Tag Archives: translation

My Brilliant Friend -Elena Ferrante

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A former student, someone for whom I have a lot of respect and admiration, encouraged (aka begged) me to read Elena Ferrante’s novel My Brilliant Friend, a book that was recently named #1 Book of the Century by the New York Times. I didn’t own the book and I don’t know whether I would have ever gotten around to reading the book given the state of my physical TBR pile, but I was next up for book club and so I chose this one, mostly in deference to Luke. Despite the fact that it was published in 2012 and is relatively popular (and has its own series on Prime), none of the members of my book club had ever read it.

This novel is the first of a quartet by the famously private Ferrante. Apparently, no one actually knows who she is, so the author’s name is actually a pseudonym, and since we don’t know very much about her, claims that My Brilliant Friend is autofiction is also an unfair characterization. How can we say the events of the novel are drawn from the author’s own life if we don’t know anything about her? Or him? Whether or not who the author is makes any real difference is beside the point at any rate.

Luke loved it. Two of the women in my book club of eight didn’t finish it. Three women loved it. (My best friend, Michelle, is on book three and has already watched the entire series.) Two women hated it (one of these is one of the DNFers). And two of us (myself included) felt just meh about it.

In a nutshell, the novel opens when 60-something Elena (also known as Lenu) receives a phone call from Rino, the adult son of her oldest friend, Lila (also known as Raffaella or Lina). Lila is missing. Poof. Vanished. This news seems unsurprising to Elena even though “it’s been three decades since [Lila] told [her] that she wanted to disappear without leaving a trace.”

Elena seems annoyed by the news and she doesn’t offer Rino much in the way of comfort. Instead she thinks

I was really angry.

We’ll see who wins this time, I said to myself. I turned the computer on and began to write– all the details of our story, everything that still remained in my memory.

And that’s essentially what My Brilliant Friend is, the written account of the friendship/rivalry love/hate relationship between these two girls beginning in the 1950s, in a neighbourhood outside of Naples, Italy. It’s the story of poverty, crime, the power of education, loyalty, family and friendship.

This is what Luke said:

“I loved the portrayal of friendship and how central it was to forming them into who they are. I loved the background setting of Naples and how poverty is corrupting everyone’s life. All of the characters come alive for me and I find her such an incredibly powerful writer. I was so invested in Lila and Elena’s relationship. […] I think she’s a beautiful writer telling a wonderful story…”

Luke and I talk about books whenever we have the chance. When he was in my Young Adult Lit class he read more than anyone and he read widely. If I talked about a book I really loved, chances were pretty high that he would read it. So it hurt me a little bit not to love this book as much as he loved this book. For me, I found it sort of slow and dry and although the friendship between the two characters was well-drawn, I didn’t especially care about either of them. I certainly feel no compulsion to carry on with the books, although I may watch the series this winter.

The New York Times compiled their Top 100 books by asking 503 literary luminaries to provide their list of all-time best books based on the following criteria: impact, originality and lasting influence. It’s an interesting list which demonstrates just how subjective a ‘best books’ list can be. Number 2 was The Warmth of Other Suns, a book I have never heard of by an author I have never heard of. Kazou Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go barely made the top ten. Atonement by Ian McEwan was #26. 26!!! Both my children would say Atonement is one of the best books ever written…and I would agree. Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, which won the Pulitzer (although not without controversy), came in at #46. Station Eleven was #93.

I tasked the ladies in my book club to pick their top three books of all time based on the criteria provided by the Times. We’ll share those Top 3 lists at our next meeting and with their permission, I will share them with you here after we meet.

The fact that no one reads the same book is one of the best things about reading, but I am sad that I didn’t love My Brilliant Friend more than I did. Sorry, Luke.

Tender is the Flesh – Augustina Bazterrica

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I mean, there are dystopian novels and then there’s Tender is the Flesh.

Marcos Tejo’s life has fallen apart. His father has dementia and is existing in assisted living. His wife has had an emotional breakdown and has left to stay with her mother after the death of their infant son. Oh, yeah, and a deadly virus – well, that’s what the government claims anyway – has made it impossible to eat animals, so everyone now eats humans. That, of course, helps with population growth too, so it’s a win win.

People are specially bred as meat and Marcos works at one of the country’s best slaughterhouses.

No one can call them human because that would mean giving them an identity. They call them product, or meat, or food. Except for him; he would prefer not to have to call them by any name.

