The Pomegranate Lady and Her Sons | Review

I'm honestly surprised that I'd never heard of Goli Taraghi's The Pomegranate Lady and Her Sons (tr. Sara Khalili) before reading it. It's not that I think I know of every new book that's published, but as a longtime book blogger, there's always a bit of awareness of new titles. Particularly titles from more mainstream publishers. The irony of it is that I'm often more aware of literature in translation from smaller publishers than I am from the heavy-hitters, where they seem almost passive in their attitudes despite more newspaper coverage. The fact is that I can't recall having seen any reviews of The Pomegranate Lady and Her Sons. Fairly undeserved.

It's been a bit over a month since I read this short story collection, so I won't pretend that all the facts and figures are perfectly aligned in my head. But truthfully, that's less relevant for a book of this sort. Like many short story collections, the plot is not really the point. More important is the clear-headed assessment of a culture, and a culture of emigration.

The fact that most of the stories in The Pomegranate Lady and Her Sons either revolve around emigration (or return), or some form of outside cultural influence, says quite a bit about the collection as a whole and about the state of Iranian culture. This is not particularly surprising given Taraghi's current status as an expat herself, but there's power to the fact that she continues to write in Farsi. There's meaning to the fact that these stories have such strong themes of coming and going, forming a core that does not dismiss offhand cultural differences between Europe/America and Iran, but also does not entirely embrace them.

One of the nice things about this collection is in its rather excellent balance of pace and story. These are short stories that know how to breathe - nothing is rushed, but no story feels unnecessarily bloated either. One story tells of a dinner party broken up by a raid. There's anxiety running throughout the story, the narrator's tense apprehensions and unease with further complications that result from her arrest. Taraghi's writing conveys this tension without resorting to blunt measures. Everything flows gracefully and smoothly, straight through to the story's end. This makes for a nice change from most novels, and certainly from flash fiction which often ends up missing important story elements.

Though certain themes crop up again, The Pomegranate Lady and Her Sons nonetheless relatively succeeds in staying fresh. This is not a collection bogged down by the same story again and again with slight variations; even the most similar stories feel distinct in their characters and settings. Some also sharply deviate from the standard mold, making for an overall bolder, more diverse collection. There's a lot here about human nature, quite a bit about passion and force of will, and sprinkles of love, often in the most roundabout way.

I liked The Pomegranate Lady and Her Sons when I really didn't think I would. The stories grow on a reader, and though the writing was a little awkward at times (a fault whose source I'm not sure of - writer or translator...), generally speaking I found myself delving quite deeply into each story. Nothing bombastic happens in any of these stories, nor are they unique for their sparseness. Instead, Taraghi looks at characters (primarily women) in different situations, calmly building the broader world around these characters and ending on just the right note. All in all, a good, balanced collection, deserving of more attention.

The Budding Tree | Review

I wanted to write about The Budding Tree the moment I finished reading it, but I got sidetracked by other books. Now, just over a month after finishing it, I feel that I have done the book a clear disservice. Aiko Kitahara's lovely collection of short stories (tr. Ian MacDonald) is a perfect example for why I feel there needs to be more literature in translation. Not only is The Budding Tree brilliant in its portrayals of women attempting to carve out an independent existence for themselves, but it's also a beautifully written book overall, and a fascinating historical fiction account.

The Budding Tree: Six Stories of Love in Edo is not remotely about romance, even as it is about love. This collection of loosely linked stories focuses on six women striving to live their lives in a society that maybe isn't quite ready for their independence yet. Opening with a story about identity and honor, we catch glimpses of the struggles young women had just in living their lives. We see a teacher, a restaurant owner, an artist, a designer, a performer, and a scribe, each one with her own complications (often tangentially linked to one of the previous stories). These are women with men in their lives - often in a romantic context - but the stories are about them, about their struggles, their desires and their hopes.

Ultimately, each of these stories is about women's freedom. In one story, a woman's ex-husband attempts to convince her to return to work in his failing restaurant, which she managed when they were still married. The attempts are marked with threats, both directly from the ex-husband as well as from the loan sharks currently keeping the other restaurant afloat. The story is set against the backdrop of an increasingly volatile economic situation in Edo, with rampant starvation and inflation. It's ultimately both powerful in its portrayal of economic hardship, as well as in its characterization of a woman doing all she can to remain independent in both her work and her personal life.

I should emphasize that no aspect of The Budding Tree tries to portray either men or women as caricatures. The men are not merely bullies in their attempts to dominate women. Nor are they objects of affection, occupying the entirety of the women's lives. Meanwhile, the women are neither portrayed as frivolous for their love, nor are they forced to completely forgo it. These are not "strong female characters" in the traditional sense of the word, but each of them is clearly a well-written woman with her own story to tell.

The writing in The Budding Tree is perfect - a good balance of quietly lyrical, with a clean, crisp tone overall. It's a lovely read - neither too sparse nor overwhelming with sticky prose. Coupled with a very even, calm pacing and a series of stories that are interesting, enjoyable and powerful, The Budding Tree is ultimately a very good book. Nothing here is bombastic, nothing is particularly flashy or attention-grabbing, but all together the result is of a woefully underrated book that deserves to be better known.

Women in Translation | Awards

Previous posts in Women in Translation series:

• Where in the world are women writers?
• Responses
• Availability and bias

In my previous post in the Women in Translation series, I looked at the general issue of availability and bias. Today, I want to narrow that focus just a bit and take a look at various translation awards in relation to international women writers.

Let's start with the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, which just released its 2014 longlist. The IFFP has long had an issue with recognizing women writers, to the point where I kept hearing this year that they were making an explicit effort to find more women writers in translation. Before we look at 2014, let's have a brief recap: the prize was launched in 1990, with a grand total of zero women taking home the prize until today. According to Wikipedia (which only includes complete shortlists from 2003 and on), less than 20% of shortlisted books from 2003-2013 were written by women. This amounts on average to one book a year by a woman.

The longlists paint a darker picture, if that's even possible. Looked at one way, you can point to a slightly greater number of women writers in some years as a sign that the award is not so skewed... yet these women are somehow consistently shut out of the next stage of deliberations, snubbed of the opportunity to actually win the prize. Meanwhile, a glance at 2012 and 2013 shows that only 2 women were even longlisted, which is, quite frankly, an embarrassment that I'm glad even the IFFP recognized. This year - 2014 - the situation is definitely brighter. A grand total of 5 women (out of 15) have been honored, a number that is comfortably above the average publishing statistics. And having read two of those books, I can easily say that both are brilliant without a doubt deserve their place on the list (more, I think, than the male-written book I've read from the longlist).

Now over to the US, we look at the Best Translated Book Award (fiction). This younger award turns out much better numbers overall, with a surprising 50% win-ratio by women authors. However, despite women writers' oddly skewed propensity to win, it turns out that the proportions of women nominated are actually much worse than the overall publishing trends, with something like 15% representation.

Taking another step back and looking at broader international awards like the Nobel, we can see further examples of women writers from around the world getting somewhat sidestepped. Over half of the prizes the Nobel has handed out to women over the past 25 years (still a clear minority overall, remember) have gone to women writing in English, from English-speaking countries. Not particularly representative either, it turns out.

The number one goal of these posts is to raise awareness - I want people to think about women's place in international literature. Awards are pivotal in getting readers excited about a certain genre or field, and are often instrumental in guiding readers to many new books they never would have read otherwise. If awards are consistently failing to recognize women writers, readers are again losing out on brilliant books by brilliant authors. Which is a shame, knowing how many other wonderful books are out there. Luckily, the trends overall seem to be improving - here's to hoping for more and more balanced lists as the years progress, and lots of new and excellent books for us to read.

Range of Ghosts | Review

I saw a lot of glowing reviews for Range of Ghosts long before I was ever interested in picking it up. After a while, though, the idea of the book sort of sunk in, and I placed it on hold. A few hours later, it was directly recommended to me on Twitter in the context of fantasy novels that acknowledge diverse cultures and languages. Doubly intrigued, I made a point to read it as soon as it arrived from the library.

