Jul-Sept 2017: non-majority language writers

This quarter's theme read focuses on authors writing in a language that is not the primary language of the country they are living in. As we will see, this is actually not always as clear-cut as it might seem -- at least for those of us living in places where a shared language is seen as a central part of national identity.

I'm avoiding using the term "minority language" here, because this is often used in connection with official political policies to acknowledge certain ethnic/linguistic/cultural groups living within a country. While some of the authors we'll be reading might qualify as such, in many cases they don't belong to any such clearly defined group.

So: why might a person end up writing in some other language than the one used by the majority of the people around them? An author's goal, after all, is to be read.

In fact, getting read does turn out to be tricky. The book industry tends to be a pretty monolingual affair in any particular location. An author has the best chance if he or she is part of a community that has the resources to organize publications of its own in some form. Alternatively, an author may get in contact with the publishing industry in their language abroad -- provided political restriction of freedom of expression is not what got them into this situation in the first place. Sometimes an author's works have appeared first in translation and only later in their native language. In any case, there is often a price: authors who do not write in the predominant language often end up little known in the place they are living, whereas authors who have moved abroad may end up neglected by the canons of both their native countries and their new homelands.

My notes here are necessarily going to reflect my own reading interests, which means the authors I'll profile will largely be located in Europe and North America, with German and Russian probably overrepresented. But I want to start by offering a general typology which I hope will be useful as a starting place for identifying other relevant authors.

1) Emigré and exile literature
This category consists of writers who fled their home country due to war or persecution (or in some cases, may have been forced into exile). Particularly when they were already established authors before emigration, they may continue to write in their native language. The stay abroad may be temporary (only until the political situation changes) or they may permanently make their home in a new country.
The twentieth century saw several waves of such exiles; particularly well-known are Russian and German writers who emigrated to elsewhere in Europe or to North America.
I've profiled a couple of major groups in my next post below; for more inspiration, check out the theme read from last year on Writers at Risk

2) Authors who are members of a minority community, or a language enclave.
Language enclaves result, for example, when groups of people immigrate and settle en masse and maintain a strong sense of allegiance to their native language and culture, often over several generations.
Empires and redrawing of national borders may also result in mixing of languages. If the community is substantial it may come to be considered a minority language (or in some cases, even as a second or third official language). European nationalism was based on the idea of a largely monolingual society. However, historically monolingualism has tended to be the exception rather than the rule and practically all European countries today have recognized minority languages of some kind or another.

3) Widespread cultural diaspora to the degree that a group does not have a distinct area considered their homeland. The two main examples of this are Yiddish and Romani. There is a well-established literary tradition in Yiddish. Romani seems to have a largely oral tradition (I was able to find little written literature, much less any available in translation).
International auxiliary languages (i.e., Esperanto), or possibly other constructed languages such as Klingon would also fall in this category. There have actually been a number of novels, as well as poetry, written in Esperanto, but they seem to have attracted little interest outside the Esperanto community, so I don't believe much, if anything, has been translated.

4) Writers who moved abroad or chose a different language for idiosyncratic reasons: work, love of travel, family, etc. It's harder to make generalizations about such authors because they're not necessarily part of a larger "wave" of immigration. Academics are often good candidates for this category, but there may also be another subset consisting of disillusioned individuals such as the American expats of the "Lost Generation".

5) There is a final category I won't get into in much detail, because this is where my own knowledge is the weakest and also because it is in part linguistically so chaotic that I'm not even sure the majority/minority category is relevant: the multilingualism of postcolonial countries in much of Africa and south and south-east Asia. These are areas of incredible linguistic diversity made even more complex by colonialism and the creation of arbitrary administrative units that had little to do with linguistic, ethnic, or cutural boundaries. Today the most relevant distinction is perhaps between administrative languages -- languages of the former colonists or other lingua francas such as Arabic, Swahili, or Urdu -- and local languages. Since we're interested in books here, arguably authors writing in languages that are not generally the first choice for literary output (either because they are not taught in schools, do not have a long-standing written literary tradition, or would not reach a wide readership) would be relevant for this theme read.
Related to this is indigenous language literature, although here the issue is less that of "too many languages" as it is of "too few speakers": there is little available literature in the indigenous languages of the Americas and Australia because so many of them are endangered. Often, too, they may have an oral rather than written literary tradition.

Author profiles

German (and Austrian) Exilliteratur

Thomas Mann: lived in the US from 1939 to 1952. The Holy Sinner, The Black Swan and Felix Krull were written during his time in exile. Already read everything by Thomas Mann? You could try his brother Heinrich Mann's Henri Quatre or his son Klaus Mann's Mephisto.

Carl Zuckmayer: the play The Devil's General was written in the US; he writes about his time in the US in his autobiography and an unfinished novel. His wife, Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer also wrote about their experiences in The Farm in the Green Mountains.

Lion Feuchtwanger: German-Jewish author, moved to France in 1933, spent a couple of months in Russia, and lived in the US after 1940. Books written in exile include Moscow 1937, The Devil in France, Proud Destiny, The Jewess of Toledo

Hermann Broch: finished writing The Death of Vergil in the US; The Guiltless was also written after emigration.

Alfred Döblin: November 1918 was written in France and the US during the war years; he returned to Germany briefly but was unhappy there, and moved back to Paris and his final novel, Tales of a Long Night, was published a few years later .

Joseph Roth: fled Germany in 1933 to Paris; had worked as a journalist travelling extensively around Europe for a number of years before. Relevant works: Confession of a Murderer, The Emperor's Tomb, Legend of the Holy Drinker

Nelly Sachs: German-Jewish poet and playwright, settled in Sweden after escaping from the Nazis in 1940. (The Seeker and Other Poems)

Peter Weiss: lived in Sweden after 1938. Best known for his play Marat/Sade (I think there's a film version of the play in English drifting around on youtube; it's rather odd but amazing when done well). Other major works: The Shadow of the Body of the Coachman, The Investigation, Leavetaking

Edgar Hilsenrath: German-Jewish writer, interned in a ghetto in WWII; escaped to Palestine, emigrated to New York in the 1950s and only permanently returned to Germany in 1975. (Night, The Nazi and the Barber)

Elias Canetti: Bulgarian-born, grew up partially in England and German-speaking countries. Wrote in German, moved to England after the Anschluß in 1938, remained there until the 1970s. (The Tongue Set Free, The Human Province)

Russian emigré writers

Gaito Gazdanov: emigrated to France in 1923 in the wake of the Russian Revolution. (An Evening with Claire, The Spectre of Alexander Wolf, The Buddha's Return, Night Roads)

Ivan Bunin: emigrated to France in 1920. (Mitya's Love, The Life of Arseniev, Dark Avenues)

Vladimir Nabokov: his Russian-language novels were written in exile in Germany and France in the 1920s and 1930s (e.g. King, Queen, Knave, Invitation to a Beheading). He switched to writing in English after moving to the US. In 1961 he moved Switzerland (from this period: Ada or Ardor, Transparent Things)

Vasily Aksyonov: stripped of citizenship in 1980, lived in the US until 2004, when he moved to France. (Generations of Winter)

Sergei Dovlatov: emigrated in 1979 to the US. (Pushkin Hills, The Suitcase, A Foreign Woman)

Vladimir Voinovich: emigrated to Germany in 1980; returned to Russia in 1990 after his citizenship was restored. (Moscow 2042, The Fur Hat)

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974; lived in Switzerland then the United States, returned to Russia in 1994. (November 1916)

Joseph Brodsky: poet, emigrated to the US in 1972. (So Forth)

David Shrayer-Petrov: emigrated to the US in 1987, works as a medical researcher as well as writing ficiton and poetry. (Dinner with Stalin and Other Stories)

German language enclaves outside Germany/Austria/Switzerland

Franz Kafka: belonged to a German speaking-minority in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Gustav Meyrink: likewise lived and worked in Prague. His writings reveal his interest in the occult. (The Golem, The Green Face, The Angel of the West Window)

Paul Celan: Jewish poet from Romania who wrote in German. Probably the best-known poet of the Holocaust.

Herta Müller: Romanian German. Faced censorship and police surveillance under communism, emigrated to Germany in 1987. (Nadirs and The Passport were published before emigration, but her later works also deal with the effects of totalitarianism and repression in Romania). Her ex-husband Richard Wagner is also a writer, but none of his work seems to have been translated into English. They were part of a German-language literary group, Aktionsgruppe Banat. German-speakers can check out the anthology Ein Pronomen ist verhaftet worden.

Oskar Pastior: Romanian German poet and the only German-language member of Oulipo. Fled to Germany in 1968. (In English: Many Glove Compartments, Poempoems)

Giselher Hoffmann: part of a German-speaking minority in Namibia descended from settlers in the colonial period. (Nothing in English. In German: Die Erstgeborenen)

Sabine Gruber: from South Tyrol, a largely German-speaking province of northern Italy (in English: Roman Elegy)

Finland Swedish

Tove Jansson (series of children's books about small creatures called "Moomintrolls": The Finn Family Moomintroll)

Märta Tikkanen (Manrape)

Kjell Westö (The Wednesday Club)

Francophone Canadian authors
This list is fairly arbitrary since I really don't know who is important! I simply picked some who sounded interesting; check out the Wikipedia category Canadian writers in French for a more complete list.

