Chile

La casa de los espíritus
Isabelle Allende

A family saga charting the Trueba family across contemporary Chilean history. Allende is the niece of former president, Salvador Allende, and this closeness to Chile's turbulent political history had a clear impact on the book and its characters. The story follows family patriarch, Esteban, from childhood at the turn of the past century through the turmoil of the country's leftist and rightist clashes and the CIA-backed coup that overthrew her real-life uncle and the president in her novel.

Her family became a target under the Pinochet regime, and Allende eventually was forced into exile for 13 years. One might imagine that this kind of experience would infuse the writing with rancour towards those that had attacked her and her family, but instead the pointlessness of ideological clashes was was of the main themes I took away from the book. 

Available in translation as The House of Spirits, and was adapted for a star-studded film of the same name in 1993 with Jeremy Irons, Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, Wynona Ryder, and Antonio Banderas.

France

Pars vite et reviens tard
Fred Vargas

A hard-boiled detective thriller of the kind I usually don't go for, but I was home one day with nothing to read and found this on the bookshelf. One of my flatmate's former flatmates had left it behind and I was in need of something to fill my long Parisian métro rides to get to uni.

I found the story a bit hard to get into at first. I admit this may have to do with my lack of French police detective vocabulary and vocabulary about the Plague – two of the plot's main focuses. Once I went to the trouble of hauling out my Larousse an learning some new words and arcane French slang, I did get into the books intrigue and well-developed cast of characters. In a way that seemed to me very realistically French, the characters are all connected to a small market square in Paris' 14th arrondissement. This is probably the city's least remarkable arrondissement, and I think this anonymity of place made the story more relatable. 

The book was translated as Have Mercy on Us All in 2003 by David Bellos (French title literally translates to "Leave quickly and come back late"). It was also made into a French film in 2007.

South Korea

Black Flower, Kim Young-ha
검은 꽃, 김영하

Part history lesson and part love story, Black Flower takes place during an almost forgotten moment in history when a group of Koreans sailed to Mexico to start a new life in the early days of the twentieth century.

Based on actual events, I stumbled across this fascinating story one day while passing time at bookstore. It follows a group of Koreans seeking to leave the Korean Empire as it collapses. They board a ship to Mexico, hoping for a better life, but are trapped in indentured servitude as hacienda labourers. 

Black Flower succeeds as a window onto this otherwise unknown moment in history. I found the story otherwise tending to veer into over-long history lessons with details and explanations of the Mexican Revolution or the hacienda system. These provide context, but distract from the story, which is ultimately left not devoting enough to developing the its main characters.

I would certainly be keen to add another South Korean book to the roster, to see if my sticking points are to unique to Black Flower or rather aspects of Korean literature that I'm not familiar with.

New Zealand

Once Were Warriors
Alan Duff

Following on the heels of my leisurely stroll down Thai memory lane with Four Reigns, comes Once Were Warriors, an emotional, unblinking look at the caustic life of Māori living in the an urban ghetto. This is a tough read through a desperate cycle of poverty, alcoholism, abuse, hopelessness, and violence in all its forms for the Heke Family living in the grim coucil estate of Pine Block. 

The author, part Māori himself, doesn't take the easy way out of blaming Pākehā (Europeans) for Māori problems, but instead creates a complex picture of people who can be their own worst enemy, but have also suffered under the long-term effects of colonialism. Alan Duff painful's indictment shines a spotlight on a group at the rock bottom in the hopes of cultural turnaround through a reconnection with old traditions and practices. 

The sobering 1990 book was made into a 1994 film that resounded through New Zealand society and is felt to have had an impact on reshaping attitudes and the relationships between Māori and Pākehā.

Thailand

Four Reigns, Kukrit Pramoj
สี่แผ่นดิน, คึกฤทธิ์ ปราโมช

A sprawling walk down memory lane, as Kukrit Pramoj, scholar, politician, and one-time Prime Minister of Thailand, recounts the lives of a family of minor courtiers over the reigns of four Thai kings (whence the title). 

In its early parts, I found the book particularly captivating as Pramoj describes the ins and outs of life in a Bangkok now long unknown to us. The Thai court and its customs, but also the everyday life of a family from the 1880s to 1946, in the "Venice of the Orient" whose canals give way to motorcars. As the book moves forward into more recent and familiar territory, it becomes a remarkable testament to the enormous changes Thailand has experienced in a very short period. 