Maybe my expectations were too high. Maybe I was looking so hard for an utterly new fantasy novel that I missed the other indicators. Maybe my tastes have changed. The fact is that ultimately Range of Ghosts disappointed somewhat. Not because it's a bad book. It really, really isn't. I enjoyed most of it. Rather, Range of Ghosts simply felt... familiar. And familiarity in a fantasy novel of this kind can signal a death knell.

Let's begin by acknowledging the diversity of the book. Or rather, the idea of diversity. Range of Ghosts is clearly heavily influenced by Mongolian-Chinese-Arab culture. Elizabeth Bear explicitly points to Genghis Khan and the Mongolian steppes as influencing her world. Names like Khagan instead of Khan, or Uthman for Ottoman do very little to mask the real-world influences. It was here that my skepticism brow rose, mostly because it didn't feel like anything new was added. Sure, the entire religious concepts were adjusted to fit the newly magical world, but at times I felt like Bear was taking far too few risks in her worldbuilding, as though she felt that the mere fact of a non-European influenced world would already break too far from fantasy standards. And so maybe that's why she stuck so close to our real-world.

With language too, I felt like perhaps I'd simply misunderstood the innovation of the novel. Range of Ghosts has references to multiple languages and multiple cultures, and does a nice job of showing people in awkward linguistic situations where they technically have no language in common. This in itself is a nice change from books that label a certain local language as "Common" (or something else self-centric along those lines), or altogether lump each racial group into one cultural identity. The only issue is that Bear introduces the struggles without entirely developing them, so there's conveniently always someone who's bi- or tri-lingual and somehow everyone picks up languages super fast, so the problem quickly disappears. It happened a couple of times, and each time I felt like it was a clear and weak cop-out from an otherwise realistically portrayed universal barrier.

Bear's writing is solid, but again not entirely fresh. It was enough to keep me clearly engaged in the story, but not quite enough to make me lose myself in it. The best fantasies (for me) are ones that overwhelm me and blur out the rest of the world. Range of Ghosts entertained me and kept me hooked, but failed that first test. At the end of the day, the writing is like the rest of the book - definitely good, but nothing particularly new.

Ultimately, I found the strength of the book to be in the story. Though I didn't form the tightest attachments to either of the main characters, both Temur and Samarkar seemed perfectly in place within the context of the broader plot. Bear managed to make even the more outlandish coincidences feel natural, and the overall flow was surprisingly good. The use of romance, however, frustrated me multiple times throughout the book - Temur's lover Edene felt very loosely sketched and much more of a cardboard cutout MPDG lover than an actual character, and scenes later in the book showcased a romance that had shown little-to-zero chemistry beforehand.

A lot of these flaws are not individual to Range of Ghosts, of course. Many of these issues stem from certain genre expectations or time-honored requirements (e.g. the romance). What makes Range of Ghosts nonetheless enjoyable - and perhaps even unique - is its ability to move past many of these smaller flaws and attempt to shake off the shackles of those expectations. Though I was moderately disappointed in Bear's worldbuilding in terms of its clear influences, the truth is that the scope Bear employs when discussing religion and the breadth of the world regardless is quite impressive. This was a world I could easily imagine, one that I saw quite vividly.

Here's the important test: Will I read the sequels to Range of Ghosts? And the answer is probably. Despite its flaws, Bear has created a world that I'm now curious about, and the last pages of Range of Ghosts left me especially intrigued and eager to know what happens next. Now I suppose I can only hope that the character development improves in the next books...

70% Acrylic 30% Wool | Review

Whatever Viola Di Grado writes next, I will read it. 70% Acrylic 30% Wool (tr. Michael Reynolds), her first novel, is so utterly bizarre, so fantastically disturbing, so engaging and interesting and weird and thought-provoking that I honestly don't care what she plans on doing next - I will read it.

70% Acrylic 30% Wool was read in a single sitting, an intense morning dedicated 100% to this depressing, offbeat novel. Centering around "word anorexic" Camelia, the novel is a curious display of various forms of mental illness and disorders. We begin with Camelia's silent mother, who essentially stopped existing after her husband was killed in a car accident (with his mistress). Her silence spreads to Camelia, who is also grieving and suffering in her own way, miserable in her loneliness but also seemingly incapable of escaping it.

It's in this precarious state that Camelia meets Wen, a young shopkeeper who works near her home. Wen has thrown out the damaged clothing his brother makes from his shop in Camelia's dumpsters, which Camelia - in her warped reality - has adopted as new clothing. From there, Camelia returns to the study of Chinese, which she had begun at the university but given up after her father's death.

Wen and Camelia's Chinese lessons form one of the cores of the novel, specifically in the way they showcase language and essentially culture. Camelia is Italian-born, but she's lived in Leeds most of her life. Her Italian identity is occasionally touched on, but it isn't necessarily the main idea. Similarly with Wen, who is Chinese but has clearly been living in England for a long time as well. During their Chinese lessons, Camelia often tries to understand aspects of Chinese writing (why certain words are drawn as they are, why certain combinations do not form the words she would expect). Through these conversations, a more subtle understanding of language arises. As a bilingual reader myself and one who has studied other languages as well, I found these parts to be fascinating and entirely on the mark.

But the other focus of the novel is, I think, much more about depression. Much more about mental illness. Much more about the silence that has seeped into Camelia's life, and how it's impacted both her and her mother.

Di Grado shows us Camelia's mother's abrupt shut-down - her immediate response to her husband's death and the way she simply stops speaking. We see her through Camelia's frustrated eyes, but Camelia herself is tainted. Indeed, as the story progresses, Camelia is the one putting herself through worse and worse situations: an extremely misguided and intentionally problematic affair which ultimately ends in violence and more pain, repeated attempts to express her feelings for Wen while getting rebuffed, and an obsession with certain themes of holes, emptiness, and the Chinese character Camelia has invented for herself. Meanwhile, her mother is slowly awakening - no longer merely lying on the couch without bathing, we see early attempts at building a new life for herself.

I don't want to spoil the end of the novel, but I'll say this - it's fantastic. It's brilliantly subversive, unexpected and twisted. Di Grado takes everything she's done throughout 70% Acrylic 30% Wool and shows us where we were wrong in our interpretations, where our assumptions misled us, and what we should have seen all along.

This is not a happy book, but there's no doubt that it's a very good one. Di Grado's writing is young and believable, very casual but also crisply intelligent. This is the sort of writing that flows from sentence to sentence, no stutters when it comes to describing characters or locales, just a pure understanding of how to show the world. It might not appeal to readers seeking something a bit more polished, but I found it matched my tastes perfectly. Similarly, the characterization is not heavy-handed, but in light, brief lines Di Grado successfully builds the characters around Camelia (who herself is a wonderfully built character).

70% Acrylic 30% Wool is two things: it's a unique book, and it's a good book. Readers seeking something cheerful - this is not the book for you. But anyone who can stomach a bit of grimness, a bit of depression, or a bit of twisted pain should read this novel. Definitely weird; definitely good.

alphabet | Review

I don't always fall for poetry collections. Despite loving poetry, despite having a long and personal relationship with the field, I often find myself dissatisfied with various poetry collections. Some poets, it's true, hit me particularly hard (Sylvia Plath and Czeslaw Milosz, for example), but I'm usually left very cold.

Not so with Inger Christensen's utterly breathtaking alphabet, one of the most innovative, beautiful, intelligent and finely crafted poetry books I've ever read in my life.

When I use the word "breathtaking" to describe alphabet, it is not merely a hyperbole. alphabet literally left me breathless as I found myself reading along aloud and getting utterly swept up in the words. It's not just the rhythm of the poems, which are all built with the same calm structure, all swept around existence, all flowing almost flawlessly into each other. There's also something about the way the poems lead into the next, the way they form a whole. The way I found myself mouthing the words, reading them aloud and incapable of letting them glide by me passively. This is nearly impossible for any poetry book. For one in translation? I was in awe.

