life.

I’m torn over The Investigation. On the one hand, this is a book about the power of words and literature – poetry’s capacity to change minds; the tension between Watanabe’s love of reading and his new duties as prison censor; the importance for the Korean prisoners of holding on to their own names and language. I’m naturally sympathetic to a novel like that.

However, for a novel whose plot is so celebratory of language, the prose feels rather… ordinary. There’s also a touch of novel-as-history-lesson about The Investigation; this can be interesting – and it often is, in this case – but it’s not really what I want from a novel, especially one up for a literary award. I can’t really see The Investigation going any further in the IFFP: it’s OK, but so are many other novels; compared to the rest of the longlist, it’s one of the weakest titles for me.

Read my other posts on the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize here.

IFFP 2015: Erpenbeck and González

27th March 2015 / / 16 Comments

EndofDaysJenny Erpenbeck, The End of Days (2012)
Translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky (2014)

I’ve come across several novels on this year’s IFFP longlist which examine the twentieth century through the lives of ‘ordinary’ individuals, but this may be the sharpest one yet. The protagonist of The End of Days is born in the Austrian Empire at the start of the century; each of the novel’s five ‘books’ imagines that she died at a different point in her life; the short ‘intermezzo’ sections between them run through all the small differences – walking down this street instead of that; a window left open to let the air in – that could have kept her alive.

The first thing to say is that Susan Bernofsky’s translation is very potent indeed. When I read the first page, in which the protagonist is buried as a baby, it was so powerful that I almost had to put the book down (something that rarely happens to me): as handfuls of earth are thrown into the child’s grave, each is described as covering the girl or woman who might have been. The rest of this first section is full of tiny but resonant details, like the toy whose bells make the same jingling noise they did the day before, although so very much has changed. The protagonist’s death at such a young age is presented as a hole in reality for her family, beside which all else becomes insignificant.

The structure Erpenbeck has used enables effects like this. In The End of Days, ‘history’ in the broad sense doesn’t change; it is the individual’s interaction with history that changes. In each iteration of the protagonist’s life, her death means something different: in one section, she joins the Communist Party and moves to the Soviet Union, but dies labouring in the gulag; in another, she escapes internment and dies thirty years later, a celebrated writer and Party member; in the last, she lives to be ninety, and is one resident among many in an old people’s home. Erpenbeck’s novel intertwines the personal with the grand sweep of history to great effect, underlining the importance of both. I would certainly expect to see The End of Days on the IFFP shortlist; for me, it’s potentially a winner.

ItBWtS

Tomás González, In the Beginning Was the Sea (1983)
Translated from the Spanish by Frank Wynne (2014)

One of the interesting things about the IFFP (or, if you prefer, something that points to just how much literature from other languages remains untranslated into English) is that we’ll see the odd book which was originally written much earlier than the translation. Such is the case with In the Beginning Was the Sea, the first novel by Colombian writer González, and his first to appear in English, some thirty years on. I actually read this last year, but didn’t review it at the time, because I didn’t particularly care for it. Looking back, I think I was thrown by what the publicity material said about the book’s inspiration (which, for that reason, I won’t reveal here).

This is the story of Elena and J., a couple of intellectuals who leave behind city life to begin a new life by the sea. But money problems mean that they are going to have to earn a living from their land, and it’s not going to be plain sailing. There are hints (and increasingly clearer indications) that all is not going to end well; the novel becomes a chronicle of ill fortune, with a claustrophobic air of dread created by Frank Wynne’s translation. We know that something is coming, but not precisely what – and, for all the foreshadowing, González doesn’t make it feel too staged. I appreciated In the Beginning Was the Sea more the second time around, though I don’t anticipate that it would necessarily make my shortlist.

Read my other posts on the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize here.

IFFP 2015: Fois and Mortier

24th March 2015 / / 6 Comments

FoisMarcello Fois, Bloodlines (2009)
Translated from the Italian by Silvester Mazzarella (2014)

Bloodlines is the story of a Sardinian family through the first half of the twentieth century – but not a family linked by blood. Michele Angelo Chironi and Mercede Lai were both orphans, and, even though he was adopted by a local blacksmith, Michele Angelo kept the surname given to him at the orphanage. So the Chironi family starts at the turn of the century, and the story of Bloodlines is the story of its first faltering steps through war, mortality, and socio-political change.

