Books in translation Archives

Kristin Lavransdatter

by Sigrid Undset

Nobel laureate Sigrid Undset tells the epic story of her heroine in 14th century Norway with great love and attention to detail. Kristin is devoted to her father until she meets Erlend at convent school and marries him against her parents’ wishes. Their passionate but tumultuous marriage leads to seven sons and ultimately estrangement. This is a much-beloved story, all the more impressive given its 1000+ pages. Translated from the Norwegian by Tiina Nunnally.

Barbara Isn’t Dying

by Alina Bronsky

I minored in German in college, and so didn't think twice about trying this contemporary German novel from Europa Editions. (Although I read Tim Mohr's new translation; I shudder to think what my experience with the original German would be after all these years!) In this tragicomic tale, Herr Schmidt wakes one morning to discover nobody has made the coffee yet—and his immediate thought must be that his wife has died in the night, because what other explanation could there be? Barbara is in fact alive, but unwell, and as the story progresses, we see this curmudgeonly husband learn to do things he's never thought twice about doing for himself, let alone someone else, in all his long decades of married life: purchase ground coffee, cook a potato, run the vacuum. And that's just the beginning of the adaptations this couple will have to make to their relationship as they enter a challenging new stage. Bronsky covers a lot of emotional ground in just 182 pages; I recommend Fredrik Backman fans take a look.

Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Installments with Recipes, Romances, and Home Remedies

by Laura Esquivel

Set in turn-of-the-century Mexico, Laura Esquivel imbues her novel with magical realism to great effect. As the youngest daughter, Tita De Garza is forbidden to marry as she must care for her mother until she dies. When she and Pedro fall in love, he marries her sister so they can at least be near each other. If that sounds like a recipe for torture, you're right. As the family deals with one tragedy after another, Tita pours her emotions into her cooking as she preserves their recipes, causing everyone who eats the food to react in different ways. It will have you yearning for Tita and Pedro to somehow find a way back to one another.

The Wind Knows My Name

by Isabel Allende

Translated from the Spanish by Frances Riddle. Allende’s new novel—her 27th(!!)—begins in Vienna on Kristallnacht, 1938. Following this night of antisemitic terror, a Jewish mother puts her five-year-old son on a rescue train bound for England. She will never see him again. A parallel narrative begins in 2019 in El Salvador, where a mother flees for her life with her 7-year-old daughter, only for mother and child to be separated at the U.S. border. In unexpectedly long chapters, Allende slowly weaves these stories together like a fine tapestry. I expect this novel will be criticized for being heavy-handed, but I couldn’t wait to discover what would happen next, and found the tidy ending immensely satisfying. For fans of Allende’s A Long Petal of the Sea and Patricia Engel’s Infinite Country.

The Murmur of Bees

by Sofía Segovia

A small Mexican town is forever changed when an abandoned baby is discovered under a bridge, disfigured and covered in a protective swarm of bees. His adoptive parents Francisco and Beatriz love Simonopio and also view him with wonder for he’s gifted with foresight. A gift that, along with his ever present bees, will protect the family as the country goes through the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Flu of 1918. This is bestselling Mexican author Segovia’s first novel to be translated into English, beautifully translated by Simon Bruni.

The Disaster Tourist

by Yun Ko-Eun

The blurb for this book begins: "Jungle is a cutting-edge travel agency specializing in tourism to destinations devastated by disaster and climate change," and that was enough to catch my attention. This story follows Yona, a top representative at Jungle who finds herself in a tricky predicament and has to decide whether to protect her job and employer, or make a more difficult decision. Described by reviewers as a "dystopian feminist eco-thriller" and a "timely capitalist satire," I expect I’ll shelve this next to Camp Zero and Birnam Wood. Translated from the Korean by Lizzie Buehler.

Disoriental

by Négar Djavadi

A National Book Award finalist and Winner of the 2019 Albertine Prize and Lambda Literary Award, and countless other literary awards (this checks a lot of boxes for the MMD Reading Challenge). At the age of ten, Kimiâ Sadr fled Iran with her mother and sisters to join their father in France. Now 25, Kimiâ sits in the waiting room of a Paris fertility clinic while generations of Sadr ancestors visit her, flooding her with memories, history, and stories. Merging a sweeping family story with factual Iranian history, this semi-biographical novel explores cultural and sexual identity, family tradition, and storytelling as a means of finding oneself.