I keep using the term "poetry book" for a very specific reason - alphabet is explicitly not a collection. Many poetry collections have similar themes and ideas running through them, but alphabet can and should be viewed as a single unit. Each poem is essentially a chapter in a growing story, a growing understanding of the world and of humanity. These chapters are framed by the alphabet (hence the title), going from A to N. Here we find the only possible flaw in the book, where occasionally the words that appear in the new chapter don't actually start with the official letter in English. I felt like this would have been purely entrancing in the native Danish, but truthfully it flowed so perfectly in English that except for the letter J or so, I felt no awkwardness in translation.

alphabet really is a masterpiece. It's a masterpiece of the type that I think any curious reader should seek out, a book that's both beautiful, interesting, and perfectly translated. It's truly something special, even if you don't usually read poetry. It's just brilliant, period. And you should all read it.

Summerhouse, Later | Review

It's a rare thing to enjoy a short story collection without particularly liking any of its actual components. Judith Hermann's Summerhouse, Later essentially falls into this category, though my appreciation of the book was certainly limited and I'm hesitant to recommend it.

Summerhouse, Later comprises of nine short stories, each of which looks rather distantly at a set of damaged, fairly unhappy characters. Despite the distance, however, Hermann manages to bring each character close to the reader, leaving the impression that though there's a certain coldness surrounding everything, we're not entirely disconnected. The distance seems to have much more to do with the story setting than as some sort of accidental flaw on Hermann's part - a coolly calculated move by an author who is in perfect control of her writing.

And so these nine stories take our damaged characters and present them to us at that crucial pivot - the moment when things change. Or rather, the moment when things can change.

This thematic idea is evident from the first story - "The Red Coral Bracelet". The narrator, rather like all the characters in the book, is not particularly likable, nor is she very substantial; meanwhile, nothing really happens in the story. What we get is that shift, a moment in which the status changes and the story gets nudged along its tracks. This might leave a lot of readers cold - the distinct lack of characterization or plot can make these stories feel a bit incomplete or shoddy. But the calm focus on those pivots proves to be an interesting storytelling technique and though I certainly felt empty after reading them, something lingered nonetheless.

Two stories seem to shy away from this model, one successfully and the other not so much. "The End of Something" is easily the weakest, most forgettable story in the collection, mostly made up of a blurry monologue that starts nowhere and ends nowhere, with nothing in between - an utterly pointless story.

But the story that immediately precedes it - "Sonja" - manages to do the exact opposite, leading to a significantly more successful story. We get a narrator who is actually sympathetic, or at least as close to sympathetic as a guy in a series of weird relationships and relative ambivalence can be. His baffling relationship with the bizarre Sonja (who is distinctly not a manic pixie dream girl) is both interesting and oddly touching (in a very weird and even somewhat unsettling way), and we also get to see the story from start to finish. I'm not sure I could call it my favorite story from the collection (indeed, I'm not sure any story qualifies for that...), but it certainly stood out in a positive light.

All in all, Summerhouse, Later is a fairly uniform, interesting read. I'd even call it pleasant, were it not for the distinctly dark and rather depressing undertones that occupy the collection from start to finish. As I said earlier, I'm not sure I'd necessarily recommend it nor do I think readers should go out of their way to read it, but if it comes across your radar, it is an interesting book. And I'm definitely curious to see what Hermann does with a full-novel canvas.

How to Suppress Women's Writing | Review

I have a hard time reviewing nonfiction books most of the time because I feel distinctly not qualified. How to Suppress Women's Writing by Joanna Russ is no exception. In fact, as a clearly feminist text, I find myself even less qualified than usual to discuss it, having very little understanding of what we generally call feminism. Yet I found myself recognizing so much of How to Suppress Women's Writing and grimly understanding where it comes from, so that I'm going to try to write about it anyways.

The core thesis of How to Suppress Women's Writing is not actually included in the book itself, but rather stems from the cover:

She didn't write it. (But if it's clear she did the deed...) She wrote it, but she shouldn't have. (It's political, sexual, masculine, feminist.) She wrote it, but look what she wrote about. (The bedroom, the kitchen, her family. Other women!) She wrote it, but she wrote only one of it. ("Jane Eyre. Poor dear, that's all she ever...") She wrote it, but she isn't really an artist, and it isn't really art. (It's a thriller, a romance, a children's book. Sci fi!) She wrote it, but she had help. (Robert Browning. Branwell Brontë. Her own masculine side.) She wrote it, but she's an anomaly. (Woolf. With Leonard's help...)
She wrote it BUT...

This text - in large, bold letters - graces the cover of How to Suppress Women's Writing. Here is the unofficial outline from which Russ builds her argument, that essentially no matter what women do, they will always be sidelined using one excuse after another. In truth, by the end of the book I couldn't help but feel that this was much less about the suppression of women's writing as it was about the dismissal of existing works, shoving them into obscurity or doggedly refusing to acknowledge their influence on the literary canon.

Russ presents the reality of the late 1970s, early 1980s when it comes to literary feminism and the clear struggles women had in gaining representation and the respect they deserved. This is a darkly determined book in that regard, as Russ presents anecdotes from the then-present alongside anecdotes from times past that show the persistent sexism women writers faced. And while she follows the outline detailed above, she doesn't stick to it 100%, and occasionally a general critique of a sexist society slips in (one anecdote describes a man trying on a woman's pants and being baffled by the lack of pockets).

Russ's criticism of the "modern" suppressing of women's writing is perhaps the most outdated aspect of the book - today, women write in mass amounts, dominating many fields and genres (particularly the growing YA field). Women are not told that writing is a man's business, women are not discouraged from writing in the same way that they were only a few decades ago. In this regard, the literary landscape is much friendlier to women today. Fantastic, right?

Well, the problems begin once you realize just about everything else about the book is still pathetically relevant. Women are still underrepresented in awards shortlists (though the past couple of years have made a jaw-jutted effort to fix that). Women are still underrepresented in the official "canon", where certain male writers get multiple slots and authors like Charlotte Brontë get nothing*. Where women writers are lucky to get one of their books on the list, even if they have multiple that surely deserve a place in the canon (George Eliot!).

There are still well-respected male authors who claim that women just "aren't as good at writing" as men**. There are still professors who refuse to teach women writers for similar made-up reasons***. Still review outlets which overwhelmingly prefer male writers (and reviewers) over female****. Still publishers who consistently translate more books by men than they do books by women*****.

And ultimately, still readers who are subtly taught to read according to gender, who are taught that books by women are less serious, less high-brow, less intelligent and overall less important than books by men.

How do I know that last line is true? Because up until a couple years ago, I thought those things.

The more I read and grow, the more I set aside my teenage prejudices and misunderstandings, the more I'm able to understand that Jane Eyre wasn't just a good, "pleasant" book. It's a good book, period. I'm able to understand that by presenting Jane Austen's books as sweet romances, we're forgetting the clear social commentary that comes alongside it. Middlemarch is simply "the greatest English novel", J. K. Rowling is not merely a "popular" writer but a groundbreaking one, indeed an important writer, and Alice Munro's recent Nobel prize was not won in spite of her small, "home-centered" stories, but rather because of her superbly clean writing and sharp eye.

Big picture, How to Suppress Women's Writing didn't really tell me anything I didn't already know. It's not a groundbreaking book with new feminist ideas (not only because it's more than thirty years old). What it does is organize the many issues with the representation of women in literature, touching on everything from availability (in large part influencing my last post) to sexism in academia (presumably less serious today, but still apparent) to the glossing-over of women's achievements when building and presenting the "canon". The anecdotes and stories build an unpleasantly familiar picture, and I found myself quite unhappy in regards to how much of the book is still entirely relevant today.

Read How to Suppress Women's Writing. Read it, discuss it, see what's changed, see what hasn't. Thirty years down the line and Russ' text is still important, still worth reading. So track it down, check it out, buy it. Read it.

--------
* The first result when searching for the 100 Best Books of All Time
** V. S. Naipaul's sexist rant from a few years ago
*** David Gilmour's sexism and racism
**** VIDA's statistics
***** My own series on Women in Translation

Women in Translation | Availability and bias

Previous posts in Women in Translation:

• Where in the world are women writers?
• Responses

One of the things that kept cropping up after I posted my original post on women in translation was a sentiment from a lot of men (and some women) that their own personal reading stats (which ended up matching the overall publishing trends almost to a T) were the result not of some problem with publishing or even with their own reading, but rather the result of their own personal bias. "I just prefer books by men" was a common sentiment. Or "Men write [X] while women write [Y], and I like [X]". Or arguments about the quality of men's writing as compared to women.

