Summer Translation Selections
It’s a summer when the Euros are in full swing and the sun is occasionally out, so we decided to pick some European novels in translation from the past decade that have become all time favourites. Even if it’s damp and rainy in many parts of India, there’s no better time to curl up with some of these and escape.
Magda Szabo - The Door, 2015
First published in Hungary in the 1980s before being translated to English, Magda Szabo’s The Door is a stylishly told, haunting tale. It recounts a strange relationship built up over two decades between a writer and her housekeeper. After a caustic start, their association becomes an inseparable relationship that also chronicles various aspects of Hungarian society with a deft touch.
Mathias Enard - Compass, 2017
As night falls over Vienna, an insomniac musicologist spends a restless night drifting between dreams and memories, revisiting the important chapters of his life: his ongoing fascination with the Middle East and his numerous travels to Istanbul, Aleppo, Damascus, and Tehran, as well as his elusive love, Sarah, a French scholar caught in the intricate tension between Europe and the Middle East. Winner of various literary prizes, this is a stunning book about the space between cultures and the pitfalls of Orientalism.
Olga Tokarczuk - Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, 2019
An astonishing and uncategorisable mix of murder mystery, dark feminist comedy and paean to William Blake from Nobel laureate and writer extraordinaire Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow is a stunning and deeply engaging read. It tells the story of an old Polish woman in a forest town where a series of disturbing murders begin to take place, but it is a deeply existential and surprising novel where nothing is what it seems.
Elise Shua Dusapin - Winter in Sokcho, 2021
Winter in Sokcho is the first novel by French-Korean writer Elisa Shua Dusapin. The story follows the interactions of the narrator and a French comic writer during the latter’s visit to Sokcho, a remote Korean town. An exquisitely-crafted debut which won the Prix Robert Walser, this is a novel about shared identities and divided selves, vision and blindness, intimacy and alienation, told in spare, affecting prose.
Marie NDiaye - Vengeance is Mine, 2023
The heroine of this novel is Maître Susane, a quiet middle-aged lawyer living a modest existence in Bordeaux, known to all as a consummate professional. But when Gilles Principaux shows up at her office asking her to defend his wife, who is accused of a horrific crime, Maître Susane begins to crack under the weight of memory, the past and haunting secrets that are far from predictable.
Jenny Erpenbeck - Kairos, 2023
Kairos is the winner of this year’s International Booker Prize from the masterful German novelist Jenny Erpenbeck. An intimate and devastating story of the path of two lovers through the ruins of a relationship, set against the backdrop of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Kairos is a coming of age story, an age-gap love story, an ode to a lost country and much more.
Ia Genberg - The Details, 2024
In the throes of a high fever, a woman lies bedridden and begins to have fever dreams about significant people from her past. A novel primarily built around four such portraits, unveiling the fragments of memory and experience that make up a life, The Details is a powerful celebration of humanity. Exhilarating, provocative and well worth a read.