I Lived on Butterfly Hill

by Marjorie Agosin

A middle grade historical novel about Celeste Marconi, an eleven-year-old growing up in Valparaiso, Chile. When warships come to town and her classmates start disappearing, she doesn’t know what to make of it. No one is safe, not even her parents who are now considered dangerous to Chile’s future under Pinochet’s takeover. Before they go into hiding, they send Celeste to Maine but she never stops longing to return to Chile and be reunited with her parents. Marjorie Agosín is an award-winning poet who based this on her own life experiences. Translated from the Spanish by E.M. O'Connor.

Painting Time

by Maylis de Kerangal

Fall under the spell of a master craftsman in this breathless French coming of age novel. This is the story of Paula, a once-floundering French student who stumbles into her calling almost by accident, and enrolls to study trompe l’oeil, or “the art of illusion,” in Brussels. In her distinctive impressionistic style, de Kerangal invites us to accompany Paula as she throws herself into her craft and learns to flawlessly imitate rare and expensive materials with her brushstrokes—marble, tortoiseshell, the heart grain of oak. As Paula finds work abroad as a decorative painter—in studios and on film sets in Paris, Moscow, and Italy—she wrestles with the meaning of her work, and what to do about the relationships she left behind. To sound like a total nerd: I couldn’t get enough of de Kerangal’s voice.

Kitchen

by Banana Yoshimoto

You may have heard me recommend this book on What Should I Read Next Episode 395 ("A little touch of magic never hurts"). Mikage is raised by her grandmother after her parents pass away. She’s left unmoored after her grandmother dies and subsequently turns to the kitchen, as well as her friend Yoichi and her mother, who takes her in. A lovely exploration of grief, found family, and the ties that bind us. Though Banana Yoshimoto is renowned in Japan, this is her first book to be published in English, translated from the Japanese by Megan Backus.

The Summer Book

by Tove Jansson

Thanks so much for your comments in this space, particularly those on our recent post 15 backlist books that feel like summer, which reminded me this book was lingering on my TBR. This 1972 novel by Finnish author Jansson (originally written in Swedish, translated by Thomas Teal) reads almost as a series of short stories about a grandmother and her 6-year-old granddaughter spending the summer together on a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland. The pacing is gentle, the descriptions of the natural world lush and beautiful, and both the heavy and light are handled with gentleness. If you enjoy the works of L.M. Montgomery or Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea, this short, contemplative novel could be a good fit for your reading list.

The Travelling Cat Chronicles

by Hiro Arikawa

Have you ever wondered what cats are really thinking? Meet Nana, a sarcastic feral cat who was rescued by Satoru five years ago. It’s a good arrangement: Satoru gives him treats and sometimes he lets Satoru pet him. One day Satoru puts Nana in the van and they set off on a road trip around Japan, final destination unknown. As they meet Satoru’s old friends, Nana tries to make sthe ense of why they’re on the trip and why these strangers are so interested in him. Needless to say, Nana and Satoru have different opinions, culminating in a heartwarming tail. I mean, tale. Translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel.

The Eighth Life

by Nino Haratischvili

I first gushed about this to the Modern Mrs Darcy Book Club in our Best Books of the Summer 2021 event. This was the Georgian novel that I didn't know my life was missing. I listened to it on audio, somewhat begrudgingly. Several people had told me it was really amazing, but golly it's long at 1000+ pages. I plunged in, hoping I wouldn't regret it. And very quickly could not wait to find out what happened next in these peoples' lives. It's a generational story, tracking 100 years in a Georgian family who fan out across Europe and the world as they seek to run from the horrors of what's unfolding in the Soviet Union. The family also has a magical chocolate recipe that they mix up at opportune moments, but whether it's a blessing or a curse remains to be seen for the 95 or so years. The ending is amazing.