The point is basically: Don't use me as an example, I have a personal bias.

And it's wrong.

First of all, I think it's problematic that readers are so quick to declare biases as something fixed. Reading belongs to a fluid, ever-changing world. A reader may love one genre on Monday, but be sick of it by Thursday, and want to come back again by Sunday. There are no rules to reading, nothing that could ever justify a bias so firmly.

But my main problem here is that readers who are suggesting that the reason they read a lot more books by men (again: in the exact same ratios as the overall stats) are completely missing the impact that availability can have.

It's very simple: when you have 15 books with a blue cover and 5 books with a red cover, and this is the pool of books from which you can choose your next read, what are you more likely to pick? There are so many more blue books than red... it has nothing to do with the fact that they're blue, it's just that you're more likely to find something you like in that pile. And so you inevitably read more from the blue pile, and occasionally pick up a book from the red. In a ratio that's approximately 3:1.

This is what's happening with women writers in translation. It's that simple.

When publishers - and particularly publishers who specialize in literature in translation - fail to offer books by women writers in the same amounts as books by men, the inevitable fact is that fewer books by women in translation are read. And then readers become convinced that there's an inherent difference, books by women are [Y] and they don't like [Y]. They have a "personal bias".

A couple weeks ago, Chad Post of Three Percent told off Jhumpa Lahiri for implying that there isn't literature in translation by saying "look for it". His point was that there's quite a bit of literature in translation if you just seek it out. Well, here's the thing: I've been actively seeking out literature in translation by women for two months now and it's not so simple. I've been reading literature in translation for years - I know where to look. I've pored over Three Percent's translations databases, went directly to publisher websites, sifted through hundreds of books. And at the end, I could find only a few dozen writers. This, despite knowing exactly what I was looking for.

Availability is important. If the translations (or the books) don't exist, obviously people aren't going to be able to read them. When the overwhelming majority of the most prominent literature-in-translation publishers have only 25% (or less) women writers (Dalkey Archive, Europa Editions, Open Letter, and many others), it's no longer that readers are creating a bias here. The bias already exists. Readers are just having a hard time getting out of it because of a lack of availability. The sooner we recognize this bias, the sooner we can try to start fixing it. And the sooner we fix it, the sooner we'll find ourselves with a more balanced, diverse and interesting literary environment, and isn't that the point?

Dreams and Stones | Review

If ever a book to serve as a transition from solving physics problems to reading literature, Magdalena Tulli's Dreams and Stones (tr. Bill Johnston) is it. This short book - and I hesitate to call it a novel, for reasons I'll soon elaborate - has so many delightfully physics-y moments, shining in its cool appraisal of this world we live in.

Dreams and Stones is hands down one of the most quotable books I've ever read. Filled to the brim with brilliant lines about momentum, or about specific cities, or about the nature of stones, or about the nature of man, it was hard not to spend the entire book just highlighting away and writing "BRILLIANT" in the margins (eBook, of course, because I doubt I would ever highlight a print book, no matter how quotable it may be...). Individual sentences were so clever, so intelligent and so well-observed that I couldn't help but view the book altogether very positively right from the start.

And yet I don't think overall I can call this a particularly good book. Because though the writing is fairly brilliant when viewed through a microscope, the bigger picture shows a very disjointed work. I really loved each individual bite of Dreams and Stones, but the overarching narrative was loose and fairly lacking in cohesion. It's abstract writing at its most vague, its most scattered, and its most frustrating.

That said, Tulli did manage to hit on some themes fairly strongly. There were the fairly obvious hints against a totalitarian, overbearing state (and the subsequent counter-city concept), but Tulli also seemed to tackle the Holocaust through this very specific, blurred lens. This section - near the end of the book - felt a bit more directed than any of the other ideas bandied about, but it also may remain open to interpretation. With my own personal experiences, I was only able to understand it as Tulli's method of acknowledging Poland's national shame... but perhaps other readers will view it differently.

I hesitate to call this a novel for one simple reason - there isn't really much here. Dreams and Stones is a meditation: a long, hardly interrupted monologue about the growth of cities and thoughts on their subsequent influence on humans. There are no characters (except perhaps the residents of the city, but they provide as much emotional connection as the stones do), there is no plot, and there is very little in the way of emotional pull. It's a book based on ideas, but unlike others of its kind (the oft-compared Calvino, Borges), the lack of a personal dimension placed it a bit further out for me.

There is one final comparison I must make. A few months back, when I reviewed the truly astounding Kalpa Imperial, I mentioned that that novel had one of the greatest thirty pages of literature I had ever read. Those thirty pages belong to the short story "Concerning the Unchecked Growth of Cities". While reading Dreams and Stones (which is obviously longer than Gorodischer's phenomenal story, but not by that much), I couldn't help but compare the two. Both look at the changing face of a city, yet while Gorodischer's city sprawls and shrinks and we get a pure, clear image of it over thousands of years, Tulli's gaze is turned too deeply inwards. I could easily see Gorodischer's city in my mind's eye, but despite spending much longer with Tulli's, it remained vague and evasive. This is clearly indicative of the two author's differing styles, but I definitely preferred Gorodischer in this case (also: everyone should read Kalpa Imperial).

It's not that I disliked Dreams and Stones. It's an extraordinarily intelligent and thought-provoking book, brilliant in its individual passages and overall hits many of the right notes for me as a reader. But after having read "Concerning the Unchecked Growth of Cities", having read Calvino, and in general having read enough books that do abstract without just being vague, I couldn't help but feel Dreams and Stones disappointed somewhat. I'm definitely going to read more of Tulli's books, but I hope that her others have a bit more to them than just isolated brilliance. Obviously a talented writer, but as a clear, coherent novel, I'm not sure Dreams and Stones really works.

How to spend my upcoming vacation

I need help.

I haven't had much of a proper vacation in a year and a half. Since I started studying in the fall of last year, the stress, schoolwork, tests, work and a general lack of time has had a serious negative impact on my reading. And now, finally, I actually have a vacation. I'm going to the US. Ten days. Ten days to read.

Over the past week, I've made a list of books that I want to read. I looked at year-end lists, books that I've wanted to read for a long time, books that bloggers recently reviewed, and of course my own slightly directed intention to read more women in translation. I started compiling a list of titles to place holds on. And then yesterday I realized that the list had gotten to about 70 books. 70 books in 10 days? Not going to happen. I started trying to cut the list down, but was not entirely successful and am still left with a list that is clearly both too long and too incomplete (there is only a very small amount of non-translated literature; little sci-fi, fantasy, young adult, or kids).

Here's where you come in. I want to know which books out of these books you all think are absolute musts. Which of these 40-odd titles needs to jump up my list? Which of these will make my vacation the most magical? Which will change my thinking? And what's missing? What are the books that haven't even made the "short"list, but obviously belong?

* I've noted which books are also available as eBooks, but to be honest, for longer books I definitely prefer the print version. So they made the cut anyways. For now.

