Books
World Books Review: Life Under Mao
Bi Feiyu’s satiric novel about village life during the Cultural Revolution is uneven, but he displays an uncanny understanding of young women and the way they use their sexuality to try to take control of their lives.
Job: The Story of a Simple Man
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German translator Ross Benjamin won the 2010 Woolf prize for his version in English of the critical study Speak, Nabokov. His latest translation, Joseph Roth’s 1930 novel Job: The Story of a Simple Man, comes from Archipelago Books. One of the finest literary evocations of the world of Eastern European Jewry obliterated by World War II, Job was a bestseller in 1931 when it was first appeared in English. Still, the novel has not gotten the attention it deserves, even though Roth (1894-1939) is now recognized as one of the major German writers of the 20th century. Benjamin’s translation does this masterpiece, a modern retelling of the biblical story of Job, justice in English. World Books editor Bill Marx spoke to Benjamin about the challenges of translating Roth. Download MP3World Books Review: A Welcome ‘Return’ to Form
What’s impressive about the thirteen stories in this volume is the coherence of Roberto Bolaño’s vision. Though the tales take place in different countries and different time periods, though some are straight fiction, some are vaguely autobiographical, and some even drift towards magical realism, each new yarn feels like a chapter in a continuous narrative.
World Books Review: A Vivid ‘Denial’
Jessica Stern’s memoir is a difficult book, uncomfortable to read and even more uncomfortable to review. It is a first-hand, detailed account by a Harvard expert on international terrorism of her rape by a stranger when she was 15 years old.
World Books Review: The Mad Bad Moralist
The collection’s choice of writings by the late 18th century Teutonic bad boy Heinrich von Kleist is streamlined, yet carefully balanced, giving readers a neatly packed sampling of his necessary lunacy, narrative brilliance, and the far-reaching vision that influenced Freud, Thomas Mann, and Franz Kafka.
World Books Podcast: Sefi Atta
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In Africa and Europe, Nigerian writer Sefi Atta’s reputation is stellar. Her novel “Everything Good Will Come” won the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature. And her recently published collection of short stories. “News From Home,” garnered the 2009 NOMA Award for Publishing. But she has yet to garner the critical attention she deserves in America, though she has lived in Mississippi for over a decade. Bill Marx spoke to Atta about what roles religion and feminism play in her fiction and why her complex vision of Africa defies popular expectations. Download MP3
World Books Review: Mao and the Chess Master
In one of the novellas in this fine, powerful collection, acclaimed Chinese writer Ah Cheng probes chess much as the best of Western writers have. What’s more, these stories, which first appeared in the mid-1980s, changed the course of his country’s literature by challenging Maoist conformity.
World Books Review: An uneven ‘Storm’
Writers and readers are drawn to natural disasters because they create an urgency that usually makes for compelling reading. But this novel about one of the worst natural disasters in the history of The Netherlands, while it contains wonderful set pieces, is a brilliant idea that never becomes more than that — a brilliant idea.
World Books Review: Cruel Intentions
In fiction, cruelty can be exploited for its shock valve or used to make a point. These two novels, “Beside the Sea” from France, “Rien Ne Va Plus” from Greece, illustrate both choices.
World Books: Summer Reads for Adventurous Minds
Who says your brain should go on vacation during the summer? An eccentric and eclectic list of literature in translation that demands and repays close attention, on the beach or anywhere else.
World Books Podcast: Filipino author Miguel Syjuco
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For many readers, Filipino literature is about local color, lush descriptions of an exotic and often dreamy landscape. Miguel Syjuco challenges that pastoral vision with his first novel, Ilustrado, which recently won the Man Asian Literary Prize. An ambitious meditation on turbulent decades of Filipino culture and politics, the novel includes emails, blog entries, news reports, and extracts from the fiction and journalism of an imaginary literary lion. His mysterious death triggers a quest to find his final manuscript, which is rumored to be an explosive tell-all. World Books editor Bill Marx spoke to Syjuco about what his complex novel says about the past and future of the Philippines. Download MP3
World Books Review: A Turkish Delight
The latest novel (now in paperback) from Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk centers on a wealthy Istanbul man who goes against convention and chooses a life governed by passion. The book also proffers a profound depiction of Istanbul, a city whose identity is symbolized by the Bosphorus—a bridge between the Middle East and Europe, Muslim and Christian, traditional and secular. What results is an urban portrait recalling the grimness of Dostoyevsky’s St. Petersburg and the romanticism of Proust’s Paris.
World Books Review: An Australian Masterpiece
Australian writer Elizabeth Jolley’s celebrated Vera Wright trilogy, available here in its entirety for the first time, memorably explores the infinite intricacies of the human heart.
World Books Podcast: Eshkol Nevo’s novel “Homesick”
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When it was published in Israel in 2004, Eshkol Nevo’s novel “Homesick” tackled a taboo topic in his homeland. The story, which is set in a small neighborhood outside of Jerusalem, includes a sympathetic look at a Palestinian construction worker who becomes obsessed with entering the home his family was evicted from in 1948. To Nevo’s surprise, “Homesick” became a best-seller and is now assigned reading in high schools and universities around Israel. An English translation of the book (by Sondra Silverston) is now available from Dalkey Archive Press. World Books editor Bill Marx spoke to Nevo about his novel’s surprising reception in Israel and elsewhere in the Middle East. Download MP3
World Books Interview: Nino Ricci and ‘The Origin of Species’
In this ambitious and provocative novel Canadian writer Nino Ricci looks at how the ideas of Charles Darwin shape the consciousness of Alex, a graduate student in Montreal during the 1980s who is trying to use evolutionary theory to make sense of his wayward life and floundering literary studies.
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