Bazterrica’s book is all kinds of ick. In scene after scene, we are treated to graphic descriptions of how this “special meat” is treated. And trust me when I say, it’s not good. It will be impossible not to imagine how the animals we eat every day are treated, and if there ever was a case for veganism, this book would be it. But, according to the scientists in Tender is the Flesh,

animal protein [is] necessary to live [and] doctors confirmed that plant protein didn’t contain all the essential amino acids, [and] experts assured that methane emissions from cattle had been reduced but malnutrition was on the rise, [and] magazines published articles on the dark side of vegetables.

When Marcos is gifted an F.G.P. (First Generation Pure) “head” to consume, his ambivalent feelings – which he mostly keeps buried – come to the surface. Once he cleans her up and discovers she’s beautiful he moves her from the barn to the house and one thing leads to another. The head can’t talk, of course; their vocal chords are removed – the killing is less noisy that way – so I guess their relationship is based on a needs must basis.

I mean, sure, I guess Tender is the Flesh has stuff to say, but Marcos is a hard character to warm up to. And you have to wade through a bucket of entrails and other gruesome stuff to get there. You’d kind of hope that Marcos would have some sort of epiphany or something, but this book is bleak start to finish.

And also. Yuck.

Nothing – Janne Teller

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Translated from the Danish, Janne Teller’s award-winning YA novel Nothing is pretty dang bleak. When fourteen-year-old Pierre Anthon announces on the first day of school that “Nothing matters”, he sets off a chain reaction of events that runs the gamut from the childish to the horrific to the ridiculous.

Pierre Anthon and his hippie father live in a commune, so his classmates figure it makes sense for him to take the position that “It’s all a waste of time. […] Everything begins only to end. The moment you were born you begin to die. That’s how it is with everything.”

Pierre Anthon takes his belongings, leaves school and proceeds to climb the plum tree in front of his house. As his classmates pass by he slings hard plums and his dismal world view at them. His friends decide that they have no choice but to coax him out of the tree and the only way to do that is to prove that life is worth something.

The kids come up with a plan. They’ll create a sort of installation at the old saw mill. The will collect things that matter. At first, they ask their neighbours to make a contribution and the items start to accumulate: old crockery, a rose from a bridal bouquet, photographs. Then, feeling that they didn’t have enough skin in the game and that Pierre Anthon would see straight through them, they decided they needed to pony up and make a personal contribution to the cause. That’s when things start getting tricky.

Pierre Anthon’s view is decidedly nihilistic: religious and moral principles don’t matter, and life is meaningless. As the teens push each other to contribute things that are deeply personal, they cross more than one line. They soon lose sight of what they set out to do and their whole experiment becomes less about trying to help their friend see the value in life and more an exercise in horror.

Translation aside (and you know how I generally feel about them), Nothing is a surprisingly complex book. At first I thought it was going to be juvenile; the characters are barely teens and they sound young; the ideas and the themes in this novel, however, are anything but. The novel starts out quite innocently, but it goes down a very dark path, invites the reader to consider some equally dark ideas and you won’t come out the other end feeling even remotely hopeful about life.

I Remember You – Yrsa Sigurðardóttir

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Yrsa Sigurðardóttir is a big deal in Iceland and I Remember You is the winner of the Icelandic Crime Fiction Award. It sounded like a book that I would really enjoy and I am always game to try new-to-me authors. The thing that I keep forgetting is that nine times out of ten translations are often disappointing, and this was no exception.

I Remember You is two stories, really. In one, three friends Garðar, his wife Katrín  and their widowed friend, Líf, have decided to travel to Hesteyri, a deserted village “way up north in the middle of nowhere.” The reason for this journey? It’s really Líf’s dead husband Einar’s fault.

He had spun them the story of a village at the end of the world, beauty and peace, and endless hiking trails in an unforgettable setting. Garðar had been inspired – not by the lure of nature, but by the fact that Einar hadn’t been able to rent a room in Hesteyri, since the only guesthouse there had been full. Katrín  couldn’t remember which of them had gone on to suggest they see if any of the other houses there were for sale and transform one into a guesthouse, but it didn’t matter: once the idea had been mooted there was no going back.

So, these three crazy kids head out to this remote place, in the winter, to begin refurbishing the house that is without electricity, running water, heat and, oh, yeah, there’s no one else around for miles. The captain of the boat who takes them to Hesteyri tells them they can return with him, free of charge, but they’re keen on this adventure. Lord knows why.

In the parallel story, Freyr, a psychiatrist, is helping Dagný, a police detective, discover who had broken into a primary school and caused a lot of damage. Freyr still isn’t over the loss of his son, Benni, who disappeared three years ago. His marriage is done, and he has thrown himself into his work. At first it appears that Freyr’s story has nothing to do with what’s happening on Hesteyri, but the more digging Freyr does the more coincidences start to reveal themselves.