THE LIST:

1. In Translation: Translators on their work and what it means - Esther Allen and Susan Bernofsky (editors)
2. The King of Trees - Ah Cheng
3. Half of a Yellow Sun - Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi*
4. An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter - Aira, César 
5. Swimming to Elba - Avallone, Silvia
6. The Twin - Bakker, Gerbrand*
7. Billancourt Tales - Berberova, Nina Nikolaevna
8. Selections - Nicole Brossard
9. Vertical Motion - Can Xue
10. The Luminaries - Catton, Eleanor
11. Silences, or a Woman's Life - Chaix, Marie
12. Alphabet - Christensen, Inger
13. 70% Acrylic 30% Wool - Di Grado, Viola
14. Visitation - Erpenbeck, Jenny
15. The Russian Version - Fanailova, Elena
16. Kamchatka - Figueras, Marcelo
17. The Blindness of the Heart - Franck, Julia
18. First Love & Look for my Obituary - Garro, Elena
19. Everyone Leaves - Guerra, Wendy
20. Summerhouse, Later - Hermann, Judith
21. Piano Stories - Hernández, Felisberto
22. Wake - Hope, Anna (to be released while I'm in the US)
23. The True Deceiver - Jansson, Tove*
24. The Shadowed Sun - Jermisin, N. K.*
25. The Budding Tree - Kitahara, Aiko
26. The Dispossessed - Le Guin, Ursula K.*
27. Ancillary Justice - Leckie, Ann*
28. Koula - Koumantareas, Menes
29. Shades of Milk and Honey - Kowal, Mary Robinette
30. Satantango - Krasznahorkai, László 
31. Children in Reindeer Woods - Ómarsdóttir, Kristin
32. The Three Fates - Lê, Linda
33. The Hour of the Star - Lispector, Clarice
34. I'd Like - Michalopoulou, Amanta
35. Stone Upon Stone - Myśliwski, Wiesław 
36. The Armies - Rosero, Evelio
37. How to Suppress Women's Writing - Russ, Joanna
38. Tenth of December - Saunders, George*
39. Everything Happens as it Always Does - Stambolova, Albena
40. The Goldfinch - Tartt, Donna*
41. The Bathing Women - Tie, Ning
42. Realm of the Dead - Uchida, Hyakken
43. Code Name Verity - Wein, Elizabeth
44. White Snake and other stories - Yan, Geling

And whatever else you recommend. Have at it, internet. Help me out.

Is American literature overrated?

Last night, Greg of the New Dork Review of Books* tweeted an article in which author Jhumpa Lahiri denounces American literature as being "massively overrated". She points towards abysmally low translation rates into English as compared to those into other languages, using her own experiences with the Italian literary market as a contrast. Greg and I started discussing the use of the word overrated - what it essentially means here, and whether or not Lahiri was oversimplifying.

Lahiri was oversimplifying - period. You can't make a blanket statement about hundreds of thousands of books without oversimplifying. Furthermore, by using the word overrated, she implied that many of the highly regarded novels published in English (her own included, I suppose) are undeserving of any praise. But the essence of her point is spot on, and here's where I find myself ultimately agreeing: Anglo-American literature is rated more frequently and more prominently than almost any other literature in the world. And often, those ratings are not entirely deserved.

Just one example: Louisa Young's My Dear I Wanted to Tell You. A distinctly midlevel novel, not a huge bestseller, no lasting impact that I've noticed, not an award winner, no particular innovation (literary or otherwise), the author is not a household name, not really hyped... nor is it exceptionally good (it's alright). Yet this fairly mediocre book got translated into Hebrew. It got translated into French. It got translated into German, and probably a couple other languages as well. This unremarkable book has made its way across the globe. Contrast that with Amir Gutfreund's excellent short story collection The Coastal Mansions**, winner of the 2003 Sapir Award, which has never been translated. Or any of acclaimed, award-winning author Lea Aini's books. Or dozens of other Israeli authors who will never be translated, and thousands upon thousands of authors worldwide whose books will never see light in English. Because, well, hmm.

Here's a fact: Anglo-American literature is given more attention, more airtime, more importance and more respect than equivalent and better literature from across the globe. The NYT Book Review almost exclusively reviews Anglo-American books. The Ha'aretz Book Review, meanwhile, looks at Israeli novels alongside American, English, Italian, French, German, Latin American, Chinese, Swedish, Japanese, and all others every week. Every issue houses books from at least two languages, to say nothing of the countries these books visit. Just as Lahiri sees an Italian literary culture that embraces far more books from across the globe, so too does Israel***. And so do most countries outside of the United States of American and Great Britain.

This too is somewhat oversimplifying matters for a very obvious reason: the U.S. and the U.K. publish significantly more books than Israel could ever hope to. Maybe even more than France, Germany and Latin American as well, though I honestly don't know. This means that it makes a lot of sense for a certain amount of Anglo-centrism, but nowhere near the levels we see today. Not a token title or two out of 100 notable books per year. Not the rare review in the most respected literary journals. Something that respects and acknowledges the excellent literature to be found worldwide.

On the whole, Anglo-American literature is kind of overrated. I won't deny that some of my favorite books have been penned by British or American writers with an Anglocentric mindset, but I can also point to the other favorites which are distinctly not originally in English, or deal with cultures and ideas beyond the standard Anglo norm, and can easily show you how much less press and attention they've gotten. English is and will remain a language with a vibrant and wonderful literary tradition, one that gives us hundreds of truly excellent books every year, but for now it also remains the language that celebrates and touts its own mediocre options over top-notch, truly excellent titles from other languages from all around the world. It's this favoritism, this Anglo-American default that leads to Lahiri generalizing and calling all American fiction "massively overrated" (when that is obviously not true).

So yes: big picture, a lot of American literature is valued more highly than it should be. And while we can choose to view that as some sort of problem, I think we should focus on the flip side - let's get more international literature, more literature in translation. Let's have a broader picture of a bigger world. Let's have the very best literature, period. No matter where it's from.

* Still one of the greatest blog names ever, by the way.
** My rough-and-fairly-literal-and-inaccurate title translation; I hope the book gets a better title if it's ever actually translated.
*** Though to be fair, many of these titles in translation are from English, and indeed a weekly column in Israel's other (more popular) newspaper that aims to showcase "titles from abroad" almost always presents American novels...

Stop writing books about novelists

There is a trope in fiction that I'm sure you've all come across - the story of the novelist. Whether the novelist is a side character struggling with a first novel, or the main character, mired in the struggles of overcoming writers block, I think we can all agree that this is not something completely unfamiliar.

Generally speaking, there are a lot of tropes I'm sick of. There are a lot of character types that bug me, a lot of basic cliches authors rely on to build a mood (particularly for anything that wants to be billed as "exotic"), a lot of phrases and ideas that crop up even though they're very rarely true... a whole literary world of tropes, and yet the one I'm most sick of is hearing about writers. You know why?

Because it's boring.

There's the old adage - write what you know. It used to be we'd get novels about doctors, novels about lawyers, novels about noblemen or noblewomen. And then came the all the artistic writers - books about generic artists, something that echoed the literary world but wasn't strictly identical. And now? Now every third novel I stumble across is about a writer. Usually living in New York. Usually struggling.

These books don't merely suffer because they're repetitive. They suffer from a fundamental lack, and that's a lack of scope. I have no problem with novels that focus very intently on one theme, idea, character or even location. I may personally find it to be a risky creative choice, but when it pays off, focused books can come off absolutely brilliantly (something like Beside the Sea). That's not the type of lack-of-scope issue novels about novelists have. Rather, those books seem to assume that they're the norm. It's an extraordinarily narrow, limited view of the world that annoys me every time.

Because how often do you see scientists in novels? How often do you see bankers, or researchers, or linguists, or programmers? How often do you have people who have an ordinary job that isn't the core of the novel? And let's be honest - how often do you see math teachers?

Write what you know. Writers today write about writing. It isn't meta, it isn't illuminating, it isn't clever... it's just dull. I for one have had enough.

Review | Stone in a Landslide

I didn't like Stone in a Landslide.

Could that be my entire review? Could I leave it at that, in the hopes of avoiding riling up readers I know enjoyed this book? Could I avoid awkwardness with the publishers, with the translators, with everyone involved in the project and just ignore this review? I could do all of these things... but I won't. That's not how it works.

Before now, I'd read three books published by Peirene Press. Though there was one I clearly liked less (the rather uneven Next World Novella), each offered a unique perspective and each had something about it that nonetheless kept me enclosed in the story. But the three also had a rather similar writing style - a bit disjointed, a bit loose... the kind of post-modern style that is popular in certain circles. It's not my favorite style and it sometimes hindered my appreciation of these novellas, but all in all, the first three were positive experiences.