I delighted in the minutiae of old Thai customs and royal traditions, without ever feeling that these got in the way of the plot or the character development. I found the translation, however, very uneven. In places, it's really quite masterful, dealing deftly with many Thai-language intricacies such as its complex personal naming conventions and old royal traditions. In other cases, awkward translations or lengthy explanations in brackets bog down an otherwise airy text. 

In all, a great historical record of a country stepping into modernity.

Bangladesh

Brick Lane
Monica Ali

In her Year of Reading the World project, Ann Morgan had to lay some groundwork as to what constituted a book "from" a country. Does the author have to be born there? Live there? Does it have to be written about that place? Does it count if it's written about a different place? The answers, it turns out, were rarely straightforward.

A case in point is my archive entry for Bangladesh. Author Monica Ali was born in Bangladesh to a Bangladeshi father and an English mother but then grew up in England from the age of three. Brick Lane begins in Bangladesh and deals with a young woman who moves from a village to enter an arranged marriage in London with and older man. Should this book of culture clash and the immigrant experience then be considered "English" or "Bangladeshi"? Letters to England from the woman's sister in Bangladesh play an important role in the narrative as well, further blurring the line of where the book might be "from".

There isn't, of course, a clear-cut answer to this question, just my own personal choices as I swashbuckle the literary high seas and shifting sands of place as I plot my course to circumnavigate the globe.

Japan

Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami
海辺のカフカ, 村上春樹

A Murakami classic from Japan's most famous contemporary author. Murakami has a very distinctive writing style and often revisits the same themes and symbols in his book; so much so, in fact, that a "Murakami Bingo" sheet exists [link]. Playing along, I nearly filled up the entire card! I think it's a big part of the reason many people say Kafka on the Shore is their favourite Murakami book, its filled with the spooky and surreal, enigmatic characters in otherworldly situations, and talking cats that people love. How can anyone help but liking a book with a talking cat?

I've read many of his other books and, having lived in Japan, read many other Japanese authors as well. In some ways, Murakami's fanciful metaphysics make him an outlier to other Japanese authors. Nor does he really delve much into Buddhist notions of dharma, reincarnation, or karma, the way many, such as Yukio Mishima, do. That said, there is a common sense of something that cuts across the Japanese literature I've read and, as I was thinking how to describe it, continually returning to words such as "melancholy" and "futility", I had a "Eureka!" moment. I remembered a Japanese term I'd learned living there: wabi-sabi (侘寂). Wabi-sabi is sometimes described as "beauty that is imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete". There are whole books written about wabi-sabi; Japanese people would generally say it is simply unexplainable. Upon reflection, it really is the indefinite element pervasive to Japanese books.

More about wabi-sabi here.

Indonesia

Saman
Ayu Utami

My fourth stop on my journey to read the world is Indonesia. I had actually tried to buy an Indonesian author even pre-Read-the-World project, but couldn't find any on the bookstore shelves of Singapore. Given that Indonesia is Singapore's biggest neighbour, I would have though people might be interested reading a thing or two about it, but I guess not.

In contrast to The Sand Fish, Saman is indeed a work of translation from Bahasa Indonesia, with a note from the translator Pamela Allen. As a translator myself, it's always lovely to see translation – usually something invisible and unaccounted for – be given a voice and translators an opportunity to say something. Since most people know little about Indonesia or its history – and the book takes place during a chaotic period of its history – the translator must have had a tough time with it all, but did so with aplomb. The book reads seamlessly, and the translation could not be felt.

Saman caused quite a firestorm when it was first published in Indonesia, touching o­n all the country's taboos: extramarital sex, political repression, and the relationship between Christians and Muslims. It is a shifting story, moving from time, place, and protagonist. The choice of Saman as title made this shifting a bit muddled for me. As the book's title character, the story is sometimes told by Saman, and sometimes by others about Saman; but other times the story told by Saman is about another person, or is told by another person about another person. – Don't get me wrong, I don't mind this kind of storytelling, but Saman as the title led me to think of Saman as the protagonist, when that wasn't really always the case. Otherwise, an interesting glimpse into turbulent slice of Indonesian life.