Marguerite Andersen (The Bad Mother)

Nicolas Dickner (Nikolski)

Nancy Houston: interestingly, French is not her native language; she writes in French and self-translates into English (The Goldberg Variations)

Dany Laferrière (The Enigma of the Return)

Antonine Maillet (Pélagie-la-Charrette)

Jacques Poulin (Translation Is a Love Affair)

Pascale Quiviger: French Canadian; now lives in the UK (The Breakwater House)

Gabrielle Roy (The Tin Flute)

Kim Thúy (Ru, about Vietnamese boat people and immigration to Canada)

Ying Chen: writes in French and self-translates into Chinese (Ingratitude)

Non-English language US writers

Ole Edvart Rølvaag: Norwegian (Giants in the Earth)

Drude Krog Janson: Norwegian (A Saloonkeeper's Daughter)

Reinhold Solger: German (Anton in America)

Ludwig von Reizenstein: German (The Mysteries of New Orleans)

Rolando Hinojosa: Chicano author; he has published in both Spanish and English. (Estampas del Valle, self-translated by the author as "The Valley")

Giannina Braschi: Puerto Rican; writes in a mixture of English, Spanish, and Spanglish (Yo-yo Boing, United States of Banana

Tino Villanueva: writes in both Spanish and English (Chronicle of My Worst Years)

Yiddish

Sholem Aleichem

Isaac Bashevis Singer

S. Ansky (The Dybbuk)

Moyshe Kulbak (The Zelmenyaners)

Der Nister (The Family Mashber)

Other writers who have emigrated or settled abroad

Elie Wiesel: Romanian, wrote in French. moved to the US in 1955 (best known for Night, but wrote a number of other novels, mostly dealing with the Holocaust, pogroms, or similar crimes)

B. Traven: pseudonym of an unknown German-language author of adventure novels. It is relatively certain that he lived for many years in Mexico. (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Death Ship)

Daria Wilke: Russian, lives in Germany (available in English: Playing a Part)

Anatoly Kudryavitsky: Russian, lives in Ireland. Writes haiku in English and novels in Russian (Disunity)

Marguerite Yourcenar: Belgian-French writer. Moved to the US in 1939 and eventually became a US citzen. (Memoirs of Hadrian, The Abyss)

Czesław Miłosz: moved from Poland to the US after WWII; was a professor in California and remained in the US until the fall of the Iron Curtain. (Visions from San Francisco Bay, many volumes of poetry, e.g., Second Space, Facing the River, Provinces)

Reinaldo Arenas: Cuban writer who got on the wrong side of the communist government, imprisoned for a number of years, fled to the US in 1980. (Graveyard of the Angels, Mona and Other Tales)

Alejo Carpentier: Cuban writer of French background who travelled extensively in Europe and South America. He lived in exile in Paris from 1928 to 1939 after being arrested for his opposition to Machado's regime; subsequently lived in Haiti and Venezuela and then in Cuba again. After 1966 he served as a Cuban ambassador in Paris. (Baroque Concerto, Reasons of State, The Harp and the Shadow)

Daína Chaviano: left Cuba for the US in 1991; is considered one of the most important female science-fiction authors writing in Spanish. (The Island of Eternal Love)

Najem Wali: Iraqi writer who moved to Germany in 1980. Unlike a number of other authors from the Arabic world who have settled in Europe, he continues to write in Arabic rather than the local language. (Joseph's Picture)

W.G. Sebald: attended university partially in England and eventually took a position as a professor there (late 1980s). (Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Austerlitz)

Hansjörg Schertenleib: German-Swiss writer; settled in Ireland in 1996, although he still spends part of his time in Switzerland. (A Happy Man)

Rolf Lappert: German-Swiss writer; lived in France for a while and spent time travelling the world; lived from 2000 to 2011 in Ireland. (Nothing available in English translation. In German: Nach Hause Schwimmen, Auf den Inseln des letzten Lichts)

Reinhard Lettau: German, member of the writers' movement "Gruppe 47"; emigrated to the US in the 1950s, literature professor. Returned to Germany in 1991. (Obstacles, Breakfast in Miami)

Elia Barceló: Spanish; is a professor of literature in Austria. (Heart of Tango)

Mikhail Shishkin: Russian, has lived in Switzerland since 1995. (The Light and the Dark, Maidenhair)

Orhan Pamuk: Turkish, has lived intermittantly in the US. Wrote The Black Book while living in New York in the 1980s; has held various professorships in the US since 2006 (The Museum of Innocence and A Strangeness in My Mind were presumably written in this period).

Sándor Márai: Hungarian, was subject to harsh criticism by the communist government, left Hungary in 1948, lived first in Italy, then in the US. Many of his books from the exile period have not been translated into English but may be available in other European languages. (Memoir of Hungary)

Isabel Allende: Chilean, writes in Spanish, moved to the US in 1989. (Daughter of Fortune, Portrait in Sepia, Zorro, Inés of My Soul, Island beneath the Sea

Olaf Olafsson: has held prominent positions at Sony and Time Warner and is best known as a businessman, but has also written a handful of novels in his native language, Icelandic, which he self-translates into English. (Absolution, Walking into the Night)

Hamid Ismailov: Uzbek writer who fled his homeland in 1992; lives in England. His writes in Uzbek and Russian. (The Underground, The Dead Lake

Dubravka Ugrešić: Yogoslavia/Croatia. Left in 1993 after public attacks due to her anti-war position and criticism of nationalism. Has taught at US universities, lives in Amsterdam. (The Ministry of Pain, The Culture of Lies)

Ruby Namdar: Israeli author who writes in Hebrew, lives in New York. His first novel The Ruined House was awarded Israel's prestiguous Sapir Prize.

Aras Ören: Turkish writer living in Berlin. (Nothing in English. In German: Bitte nix Polizei)

I know the focus of this group is on non-American/British/Canadian literature, but for the curious, here are a few English-language writers living in non-Anglophone contexts:

Gertrude Stein: lived in Paris after 1903, held a Paris salon visited by many of the expat writers of the Lost Generation (Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound) (The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas). (Paris was also a temporary home to some of the Beat Generation in the late 1950s and early 1960s: The Beat Hotel)

D. H. Lawrence: British writer, spent the later years of his life (after 1919) in various places abroad, including Italy, Mexico, and southern France (The Plumed Serpent, Lady Chatterley's Lover)

James Joyce: spent most of his life after 1904 abroad in Europe (Italy/France/Switzerland)

James Baldwin: African-American and gay writer who emigrated to Paris in 1948 because of the restrictiveness of US culture at the time, although he returned to the US temporarily during the Civil Rights movement (Giovanni's Room)

Richard Wright: African-American writer who moved briefly to Quebec, then France in 1946, hung out with the French existentialists, travelled in Europe, Asia, Africa (The Outsider, Savage Holiday)

Harry Mathews: US writer, moved to France in the 1950s and lived there full-time through at least 1976, later divided his time between France and the US. Member of the French experimental writing group Oulipo. Some of his later work is in French. (Tlooth)

Paul Bowles: American, settled in Morocco after 1947 (The Sheltering Sky)

Lawrence Durrell: Born in colonial India, schooled in England, spent much of his adult life abroad (Corfu, Egypt, Greece, Cyprus, France), partly while working for the British Foreign Service (Alexandria Quartet, Avignon Quintet)

Kay Boyle: American, lived in Europe from 1923 through the end of WWII, mostly in France, but also spent time in Germany and Austria. Her 1936 novel Death of a Man thematizes the growing Nazi threat.

William Demby: African-American writer, lived in Rome from 1946 to 1967, continued to spend significant amounts of time in Italy after. (Beetlecreek)

Frank Yerby: African-American, moved to Franco's Spain in 1955 in protest of US racial discrimination. (Goat Song, Judas, My Brother, The Dahomean)

Sharon Dodua Otoo: British, has lived in Berlin since 2006. Has published a few stories/novellas written in English (the things i am thinking while smiling politely), recently won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, which is awarded for texts written in German and presented orally during the literary festival.

Nell Zink: American, has lived in Germany since 2000, had previously worked in Tel Aviv for a time. (Wallcreeper, Mislaid)

Minority languages
As mentioned in my previous post, I can only touch on this topic; here is a fairly arbitrary list of some minority languages and representative authors for each (I've tried to include authors available in English translation; note that some of these authors also write in a majority language as well):

Basque (Bernardo Atxaga, Unai Elorriaga,)

Catalan (Sebastia Alzamora, Najat El-Hachmi, Jaume Cabre, Quim Monzo, Albert Sanchez Pinol, Mercè Rodoreda, Teresa Solana)

Galician (Manuel Rivas, Chus Pato)

Faroese (Heðin Brú, Jogvan Isaksen)

Irish (Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Tomás Ó Criomhthain, Brendan Behan, Michael Hartnett)

Welsh (Mihangel Morgan, Caryl Lewis, William Owen Roberts)

Romansch (Arno Camenisch)

Breton (Pierre Jakez Hélias)

Kurdish (Bakhtiyar Ali)

Chuvash (Gennady Aygi)

Tigrinya (Gebreyesus Hailu)

Sesotho (Thomas Mofolo)

Gikuyu (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o)

Luo (Grace Ogot)

Yoruba (D.O. Fagunwa)

Wolof (Boubacar Boris Diop)

Zulu (Sibusiso Nyembezi)

Inuktitut (Sanaaq)

Some themes and questions to think about while reading:

What is the author's relationship to the majority language and culture surrounding them? Do they thematize this in their writing, for example, by "code-switching" or including dialogue in the other language? Do they identify with the majority culture or do they feel like outsiders or identify with a much smaller minority community?

What is the status of the language they write in? High status? Low status? Is there institutional or government support for authors writing in this language, or is there pressure to write in the majority language instead? Does the mainstream population have prejudices against this language?

Does the language have a well-established literary tradition? Does their writing reflect this literary tradition, or the literary tradition of the country they are living in?

For authors who were forced to emigrate: were they well-established writers before emigration? How does the experience of being in a new country affect their writing? Are they part of a community of other writers in exile from their homeland?

For authors who migrated under more auspicious circumstances: what are their reasons for leaving their homeland? Do they see their stay as temporary or as a source of inspiration for their writing? How do they maintain connections with readers and the literary community in their native country?

For authors writing in a minority language: to what degree do they take a political statement by writing in this language? Is this reflected in the content of their work?

**** Reserving one more post for additional commentary/links ****

Thank you for a wonderful introduction. As you said, it appears to be much more complex than I thought. I'll start hunting up a read.

Thanks for setting up this theme! I'm looking forward to it, as I was in the País Vasco (Bilbao and San Sebastián) all of last week and have several books by Basque and Catalan authors that I've been wanting to get to for months or years. I'll probably read most if not all of these books this quarter:

The Accordionist's Son by Bernardo Atxaga (Basque)
The Dolls' Room by Llorenç Villalonga (Catalan)
The Gray Notebook by Josep Pla (Catalan)
Life Embitters by Josep Pla (Catalan)
Martutene by Ramón Saizarbitoria (Basque)
Obabakoak by Bernardo Atxaga (Basque)
Private Life by Josep Maria de Sagarra (Catalan)
The Sea by Blai Bonet (Catalan)

I've read a couple of books by Catalan authors that I would recommend, The Time of the Doves by Mercè Rodoreda and A Thousand Morons by Quim Monzó, and I also liked Plants Don't Drink Coffee by the Basque author Unai Elorriaga. I'll go through my library next week to see if there are any other books originally written in Catalan I liked.

ETA: I also enjoyed A Man of His Word by the Catalan author Imma Monsó.

spiphany - thanks! A lot to think about there.

I've looked at exiles quite extensively in the past, so I'll probably try to focus on minority languages/enclaves. Although it must be about time for a re-read of Sebald.

I definitely want to read some more Herta Müller, and I want to read some French-Canadians. Yiddish (I've never read anything other than I B Singer) would also interest me - in translation, and it would be fun to try some Welsh. I've read Feet in chains in translation, but that's about it. I'm about halfway through the Duolingo Welsh course, but I doubt that I'll be reading Welsh novels in the original by September!

To start with I'm going to have a go at Marguerite Andersen - as a francophone German living in Ontario she seems to tick just about all your categories...

