Tag: Véronique Olmi

10 books, Book lists

10 of my favourite books by women writers in translation

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August is Women in Translation Month, an initiative designed to encourage people to read books by women in translation, which is now in its sixth year.

This year it is slightly different. Blogger Meytal Radzinski, who set up the first #WITMonth in 2014, is hoping to build a new canon by curating a list of the 100 best books by women writers in translation. She’s invited readers, bloggers, book fans, publishers, translators, editors and writers — in fact, anyone who loves books — to nominate up to 10 titles by women who write in any language other than English. (You can find out more about that here.)

I thought I would contribute to this exercise with the following list. Note that some of these titles have previously appeared in a list of 5 books for Women in Translation month that I compiled in 2016, so apologies for any duplication. The books have been arranged in alphabetical order by author’s name — click the title to see my full review:

The_lover

‘The Lover’ by Marguerite Duras
Translated from the French by Barbara Bray
An evocative, melancholy novel — set in Indochina in 1929 — about a young French girl’s affair with a South Vietnamese man 12 years her senior.


‘A Woman’s Story’ by Annie Ernaux
Translated from the French by Tanya Leslie
Deeply affecting and brutally honest memoir about the author’s mother and the sometimes-strained relationship they shared.

‘Bad Intentions’ by Karin Fossum
Translated from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund
A “whydunnit” that looks at what happens when three young men go on a weekend camping trip but only two of them come back.

‘This Place Holds No Fear’ by Monika Held
Translated from the German by Anne Posten
A touching and compelling portrait of a marriage and an exploration of what happens to Holocaust survivors long after the war is over.

Soviet Milk
‘Soviet Milk’ by Nora Ikstena
Translated from the Latvian by Margita Gailitis
A powerful novella that explores motherhood, the freedom to pursue your calling and life under Soviet rule.

The Party Wall
‘The Party Wall’ by Catherine Leroux
Translated from the French by Lazer Lederhendler
Shortlisted for the 2016 Giller Prize, this is a complex, multi-layered and exhilarating story about identity and self-discovery, with a strong focus on kinship, biological parentage and the ties that bind siblings together.


‘Confessions’ by Kanae Minato
Translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder
A dark revenge tale about a teacher who takes the law into her own hands and dishes out cruel and unusual punishment to the students she thinks killed her daughter.


‘The Housekeeper and the Professor’ by Yoko Ogawa
Translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder
Charming and heartfelt story about a young housekeeper and her client, an elderly mathematics professor whose short-term memory only lasts 80 minutes.

beside the sea

‘Beside the Sea’ by Véronique Olmi
Translated from the French by Adriana Hunter
Profoundly moving novella about a single mother with no money who takes her young children to the seaside for a short vacation — with tragic consequences.


‘The Mussel Feast’ by Birgit Vanderbeke
Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch
A deceptively simple story — about a delayed celebratory dinner — that morphs into a complex portrait of a tyrannical man with an unrealistic expectation of family life but is actually a metaphor for East and West Germany.

Have you read any of these books? Or can you recommend other translations by women writers? Are you taking part in #WITMonth? Which 10 books would you recommend?

5 books, Book lists

5 books for Women in Translation month

kimbofo

5-books-200pixAugust is Women in Translation Month, an initiative designed to encourage people to read books by women in translation.

Why? Mainly to redress the balance: figures suggest that just 30 per cent of literature in translation is written by women. According to blogger Meytal Radzinski, who set up the first #WITMonth in 2014, the situation has changed little over the past three years — and now it’s time to change it. (This post gives you all the stats you need to know.)

It’s great to see that this year’s #WITMonth seems to have really caught the imagination of readers, publishers and booksellers everywhere. All the major bookshops here in London — Waterstones, Folyes, the LRB et al — have got behind it. So, too, has the Reading Agency.

I’m a keen reader of translated fiction (you can see everything I’ve reviewed here), so thought I would highlight some of my favourites by women writers. The books have been arranged in alphabetical order by author’s name — click the title to see my full review:

The_lover

‘The Lover’ by Marguerite Duras
Translated from the French by Barbara Bray

This is an evocative and sensual novel about a young girl’s affair with a man 12 years her senior, which is supposedly based on the author’s own life. Set in Indochina in 1929, it is compelling in the way it explores sexual taboos and the tensions between the French colonists and the South Vietnamese, and the writing has a beautiful melancholic tinge to it. It’s not a story that is easily forgotten…

Bad intentions

‘Bad Intentions’ by Karin Fossum
Translated from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund

Three young men go on a weekend trip to an isolated cabin by a lake, but only two of them return to shore. It’s not so much what happens, but why that makes this novella such a terrifically good read, one that explores culpability, peer group pressure, betrayal and paranoia. It’s the ninth volume of Fossum’s Inspector Sejer series, but it works as a stand-alone book. I’ve read quite a few of Fossum’s crime novels — and I’ve yet to come across a bad one.