United Arab Emirates

The Sand Fish
Maha Gargash

An Etihad Airways stopover on a recent flight from Asia to Europe prompted the third destination in my journey to read the world: the United Arab Emirates. Although not available in Singapore, The Sand Fish was widely available at bookstores, tourist shops, and even at some newsagents in the UAE. I picked up my copy as I exited the airport into the dusty haze of Abu Dhabi and made my way to sand dunes of the interior.

As the book was originally written in English, I had the impression that The Sand Fish was intended for outsiders looking in. In the afterword, the author states that this was indeed her intent, but not as I might have suspected, for foreigners reading about Dubai. The discovery of oil brought such monumental and rapid changes the UAE, that the 1950s world described in the book is as foreign to Emiratis today as it is to armchair readers anywhere. 

The Sand Fish proved an interesting reading experience as I found the protagonist rather unlikable. I kept waiting for Noora to save herself from herself in a classic (Western) narrative of self-discovery and emancipation. But, of course, the whole point of reading the world is to get away from the tried-and-tested structures of well-rutted literary paths and be exposed to different ways of being. Looking back on Noora's tale, I recognise that self-discovery and emancipation would have been in short supply for an uneducated woman in 1950s Arabia. Such story simply would not have rung true. With that realisation, the veil dropped – as it were – and The Sand Fish offered an beguiling insight into Noora's life and lifestyle, and why "unlikable" might have actually been "realistic" instead.

Colombia

The Autumn of the Patriarch, Gabriel García Márquez
El otoño del patriarca

Gabriel García Márquez is probably my favourite author and I have read quite a number of his books. I'm lucky to be able to read them in Spanish, but I happened to pick up The Autumn of the Patriarch in English at a book sale. It's probably just as well because it is a terribly challenging read. I'm tempted to say I might not have actually been able to get through it in Spanish. In fact, The Autumn of the Patriarch frequently pops up on lists of most challenging books to read, up there with Naked Lunch and Finnegans Wake.

With sentences that go on for chapters, jump across time periods, and shift from first to third person, The Autumn of the Patriarch paints a vivid portrait of the rambling, failing mind of a dictator caught in the madness of his own dictatorship. The narrative challenges, while not ideal beach holiday reading, are perfect for describing the General's long, nightmarish reign and the surreal experience of totalitarianism. It's a book I would like to reread (in Spanish?) when I have the time for proper contemplative reflection.

Guadeloupe

La migration des cœurs
Maryse Condé

When Ann Morgan started her A Year of Reading the World project, she came up against the tricky question of what to do about reading works in translation. She is able to read in French and German "slowly and with a very big dictionary" and felt that surely it would be better to read something in its original language. Yet she had quite the inner struggle about the actual importance of translation to her project and the unfortunately disadvantaged position of non-English writers who must both face the juggernaut of the English language's massive literary output and the disinterest of English publishers in publishing translations. 

In the end, she embraced translation, and you can read all about her process of making the decision here. As a translator myself, I certainly understand the importance of promoting work in other languages and ensuring that people are able to express themselves naturally and to the best of their abilities in their native language. I too am going embrace translation as I read the world, but I'm not going to shy away from reading books in French and Spanish when I can. It will open up more options to me, especially from further-flung places like Mauritania or Paraguay, and will help me keep up my skills in those languages.

I read Guadeloupean author Maryse Condé's book La migration des cœurs in high school and, to be honest, I don't really remember much about it. I did discover that it is now available in English translation under the title Windward Heights, an allusion to Condé's reinterpretation of Wuthering Heights in the colonial Caribbean. One thing I do remember is that the dialogue was often written in French Creole – a most disconcerting fact to high-school-French-reading me. It would be quite interesting to see how the translator approached this sticky wicket and whether he or she used analogous English West Indian Creole.

Mexico

La ley del Amor
Laura Esquivel

Softmore work from Mexican author, Laura Esquivel, which followed on the heels of Like Water for Chocolate, a wonderful book made into an equally wonderful film, which is the highest-grossing Spanish-language film of all time in the United States. Big shoes to fill indeed.

The Law of Love is quite an interesting concept for a book, a multimedia effort incorporating music and artwork, with a CD and illustrations. I felt, however, the multimedia aspect was more of a novel aside than a really integral part of the book. This story of New Age-sci-fi-magical realism and spirituality, stretching from the twenty-third century back to Montezuma's Mexico, fell a bit flat for me. The narrative was a bit forced at times and the characters hard to relate to. 