...et voilà. Not quite in time for international Justin Trudeau Day, but nearly.

This book happens to be the only one of Andersen's works currently available on Kobo where I am:

Le figuier sur le toit (2009) by Marguerite Andersen (Germany, France, Canada, etc., 1924- )

 

The reasons why an elderly German lady who has been living in Toronto for many years should be writing a book in French slowly become clear as we follow her exploration of her own past - including some disagreeable parts she has been avoiding thinking about for a long time - and her attempt to answer the inevitable question "where do you come from?" in the run-up to a big family party that has been planned for her 84th birthday.

Although it's presented as a novel, this is unambiguously intended to be read as non-fiction. The author looks back at her life in 20s and 30s Germany with her far from everyday parents, Martha - daughter of the well-known theologian Reinhold Seeberg - and Theodor Bohner - a writer, born in Ghana where his parents were serving as Lutheran missionaries. There's a lot of fascinating detail about the life of a liberal middle-class family in those times, and Marguerite's portrayal of herself as a little girl is both convincing and funny.

But of course the real story is about the political change that was going on in the background, and which she was only intermittently aware of. With hindsight, she now understands the quarrel between Theo (a mild liberal who sat in the Prussian state parliament) and Seeberg, whose strongly nationalist and anti-semitic publications after World War I helped give a veneer of intellectual respectability to the Nazis. And of course she has to try to find a way of dealing with the knowledge that the grandfather she loved and was a little in awe of was an inciter of crimes against humanity.

This isn't really a very obviously Canadian book. The French it's written in is rather metropolitan, possibly a bit old-fashioned, but elegant and a pleasure to read. There are certainly more Germanisms than Americanisms in the text. I thought at first that there was some sort of eccentric spelling convention in play, but after a few pages I worked out that it was simply an incompetent e-book conversion which had somehow messed up all the ligatures ("fammes" instead of "flammes"; "ofce" instead of "office", etc.). Irritating, but not enough to spoil what was otherwise a very interesting and enjoyable book.

---

ETA: looking back, I see I didn't actually comment on why Andersen writes in French. She doesn't answer that question very clearly herself in this book, but reading between the lines it seems to have been largely accident (marriage to a French officer) that led to her stepping onto the French-speaking academic circuit and eventually brought her to Montréal and then Toronto. She left Germany "pour voir du pays" rather than from any political necessity, and having once left she clearly found it easier to keep moving than to go back. So this seems to be a case of using French as an international language (which by chance she knows better than English) rather than as a member of a linguistic minority. And, as mentioned in >1 spiphany:, there are definite advantages to using a language that has official standing in the country you are living in - Andersen has won prizes and benefited from government grants she wouldn't have been eligible for had she been writing in German.

>1 spiphany:

"2) Authors who are members of a minority community, or a language enclave."

Would you include members of the colonizing culture in this category? I'm thinking of, say, "Out of Africa" and "West with the Night." At least those are the first two that come to mind.

>9 rocketjk: I interpreted this theme quite broadly to begin with, so as far as I'm concerned you can define it however you want ;) These are the sorts of places where easy categories start to break down -- which is part of what I personally found intriguing about the topic: authors who don't fit neatly into pigeonholes.

I might not be inclined to think about a writer in Africa writing in English today as a non-majority-language writer because English has become the default language used for literary production in many parts of Africa (this doesn't mean that English is necessarily the everyday language of most of the population). And, I don't know, someone like Kipling also doesn't feel (to me) like he quite fits this theme read because the British colonial presence in India was so far-reaching, but colonists farmsteading out in the wilderness probably would. I almost included Karen Blixen in my list because she has such an interesting story in any case -- a Danish writer who wrote in both English and Danish and lived all over the place.

I suspect that part of the minority/majority dynamic is often a power differential -- i.e., with the language of those in power functioning de facto as a majority language regardless of the actual numbers of speakers. But it's tricky. Even in Europe situations where the upper classes spoke one language and the peasants spoke another are historically not at all unusual (Russian in Ukraine, Polish in Lithuania, German in Poland, Danish in Sweden, etc). Or Latin as the language of scholarship for some centuries after anyone actually spoke it.

As I'm Swedish it is hardly "reading globally" for me to read Finnish-Swedish literature but as I've read and loved books by both Tove Jansson and Märta Tikkanen this year I can at least add my recommendations.

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
Tove Jansson may be best known for her Moomin books (which are well worth a read also for adult readers) but she also wrote several books for adults. The Summer Book is one of my favourites and I've re-read it several times.

The Love Story of the Century, a narrative poem by Märta Tikkanen is one of the best books I've read this year. I can't answer for the English translation but in Swedish it is a (feminist) classic.

One thing I've noticed already - whilst it's normally fairly easy to get French books here in the Netherlands, none of the usual sellers stock more than a handful of French books by Canadian authors. Even amazon.fr doesn't have all that much choice. But I did manage to order Pélagie-la-charette and Volkswagen blues, so I hope to have something to contribute to this thread in due course...

Thank you for all the recommendations in >1 spiphany: and in-thread. So many new (to me) authors and books to explore! Le figuier sur le toit sounds rich and interesting, but I must say I'm put off by the OCR SNAFU, and there's no paper version available anywhere. I can borrow La soupe, by the same author, from my local library, so I'll go with that instead. It's a psychological novel and it's about food - right up my alley!
If you're looking for French Canadian books that are very Quebécois - in language and in subject matter - there's Michel Tremblay.
Another author that might be of interest for this theme is Frédéric Mistral. He's nearly forgotten now, but he was the first Nobel-prize winner writing in a regional language (Provençal). His
long poem Mireia/Mireille is available online in Provençal and in French. I don't know about the English translation, though. There's probably a very stuffy Edwardian translation somewhere.

>13 Dilara86: stuffy Edwardian translation

Victorian, rather: I found one on Archive.org by Harriet W Preston (Boston 1872) that looks like a cross between Scott and Longfellow - full of things like "would fain", "methinks", "'twas", and "ne'er".

But Mistral might be interesting - I passed him over for Grazia Deledda when we did the Nobel thing last time.

>14 thorold:
stuffy Edwardian translation
Victorian, rather: I found one on Archive.org by Harriet W Preston (Boston 1872) that looks like a cross between Scott and Longfellow - full of things like "would fain", "methinks", "'twas", and "ne'er".

But Mistral might be interesting - I passed him over for Grazia Deledda when we did the Nobel thing last time.

What I take from your post is that an English translation of Mireille was available 30 years before he received his Nobel Prize, which is rather heartening. Mistral clearly was more famous outside of France than I thought he was... The opera (and Lamartine's praise) probably helped. Shame about the translation, though. Here's a link to the Provençal original for those who want to get a feel for the language. The French translation I'm reading is fairly straightforward, with a light "provençal flavour" to the language - the characters are peasants after all. There's an abundance of "et" and "ette" suffixes to denote smallness or fondness, and some archaisms that give a sense of timelessness and earthiness to the language, and which probably felt a lot less archaic at the time anyway. It's neither turgid nor grandiloquent, and it reads reasonably well, for nineteenth-century prose/poetry. The subject isn't necessarily my cup of tea, but that's another problem.

Speaking of Grazia Deledda, I loved Ashes, which I read in a French translation a while back, but could not get on with After the Divorce because the 1905 translation was a bit of a plod. And that makes me think that there might be some Italian authors (Ferrante?, possibly Deledda herself? - maybe someone who knows Italian could chime in) who use enough dialect in their books for them to possibly qualify for this quarter's theme.

>15 Dilara86: Yes, it looks as though Mistral really hit a nerve in the 60s and 70s - Gounod's opera came out only 4 years after Mireille was published, and I saw a couple of other English translations apart from the Preston one on archive.org. Wikipedia says it was translated into 17 languages. I think I even remember a mention of Mistral in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's letters somewhere (she died in 1861).

I don't remember there being much dialeect in Deledda, apart from the dialogue and a few specific local terms. But I only read one book. Sadly, Andrea Camillieri probably doesn't count as a minority language either...

I know this doesn't fit the topic theme precisely, but here is an interesting biography of Mistral that I read several years back: Lion of Arles: A Portrait of Mistral and His Circle.

I'm back online as of today, so a belated thank-you to >1 spiphany: for a wonderful introduction. As I unpack my books I am finding some of these authors and yesterday my first new book arrived at my new home: A Broken Mirror translated from the Catalan should fit really well with this theme.

>12 thorold: How about amazon.ca?
I really liked Pélagie and would add that it was the first foreign book to win France's Prix Goncourt. Maillet is Acadian, a Francophone group in Canada with a different pronunciation and different expressions than the better known québécois French.

This is a book that I didn't really think of as belonging in this category until after I'd read it, but Goytisolo, who died last month, probably qualifies on several different counts. He lived in (voluntary) exile most of his adult life, first in Paris, then in Marrakech. He wrote in Castilian in a French-speaking environment, and his biggest influences were probably the French authors and film-makers who were around him in Paris (especially Genet). He grew up in Barcelona in a middle-class Castilian-speaking family, and after the Civil War he wouldn't have been allowed to speak Catalan, but of course he would have been well aware of the language and its political significance. (Maybe he even spoke it with his mother, who was killed in the war while he was still a small child?)

Señas de identidad (1966, Marks of identity) by Juan Goytisolo (Spain, France, Morocco, 1931 - 4 June 2017)

 

Señas de identidad was the first of Goytisolo's books to break with realism (he later disowned the eight novels that preceded it). He deploys just about every modernist trick in the book: multi-page sentences; a narrator who switches freely between first, second and third persons; unpredictable scene-changes (the one I had to read three times before it made sense was when we switched from a piazza in Venice to a voodoo ceremony in Cuba in mid-sentence); inserted texts and documents; polyphony; language-switching (the book is written in Castilian, but he expects the reader to be able to negotiate quite lengthy passages of French and the occasional bit of Catalan dialogue; in the last chapter there are as many as five languages going on at once), etc., etc.

The multiple-voices thing is one of the most characteristic elements of the book, and Goytisolo builds it up gently from classic "now"/"then" alternation of the opening chapters to (apparently) unconnected narratives interleaved first paragraph-by-paragraph, then sentence-by-sentence, and ultimately moves on to multiple voices within the same sentence, so that the last chapter becomes as complicated to unpick as the final ensemble of a Mozart opera.