Reading Stone in a Landslide was not. For such a short novel, I found myself struggling to remain interested in the story. And for good reason too: Stone in a Landslide has neither plot nor characters to latch onto, making it extraordinarily difficult to become emotionally invested in the story. Over at Goodreads, the publisher blurb describes main character Conxa as having "a voice totally free of anger and bitterness". This is true, but it's true because you could easily change that sentence to "a voice totally free of emotion". In the next paragraph, we're told that Stone in a Landslide has "everything": love, loss, history, death, war, etc. All of which is technically true. The book mentions each of those things. It just doesn't know how to feel them.

The story is this: Conxa is forced to move to her aunt and uncle as a young girl so that her family can avoid starvation. Though the move is said to be temporary, she ends up spending the rest of her life (essentially) in this new village, for all intents and purposes losing touch with her parents and siblings (who are only ever mentioned again in brief, offhand comments). This new life is described as being full of hard work and dedication, but we see none of it. Within a few years, Conxa falls in love with Jaume. There are approximately three paragraphs worth of courting and drama, then they marry. They start a family.

Around this point in the story, Maria Barbal slips in the first explicit reference to a year, grounding us in reality. This turns out to be more of a flashing warning sign for the war ahead. Except... not really? The war and its aftereffects are treated with the same dulled hand and the same utter lack of tone that the previous sections had. Tiny flashes of clever writing and thoughtful observations make their way into the narrative at this point, but it just isn't enough. From here until the end, the story is like a toy that's running out of batteries - slower and slower until it finally comes to a halt.

Does it seem like this is the bare-bones of the story? Yes. That's exactly what it is. Stone in the Landslide does one thing well, and that's its remarkable ability to skip over many years in the space of a sentence. But the pacing is still off, because nothing fills these gaps. The story is nothing more than an outline, and there is no hope of filling it in.

I didn't like Stone in a Landslide. I didn't like Conxa as such a detached narrator, who constantly tells rather than shows. I felt nothing from her - no real love for her husband, no real love for her children, no passion, no fear, nothing. And since Conxa's head is all we have, there are essentially no other characters. Jaume is nothing more than a prop, the children are nothing more than dolls Conxa occasionally feels possessive of, and Conxa's aunt and uncle serve more as a reminder of the "old days" than they actually have personalities themselves. Nobody has any personal spark that could make them remotely interesting to me as a reader.

But surely the writing! you must say at this point. The writing must be good, if so many other readers enjoyed it! If Peirene published it! But like I said, I have a bit of a different taste when it comes to Peirene's preferred writing style. The loose style found in previous novellas was once again present here, and once again failed to impress me. More than that, the writing was sometimes downright clunky, with passages that actually jolted me out of the reading experience. ("Even in the bumping and bouncing cart, I could feel myself trembling. It was happiness.")

It was impossible to read Stone in a Landslide without immediately comparing it to the significantly superior The Time of the Doves. These two Catalan books about women in the Spanish Civil War tell very similar stories, yet in markedly different ways and with clearly different results. Barbal minimizes her story so very much and spreads it out over the years such that nothing has a particular impact. Everything is told in a bland, dead-sounding voice; nothing is felt. Rodoreda looks at a more narrow slice of time and spreads it out over many more pages, but she delves deeper into the characters. She shows the world around them.

If you read the publisher summary Peirene provides, it sounds like they readily admit that there's nothing particularly new in Stone in a Landslide. In fact, their description of what makes up for the lack of voice is very similar to how I myself described The Time of the Doves in my review. At the end of the day, I can't view Stone in a Landslide as something unique because it isn't. I can't view it as well-written, because my reading experience was uncomfortable (at best). I can't pretend like I cared about the book, because there was just nobody to care about and nothing to learn from. It's a prime example of a pointless "literary" novella - instead of admitting that it's not particularly good, we're supposed to praise the minimalism (read: emptiness), praise the "glimpses" of life (read: all we get), and praise the detachment (read: utter lack of emotional connection).

So once again: I did not like Stone in a Landslide. In fact, I really didn't like it. It's the sort of book I'm sorry to have wasted an afternoon on, and quite frankly reminds me where I often diverge with the broader literary community in terms of defining certain books as "quality" versus not. Other prospective readers may go with the crowd on this one, but I felt the need to nonetheless share my opposing review: I did not like this book.

Surprising depth | The Golem and the Jinni

It's been a very long time since I read a book like The Golem and the Jinni. I'd heard quite a bit of praise for the novel going around, but I kept feeling like this wasn't really my sort of book. Which is utter nonsense and quite frankly colored by the fact that many of the reviews I'd seen labeled the book as a romance (which is a terrible way to describe it). The Golem and the Jinni is actually very much the sort of book I like - magic mixed in with the
real. Warmth. Depth. And it even has a bit of a nostalgic historical vibe that reminds me of an earlier time in my reading life.

I happened to read The Golem and the Jinni at a perfect time - the electricity had just come back on (after over eight hours without), snow was falling on a silent, solemn Jerusalem, and I wanted nothing more than a book into which I could dive without reemerging for many hours. I chose Helene Wecker's novel more for its length than its actual content, yet the mood and the vibe and the environment soon made their way into my own living room, and I found myself hooked.

Here's the thing about books like The Golem and the Jinni - they will always get a bit shafted by certain literary groups. For some, this richly written and very traditionally "literary" novel will be too heavy and atmospheric, seemingly lacking in plot for 3/4 of its length. For certain literary snobs, on the other hand, the book will be dismissed as simplistic and pedestrian because of a relatively straight-forward narrative, its length, and the fact that it's been pretty successful. Criticism of the latter sort particularly bothers me, because The Golem and the Jinni is actually a surprisingly alert and thought-provoking book. Wecker nudges a large number of Topics and Issues, without making them feel like a crutch or utterly ignored. There's quite a bit beneath the surface here, whether it's about belief and religion, loyalty and love, friendship or even human nature. I often found myself pausing to mull over a certain sentence, or thought, or idea Wecker had quietly slipped into the narrative.

That's not to say the book is flawless. Not at all. An entire subplot felt tacked on to make it a bit more conventional and "accessible". The characters involved in this story felt driven less by actual emotions as much as a need to insert this type of romance and drama, and it bothered me every time it arose. It's the sort of thing I feel ought to be taken care of in the editing stage, yet it somehow stuck. Not bad, exactly, but unnecessary in a novel that otherwise flowed very well.

The main reason to read The Golem and the Jinni is for those two characters, and their growing interactions with the world around them. There's the outsider-tries-to-understand-humanity thing here, except each character takes it to a different place. Both the Golem and the Jinni live in immigrant societies, surrounded by people who have come to the US in the hopes of starting a better life (or, in one case, ending it). "Chava" and "Ahmad" are foreigners among foreigners, each struggling with their own nature and their own needs. The Golem must fight her inherent servile nature at every moment; the Jinni is stripped of his powers and must constantly keep those powers he has left hidden. Both are guided by humans who themselves are unsure of how to help, humans who find themselves burdened with the knowledge they carry and the potential consequences.

The truth is, The Golem and the Jinni would have been a successful story even had the two characters never met (which they obviously inevitably do, though the course of their relationship and its placement within the larger novel both end up completely different from what I was expecting - in the best possible way). Had Wecker chosen only to look at the Syrian and Jewish communities of New York City at the end of the 19th century without ever having the two threads meet, the book still would have had a lot to say. The plot might have been severely hindered, but this alternate version of The Golem and the Jinni still would have been pretty good.

I really enjoyed The Golem and the Jinni. I enjoyed it for everything it is - intelligent, well-written in a very clear, simple way, thought-provoking, entertaining, heart-warming and engaging - as well as everything it isn't. This is a novel without much of the pretension I find in other books I'm recommended - it's not trying too hard to do anything (except maybe an attempt to be more mainstream - again, the unnecessary subplot...), and it doesn't hide its point in nonsense subtleties. The Golem and the Jinni is definitely a quieter, more subtle novel than many others of its ilk, but there's no trickery here, no omission which is supposed to convey cleverness, no hint of "well, if you don't understand it, it means you missed something". It's a book that can be appreciated and enjoyed on multiple levels. And it's a book I can warmly recommend to readers of many different genres. If you're on the fence - get off it. Read The Golem and the Jinni. It's not a perfect book, but it's a pretty great one nonetheless, and you just might find yourself as pleasantly surprised as I was.