Perhaps when you start off so high, like Esquivel did with Like Water for Chocolate, it's difficult to go anywhere but down. Her latest book, Malinche, about has gotten some good press however. It's about conquistador Hernan Cortes' native Mexican interpreter and mistress, a real historical figure who is both scorned as a traitor and revered as the mother of the raza cósmica in contemporary Mexico. I'm interested in reading more about this engimatic contradiction, so Malinche might figure in the list of next Mexican book to read.

United States of America

Dune
Frank Herbert

By default, I've probably read more American authors than any other country. However, when it came time to draw up this list, I couldn't for the life of me think of the last American author I'd actually read! I racked my brain and my bookshelf, only coming up with non-fiction American titles. I finally remembered Dune, which I'd read just a few months ago! One would think this would be easier to call to mind than books I had read in high school, but the mind works in mysterious ways.

Dune, of course, has nothing to do with America, but with a a feudal interstellar society, set in the far distant future. In a way, however, it has everything to do with America, the rise and fall of empires, resource extraction, and the price of commercialism. The book sees the ascendancy of ecological concerns over commercial ones and we can be hopeful that this too will be the case for our own present world that we seem so keen to ransack.

Canada, English

The Year of the Flood
Margaret Atwood

With Viet Nam and Cambodia, the first two countries I read specifically for my Read the World project, now out of the way, I'm going to take a bit of time to go through my back catalogue. I'll list the the countries I've already read, revisiting the title I've most recently read from there.

As a Canadian, it's only fitting I start with Canada, and I doubt one could get more Canadian than Margaret Atwood. The Year of the Flood book doesn't have anything to do with Canada necessarily, but rather a dystopian near-future city that is not explicitly identified. This second book in her MaddAddam Trilogy describes the same events as the first, Oryx and Crake, but from two at-times parallel, at-times intersecting, points of view of the female protagonists in the lower-class "pleeblands" of this future gone awry.

I'm generally a big fan of dystopian and alternate future stuff, so I enjoyed this read very much. Am certainly looking forward to the last book in the series to see how it all pans out. For being a sober reminder of a world that really isn't that far off, I loved that there were so many puns and so much humour throughout. Dark satire at its best.

Cambodia

In the Shadow of the Banyan
Vaddey Ratner

After spending a few days in Viet Nam, where I was able to purchase Dumb Luck by Vietnamese author Vũ Trọng Phụng, the second stop on my Read the World project was Cambodia. Like with Viet Nam, I was counting on local bookstores to step up to the plate when my bookstore back home fell flat.

Almost completely by chance I came across Monument Books while walking the streets of Phnom Penh. It is a wonderfully comprehensive bookstore covering the whole of Cambodia's history from Angkorean temples through Khmer Rouge hardship right up to the present day, while not skipping over specialty topics such as French colonial map-making and movie star biographies. While the shelves had a wealth of fiction written about Cambodia by foreign authors, Cambodian writers seemed focused on harrowing memoirs about the horrors of the Khmer Rouge period, with titles such as First They Killed My Father or To the End of Hell. 

Undoubtedly, now that Cambodians have the time, space, and possibility to reflect on that truly traumatic period, much needs to be said and purged, as we the case following the Great Leap Forward in China. Like Ann Morgan, I had to now decide what I would count as a "story". (Read about her choices here). Were memoirs "in"? What about plays? Poetry? Journalism?

Some books don't fit in any box, while others, such as In the Shadow of the Banyan, might straddle several. While clearly proclaiming on the title page to be "A Novel", the story is a semi-fictionalised account of the author's own personal experiences living through the Khmer Rouge. – Suits my purposed well enough.

While I'll aim to focus on prose fiction for this project, I recognise that its not native to every culture, nor necessarily accessible to foreign readers. I will need to bend the rules here and there.

Viet Nam

Dumb Luck, Vũ Trọng Phụng
Số đỏ

Very shortly after hearing about Ann Morgan's A Year of Reading the World site, I left for a short holiday in Viet Nam and Cambodia. — What a perfect opportunity to kick-start my own Read the World project by reading some local authors in the country they are from!

Off I headed to my local bookstore with a list of Vietnamese authors in hand. To my dismay, none of them were stocked on the shelves. Trips to other bookshops also came up fruitless and I realised that things might not go quite according to plan. Most all of the authors were in fact banned by the communist government in Vietnam for being too subversive or counterrevolutionary. 