So there's a lot of virtuoso showing-off going on (and a few cheap tricks, like the way he gets the book to end on the words INSERT COIN in several different languages), but it isn't just about technique: Goytisolo wants to take the focus away from his disenchanted narrator, the exiled photographer Álvaro, and generalise his jaundiced view of the "menopausal society" of Francoist Spain into a much broader picture. Spain, as he sees it, is irredeemably damaged by centuries of (Catholic, feudal, monarchist) social control and exploitation. What money there is has been made on the backs of slaves (inter alia by Álvaro's family, who, like Goytisolo's, owned plantations in Cuba). The Civil War has left terrible scars on both sides, and Spain is being damaged further by rural poverty and emigration (we forget it now, but about two million Spanish workers migrated elsewhere in Europe in the 50s and 60s), whilst the recent opening up of the tourist trade is merely leaving scars on the landscape and putting money into a handful of greedy pockets. And the Spanish exiles in Paris are too damaged and divided to organise anything (they can't even manage to stage an orgy in an artist's studio...).

A fantastic, subtle, complicated and powerful book that it isn't possible to do justice to on a first reading...

>18 SassyLassy: How about amazon.ca? - That's such a simple solution that I must have tried it and rejected it for some reason. Mustn't I? Or maybe...

Shakespeare and Company by Sylvia Beach
About an American woman in Paris, the book store she started there and how she became the first publisher of James Joyce's Ulysses.

An interesting and very readable memoir about about life among the (primarily) English speaking writers and artists in Paris between 1919 and 1945.
Sylvia Beach was an interesting person in herself and she was closely involved in the literary life in Paris. I recommend it if you are interested in James Joyce, the American "Lost Generation" or Paris between the world wars.

A chance find in the charity shop today, by a writer I'd only vaguely heard of, who happens to fit into this category:

Mozart-Novelle (1947) by Louis Fürnberg (Austria-Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Palestine (British Mandate), East Germany, etc. 1909 - 1957)

 

The poet Louis Fürnberg belonged to the German-speaking minority in Czechoslovakia. As a Jew and a dedicated communist activist, he was lucky to survive the Nazi period, which he spent partly in captivity and partly in exile in Jerusalem. After the war he returned to Prague, working as a journalist and diplomat, but the growing anti-semitism of the Czech communist party led him to move to the DDR in 1954. Amongst other things he was celebrated as the author of the anthem of the East German communist party (Refrain: Die Partei, die Partei, die hat immer Recht! ). Bizarrely, this best-forgotten song has recently been resurrected in German politics as the anthem of the satirical party, Die Partei...

As well as agit-prop and lyric poems, Fürnberg wrote a number of short prose works, in a style that obviously draws on Kleist's famous novellas. The most famous, Die Begegnung in Weimar (1952), deals with a meeting between Goethe and the Polish writer Adam Mickiewitz, whilst Mozart-Novelle (1948) has Mozart, in Prague on the eve of the 1787 premiere of Don Giovanni, spending an evening with the elderly Chevalier Casanova. There is some historical basis for this - Casanova was living in Bohemia at the time, and he is on record as meeting Lorenzo da Ponte, so a meeting with Mozart would not be so surprising.

There's a lot of nicely-handled period comedy revolving around jealousies in the opera company, the intervention of a reactionary Prussian Junker, Casanova's misapprehension that the opera is about him, Mozart's suspicion that Konstanze might be cheating on him, etc. There's also quite a bit of linguistic fun: Mozart's down-to-earth Austrian talk and the French-laced German of Prague high society are both teased mercilessly ("Antiquitäten embrassieren mich nicht", one lady says at the prospect that Casanova might want to kiss her). But the point of the story is the late-night dialogue between Casanova and Mozart as they wander through the streets of Prague discussing the role of the artist and the arts in a world which - as Fürnberg is only just able to resist telling us explicitly - is only a couple of years away from the French Revolution.

More fun than I expected, and the little seventies DDR hardback with illustrations by Karel Müller is a very nice object in its way too (...and it was fun to see that its previous owner had received it as a somewhat oddly-chosen confirmation present!).

>21 thorold: Austria-Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Palestine (British Mandate), East Germany, etc. - it didn't occur to me last night, but there's something all those states have in common. (As does Jugoslavia, which I left in the "etc." bundle.)
If we ever do a "writers from countries that no longer exist" theme, Fürnberg might well turn out to be the champion...!

>21 thorold: Great idea! Would countries that changed names be considered? (Burma and Myanmar?) Here is link to more:
https://www.thoughtco.com/missing-countries-1435425

>22 thorold: . . . You would get a healthy debate, to say the least, regarding whether Palestine as an entity no longer exists, though.

>24 rocketjk: Yes, and this isn't the place. I've edited my original post slightly to reduce that risk...

>12 thorold: "...whilst it's normally fairly easy to get French books here in the Netherlands, none of the usual sellers stock more than a handful of French books by Canadian authors. Even amazon.fr doesn't have all that much choice."
This seems to be fairly typical...I noticed something similar when looking for Luxemburg authors for the first quarter's theme read. I guess publishing is very much a national affair. (This is even true to some degree for the English-language book market: in the US one easily finds US writers, and to a lesser extent Canadian and British ones, but Australia and New Zealand are hardly represented at all.)

On a related note, here is an interesting essay in the New Yorker on French literature in Canada and the lack of dialogue between the Anglophone and Francophone literary communities:
...Despite tapering enmities, though, the dynamic between Canada’s Francophone and Anglophone communities remains less one of cohesion than indifference and estrangement. ... This is partly a language issue, as few Canadians outside Quebec—save some enclaves in New Brunswick, Ontario, and Manitoba—are fluent in French. But it also has to do with the particular codes of Québécois society. Quebec’s cultural insularity protects its language and culture from outside influence—and so, for instance, the province has its own TV, film, and pop-music celebrities, completely distinct from those of Hollywood, while the pop culture of Ontario is almost entirely American....

>26 spiphany: That's very interesting. Here's a brief supporting anecdote. Into my used bookstore in northern California one day came a fellow who sounded like he was speaking English with a French accent. I've learned not to assume origin from accent, however, so I posed it as a question: "Are you French?" The answer was, "Yes. I'm from Quebec." If a French Canadian identifies more with being French than with being Canadian, you can see where there'd be a schism between the two communities.

This is the one I interrupted for the Fürnberg book. Much as I appreciate Herta Müller's writing, it's very emotionally demanding, and you wouldn't want to bash through one of her books in a single evening.

Heute wär ich mir lieber nicht begegnet (1997, The Appointment) by Herta Müller (Romania, Germany, 1953 - )

 

The 2009 Nobel laureate Herta Müller, as spiphany already mentioned in one of the intro-posts, was a member of the German-speaking minority in Romania until she emigrated to Germany. This book was written after she left Romania, but it obviously draws on her earlier experiences, so I think we can count it for this thread.

The unnamed narrator of this novel is taking a tram journey from her home to the office where she has been summoned - yet again - to be interviewed about her alleged crimes against the Romanian state. Along the way, she reflects on the other passengers in the tram, on her current and previous husbands, her family and in-laws, her neighbours, and the circumstances that led her to the point of making a small and rather futile gesture against the authority of the régime. Her observation of the small details of everyday life is almost brutally sharp in its focus, as the stream-of-consciousness builds up a composite picture of the way living under a corrupt authoritarian government distorts and coarsens everything in life, down to the most trivial level, with madness, alcohol and suicide appearing as the only viable ways out.

It's an interesting contrast with Herztier, the other of her novels that I've read: there the character was a young intellectual who was driven to write, whilst here it's a woman who strongly distrusts the written word (or anything else that leaves a record), but has nonetheless started to note down details of the physical world around her because her faith in reality is so shaken that she no longer trusts that there will be the same number of lampposts along the street from one day to the next. Magnificent, but very painful writing.

(I wonder why it is that Müller's titles so rarely survive translation to English? The plain ones become extravagant - Herztier -> The land of green plums, Atemschaukel -> The hunger angel - and the extravagant ones plain Heute wär ich mir lieber nicht begegnet -> The Appointment, Der Mensch ist ein großer Fasan auf der Welt -> The Passport)

>17 rocketjk: That looks interesting!

Back to the original post. I've thought of another author who definitely fits the bill. Galsan Tschinag was born in a Tuvan nomadic family in Mongolia. He won a scholarship and moved to the German Democratic Republic as a student. He divides his time between Germany and Mongolia, and writes in German. His autobiographies are available in English, but I'm not sure about his novels. There's a special place in my heart for Dojnaa, with its bleak description of the female condition in Mongolia, and for The Blue Sky, his childhood memoir, that oozes love for his extended family, his people and the Mongolian landscape.

>29 Dilara86: Galsan Tschinag has such a fascinating biography, doesn't he! I sometimes have a slight suspicion when reading his novels that we're being fed Soviet Naturvölker romanticism written for the benefit of us out-of-touch Westerners spoiled by capitalism (he reminds me a bit of other Soviet minority writers like Yuri Rytkheu and Chinghis Aitmatov)... but he's a wonderful storyteller and writes with such love about a fascinating world that it ultimately doesn't matter.

>27 rocketjk: I would guess for French Canadians it may be a case of the regional identity being stronger than the national identity, plus probably a certain amount of cultural isolation -- I imagine French is more of a language barrier for Anglophone Canadians than English is for Francophone Canadians. (I'm thinking of the Spanish-speaking communities in the US, although the situation there is of course different because there's no official policy of bilingualism. Or perhaps something like the position of Bavarians in Germany...)

This article from the Montreal Gazette profiles Lazer Lederhendler, an important translator of French-Canadian literature. He makes some comments that are quite revealing about the English and French communities existing to a degree as "parallel societies".

>30 spiphany: One other important difference between the Spanish speaking community in the U.S. and the French Canadians is that, for the most part, my Spanish speaking neighbors and compatriots moved here from other places (not counting Texas, where the situation is more complicated for families whose roots go back to before the Mexican-American War: "We never migrated to the U.S. The U.S. migrated to us."). The French Canadians moved to Quebec from France, for the most part (I'm going back to colonial days, now) and had English Canada imposed upon them. (Unless they were living in what's now Nova Scotia, in which case they were thrown out and ended up living in Louisiana, which leads me to wonder whether anybody has published in Cajun French. I lived in New Orleans for about seven years but never heard of anyone. That doesn't mean there isn't anyone, though.) So even the concept of "national identity" might resonate differently for French Canadians.

So...part of my plan for this quarter's theme read was to work through some relevant titles from my to-be-read shelf. Except that I just ordered half-a-dozen books that I discovered while preparing my moderation comments and that were just too interesting to pass up. So much for reducing the backlog.

Anyway, first up for this quarter was Edgar Hilsenrath's The Nazi and the Barber. By an odd coincidence, Hilsenrath grew up in my new home city (Halle), although I didn't know I would be moving here when I purchased the book back in December. Like thorold noted above about Herta Müller, I found that I had to read Hilsenrath in small doses: his writing is compelling but extremely uncomfortable.