Though there are tumultuous events in the background, the focus is always on what they mean for the Chironis, and there is a sense that the family’s struggles are a reflection of wider Sardianian society coming to terms with the changes of modernity and gradually becoming more of a part of Italy (if I were more certain of the history, I might suggest that the family’s seeking to establish itself from effectively nothing reflects the coming together of Italy as a nation-state). There are frequent reminders from Fois’s narrator that this is a story, and therefore selected and shaped – there are many other stories that could be told about other families. Silvester Mazzarella’s translation captures the tone of being slightly distanced from events that occasionally – often tragically – come close to home. All in all, I very much enjoyed Bloodlines and I’d be happy to see it progress to the IFFP shortlist.

Mortier

Erwin Mortier, While the Gods Were Sleeping (2008)
Translated from the Dutch by Paul Vincent (2014)

Belgian author Mortier  offers another personal approach to the early twentieth century, this time through the eyes of Helena Demont, an old woman in the present looking back on her life before and during the First World War. It begins as a comfortable bourgeois existence, before the German invasion sends Helena to France,, and the farm of her mother’s family. The experiences of Helena’s brother in battle and convalescence, and her journeys with an English photographer whom she falls for, will bring Helena – and us – closer to the horrors of the war.

Paul Vincent’s translation is rich and dense – indeed, at times (especially towards the beginning) I found the prose a little too over-egged. But the realities of war-ravaged Flanders are rendered vividly indeed, and Helena’s emphasis on the nature of memory underlines that even such dark moments of history will eventually fade into shadows and exist, for good or ill, only in our recollections. It wouldn’t at all surprise me to see While the Gods Were Sleeping make the IFFP shortlist, and I don’t think I’d mind if it did.

Read my other posts on the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize here.

IFFP 2015: Knausgaard and Ávila Laurel

20th March 2015 / / 14 Comments

KnausgaardKarl Ove Knausgaard, Boyhood Island: My Struggle Book 3 (2010)
Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett (2014)

I expect that Knausgaard will remain a fixture of the IFFP longlist until the whole of My Struggle receives UK publication; here he is for the third year running, anyway. By now, the style and approach are known quantities – intensely detailed chronicles of everyday life, told in the rough-and-ready tones of Don Bartlett’s translation – but the substance varies. The stereotype of My Struggle is that it’s just a catalogue of minutiae; but what made the first volume especially so vital for me was the sense of Knausgaard grappling with the deeper realities of life – love, death, memory – and the dizzying moments when these would break through all the chatter.. In Boyhood Island, though, I we’re largely left with only the chatter.

It’s sharp, disarmingly frank chatter: Knausgaard is focusing on his childhood, and evokes the sense of this as a time of exploring, discovering boundaries and testing them (for good or ill). There’s a running theme of the restrictions of inside spaces (home, school) versus the freedom of outside – to the point where the teenage Karl Ove talks in terms of treating his bedroom as the ultimate ‘outside’ space.

There are times when Knausgaard confronts the some of the realities which animate My Struggle: how can he really remember all this? what does he actually know about that time? But I cannot shake the impression that, in Boyhood Island, I got the form of My Struggle without the full effect, and that feels like having only half a book. That’s why I’m not keen to see this volume progress any further in the IFFP.

Avila Laurel

Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, By Night the Mountain Burns (2008)
Translated from the Spanish by Jethro Soutar (2014)

Relatively little African literature in translation makes it to UK publication, and By Night the Mountain Burns would be notable simply for being only the second work from Equatorial Guinea to be made commercially available in English. More than that, though, it’s also very good.

At the beginning, we don’t know why, or to whom, the narrator of Ávila Laurel’s novel is telling his story, but we do know that he’s telling it orally. He begins with the song that would be sung when the people of his island pulled canoes to the shore, then runs through various events and situations from his childhood: the grandfather who would never visit the sea; a fire that destroys the mountainside plantations; visitors who come to trade, or for more mysterious reasons. The style is dense, rhythmic and discursive; I was interested to read this article by Jethro Soutar on the choices he had to make while translating, which shows just what a precision job it was.