I boarded my plane to Saigon empty-handed, hoping that a local bookstore would have some State-sanctioned fiction that I could pick up. The helpful staff at Artbook at 43 Đồng Khởi Street confirmed that the authors on my list were still banned in the country, save Vũ Trọng Phụng, who had been recently "rehabilitated".

Phụng is considered one of the most influential figures in modern Vietnamese literature. His book, Dumb Luck, was published in 1936, but was then subsequently banned in most of the country for its critical portrayal of colonial society and for its "bourgeois tendencies". Dumb Luck is a vivid and often unexpectedly absurd tale of a street-smart ruffian who rises within colonial society and its preoccupation with sex, fashion, and capitalism. The book is very much a satire, a scathing commentary of the rapidly changing Hanoi of the period that made me laugh out loud on a number of occasions. A great first stop on my journey to read the world!

Turkey

The Black Book, Orhan Pamuk
Kara Kitap

Rather quite some time ago now, my Mum went on holiday to Turkey. As a going-away present, I sought out a book by a Turkish author to give her for her long plane ride. I managed to find The White Castle, which is Orhan Pamuk's first book translated into English. She passed the book onto me, which I read and loved. Shortly thereafter, his second book in English translation was published, The Black Book, which I eagerly read as well. I have to admit that, sadly, I don't remember it at all. Even looking at the book's Wikipedia page didn't really jog my memory other than to remind me that the book was a bit of a challenge to read – rather too esoteric and metaphysical for the state of mind when I read it on a summer holiday. 

Since then, Pamuk has gone on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006 and has now sold millions of books in dozens of languages. Perhaps it's the right time to revisit Turkey on my literary travels now. 

Senegal

Une si longue lettre
Mariama Bâ

Another book I happened to pull off the living room bookshelf to occupy my long commutes to school while living in Paris . Une si longue lettre is written as a letter from one woman, recently widowed, to her friend now living in the United States. The women both married men who became successful and took second wives. Much of the novel centres on the different paths each woman takes in reaction to the betrayal of their husband.

The novel illustrates the challenges women faced in post-colonial Africa as it rapidly modernises. Both the protagonist letter-writer and her friend represent women of the “New Africa”, having been highly educated, yet must contend with traditional, African, and Islamic views about the roles of wives and women, views espoused by their husbands and parents, but also by the women around them. An interesting read about the importance of women's development and of unity between men and women. 

Available in English translation under the title So Long a Letter as translated by Modupé Bodé-Thomas.

Portugal

The Stone Raft, José Saramago
A Jangada de Pedra

José Saramago is one of my favourite writers and I have read many of his books – Blindness is one of my favourite books ever. of which The Stone Raft is my most recent Saramago read, although it now dates back quite some time.  

I love his take on the legacy of magical realism in Latin American literature. All of his books start on a rather unusual premise and go from there to develop the human side of the unexpected situation, driven very much by characters on a journey.

The Stone Raft certain follows in this familiar Saramago territory; the books opens with the Iberian Peninsula splitting along the Pyrenees and sailing off into the Atlantic Ocean. The story follows a group of individuals as they travel around the now floating peninsula, driven by feelings that they may have been the cause of the split. 

Interestingly, Saramago was of the opinion that Spain and Portugal should be united and the book was written in 1986, the year when the two countries entered the EU's precursor, the European Economic Community.

Norway

The Orange Girl, Jostein Gaarder
Appelsinpiken

I picked up a copy of Jostein Gaarder's highly acclaimed Sophie's World completely randomly off a book swap shelf at the office a while ago. I loved Sophie's World, so I had high expectations when I followed on with The Orange Girl. This book loses out on the philosophy and meaning-of-life musing of Sophie's World to focus on a more character-driven story of a boy who finds a letter from his long-deceased father, setting him off on a series of adventures to discover the secret of his father's connection to the "Orange Girl". 

Since the philosophy and meaning-of-life musing is what appealed to me in Sophie's World, I was a bit downhearted to not find it here. But the story is captivating and well told, and, importantly, very unique. I projected myself into the protagonist's position, and enjoyed the journey I was taken on.

It's interesting to think that Norway came in with an erudite and philosophical writer, while I had a tough time with Sweden coming up with anything other than hard-boiled crime and detective books. Who knew that two bordering countries with a long, shared history could have such different literary landscapes?