As a Jewish German who lived through WWII, Hilsenrath's biography is familiar: after liberation from a ghetto in Romania he travelled to Palestine, then emigrated to the US in the 1950s. However, he's a bit of an outsider in both German literature and Holocaust literature. It's not hard to see why: "The Nazi and the Barber" is narrated by Max Schulz, a mass murderer (his own descriptor) who shot Jews in Poland while in the SS. To escape prosecution after the war he assumes the identity of Itzig Finkelstein, a Jewish boy with whom he grew up and trained together as an apprentice in the Finkelstein barber shop. After selling gold teeth of his victims on the post-war black market in Berlin, Schulz sails to Palestine, then still a British territory, where he is involved in the fight to establish the new state and where he eventually sets up a barber shop of his own.

Hilsenrath's talent is as a satirist and he has a certain black humor and appreciation for the more earthy aspects of human life (sex, defecation, violence). And this is what made parts of the book so unpleasant to read: the laconic, matter-of-fact descriptions of abuse and torture are disturbing precisely because the violence is so casual and arbitrary, almost cartoonlike. The book turns on the substitutability of victim and perpetrator, the implication that there's no real difference between the two except for an accident of fate. Hilsenrath's mass murderer doesn't murder out of hate or any particular conviction at all, it seems. Beaten by his father as a child, when a stick is placed in his hand he uses it to beat others: that is the simple logic of his world. Schulz is able to assume a Jewish identity because -- ironically -- he is grotesquely ugly precisely in such a way that he resembles a caricature of Jewishness that means he is accepted unquestioningly as such by Jews and Germans alike. In Israel, Schulz/Finkelstein uses his SS skill with a gun in the service of a Jewish terrorist organization, the owner of the barber shop he works in has numbered chairs for the customers based on the purity of their Jewish heritage in a hierarchy reminescent of the Nazi categories of race, and our protagonist delights customers with speeches about Jews taking over the world using the emotion-filled language of Nazi rallies.

All in all, a disturbing, provocative book. I'm not sure how I feel about what Hilsenrath does with the subject matter, or the seemingly amoral world he portrays, but it leaves one with a lot to think about.

Of particular interest for this theme read is the fact that, although it was written during a time when Hilsenrath was living more-or-less permanently in the US, he spent 8 months in Munich while writing the book because after two decades in the US he felt like he was losing touch with the German language. He eventually moved back to Germany for this reason. And yet the book was published first in English translation and only several years later in German, because he couldn't find a German publisher who was willing to have anything to do with it. The topic was simply too scandalous. I hinted in my introduction to this thread that authors living abroad and writing in their native language often risk obscurity simply because of the geographic and institutional separation from their homeland. For Hilsenrath this explanation doesn't quite to fit -- his (relative) obscurity seems to have more to do with the content and style of his writing rather than his location.

>31 rocketjk: I thought about Louisiana French when I was researching this theme read, but wasn't able to turn up much besides this anthology: Creole Echoes: The Francophone Poetry of Nineteenth-Century Louisiana.

Also, fun tidbit, Jack Kerouac was born to French-Canadian parents and some of his early writings, including part of an early draft of "On the Road" were composed in French. For those of you who read French, some of these writings have been collected in the volume La vie est d'hommage.

>31 rocketjk: and >33 spiphany:
About French literature in Louisiane, if you can read French, the website for the Bibliothèque Tintamarre, an online repository of French-Louisianais works, is worth a look: http://french.centenary.edu/louisiane.html. There's an interesting article by Zachary Richard, the Cajun singer-songwriter (L’émergence d’une littérature francophone en Louisiane), a decent list of nineteenth-century and twentieth-century works in French and in Louisiana Creole*, mostly stories, serialised novels, poems and songs, but also some plays and the Louisiana Black Code, and a much smaller list of English translations (http://french.centenary.edu/anglais/), including The Black Marseillaise.
I might look into the deliciously-named Louisiana poet Kirby Jambon. He was given a prize by the Académie Française in 2014. But if people are really struggling to find something suitable and easily available, there's always Kate Chopin. She wrote in English, she was bilingual, and her texts are peppered with French (and of course, she describes the life of the Creole* minority to which she belonged).

*Infuriatingly, "Creole" means two completely different things depending on the context. So, "Louisiana Creole" is the French-based Creole spoken (or formerly spoken) by the descendants of slaves in parts of Louisiana, but Chopin's Creoles were middle- to upper-class Louisianais of French origin.

>34 Dilara86:

"*Infuriatingly, "Creole" means two completely different things depending on the context. So, "Louisiana Creole" is the French-based Creole spoken (or formerly spoken) by the descendants of slaves in parts of Louisiana, but Chopin's Creoles were middle- to upper-class Louisianais of French origin."

My understanding of this situation is that the slaves of white Creoles were considered Creoles, too. The middle/upper-class whites would have spoken more classic French, while the slaves would have spoken a combination of the French of their masters and the African tongues of their own people. That mix would be the language known as Louisiana Creole, which I guess is much akin to the language spoken in Haiti, also called Creole.

In New Orleans culture, there was a lot of inter-mingling, to put it discreetly. (Or masters taking sexual advantage of their slaves, to be more blunt about it.) So many New Orleans Creoles were of mixed heritage. The French, as I recall, were a lot less savage than their American counterparts about keeping their slaves ignorant. For a while, there was a thriving mixed-blood Creole society in New Orleans including opera houses and classical orchestras. etc. Once the Americans gained the upper hand politically for good, though, all that came crashing down with the institution of harsh Jim Crow laws that ended those Creole institutions. Mixed blood meant black, period. In his book, The Blues People, Amiri Baraka makes the point that this development hastened the development of jazz, as a whole cohort of classically trained Creole musicians now had nowhere to play other than with other black musicians. When the classically trained players started hooking up with the former slaves more versed in African rhythms . . . jazz!

I don't feel absolutely certain about anything I just wrote, so I will not be offended about being corrected. It's been a while since I read about this topic, and I haven't lived in New Orleans since 1986, but that's how it all sits in my fevered numbskull.

>30 spiphany:
Galsan Tschinag has such a fascinating biography, doesn't he! I sometimes have a slight suspicion when reading his novels that we're being fed Soviet Naturvölker romanticism written for the benefit of us out-of-touch Westerners spoiled by capitalism (he reminds me a bit of other Soviet minority writers like Yuri Rytkheu and Chinghis Aitmatov)... but he's a wonderful storyteller and writes with such love about a fascinating world that it ultimately doesn't matter.

Yes, I agree with you, although I’m not sure they were targeting Westerners, so much as – maybe – justifying their way-of-life to their country’s ethnic and political majority, while working within the constraints of the Soviet era regarding the portrayal of the working/peasant/nomadic class. It’s great comfort reading, though. And to be fair, Tschinag, Rytkheu and Aitmatov all moved away from romantic novels that celebrated Nature and a Simpler, Wholesome Life, after the end of the Soviet Union. For example, Rytkheu’s Unna describes a Communist Party’s young hope’s descent into hell and alcoholism. Unna comes from a nomadic Chukchi family. Because she’s extremely intelligent, from an underrepresented minority in the USSR, and female, she gets noticed, benefits from the Soviet equivalent of Affirmative Action, and is fast-tracked into the Party. She’s ruthless and ambitious, and things go well for her, career-wise, until she falls in love with a Jewish musician. Then the cracks start to appear. Antisemitism and anti-Chukchi racism are systemic and pervasive, and in the end, inescapable, whatever the individual’s talents. It’s quite bleak and unrelenting. I think Rytkheu said that Unna was basically him. Except that *he* was saved from alcoholism and self-destruction (by Aitmatov, of all people – that makes me happy). Aitmatov was very critical of contemporary Kyrgyztan in Der Schneeleopard/Le léopard des neiges, which is the only novel of his that I've read. One day, I'll bite the bullet and borrow Jamilia from the library. I've been putting it off because although I do like a bit of idealised nature, I'm a lot more ambivalent about idealised love objects. In Dojnaa, Tschinag also has a few harsh words about Mongolian/Tuvan macho culture. And all three authors have written about the corruption in their country.
All the novels I mentioned have French and German translations, but I’m not sure about English (apart from Jamilia), which is a huge shame. If only the cutesy, folksy side of this kind of literature is being translated into English, that's a problem.

By the way, I had to look up “Naturvölker” before I could answer you, and that made me reflect on the fact that virtually everything I’ve read or watched about Mongolia was mediated through the German language or German facilitators: Tschinag writes in German, every single film I’ve seen featuring Mongolia was at best a German coproduction, if not actually written by a German scriptwriter: The Story of the Weeping Camel, The Cave of the Yellow Dog, The Two Horses of Genghis Khan... The Great Mongolian Outdoors seems to be a genre in itself in Germany!

>36 Dilara86: There does seem to be a very deep-seated love of nature in German culture that has played out in all sorts of ways (positive and negative) historically. Maybe Mongolia captures some of that? Although the prominence of German-Mongolian film collaborations may have another explanation -- I found a number of online articles talking about particularly strong ties between the two countries that date back to East Germany (trade relations and educational exchanges) which leads me to suspect the film productions may have arisen out of these existing networks.

Sorry to throw around foreign terms without any explanation -- I think in English the closest equivalents of "Naturvölker" would be "primitive peoples" or "noble savage" and neither of those are quite what I wanted to get at. You're absolutely right that all of the three above-mentioned authors do include critical elements even in their works that have an overall positive perspective, although I suspect it is indeed the case that it's mostly the more "idyllic" novels that have made it into English translation.

My slight discomfort with the "simpler, wholesome life in spiritual harmony with nature" narrative has a lot to do with having grown up in the American West and the way such narratives (written by white people and featuring Native American protagonists) have been used in very problematic ways by European Americans to simultaneously appropriate a mythical past and erase the centuries of tremendous wrongdoing that those same European Americans perpetrated against Native Americans. I mean, members of minority cultures should be able to write loveingly about their lifestyles and beliefs and traditions as offering something fundamentally valuable and worth preserving. And there is something very appealing and very comforting about these stories. But I find that as a consumer of such narratives there are all sorts of tricky issues resulting from the ways they end up embedded in other discourses of the majority/privileged/colonial culture.

It occurs to me again while writing this that there are some links between this quarter's theme read and last quarter's on travelogues by non-Western writers -- in both cases authors have to grapple on some level with the contact between two potentially quite different cultures, often with a clear power imbalance.

One topic I decided to focus on this quarter is German-language writers outside Germany/Austria/Switzerland (and non-German writers in these three countries, although those are proving harder to track down). Many of these texts aren't likely to be available in English translation, but I hope my comments are of some interest anyway.