Women in translation | Responses

In the wake of my post from a couple weeks ago about the dismal percentage of women writers who have been translated into English, I cannot in good conscience leave the matter alone. It's not done. My post was meant not to throw the observations to the wind, but to search for answers and make sure that the playing field starts to change.

First of all, I'd like to thank everyone who was involved in the conversation: everyone from bloggers, to translators, to publishers play an important role in finding the source of the problem and rectifying it. Without your insights and thoughts, this really would have just floated away, never to be mentioned again. We've already taken the first steps. Now we continue.

Here on the blog and over on Twitter, a few theories arose as to why the stats look the way they do. Tony Malone of Tony's Reading List suggested that perhaps men are perceived as writing better "literature" than women, hinging on the fact that books in translation are often of a more "literary" nature. After a short debate over the use of the word "perceived" (in which I would argue that using such a claim only further implies actual, active sexism...), Tony also rightly pointed out the sad notion that while women will gladly read books by men, men are somewhat less willing to read a book written by a woman, and that perhaps publishers are merely "hedging their bets".

Meanwhile, Meike Ziervogel of Peirene Press provided a publisher's view on the matter. She argued that women are simply not writing the type of Literature that Peirene, for example, want to publish, adding that women write more "genre" and less "literary fiction", and that their technique is often "not up to scratch" as compared with men. While I greatly appreciate her perspective on the matter, I'm not sure I agree with it. At all. To start with, I struggle with the definition of "literary fiction" Meike seems to be using, especially the idea that books should not form a type of escape. While we clearly have different ideas on art, its power and what even qualifies, what troubles me more is Meike's perception (again that word!) that women lack the technical talents male writers have.

This is a problematic idea for several reasons. One, there is no logical basis for it. Writing is in no way something biologically influenced - it's not as though because of their better upper body strength, men will obviously be better able to describe dewdrops on a leaf. More than that, however, is the fact that it's an extraordinarily unfair and broad generalization of both men and women's writing styles. I will not pretend to have ever read books with the same type of scouting eye that Meike must, but I have read a lot of books in my short lifetime. Usually, the only differences between writing styles stem from the very type of book itself. Does Hilary Mantel's writing lack technique? Obviously not. Does Marie NDiaye's odd writing sound like a woman or like a writer experimenting with a different style? Definitely the latter. Does Alice Munro's actual writing sound like a woman wrote it? Nope, though the topics may be viewed as more domestic and as such "effeminate" (an assessment I thoroughly disagree with, by the way).

In both Meike and Tony's comments, a certain subtext appears - that women are not writing the type of Literary and Important and Quality books that these publishers are seeking. I take particular offence at this. Besides the fact that I don't believe it (basing myself mostly off of Hebrew, where women are just as likely to produce quality Literature as men, yet significantly less likely to get translated - as we saw, no Israeli women were translated in 2013), I think it shows a greater problem with literary elitism. I don't want to get into that argument today, but if this remains the last hurdle to cross before women are properly represented in literature in translation, I will happily tear it down.

Michelle Bailat-Jones (of pieces fame) linked to a brilliant article which I wish I could have seen before writing my own paltry post: Alison Anderson's Words Without Borders article which is exactly about this lack of women in translation. Yet this article raises a point I failed to mention in my own post - the strikingly low percentage of women to be recognized by the various translations awards (to be discussed more in the next follow-up post).

Michelle and T. Olmstead (of BookSexy Review) went on to discuss what might be the source of the imbalance. Michelle pointed out that most of the books she had received in 2012 for review from publishers (unsolicited or pitched) were written by men, while she had been forced to specifically request books written by women. 2013 might emerge with better statistics (indeed, Michelle felt confident that it would), but based on the broader numbers, I am somehow skeptical that it will be a perfect split at the end. Based on other comments I've seen and my own observations of the literature-in-translation blogosphere, publishers sending more books by male authors might just be a trend. More statistics are needed before we can really point fingers - I would greatly appreciate more insight from other bloggers and reviewers who receive books for review directly from publishers.

The next stage comes in several parts, asking help from across the board. But we'll be looking at that in the next follow-up post, hopefully in the coming weeks. Brace yourselves: we've got a long way to go.

Review | Too Much Happiness

I'm really beginning to doubt whether or not it was wise to start my literary relationship with Alice Munro through Too Much Happiness. As a collection it is surprisingly strong, but though I recognized an obvious brilliance to Munro's writing (something which is often lacking in Nobel laureates, oddly enough), I didn't feel quite the emotional resonance I was expecting. It'll come, I'm certain - unlike an author like Mo Yan (who will take me a long time to revisit...) or an author like Herta Müller (with her depth and quiet pounding who can only be visited on rare, carefully planned occasions) - I have every intention of reading another of Munro's collections within the coming months.

The stories in Too Much Happiness generally follow the same idea - characters' lives revolving around a before-and-after pivot. These pivots are misleadingly quiet plot points, usually so calmly dealt with they almost lose their whiplash strength. These are not quiet events - divorce and death and children and love - but they lack the grandeur and pomp many other writers would ascribe to them. In "Fiction", the pivot is most strongly felt by a chapter-like division, giving us the set-up and then an entirely different story in the second half. Or the powerful opening story "Dimensions", which has reveals the backstory in bits, then all at once.

With the exception of the titular "Too Much Happiness" (the final story in the collection and by far the weakest - I'll get to it in a moment), each of the stories seemed to strike me like a punch while I was reading them, then leave behind a mildly bitter aftertaste (except "Dimensions", which simply left me speechless and almost physically winded), and then appear remarkably clearly in retrospect. Looking back on the stories a couple weeks later, I'm reminded of the characters and their lives. I'm reminded of Munro's absolutely clean writing. The stories have stuck, even if it seemed for a short time like they might not. They still don't scream, but they've firmly pushed their way to the front. They will not be forgotten so easily.

Weierstrass was last semester 

My main struggle with the collection on the whole comes from the final story - "Too Much Happiness". This, it should seem, would be right up my alley, telling the story of Sophia Kovalevsky, a mathematician in the late 19th century (with extra Weierstrass references!). But it's not. The back cover describes this one as being about Sophia's "yearnings", but if so, her yearnings are decidedly dull. "Too Much Happiness" is too long, too clumsy in its characterizations (namely, its lack of it - the previous story "Wood" managed to make me significantly more emotionally invested in the struggles of its lead than the almost-sprawling-by-comparison "Too Much Happiness". It's a story that seemed hemmed in by its own ambitions of telling a bigger story, but also hindered by a lack of space in which to grow and breathe. The story is also unique in that Munro seems to be experimenting with a different writing style (a bit more old-fashioned, less coolly detached and more dramatically involved). It's a nice idea, but I don't think it worked particularly well within the story, and certainly not within the rest of the collection. Much less as the closing story.

All in all, I liked Too Much Happiness. I wasn't blown away by it (no absolute adoration here) but I appreciated it very much. After hearing so much about Munro's stellar writing, it was a joy to experience it myself, and the multi-layered strength of her stories will stick with me for a while longer. It may not turn out to be Munro's best collection, but Too Much Happiness certainly made me want to read more of her stories... perhaps it wasn't such a bad introduction after all.

Where in the world are women writers?

A realization: most of the books in translation I've read this year have been written by men. A quick run through my reading list confirmed this suspicion: 21 written by men, 7 written by women.

This is a shockingly disproportionate number (especially since my overall male to female writer ratio is a perfect 50:50). I considered that it might just be my own personal reading tastes or biases, so I decided to run through Three Percent's list of titles in translation for 2013. The list is a bit outdated, but the results are strikingly similar to what I found in my own reading. Based on my rough calculation*, women writers contribute less than 30% of the literature that is translated into English.

The top three languages from which books were translated in 2013 are French, Spanish and German. Out of 59 books translated from French, 17 were written by women. Out of 41 books translated from Spanish, 7 were written by women**. Out of 35 books translated from German, 12 were written by women. Even here we see statistics that heavily favor male writers. Meanwhile, my (very brief) survey of French and German bestseller lists seemed to show a fairly balanced playing field - certainly there wasn't as wide a gap as what I found in the translations.