Nigeria

Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe

I totally understand the importance of this book. It was the first book written by an African author to receive global critical acclaim. It became the foundation for post-colonial literature in Africa. It is now the most widely-read piece of African literature. I get that Things Fall Apart is important. 

Given the status accorded to Things Fall Apart in the world's literary pantheon, however, this might be quite inflammatory and controversial to say, but I did not really like it. I found the protagonist unlikable and the story mundane. – When faced with another unlikable protagonist in my United Arab Emirates entry, Noora in The Sand Fish, by Maha Gargash, at least I had an interesting and evocative story to carry me along. 

The novel follows the life of a local village leader, Okonkwo, whose world begins to "fall apart" under the influence of British colonialism and intrusive proselytising by Christian missionaries. Again, I understand that the forces of colonialism and missionaries rarely led to happily-ever-after endings for the local people involved. But, as an aggressive mysogenist, it's a bit hard to feel for Okonkwo as things start to go pear-shaped over the course of the story that I found otherwise unremarkable.

Ann Morgan seemed pretty please by her Nigeria selection, The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives by Lola Shoneyin. So I might have to check that, or another contemporary writer, as I continue forwards with my project to read the world.

Morocco

La Civilisation, ma Mère !...
Driss Chraïbi

Going way back in my archives to dig out this North African entry that I read for a high school French class. We were free to choose any novel in French from what was available in the school library. French book covers tend to be exceedingly plain, most often with text only, so I was drawn to this one because of the intriguing cover.

Driss Chraïbi was a Moroccan author writing in French, whose novels deal with colonialism, culture clashes, generational conflict and the treatment of women and are often semi-autobiographical, as is indeed the case with La Civilisation, ma Mère !...

The novel deals with the narrators' attempts to introduce their mother to the modern age as telephones and electricity make their way into a traditional household. The book's second half explores the effects of these changes on the mother and the notion of modernity as her second coming of age.

I was lucky enough to have a classmate of North African origin who was able to help me out with the customs and bits of language that would have otherwise eluded me. A big, and much deferred, shukran to her for helping me out.

Available in English translation under the title Mother Comes of Age. English translator: Hugh Harter.

Liechtenstein

Seven Years in Tibet, Heinrich Harrer
Sieben Jahre in Tibet. Mein Leben am Hofe des Dalai Lama

As you might imagine, finding authors from postage-stamp microstates can be quite a challenge. Drawing from an already tiny population, the pool of potential authors is seriously restricted. And when you add the need for a work in translation, it's almost a Sisyphean task to find entries for places like Liechtenstein, Monaco, or San Marino.

When I started my world-reading project, I was interested to see what Ann Morgan had come up with for some of these tough countries and scrolled through her list. I was a bit stunned to see Seven Years in Tibet listed for her Liechtenstein entry, not only because I had already read the book, but because I seemed to remember the author being Austrian. Indeed, Heinrich Harrer was born in Austria, but lived in Liechtenstein for a big part of his life and wrote Seven Years in Tibet there. Since no native-born Liechtenstein author is available in English translation – despite the fact that Liechtenstein author, Iren Nigg, had won the European Union Prize for Literature in 2011 – Harrer's Seven Years in Tibet will have to do.

Seven Years in Tibet is Harrer's autobiographical account of his escape from an interment camp in British India during the Second World War into the Himalayas to Tibet, a hermetic kingdom with virtually no contact with the outside world at the time. Harrer spent several years in Tibet and became a tutor and friend to the Dalai Lama.

The book is very evocative, describing a world that moved at a different pace and revolved around different poles. The Dalai Lama said Seven Years in Tibet introduced hundreds of thousands of people to Tibet.  

Iraq

Gilgamesh
𒄑𒂆𒈦

A bit of a stretch to consider this as my Iraq entry, as the Epic of Gilgamesh predates the nation of Iraq by about 4,000 years, but it'll do for now.

Stephen Mitchell, who appears already in my list for his new translation of the Bhagavad Gita, presents a new version of what is regarded as the earliest surviving work of literature. It's a "version" rather than a translation, as Mitchell does not speak ancient Akkadian, the language of the original. Instead, he used previous versions and scholarly works to retell the events in a way that would convey the power and meaning of the original yet be familiar and digestible for modern readers. Mitchell clearly has a knack for that kind of thing, as his version is lively and full of emotion. Quite a feat when the source material is a bunch of clay tablets almost five millennia old.