By Night the Mountain Burns highlights a number of opposites (I hesitate to say ‘contradictions’): the spoken and written texts; the island’s vernacular and Spanish, the language of authority; the mixture of Catholic and traditional beliefs. The tensions created by these opposites create an undercurrent that ripples through Ávila Laurel’s novel; but all is held together by the flexibility of the narrative voice. Though the narrator’s digressions might seem to risk making the novel too diffuse, in the end I found that a cohesion of tone wins out. There’s a wonderful sense that the style and voice are not passively reflecting place and circumstances, but are actively creating them. I was reminded of Zone in that way – and, like Zone, it helps just to jump right in.

I enjoyed By Night the Mountain Burns, and I’d be happy to see it on the IFFP shortlist. On a final note, this is the first time that And Other Stories have received a nod from the IFFP; they’re a great publisher, and I’m pleased to see them get this recognition at last.

Read my other posts on the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize here.

IFFP 2015: Kehlmann and Murakami

16th March 2015 / / 16 Comments

KehlmannDaniel Kehlmann, F (2013)
Translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway (2014)

I keep wanting to call F a family saga in reverse; but that description, though snappy, isn’t quite right. Let’s say that F is a novel about several generations of a family, which highlights that we approach family history by working backwards, and thereby have to piece everything together to make sense of it.

We begin in 1984, when the Friedland brothers go with their father Arthur to a hypnotism show. The hypnotist tells Arthur it’s time to make the change in life that he always wanted; next thing the boys know, their father has gone away, taking his passport. They won’t see Arthur again for years – but in the meantime, he will become an internationally famous author. The bulk of the novel follows the brothers in adulthood: Martin, the priest; Eric, the financier; Ivan, the painter – each fundamentally a fraud in his chosen profession. Their stories overlap, but in reverse chronological order; so the causes of certain events become clear only gradually, and we see the contrasting ways in which the Friedland brothers view each other.

In another section, Arthur gallops back through the generations of his family, a survey of centuries that serves to illustrate how little he ultimately knows. The final chapters of F focus on Eric’s daughter, and tie up a few loose ends – for the reader, of course; Kehlmann’s choice of viewpoint character reminds us that, as a new generation emerges, the stories of the old one recede into mystery.

Carol Brown Janeway’s translation effectively facilitates F’s movement through different tones: from social realism to humour to gothic nightmare and beyond. I knew nothing about Daniel Kehlmann’s work before starting F; now I want to read everything I can that he’s written, and I would be very happy to see this novel on the IFFP shortlist.

Murakami

Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (2014)
Translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel

So, time for my second encounter with the work of Haruki Murakami. I had a hunch that the IFFP would bring this, and felt both intrigued and apprehensive at the prospect. The first Murakami I read, Sputnik Sweetheart a couple of years ago, didn’t leave much of an impression. I have wondered whether he’s the kind of author for whom you need to have ‘caught the bug’ at the right time (as can be the way with such prolific writers). Obviously I’d need to read more to find that out, but going straight to an author’s latest book is not necessarily the best way. Still, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is the book on the table for the IFFP, and I like it better than Sputnik Sweetheart – albeit not  quite enough to send me off to read all his work.

Tsukuru Tazaki is 36, designs train stations for a living, and is drifting aimlessly through life. At high school, he was part of a close-knit quintet of friends – though he felt an outlier, simply because he was only one without a colour in his name. Then, one day, they asked him not to contact them any more – and Tsukuru never quite got over it. Now he’s seeing a woman, Sara, who convinces him it’s time to track down his old friends and find out why they cut him off.

It took me a while to warm to Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki – at the beginning, it seemed that barely a page went by without an overwrought simile – but my interest began to be perked when Tsukuru’s search got underway. Tsukuru is someone who makes things (that’s even what his name means), and the way he works through his problem is both kinetic (going to visit his friends once he finds out where they are) and rooted in physicality (one of the novel’s key metaphors is how much Tsukuru and friends have changed over the years, perhaps without realising). I think that sense was what ultimately made Colorless Tzukuru Tazaki work for me. If I were more familiar with Murakami’s work, I might have picked up on more, but there it is. I don’t have particularly strong feelings either way about the prospect of the book making the IFFP shortlist, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it did.

Read my other posts on the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize here.

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