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.