Chirp

Whereabouts

by Jhumpa Lahiri

A quiet melancholic literary exploration of a woman in her 40s making sense of her life. She wavers between wanting to be known and wanting to cut ties. We follow her as she goes through her days, seeing the places she frequents and the people and family in her orbit, all ultimately leading to change. After studying the language for years, this is the first novel Lahiri wrote in Italian and self-translated into English. An impressive feat.

The Memory Police

by Yōko Ogawa

Our unnamed protagonist in this 1994 Japanese novel, as translated by Stephen Snyder, is a novelist who lives on an island controlled by the Memory Police. The feared group’s sole purpose is to periodically "disappear" objects and ideas from the town—first small objects like emeralds, ribbons, and candy, but over time, the disappearances grow more profound. Birds vanish, then photographs. But the truth is that not everyone "forgets" what they are supposed to, which puts them in great danger from the Memory Police, whose duty is to make sure the disappeared items are fully eradicated. If any citizens stand in their way, they will be disappeared as well—which is how our young novelist ends up putting herself in danger. The gentle prose is lovely in its own right, and perfectly suits the story's eerie feel. This novel went places I didn't expect, right up to the stunning conclusion.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

by Olga Tokarczuk

A quirky noir/murder mystery with a dash of fairytale set in the rural mountains of Poland. Janina prefers animals to humans and spends her days translating poetry, studying astrology, and looking after the summer homes belonging to rich people. Then a neighbor dies unexpectedly. And another one. And another one. Soon Janina begins investigating herself, certain mistreated animals are enacting their revenge. She wouldn’t blame them. Now if she could just get the police to listen to her. Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.

A Woman in the Polar Night

by Christiane Ritter

This lesser known memoir in translation is one of MMD team member Chelsey's favorites. Now that it's back in print from Pushkin Press, she widely recommends it every winter. In 1933, Christiane Ritter, an Austrian painter, arrived on the arctic island of Spitsbergen to live with her hunter husband in a tiny little hut. In her vividly detailed diary entries, she used her artistic eye to paint a picture of the barren landscape, its wonders, and its dangers. Introspective yet expansive, this memoir is one of very few 20th century accounts of the arctic tundra by a woman.

Diary of a Void

by Emi Yagi

The premise of this Japanese debut (translated by David Boyd and Lucy North) hooked me immediately: when 34-year-old Ms. Shibata begins working at the cardboard tube manufacturer, she initially finds it a welcome change from her old job, where sexual harassment was a constant threat. But she quickly realizes her new position has problems of its own: as the only woman in her department, her colleagues expect her to serve the tea, do the dishes, and sundry other menial tasks unrelated to her actual work. Then one day, fed up with waiting on the men, she impulsively tells them she can't clear the tea: she's pregnant and the smell makes her nauseous. The thing is, she's <em>not</em> pregnant—but because her work life instantly gets a whole lot better, she determines to find a way to keep the ruse going for the whole nine months. A satisfying blend of clever, playful, and subversive.

My Brilliant Friend (Neapolitan Novels Book 1)

by Elena Ferrante

This is the first installment of Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, which revolves around the friendship between Elena and Lila. This book begins when the girls are in first grade and carries them through adolescence. I picked this up from my local bookstore's blind date with a book shelf: the bookseller had described it as "a masterpiece you probably haven’t read yet. (Three and a half years later, booksellers can no longer say that with confidence!) Originally written in Italian and beautifully translated by Ann Goldstein. (Hot tip: I LOVED this series on audio.)

The Postcard

by Anne Berest

The premise of this 2023 Minimalist Summer Reading Guide selection is irresistible. In 2003, Anne Berest’s mother Lelia received a postcard, an old postcard, addressed to Berest’s grandmother, who is dead. The card is blank except for four names—Ephraim, Emma, Noemie, and Jaques. These were the names of her grandparents, aunt and uncle, all killed at Auschwitz. Anne was about to give birth so the postcard was forgotten, put away. But when Anne remembers the card nearly two decades later, she is determined to find out who sent it and why. This sweeping French novel—an award winner and bestseller in France—deals with history and memory, hope, grief, and, reader take note, trauma. Translated from the French by Tina Kover.

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