I started with an anthology called Aus der neuen Welt which collects short stories by young authors from South Tyrol. South Tyrol is an autonomous province in northern Italy along the border with Austria. It was apparently once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire but ended up as part of Italy after WWI. The majority of the population is German-speaking, although there are substantial numbers of Italian speakers as well. There is a third official language, Ladin (a Romance language with similarities to Swiss Romansch), spoken by a small minority. Because of the absence of major cities, many writers seem to end up living and working in neighboring countries. For example, Herbert Rosendorfer, whom Germans will associate with his satirical novel about Munich, Letters Back to Ancient China, was of South Tyrolese extraction.

I greatly enjoyed the stories in "Aus der neuen Welt." As Sepp Mall writes in his preface to the volume, they are anything but provincial. In fact, the setting of many of the stories can't be identified more specifically than somewhere in present-day central Europe. Although a couple of the contributions are experimental in style, most of them are simply tightly crafted, well-told, and keenly observed stories about the struggles and dramas of ordinary people. I found this immensely refreshing. Contemporary German and Austrian literature tends to be obsessed with rehashing recent history in one way or another, or else with commenting on the state of society. And the novel is definitely king: while some authors do continue to write short stories, they can be hard to find, so dominant is the novel in the contemporary German publishing market. So this was a delightful discovery for a number of reasons.

The volume was published in 2003 by a small South Tyrol press and few of the authors are likely to be familiar names to German-speaking readers, although some have since become fairly well established as writers. One thing I found quite interesting is that the multilingualism of their milieu is not thematized at all in the stories -- I don't know if this is typical or simply the result of the selection of this particular volume (I rather suspect that South Tyrol poetry, at least, is likely to draw more strongly on the creative potential of multilingualism).

I assume everyone is busy reading, but to keep the thread from dying out and provide some food for thought, a couple of links on minority-language topics.

Since Catalan literature was mentioned earlier in the thread, here is a link to an interesting interview in Words without Borders with Moroccan-born Catalan writer Najat El Hachmi in which she talks, among other things, about language and identity:
I don’t think we are different people when using different languages, but there seems to be some kind of adjustment for each one of them. Have you ever noticed how a person’s voice timbre changes slightly depending on which language he or she is speaking? I think this is exactly what happens when we wear a different language—we make some adjustments, but in essence we are still the same person. The protagonist in The Foreign Daughter considers all of these issues. She pays attention to them because her linguistic situation requires it. Many of her concerns don’t come from the fact that she lives with two different languages ​​but that each of them has a very different role in her life. Amazigh language in migration remains a family language, but the family, which was originally extensive, has now been drastically reduced, thus there are fewer people who share it. I tried to capture that sense of the loss of the native language, and also the protagonist’s knowledge that she, as a daughter, will not be like her mother, mainly because the circumstances in which she now lives have little to do with her lived experience during early childhood. Personally, I find it very hard to dissociate languages ​​from the world they represent.
(Note: Words without Borders had a theme issue on Catalan literature in April 2017, including an excerpt of the novel talked about in this interview)

And on a completely different note: science fiction in Welsh? Not as unusual as one might think, according to this article on How Writers of Endangered Languages are Embracing Sci-Fi:
Sci-fi and speculative fiction (a broader category encompassing any literature with fantastical elements) aren’t the obvious vehicles for preserving an endangered language like Welsh, the oldest language in Europe, spoken by 19 percent of the population, around 562,000 people in 2011. But the genre has been intimately connected to the Welsh revitalization movement over the past 60 years, its writers playing creatively with the language, mixing up traditional folklore with space-age hobgoblins, and imagining various linguistic apocalypses. In fact, for those concerned about endangered languages anywhere in the world — including in the United States — sci-fi is a very natural way to express the perilous experience of an uncertain linguistic future.

Heðin Brú, The Old Man and His Sons

A rather bleakly realistic novel set in the Faroes. The elderly Ketil takes part in a whale hunt along with his youngest son; after the hunt he gets excited and bids more than he can afford for a large share of whale meat; he and his wife spend the next several month engaged in various endeavors to scrape together extra funds and avoid going into debt when the bill comes due.

The novel offers a vivid picture of Faroese life in the mid-twentieth century, a society on the brink of transition from a traditional subsistence lifestyle to a more modern one. We see the rift between Ketil and his sons, whose ideas about how to live their lives are very different than that of the older generation. Ketil scoffs at his youngest son's suggestion that they should borrow a motorboat to travel to the whale-hunt, for why spend money on something when their own two legs will get them there perfectly well? He is embarressed when this same son is caught sleeping with the neighbor's daughter, but his married sons laugh about it, saying that the times have changed and it is no big deal anymore. We see the poverty and struggle to survive in a harsh landscape where every scrap of wood is precious -- the local ne'er-do-well is disliked, among other reasons, because of his tendency to pilfer driftwood he has no right to. Honor is greatly valued, and, as in many small communities, gossip spreads like wildfire and people are quick to judge those who do not conform to their moral standards.

But amidst this stubbornness, we also see a tremendous sense of community and hospitality. Even while in the midst of financial worries, Ketil is quick to help out others in need (even if he sighs all the while), and even his estranged sons come to help when the roof is in danger of being blown off by a storm.
It isn't a cheerful novel, but it's written with great love for the characters and Faroese society and landscape and there's a subtle humor to the writing which compensated for the moments when the stubborn pride and self-defeating behavior of the protagonist left me wanting to scold him.

***

Heðin Brú (Hans Jacob Jacobsen) was a key figure in establishing Faroese as a literary language; the islands had long been subjects of Denmark (today the archipelago is a self-governing country within Denmark) and Faroese had not been considered suitable as a literary language. Like other Faroese writers of his era (e.g., William Heinesen, who wrote in Danish), he was educated in Danish and in fact left the Faroes for a time to study agriculture in Denmark. The afterword to my copy of the novel notes that it is marked by dialect and a casual style inspired by storytelling that shifts rapidly between past and present and formal and informal registers -- including pepperings of slightly-artificial sounding Danish. This aspect unfortunately could not be captured in the translation, but it is suggestive of the situation of a minor language in a society dominated (both administratively and linguistically) by another culture. And yet the novel is not at all self-conscious, nor is it idealising-nostalgic, as can sometimes happen in such cases of language and cultural revival. Heðin Brú feels confident as a writer, well aware of both the strengths and weaknesses, the beauty and absurdities of the island community.

I read this novel in German translation; it is telling that although there had been two previous translations of the novel into German, this is the first one which is actually based on the Faroese version -- the earlier translations used a Danish translation. Unfortunate as this is, it is perhaps unsurprising, given that the population of the Faroes is only around 50,000, which places definite constraints on the likelihood of finding translators who know the language.

Oh dear, I just finished a long response to rocketjk and it's been so long since I've posted on LT, that I closed the page without posting. Here goes with a summary

>31 rocketjk: ...which leads me to wonder whether anybody has published in Cajun French.

Cajun are some of the descendants of the Acadians, who as you say were expelled from the area of current day Nova Scotia, as well as current New Brunswick and PEI, in Le Grand Dérangement. Many returned over the years, and Antonine Maillet wrote of this return in Pélagie, for which she became the first writer outside France to win the Prix Goncourt. Also fairly easily available is La Sagouine. Spoken Acadian French sounds very different from the French spoken in Québec, which in turn is different from that in Manitoba and so on. New Brunswick is Canada's only officially bilingual province. Acadian music would probably have a very familiar sound to people in Louisiana.

>39 spiphany:I assume everyone is busy reading...
I've finally managed to get back to reading and finished A Broken Mirror last week. I will post on this later.

>41 SassyLassy: Thanks. I was really thinking of the Cajun language of Louisiana, which is specific to the locale, having all sorts of other influences mixed in. To quote from wikipedia:

"Cajun French is derived from the mixing of Acadian French with the original French spoken by French soldiers and settlers in Louisiana before the arrival of the Acadians. The language incorporates words of African, Spanish, Native American and English origin, unknown in Acadian French."

In fact, I lived in Louisiana for about seven years. During the years I lived in New Orleans, which is not, strictly speaking, Cajun country (although I knew many Cajuns and learned a lot about their history, food and music), I never heard of anyone living in Southwest Louisiana, living or dead, who had published prose or poetry in Cajun French, but that of course doesn't mean there hasn't been anyone or even many such writers. And, come to think of it, there are certainly many, many sets of song lyrics written in that language for both Cajun music and Zydeco music, so, assuming we can consider song lyrics to be poetry, forget what I said about "no Cajun poetry." Duh!

Maillet, as you know, was born and lives in Canada, so I would be surprised to learn that she wrote in Cajun French, or at least the Louisiana Cajun I was thinking of, although she is Acadian. The wikipedia entry on her, for example, does not speak of her as writing in Cajun French.

The only reference I could find online to someone writing in Cajun is Barry Jean Ancelet, of whom wikipedia reports, "Barry Jean Ancelet is a Cajun folklorist and expert in Cajun music and Cajun French. He has written several books, and under the pseudonym Jean Arceneaux he has written Cajun French poetry and lyrics to Cajun French songs."

eta: I suppose, though, that any Louisianan or East Texan writing in French, whether Cajun French or otherwise, would still fit within the confines of this quarter's theme read. But I would still love to know who wrote novels and/or short stories in Louisiana Cajun.

>41 SassyLassy: Sorry, I didn't mean to suggest Maillet wrote in Cajun, only that the roots of Cajun and Acadian had similarities and so there was some writing out there that might be of interest. I would say her writing does suit this theme.

"Song lyrics to be poetry" .... definitely!

I envy you your time in Louisiana. It is a place I have always wanted to visit.

>43 SassyLassy: "I would say her writing does suit this theme."

Absolutely!

I read Crow Blue a couple of weeks ago. The author, Adriana Lisboa, is Brazilian. She used to live in the US, and now lives in New Zealand. She writes in Portuguese. Crow Blue is about Evangelina, a Brazilian/American girl whose mother dies. She decides to leave Copacabana, and go to her mother’s ex-husband (whom she doesn’t know, even though he is marked as her father on her birth certificate) in Colorado. This was a lovely short novel, about living in different cultures (North-American, Brazilian, Latino) and with different languages, and making them coexist in your life. We know the characters are struggling, but Lisboa is never melodramatic. Despite the fact that the main character is an orphan, it’s not a sob story. In fact, it presents an incredibly positive outlook on life, given the circumstances. Each time I turned a page, I was certain something awful would happen – someone would be deported, or end up on the streets, or get beaten up or abused or rejected – but no. People were decent and kind without being saints, and to have a young girl go live with an unknown man and not end up a slave was so refreshing.

I’m starting Song of Lawino & Song of Ocol by Okot p’Bitek, an Ugandan writer. He wrote Song of Lawino in Acoli/Acholi, a Luo dialect of Northen Uganda, then translated it himself into English, just like Ngugi Wa Thiong'o does with Kikuyu. In opposition, Song of Ocol was written directly into English, which makes sense, since Ocol rejects local traditions. It’s a classic, there are academic studies about it, but somehow, I had never heard of it before this morning. I'm really looking forward to reading it.