India II

Bhagavad Gita
भगवद्गीता

The reason I started reading this book is quite a silly one: it's the book Mrs Madrigal is reading when she meets Edgar Halcyon in Tales of the City, and leads to one of my favourite exchanges about spirituality:

He sat down on a bench in Washington Square. Next to him was a woman who was roughly his age. She was wearing wool slacks and a paisley smock. She was reading the Bhagavad Gita.
She smiled.
"Is that the answer?" asked Edgar, nodding at the book.
"What was the question?" asked the woman.

I'm not sure I found any spiritual enlightenment myself when I read the book, but in writing this post, I did learn that the book Mrs Madrigal was reading was not, in fact, Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse as I had thought when I started to put together the blog (the actual reading haven taken place many moons ago) and, by consequence, I don't seem to have read any German authors. That seems a bit strange to me, as there are so many German authors out there, but barring any sudden enlightenment as to books read far in my past, I'll add Germany back to the list of countries to read.

Denmark

The Little Mermaid, Hans Christian Andersen
Den lille havfrue

Like a lot of the books in this list, The Little Mermaid is a book I picked up by accident. It was on the book swap shelf at work, probably for years, and I like to think I rescued it from oblivion.

I had heard that the original Hans Christian Andersen version was quite different to the Disney movie version, although I don't think I was adequately forewarned about absolutely depressing it would be. – Seriously, that is some messed up stuff.

Andersen was a prolific writer and his stories have become part of our collective consciousness. However, in many cases and as with The Little Mermaid, the original and the fairy-tale versions differ considerably. Apparently, Andersen had a difficult, troubled life and many people feel this was reflected in his unhappily-ever-after allegories that we all know and think we love.

Brazil

The Valkyries, Paulo Coelho
As Valkírias

It's been absolutely ages since I read this book, originally published in Portuguese as As Valkírias and translated to English by Alan R Clarke. As a consequence, I don't really remember much about it, other than I found it a bit too metaphysical for my liking. All of Coelho's books are like that to various degrees, even mega-smash-hit The Alchemist and my quirky fav Veronika Decides to Die. For some reason, I just couldn't really connect with this one. 

Trying to refresh my memory as to the book's plot, I've seen a fair few people who shared my sentiment; the book strays further into abstraction and the search for meaning than his others. Of course, a great many people go in for that sort of thing, but it's not totally my cup of tea. — You win some, you lose some, even when you're one of the world's best-selling authors. 

I did learn, obviously, that Coelho is Brazilian and not Portuguese, as I had thought all this time. I wasn't even really aware that his books were translations, so special kudos to the translators for doing such a fine job.

Belgium

L'Affaire Tournesol
Hergé

Tintin is a bit of a departure from the other novels on this list. It's certainly not for lack of other Belgian authors; there's a tonne, including one of my favs, Amélie Nothomb. But L'Affaire Tournesol is indeed the last book I read by a Belgian author. And just as well, Hergé is certainly Belgium's most famous author by a long shot. Tintin had been published in more than 70 languages with sales of his books totalling more than 200 million copies worldwide.

L'Affaire Tournesol – available in English translation by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner as The Calculus Affair – follows Tintin as he travels to rescue Professor Calculus from the Cold-War clutches of fictional Borduria. Borduria is a vaguely Balkan/Eastern-Euro type place that always made me think of hermetic Albania, right up to the moustache-driven personality cult of Enver Hoxha like Borduria's Marshal Kûrvi-Tasch. A trip to Albania prompted me to pull L'Affaire Tournesol off my childhood bookshelf, and it didn't disappoint with its Cold-War plotting and counter-plots, espionage and double crosses.

It made me realise that Tintin exposed me to a lot of things that I probably wasn't totally conscious of as a child – such as poverty, racism, and international geopolitics – but that definitely had a lasting impact on my development. Tintin, shaping young minds since 1929.

Start Your Engines

This map represents the starting point to my Read the World project: 28 countries, one territory, and five continents (sorry Australia!) I've already read, and many big holes like the Caribbean and Central Europe that will need filling. I don't know when, or if, I'll ever get to every country, but it's great to see the starting point for this literary globetrot.

What I've read so far: Afghanistan, Albania, Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, France, Germany, Guadeloupe, India, Ireland, Japan, Lebanon, Liechtenstein, Mexico, Morocco, Nigeria, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Senegal, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Turkey, United States of America, United Kingdom.