World Books Feature: Summer Reads for the Adventurous

It may be summer, but your brain needn’t go on vacation. A list of recommendations of fiction in translation that demands and repays close attention.

I resist the rule that books for the beach have to go down as easy as piña coladas. My eccentric and eclectic list of summer reads is made up of fiction in translation that demands and repays close attention. In addition, I feel that the intrepid group of small or university presses that publish books in translation should be rewarded for their courage. Thus I haven’t included first-rate books from major publishers but highlight offerings from less mainstream presses.

Note that many of the books covered by World Books over the past few months, from “Crossing the Hudson” and “The Foundation Pit” to “The Ninth,”  are worth considering as well.

Feel free to send in other suggestions of worthwhile international fiction, especially those from the smaller publishers.

1) The Halfway House by Guillermo Rosales. Translated by Anna Kushner. New Directions. Rosales destroyed most of his work before he committed suicide in 1993, but the anguished Cuban writer left this short novel, a masterful kick-in-the-teeth. The plot revolves around a man who, after his release from a Miami psychiatric ward, struggles to maintain his sanity in a hellish halfway house. An unconvincing note of sentimentality in the book’s final pages doesn’t dilute the story’s gaunt, gut-wrenching impact.

2) Courtesans and Opium: Romantic Illusions of the Fool of Yangzhou by Anonymous. Translated from the Chinese by Patrick Hanan. Columbia University Press. You want a racy, nineteenth-century epic about sex, sin, drugs, and prostitution set in China? Here it is, a bawdy journey by five brothers through the gaudy brothels of Yangzhou. The novel’s alleged purpose was to serve as a cautionary tale. The book’s sensual gusto overwhelms any taint of moralism.

3) In the United States of Africa by Abourahaman A. Waberi. Translated from the French by David and Nicole Ball. University of Nebraska Press. Waberi, a French-speaking African writer, makes expert use of an acidic satiric set-up worthy of Swift. History has reversed itself: millions flee the poverty of the United States and Europe for the prosperity of Africa. A short, bittersweet, and amusing mediation on multicultural reversals of fortune.

4) The Essential Yusuf Idris: Masterpieces of the Egyptian Short Story by Yusuf Idris. Various translators. Edited by Denys Johnson-Davies. The American University in Cairo Press. Surprisingly, this is the first volume in English that brings together a selection of short stories by one of Egypt’s finest writers (a giant of Arabic literature), rumored to have been on the short list for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Idris’s tales are often straightforward psychological studies of the frustrations and desires of society’s have-nots; the author brings a clear-eyed power to his depictions of individuals grappling with controversial sexual and political issues, from homosexuality to the threat of religious fundamentalism.