I wish I could tell you that all of this is super creepy, but it’s not.  It takes f-o-r-e-v-e-r to get anywhere until the very end, when things seem to unravel super quickly. And, of course, the dialogue – especially near the end – is as clunky as hell. I understand this is a translation, but I always think it would be better to have someone go over dialogue after the translation is done to try and make people sound more natural. Given the circumstances these people find themselves in, you’d think they’d spend less time explaining and more time reacting.

There were a couple of creepy moments, but overall, it was a lot of fuss and bother for nothing.

The Perfect Nanny – Leila Slimani

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nannyLeila Slimani’s novel The Perfect Nanny was one of The New York Times  Top 10 books of 2018. Hmmm. It was also the winner of the Goncourt Prize. (Yeah, I’d never heard of that one, either, but apparently it’s “a prize in French literature, given by the académie Goncourt to the author of “the best and most imaginative prose work of the year”. Wikipedia) To me, I thought it was going to be a quick little thriller with a pedigree that was perhaps a cut above. Because go into any bookstore these days and there are about a zillion thrillers out there. How are you supposed to know what’s good?

I’ll save you the trouble: not The Perfect Nanny.

Myriam, a French-Moroccan lawyer, and Paul, her husband who is a music producer,  need someone to look after their two small children, Mila and Adam. They live in a small apartment in Paris and Myriam has recently decided to go back to work. They interview a few potential nannies, and then they meet Louise.

She must have magical powers to have transformed this stifling, cramped apartment into a calm, light-filled place. Louise has pushed back the walls. She has made the cupboards deeper, the drawers wider. She has let the sun in.

To Myriam, Louise is “a miracle worker.” Not only does she transform their living space, she “sews buttons back on to jackets…hems skirts…washes curtains…changes sheets…she is like Mary Poppins.”

She works her magic with the children, too and “When Myriam gets back from work in the evenings, she finds dinner ready. The children are calm and clean, not a hair out of place.”

But of course, not all is as perfect as it seems and we know that from The Perfect Nanny‘s opening line “The baby is dead.”

Slimani weaves Louise’s backstory throughout the novel, snippets of information about her dead husband, the horrible Jacques, her MIA daughter, Stephanie, other homes and families she has worked with. Simmering just below the surface, Louise is fragile. It seems she has buried all her own needs in service to others. She lives in a shithole; she has no friends; she has no money. Without someone else to look over, Louise is a non-person.

The Perfect Nanny has been compared to  Gone Girl  but I don’t think it’s an apt comparison. This book is a slow-moving, naval-gazing look at motherhood and surrogacy. It’s about how we treat people in subservient positions, about privilege. Yes, that opening line might make you think you’re about to read a thriller, but there’s never any question of whodunit and so all that remains is the why. At the end of the day, I didn’t care about any of these characters, so the why hardly mattered.

 

 

Popular Music from Vittula – Mikael Niemi

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popularmusicI didn’t get this book – at all. Everyone from the New York Times to Entertainment Weekly waxed poetic about its beauty and prose that “buzzes with wonder, fearlessness and ecstatic ignorance.” Um. I didn’t get it.

Translated from the Swedish, Popular Music from Vittula is a “novel” that actually seems more like a memoir  – or a series of loosely connected short stories –  because if there was a narrative thread here, I wasn’t seeing it.

The main character and narrator is Matti and we meet him as an adult “in a fix in the Thorong La Pass” (which is on Mount Annapurna, Nepal) where  he finds himself 17, 765 feet above sea level, with his lips stuck to  a Tibetan prayer plaque. I am sure what happens next is meant to be comical but, sadly, I didn’t laugh. And I didn’t laugh at any of the other crazy escapades Matti finds himself embroiled in from the age of five straight through to his teenage years.

Matti and his friend, Niila, meet at the neighbourhood playground and their friendship is cemented during a nose-picking session. The rest of this story traces their frienship, particularly their love for music, for the next decade or so.  Their otherwise straightforward lives are touched by elements of magical realism. (Did these two five year olds really manage to get on a plane and fly all the way to Frankfurt?)

Matti’s story dips in and out of his life, giving the reader a chance to experience the first time he ever heard Elvis Presley sing (in his sister’s bedroom), the first time he goes to school, his first kiss. I wish I could say that the book was more than the sum of its parts, but for me I just didn’t get it.

The Last Night I Spent With You by Mayra Montero

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The Last Night I Spent With You is a slim volume, only 115 pages. Translated from the Spanish, Montero’s novel tells the story of Celia and Fernando – a middle-aged couple on a cruise. Their only daughter has just been married and Fernando’s friend, Bermudez, has sagely offered this advice: “women lose their inhibitions on ships.”