Among all the heavyweights in this (amazing!) thread I'd like to contribute some easier reading from authors who clearly belong into category 4: people who left their homeland because they could, not because they had to.

Cornelia Funke is a German YA fantasy author (Inkheart) who's been living in the US since 2005, but continues to write in German.

Veit Heinichen is a German crime fiction author who lives in Trieste/Italy. His Proteo Laurenti novels play there and in the border region of Italy, Slovenia, Croatia and Austria. Unfortunately he's not translated into English, but available in Italian, French, Spanish, Dutch, Norwegian, Slovenian, Greek, Czech and Polish.

Trieste is a bit like South Tyrol, with its history as part of Austria-Hungary and Yugoslavia after WW2 it inherited a pretty wild mix of cultures and languages. Wikipedia even has a list of non-italian-speaking authors who have lived and worked there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_from_Trieste#Literature

Donna Leon is an American crime fiction author (Commissario Brunetti) who lived for over 30 years in Venice and now resides in Switzerland.

Thanks to everyone who has added additional suggestions, as I know there are surely a ton of places and languages and writers I missed.

Working through my to-be-read pile, I picked up a play that had been recommended to me back several years ago when I was doing costuming for an amateur theater group: The Dybbuk is a supernatural tragedy about a young bride who is possessed by the soul of the young man whom she had been destined to wed. It's a touching story but I initially found it quite difficult reading because it is so steeped in Jewish religious culture of the early twentieth century; as someone unfamiliar with this world, it took me most of the first act to orient myself. The author, who wrote under the pseudonym Ansky, was a Russian/Belarusian Jewish intellectual, political activist, and ethnographer. To a certain degree, the play seems like a product of his work documenting the culture and traditions of Jewish communities in eastern Europe. There is little sense in the play of there being any world existing outside the shtetl in which it is set: it very much looks inward, at the community, rather than at the interactions between the Jewish community and the outside world.

The convoluted history of the play speaks volumes about the linguistic and cultural situation out of which it emerged: the play was originally written in Russian, and Ansky attempted to have it staged at major Russian theaters but encountered various obstacles (anti-Semitism, censorship). It was subsequently translated into Hebrew but there were again difficulties with the performances (including a nervous breakdown by one of the lead actors). Ansky himself translated the play into Yiddish; the Yiddish premiere in Warsaw was immensely successful, as was an early staging at a Yiddish theater in New York. Reading this as a Yiddish play, what is striking about it is the fact that it is actually the presence of Hebrew -- not the everyday language, but the language of religion, of the kabbalistic rituals and the exorcism--that makes itself most strongly felt.

Disunity by Anatoly Kudryavitsky. Kudryavitsky is a Russian writer who, like so many, was unable to publish openly before the breakup of the Soviet Union. He moved to Ireland in 2002 after a brief stay in Germany. He writes fiction in Russian and poetry in Russian and English, and also translates into and out of both Russian and English.
This volume actually includes two works, "Shadowplay on a Sunless Day" and "A Parade of Mirrors and Reflections"; the latter is a fairly minor novella and most of the motifs that appear in it are explored more thoroughly in "Shadowplay".

Kudryavitsky's writing is dreamlike and surreal. It's hard to summarize the story because his writing is really all about the imagery, but I'll make an attempt. "Shadowplay on a Sunless Day" centers around Arefiev, a scientist working at a genetic research lab in Moscow (the Institute for Useful Mutations, established with the goal of creating a new generation of ideal communist citizens). When armed men from the government come to shut down the institute, Arefiev manages to escape with the help of a mysterious being in the form of a baboon who shows him the way into an otherworld beneath the city. The scene then moves to Germany, where Arefiev's step-brother, a writer, is living. He and a companion likewise find their way into this underworld, where they are given an opportunity to explore via a potion that allows them to shed their "bodily casings" and assume other forms at will. Unfortunately, it turns out to be a bit more difficult to return to their own bodies than they had been promised...

I'm glad I didn't try to read this in Russian, because the writing is not at all straightforward or predictable and I would soon have been helplessly lost. There's a lot to think about: the ethics of science (Kudryavitsky originally studied medicine), identity, mortality, life as an immigrant, etc. The Celtic-inspired otherworld was founded by escapees from the Soviet system, but it soon becomes clear that rather than avoiding the problems of the world above, they have, to a degree, perpetuated its bureaucratic and oppressive structures. Some knowledge of Soviet history and culture, as well as Celtic folklore, is helpful, but it's still enjoyable even without having to understand all the references. The writing is melancholy, but there's also a surprising amount of humor and wry side comments. Here are some random samples to provide a taste of the style:

It was not, as you might expect, people who were talking, but uniforms. What was inside those uniforms was quite another matter. But it doesn't matter anyway, since whoever was idling in those uniforms was nothing more than uniform-filler.
...
He had supper before going to bed. He served up silence. Under his knife the silence fell away into pieces of china sound, sliced air, and a rustle behind the window. The leaves were evidently begging to be included in the salad, but the window pane kept them out.
...
The enormous acedemician, waking in a cold sweat, finally raised the receiver to his small, myopic little head: he was vaguely reminescent of a diplodocus which had somehow acquired glasses.
...
Arefiev was celebrating his trousers' birthday. He deliberately kept forgetting his own birthday so as not to count his each passing year. ... Arefiev only had one pair of trousers and he had bought them exactly one year ago, by chance, cheaply and brand new. A brand new pair of grey Italian cords was definitely worth celebrating! His trousers were proudly hanging on the corner of the wardrobe door, with the legs bent at the knee giving the impression they had struck up some casual pose.

>48 spiphany: ok, I have to read this - love the examples you posted of his writing style and humor! Thanks for the rec!

Just a quick recap on where I am with this theme before I forget. I'll expand on it later...
I read Song of Ocol & Song of Lawino and enjoyed it. I hadn't touched poetry in a long time, and realised that I missed it. So, I thought I'd buy one of Kirby Jambon's books as an e-book for convenience, but it's only available in paper form, and French shops (online or high street) don't seem to carry it. I'd have to order from Amazon.com. Getting stuff from the US is potentially a lot of faff, so I don't know... Someone tell me whether it's worth it!
I did get The Citadel of Weeping Pearls by Aliette de Bodard, a French SF writer (Vietnamese mother, French father, born in the US, educated in France and the UK, lives in France) who writes in English. It's set in the same universe as On a red station, drifting, with a culture that's Chinese/Vietnamese-inspired (before I get accused of cultural myopia: the pairing of Chinese and Vietnamese cultures comes from the author herself).
Another book I'll be reading this month is L'Autre by Marta Rojals, a Catalan author who writes in Catalan. I had been on the lookout for Catalan literature, and this is what I found on the Spain shelves in the bookshop. I'm not sure it's available in English though - or maybe it is, but nobody catalogued it on LibraryThing yet... I'll be reading the French translation.

Other novels in the To-Read pile:
Le terroriste noir by Tierno Monénembo (born in Guinea, educated in Guinea, Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, France, lives in the US, visiting professor at Middlebury College, Vermont, political exile, writes in French)
Tram 83 by Fiston Mwanza Mujila (born in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, lives in Graz, Austria, writes mostly in French, but also in German - Tram 83 was written in French, but some of his plays were written in German)

It turns out I didn't make as much headway as I hoped into my tbr pile for this quarter (or maybe I got excited and went a bit overboard when purchasing books...). Anyway, here are some notes on my most recent reads; I have a couple more books in progress (Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian and Gustav Regler's Die Saat, a historical novel about the German Peasants' War) which I'll try to report back on once I finish, although I doubt that will be by the end of the month.

Arno Camenisch, Sez Ner (English title: The Alp)
Caminisch is a Swiss author who writes in Romansh as well as in German. Of Switzerland's four official languages, Romansh is the least commonly used, and the only one that doesn't have the advantage of also being the literary language of another major European country.

Sez Ner is the first novel in a trilogy and consists of short paragraph-long anecdotes about the daily experiences of the herdsmen on an Alpine summer pasture: a sick cow, a rainstorm, a grey goat bouncing around, feeding the pigs, squabbles amongst the herdsmen, the politics of choosing which cow is to be honored as queen of the pasture, the mountain disappearing and reappearing in the mist.
I found it oddly delightful. There's a review of the book on LT already which pretty much captures my thoughts, so I'll try to keep my comments brief. The writing style is unique: it reminded me somehow of a silent film in that all we're offered are the visual details with little dialogue (there are occasional exclamations) and few glimpses inside the characters' heads. None of the herdsmen are named, although the animals and the mountains are, and cigarettes and cars are referred to by their brand. The story is told with humor and somehow avoids being clichéd in spite of the fact that the subject matter is pretty much one huge Switzerland stereotype. In fact, the author is quite aware of this and tourists wander in and out of the pages, getting in the way and photographing everything in sight. My only complaint is that it felt a bit too long for something that had almost no plot progression -- I suppose that's probably part of the point, as life on an isolated mountain surely is monotonous, but nonetheless I don't think it would have suffered from a tiny bit of trimming.

Camenisch composed the novel in both Romansh and German and it was published in a bilingual edition, which I found fun; it was interesting to look at the Romansh text and see how much I could figure out (the language somewhat resembles Italian). There's occasional code-switching, i.e. fragments of Romansh in the German text, usually in implied speech/thought. Surprisingly (to me) the German was largely standard German, not Swiss dialect, although there were a few places where a glossary of some of the special Alpine pasture terms would have been helpful. However, it felt appropriate in a way that the reader was left to guess the meaning, much as we are immersed with little explanation in the world of the novel.

------

Giselher W. Hoffmann, Die Erstgeborenen ("The First-Comers", originally titled "Das Land der wasserlosen Flüsse", i.e., "The Land of Waterless Rivers")
Hoffmann is the grandchild of German emigrants who settled in the colony German South West Africa (today Namibia). He grew up on a farm and worked for a number of years as a professional hunter in the Kalahari. He writes in German, which is the second-most common language of the white population. It has sporadically been an official language of the country, but does not enjoy the status of a lingua franca like Afrikaans. Given the lack of a significant German-language literary tradition in contemporary Africa, I figured the book qualified for this theme read. Interestingly, Hoffmann evidently garnered some criticism from German-speaking Namibians for a novel about internment of Germans during WWII and also occasionally ran into difficulties with publishers, who didn't feel like he, as a white man, fit their definition of African (= black African) literature.