Closer to home for me, the four books that were translated from Hebrew were all written by men, despite the fact that I can firmly attest that Israeli literature tends to be very balanced in terms of men-women writers. The fact of the matter is that nobody has yet translated one of 2011's most highly regarded Israeli novels Rose of Lebanon, nor any of Gail Hareven's other novels (despite the fact that her one translated title won the Best Translated Book Award!), nor dozens of other highly respected novels and bestsellers written by Israeli women. And this is clearly something that is happening across the board, across the world.

What does this mean? For starters, it doesn't seem as though the source of the problem is in various countries around the world. Rather, it seems that the problem lies in the process of translation. It isn't that women aren't writing books, or that they aren't getting published in their own countries***. The problem is on the English-speaking world's receiving end. With us.

These are only preliminary findings. Without more information about Spanish, French, German and any other language bestsellers and without more understanding about the selection process for translation, there is little more to be said. Only this: readers of literature in translation, take note. If we were looking at a ratio of 40% to 60%, I would be able to accept it as a minor bias. But we're not talking about a small preference for male writers. We're talking about a preference for men that is over 70%... and that is a problem.

So readers: share your own stats. Let's find out where the problem starts - whether I'm missing something in France and Germany and Latin America, or whether something is getting stuck in the publisher's offices in the Anglo publishing world. Let's be aware that this problem even exists. Maybe then we can start to fix it.

* My calculation was generally based on first names (easily recognizable male-female names like Paul or Charlotte didn't get double-checked, names I was uncertain about I attempted to track down)
** One of these happens to be one of my favorite books of the year

*** Though I'm certain that this is the case for certain countries in which women do not have much freedom, it does not appear to be true for the major sources of literature in translation, nor would it make much sense given which countries we're talking about...

Review | The Girl Who Fell from the Sky

I'm not sure what it is about Heidi Durrow's The Girl Who Fell from the Sky. It's not that anything about it was inherently bad, or even specifically disappointing. It is ultimately the fact that the novel failed to move me and felt so under-resolved that leaves me with a wholly empty feeling and a sense of "what was the point?"

The Girl Who Fell from the Sky has been praised for its presentation of a character growing up mixed race, essentially growing up neither here nor there. Indeed, this would have been enough to set main character Rachel apart. Yet on top of this, Rachel has a troubled and traumatic past that is mostly revealed through different point-of-view chapters (essentially flashback chapters). These two heavy concepts alone should be enough to fill a couple hundred pages, but Durrow also tacked on multiple other threads that weakened the stronger parts of the novel.

The first major theme - that of growing up mixed race and never quite fitting in - is by far the novel's strongest. Durrow handles the racial issues deftly, using some familiar ideas and a couple new ones to emphasize Rachel's struggles. For example, Rachel's musings over her hair, her struggles with accepting it one way or another (and comparing it to her white mother's hair) felt entirely real and believable. Or how she couldn't just forget half of her origins - shown thr
oughout the book in her effort to retain her mother's Danish tongue. In these moments, Rachel truly came alive as a young woman struggling to find her identity in a society that generally views matters in a binary.

From here, though, Durrow's ideas and themes start to fall apart a bit. There was a muddled theme about redemption and drugs somewhere near the end of the book, but it utterly failed to lift off. Themes of alcoholism similarly seemed to come apart quickly. Meanwhile, the secondary plotline - that of the family tragedy that leads Rachel to live with her grandmother in the first place - didn't leave much of an impact on me. It felt much more like a straight-up plot device than an actual opportunity for character growth or development. Finally, Durrow's sharp turn towards focusing on sexuality in the latter half of the novel felt oddly out of place and did little to further either the story or character development. I have seen many readers praising the inclusion of this theme, however I found it to be in an awkward middle-ground - not given enough space to properly grow, but also intrusive to the core of the novel.

As a character herself, Rachel generally felt underdeveloped. True, the novel is a relatively short one, but in that time I didn't feel like I could understand her motives or many of her decisions. She seemed to exist in a bubble that occasionally ran tangent to the story, but was really disconnected from it. And that doesn't make sense for the main character (and generally the narrator) of a novel. The other characters didn't feel particularly better developed, though at least with them I felt as though their behavior was a bit clearer and less drawn from nowhere.

The strength of a novel like this could (and should) have been rescued by Durrow's writing. Alas, it was not exactly to my taste - neither crisp enough to compensate for occasionally awkward turns of phrase, nor beautiful enough to make up for my general disinterest in the characters. It's the sort of writing I know many readers enjoy, but it didn't thrilled and it didn't moved me, leaving very little impression.

Overall, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky is an interesting novel with quite a bit of potential that just didn't live up to my expectations. I appreciated the messages it tried to get across, however I think Durrow attempted to tackle too many ideas in too short a book, ultimately leaving each one lacking for it. Besides the notable racial themes, nothing was particularly worthwhile about the book - not the characters, nor the writing, nor the way the premise played out. I can see how readers who prefer a writing style like Durrow's might have had a much greater appreciation for the book than I had, but I personally wouldn't be able to recommend it to readers.

The pendulum swings

Here's the thing I've had to accept about my life right now: I don't have as much time to read. I just don't. Lives are messy, complicated beasts that take up our time in different ways. Mine right now is filled with stress, work, extremely difficult studies, and personal things. This is how it goes. Reading comes second to school, comes second to health, comes second to a lot of things. And so reading has been bumped down many slots on the stuff-that-is-important list. That doesn't mean I've stopped reading altogether. It just means that when I do read, I don't have quite the time or the same temperament for it that I might have once had. It also means that I have less time to write reviews, or my thoughts on publishing, or my thoughts on the book world altogether. Alas.

I often talk about how I don't like setting goals for my reading, or reading according to some sort of plan, but the truth is that I inevitably don't follow my own advice. I may not set a direct reading plan, but I have that rough sketch, those "guidelines" and quiet hidden quotas that shape my reading from behind the scenes. It does matter to me, despite the fact that I wish it wouldn't.

These quotas exist because at the end of the day I have a general life-goal from reading. And that goal is to read far and wide. I watch what books I read to make sure I don't get caught up in one genre too exclusively, or wrapped up in one very limited mindset, or just reading the default. I don't want to read books just because those are the ones that publishers felt were worth the strongest marketing. I don't want to read books that repeat themselves, that tell me the same story again and again. I want books that challenge my thinking, entertain me, excite me, and take me to new places, intellectually and maybe a bit more literally. This has made me branch out my reading much more than I ever could have imagined, ultimately leading me to many wonderful books.

But it also leads me to a lot of books that are, for lack of a better term, hard. And I don't really mean books with more complex vocabularies or darker stories or even necessarily a greater subtlety to their storytelling. Often, it's just literally a book that's harder to read. For example, a book in Hebrew. Or a particularly thick tome. Or the type of book that requires perfect concentration for four hours while you devour it in one go, while I can only give it fifteen minutes between classes. To be perfectly honest, many of the books I've read in the past year have been wholly unsatisfying, while many of the best have been the ones from the genres I tend least to visit. Some of the most "standard" books have proven to be the most innovative and exciting, while some of the most "impressive" books have turned out to be nothing more than overly ambitious messes.

The pendulum swings. When I was very young, I used to read a lot of fantasy. Later it was historical fiction, then the Classics, then a burst of young adult and "grown-up" fiction (mostly American). Then the growing power of translated literature, my desire to seek out the strange and the magical. And now? Now the pendulum looks like it's heading back towards all those old friends, to books that give me new angles from which to view the familiar. I still don't want to read the same books I've read many times before, but I also don't want to feel like reading is hard work. I don't want to feel like I'm forcing myself to read these huge post-modern "masterpieces" when I'm just not feeling it right now. When it turns out that a simple work of fiction in a genre I tend not to visit manages to suck me in for a whole day. But the pendulum swings, and I know that one day it will take me back to these books I'm currently setting aside. In the meantime though, I think I'm just going to have to take it "easier".