Actually, it seems as though everyone does.

Both Fernando and Celia are trying to come to terms with suddenly being cut loose from the strings that tied them to their daughter and each other. Fernando, too, seems to be experiencing a bit of a midlife crisis: death is looming. As their ship sails and docks, Fernando falls into an affair with Julieta, a middle-aged passenger.  For her part, Celia reminisces about an affair she’d had several years ago, when she’d been taking care of her ailing father.

Everything about this voyage is sexually charged in a way, one gathers, things haven’t been for several years between this married couple.

At last we were alone, it was true, after almost twenty-three years of winters and vacations, springs and birthdays, when Elena had been the axis of our lives. Elena growing up, becoming pretty, becoming taller than Celia, much more slender, infinitely more flirtatious. Our daughter Elena.

The Last Night I Spent With You is graphic and the writing is – despite it being a translation – good. The characters are selfish and often  behave inappropriately. It’s hard to say what they are searching for. It’s even harder to say whether, by the novel’s end, they’ve found it.

Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson

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Out Stealing Horses has been on my tbr list for ages, so I was happy when it was chosen as the December read for my book club. I was also surprised because the woman who chose generally dislikes translations and this novel was translated from the original Norwegian. Anyway, I settled in and finished the book (one of the few in the group who actually did) and even after discussing it – I am not sure how I feel about the book.

The story concerns 67 year old Trond Sander who is living in isolation after the death of his second wife. The novel moves seamlessly between Trond’s every day concerns (getting his driveway plowed and stacking wood) and his memories of his youth. The summer he was 15 he and his father had left Trond’s mother and sister in Oslo and come to a cottage quike like the one Trond is currently inhabiting. It was there that Trond’s world was knocked off-kilter – not only by a tragedy that occurred in his friend Jon’s family, but also by events in his own life.

It took my a while to settle into this book. It’s a quiet novel and while the writing is quite powerful (particularly Pettersen’s descriptions of the natural world), I found the long sentences strangely difficult…too many commas or something. Still, I eventually stopped wanting to add full stops and gave myself over to Trond’s remarkable childhood recollections.

I’m not sure this book will appeal to everyone and so it’s not one that I can whole-heartedly recommend. That said – I do think it achieves something quite remarkable. As Trond’s story unfolds we learn a universal truth – sometimes there are no satisfactory explanations for life’s mysteries.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

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Several months ago Muriel Barbery’s novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog was chosen as the book for the bookstore reading group I lead. We have a sort of willy nilly way of choosing our books and this novel ended up on the top of the heap. When we came together to discuss it a month later, other than the woman who had thrown it into the pile, no one else had finished the book- including me. I got about halfway through…and I just really didn’t like the book at all. So imagine my dismay when the novel was chosen by my longstanding book club as our first novel for our new reading year! I had no choice but to finish the book.

So, I started again. And strangely, this time around, I didn’t find the book so grating. That’s not to say that I found it all that plausible, either. Still, I did manage to get through it.

Barbery’s novel tells the story of Renee, a concierge at an elegant apartment building in Paris.

I am short, ugly and plump, I have bunions on my feet and, if I am to credit early mornings of self-inflicted disgust, the breath of a mammoth. I did not go to college, I have always been poor, discreet and insignificant. (19)

Renee has, despite what she considers her considerable flaws, a deep and abiding love for literature, art and music. Seriously, the novel opens with a rumination on Marx – which is perhaps the reason why I didn’t groove to the novel straight away the first time around: I know nothing about Marx.

Paloma lives in the building with her parents and older sister. At twelve, Paloma is already sick of the world and everyone in it.

My parents are rich, my family is rich and my sister and I are, therefore rich….Despite all that, despite all this good fortune and all this wealth, I have known for a long time that the final destination is the goldfish bowl. How do I know? Well, the fact is that I am very intelligent. Exceptionally intelligent. (23)

The Elegance of the Hedgehog is about appearances. Renee is forever fearful about giving away her love of the finer things; after all, she’s just a concierge. Paloma,  is keeping a journal of profound thoughts and plotting her own death. And then into their lives comes a Japanese gentleman named Kakuro Ozu. He sees straight through these women, into their very heart of hearts and changes them in ways they might have never imagined.

This novel was a sensation in France. As with any translation, it’s important to remember that you are not reading it in its original form; something is bound to be lost in the translation no matter how good it is.

I have a feeling that when we discuss this novel tomorrow night, most everyone will have loved it. I didn’t love it (in fact I didn’t like the ending at all!), but I did see the novel’s charms- even though I often found the novel pretentious (all these mini-lessons on art and literature) and perhaps just a tad contrived.