This-place-holds-no-fear

‘This Place Holds No Fear’ by Monika Held
Translated from the German by Anne Posten

One of my favourite reads from 2015, this extraordinarily beautiful novel is both a touching portrait of a marriage and an exploration of what happens to Holocaust survivors long after the war is over. How do such people damaged by the unfathomable horror and trauma of the Nazi death camps get on with their lives? Based on a true story — the author interviewed and spent time with Auschwitz survivors — it feels incredibly authentic. It’s certainly powerful and compelling.

Hotel Iris

‘Hotel Iris’ by Yoko Ogawa
Translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder

This is another haunting tale about the relationship between a younger woman and an older man. But Ogawa’s story is more dark and twisted than Duras’ (above). The affair puts the woman in danger because the man is a sexual deviant and prone to unexpected rages and no one knows that the pair have hooked up. This tension-filled story is written in such a quietly understated and restrained style it’s not until you finish it that you realise how strange and disturbing it really is…

beside the sea

‘Beside the Sea’ by Véronique Olmi
Translated from the French by Adriana Hunter

This profoundly moving novella looks at what happens when a mother feels she can’t cope with her children. She takes them on a holiday to the seaside but doesn’t have the money to do much other than pay for the squalid accommodation that she’s arranged for them. The kind of story that could have been lifted from the news headlines, this has an earth-shattering ending that will make you think twice about judging women who commit infanticide.

Have you read any of these books? Or can you recommend other translations by women writers? Are you taking part in #WITMonth?

Author, Book review, Books in translation, Fiction, France, literary fiction, Peirene Press, Publisher, Setting, Véronique Olmi

‘Beside the Sea’ by Véronique Olmi

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BesideTheSea

Fiction – paperback; Peirene Press; 121 pages; 2010. Translated from the French by Adriana Hunter.

Véronique Olmi’s novel Beside the Sea has been a bestseller in its native France since publication in 2001. Thanks to a new London-based independent publishing house, Peirene Press, it has now been translated into English for the first time.

Peirene’s mission is to publish contemporary European literature in translation that is thought-provoking, well designed and short. Beside the Sea certainly ticks all those boxes — and then some.

The book opens with a single mother taking her two young boys, Stan, 9, and Kevin, 5, on their first visit to the sea. Immediately the reader realises that this is no ordinary trip — they leave on “the last bus of the evening, so no one would see us” — and this is no ordinary mother — “Yep, sometimes I sit in the kitchen for hours and I couldn’t give a stuff about anything”.

And even before they arrive at their unnamed destination things do not go according to plan: the boys play up on the bus (“talking loudly, peeing and blubbing”), and the mother, who narrates the story, is worried that other passengers are talking about them and that she will miss her stop. When they do arrive it gets worse: it’s raining, they get lost in the dark, and when they eventually find the hotel, it’s a severe disappointment:

Everything was brown: the walls, the lino, the doors, it was an old-fashioned brown – they can’t have repainted the place for centuries, and it looked like years of dirt had stuck to the walls and floor, it was like being inside a cardboard box, a shoebox actually.

This sets the pattern for what can only be described as a rather sad and squalid holiday, in which it becomes increasingly clear that the stark reality of the trip does not mesh with the mother’s expectations. Olmi plays her cards very close to her chest and drops the odd clue to the woman’s background without spelling anything out. We discover the woman has no teeth and “quite often I daren’t smile or laugh without putting my hand over my mouth” but we do not know how she lost them. Is a poor diet to blame? Perhaps domestic violence? A drug habit?

We know that she has mental health problems (“It’s not true that I’m paralyzed by my anxieties, like they say at the health centre”) and that she often takes to her bed to shut out the realities of her life. She’s also very poor and has paid for the trip using “all my little savings scrimped from the change at the baker, and sometimes at the supermarket”, bringing her coppers long in a little tea-tin.

But it’s also apparent that she loves her boys very much and that the whole trip has been planned so that they can see the sea for once in their lives.

Notwithstanding the brevity of the book, it does not take long for an ominous sense of doom to rise off the page. Despite the mother’s best intentions “bad luck” has a habit of getting in the way and screwing everything up. It’s hard not to feel pity for her and even more pity for her boys. You wonder where it might end.

And then Olmi delivers her final shocking blow. To be perfectly honest, I had seen enough reviews of this book on other blogs to guess that something very bad was going to happen. However, I still found the ending so powerful, so intense and so quietly devastating that I’m still thinking about it a week down the line… By showing the extraordinary in the very ordinary, Olmni has crafted a fine novel indeed. Beside the Sea may not be a cheery read, but it’s a hugely emotional one that deserves the widest possible audience.