When I started this novel I wasn't at all sure what to expect, but I was pleasantly surprised: although set in the colonial period, it was written in the 1980s, and the author uses this distance to provide a fairly balanced and nuanced picture of the experiences and motivations of the various groups inhabiting the area. Basically, the novel is the story of the encounter between European colonists and the Gwi, a tribe of indigenous hunter-gatherers, or "bushmen", whose fates become strangely entwined. Ecksteen, a shopkeeper, sells all his possessions and buys a farm, seduced by a rumor of a hidden mountain full of diamonds. Meanwhile, a drought has hit the Kalahari and a group of Gwi are on the move through this "land of waterless rivers" in search of sustenance. A series of events are set in motion after Ecksteen senior is killed by a Gwi arrow and a rather hapless young Gwi artist is taken captive by Ecksteen junior, who is determined to carry out his father's dream.

Hoffmann's goal in writing seems to have been the classic "entertain and educate": it is a decent adventure novel, but also succeeds in its didactic purpose of introducing readers to the culture of the Gwi without being too heavy-handed or preachy. He avoids the predictable stereotypes regarding the characters -- his colonists are a bit obsessed but more stupid than power-hungry, ruthless, or greedy, and while portrayal of the Gwi is romanticized a bit, they are also very human and squabble, have jealousies, make mistakes. Interestingly, portions of the story are told in the first person by Nossop, the Gwi artist who ends up being caught between the world of the colonists and the world of his people, not quite belonging to either. I found some of the imagery used to evoke the Gwi's perspective on the strange world of the Europeans a bit overdone at first (cars are "giant tortoises", cattle are "tame antelope", the colonists are given names like "the red ant", "termite queen", "falcon-rider") but it grew on me after a while. Given this, we oddly don't learn anything at all about the Gwi language; the only language that is palpably present in the novel is Dutch or Afrikaans, i.e., the language of the colonial rulers.

In the UK, the The National Poetry Library has launched an appeal for poetry in endangered languages - not that I can find anything about it on their website, but anyway... Here's the Guardian article https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/28/appeal-launched-to-collect-poetry-.... I thought it would be of interest, as endangered languages are generally non-majority languages.

I read this book, and coincidentally another Catalan book during the third quarter, but am only getting around to posting about it now.

CATALONIA



Solitude by Caterina Albert i Paradís published under the pseudonym Victor Català, translated from the Catalan by David Rosenthal, 1992
- first published in serial form in the magazine Joventut in 1904-5, published in book form in 1905 as Solitud

Solitude is one of those tales, seemingly so simple, that carry you along right from the beginning, almost as if you are listening to a skilled storyteller.

Recently wed Mila and Matias were travelling to their new home and his new job. Matias had been quite vague about both, but Mila was excited enough about her new life to accept at face value what little information he had given her. Initially they had travelled by cart, but now the Catalan mountains had become so steep that they would have to complete their journey on foot. Mila grew more and more apprehensive.

Suddenly Mila halted and turned around, astounded: Holy Virgin! How far they'd travelled that day!

Beneath them she saw nothing but waves of mountain, huge, silent mountains that sloped into the quiet dusk, which enveloped them in shadow like a darkening cloud.

Mila searched that blue emptiness for a wisp of smoke, a hut, a human figure... But she saw nothing, not the slightest indication that they shared the landscape with other human beings.

"How lonely!" she mumbled, stunned and feeling her spirit grow as dark or darker than those shady depths

Finally they reached their destination, a hermitage and chapel dedicated to St Pontius, ironically the "patron of good health". They were to be the new custodians. The shepherd Gaietà and the boy Baldiret were there to greet them.

Mila and Matias now became "Hermit" and Hermitess"; Gaietà was "Shepherd". Mila hated this form of address, this loss of identity, the inability to see beyond the role. "Hermitess" served as a constant reminder to her of her isolation, especially as Matias spent more and more time away.

Solitude need not equate to loneliness. The shepherd worked hard to tell Mila the stories of the mountain, its rocks, trees, streams and spirits. He knew what loneliness and melancholy could do to her if she let them intrude. He wanted her to see her new world in the way he understood it; to become one with it. He wanted her free from the evil forces on the mountain, both natural and human.

Mila's struggle to adapt could be seen as any young woman's journey to adulthood. However, Paradís creates such a tension between the mountain's opposing forces that Mila becomes the embodiment of the struggle to attain psychological and sexual self awareness. There is very little explicit here. Solitude was first published in serial form in 1904-5, well before such themes built around female characters gained acceptance. Paradís had to publish under a male pseudonym, Victor Català, although her identity was known to her publisher.

Apart from her pseudonym, there is nothing overtly Catalan about this novel. The story would be as credible in settings like Greece or Albania. Later, however, it was affected by the Spanish Civil War. In the author's 1945 foreword to this, the fifth edition of Solitude, she says two additional chapters, left out of the earlier editions, were intended to be reintegrated in a new 1937 edition. "However, the fratricidal war, which wrecked so many things with its obstacles and unforeseen upheavals, paralyzed publication temporarily, and when I returned home, it was to a disagreeable surprise." A search of her home under a flimsy pretext "... had turned the whole house upside-down", and the two chapters had disappeared.

This 1992 translation by David Rosenthal is the first translation into English of a book the publishers say is "... the most important Catalan novel to appear before the Spanish Civil War."

_______

edited to correct date

Another Catalan novel, also read during the third quarter

CATALONIA



A Broken Mirror by Merce Rodoreda translated from the Catalan by Josep Miquel Sobrer 2006
first published as Mirall trencat in 1962

A Broken Mirror is a novel with an old fashioned feel, one of Balzac, for Mercè Rodoreda is a family chronicler on that level.

Right from the first chapter, the reader knows that Teresa Goday is a force to be reckoned with. She is first seen on an expedition with her wealthy much older husband, Senyor Nicolau Rovira. He had recently bought her a very expensive brooch to mark their six month anniversary. Teresa had disdained it, and so here they were, back at the jeweller's to buy another piece. The jeweller mentally reviewed their story:

Senyor Rovira, in his old age, had married a girl of low origins; who knew what those seemingly innocent eyes and that great beauty might hide? 'These marriages work sometimes' he thought, 'but it's better not to chance it'.

This time Rovira bought the most elaborate piece in the shop, to Teresa's delight.

In that first chapter we learn much about Teresa, as she carries out a complex scheme with the jeweller to get money to pay for the board of her illegitimate son, deceiving her husband, who knew nothing about the child, still further, in a successful twist on having your cake and eating it too.

Over the years, Teresa will become the highly respected matriarch of a wealthy Barcelona family. The story is told in fragments, from multiple characters' points of view. Like the shards of the mirror the old servant breaks, the fragments can never be assembled to form a complete whole. Each piece, each chapter, reveals something.

Rodoreda, a Catalan nationalist, left her Barcelona home early in 1939 as Franco's troops closed in on the city. She did not return to Catalonia until 1979, four years before her death. A Broken Mirror, written in exile with an exile's love for a home that cannot be, like the home Teresa will try to make, but that will splinter with the war, is also a picture of a fragmented and broken Catalan society.

This is an author I will look for again.

>50 Dilara86: Tying up loose ends before the end of the year...

The Citadel of Weeping Pearls was a short, enjoyable read. It’s a Locus Award finalist (for best novella), and exactly the sort of SF I find satisfying, with a focus on interpersonal dynamics and psychology, plenty of well-rounded female characters, a lot of food descriptions, and absolutely no whitewashing, thanks to the Chinese/Vietnamese background to the story. I think people who liked Ancillary Justice will like it.
I gave up on Tram 83 a third of the way in. This is not for me. It’s not awful, but it’s not speaking to me, and I’ve had enough of men in love with the sound of their own voices in my real life. I don’t want more of this in my reading life.

>55 Dilara86: Thanks for coming back with after-reading comments. Aliette de Bodard's work sounds interesting. I haven't read Ancillary Justice yet, (largely due to English-language books in paper form not being as straightforward or inexpensive to acquire here in Germany as at home), but the psychological/sociological approach to SF is one of the things that I love about Ursula Le Guin's work, so it sounds like this would be right up my alley.

Speaking of checking back with reading updates, I don't think I ever posted about Gustav Regler's Die Saat, which I finished in October or November.

Regler was a German writer from the Saarland (which, like Alsace-Lothringen, is a border region that has gone back and forth between being part of France and Germany). As a communist, he fled Germany in 1933, spoke out against the return of the Saarland to Germany in the 1935 plebiscite (novel: Im Kreuzfeuer), spent time in France and the Soviet Union and fought in the Spanish Civil War (novel: Das große Beispiel). Like a number of other communist-leaning exile Germans, he eventually settled in Mexico (travel narrative: A Land Bewitched).

Unlike some of his other writing, Die Saat ("The Sowing") doesn't directly thematize Regler's experiences of exile and life abroad. It was published in 1936, shortly after Regler left Germany, and is a historical novel about the Bundschuh movement, a series of peasant uprisings between 1493 and 1517. I was interested it in part because this is an episode in history that I knew very little about. The novel was in part a response to the rise of the Nazi regime, although I was relieved to discover that he doesn't force the parallels -- it's not simply a novel about Nazism in historical disguise. I found the parallels to be more thematic: he looks at oppression and its causes and much of the novel's plot is about how his two protagonists organize a rebellion via an underground network in a time before there was either mass communication or even mass literacy. So to some degree it's an exploration of the possibilities, forms, and limitations of popular uprisings. His communist politics show through here, but again, not in a dogmatic or preachy way as is sometimes the case in authors like his compatriot Stefan Heym. What I found particuarly enlightening was the insight it offered into the material and economic circumstances that inspired the communist movements of the twentieth century -- especially the need for land reform in an agrarian society based on serfdom and the incredible vulnerability of the peasants to violence committed by those in power. I also found the spread of social ideas about freedom, taxation, and justice interesting in the context of an era which would soon see the beginnings of the Protestant Reformation.

>56 spiphany: Well, I'll be needing a couple more lifetimes to read all the books I'm discovering thanks to LT...
I'd never heard of Gustav Regler before today (even though Time Magazine called him the German Malraux, according to Wikipedia), and now I've added Das Ohr des Malchus/The Owl of Minerva/Le glaive et le fourreau - apparently his only book available in translation - to my wishlist. I'd really like to read Im Kreuzfeuer, but it doesn't seem to be available in translation. You'd think there would be one into French at the very least, given the subject matter...

I have two more reviews to write, but I'm still mulling them over.

Gustav Regler is pretty obscure in Germany, too, although he seems to have associated with many of the prominent expats of the era. I'm not quite sure how I happened to come across his name in the first place.

As far as I can tell, in addition to his autobiography, his novel about the Spanish Civil War has been translated into English (Das große Beispiel = The Great Crusade), and his writings about Mexico are available in several languages. Worldcat suggests that he has a novel about Pietro Aretino that has been published in French and Italian, and there is a listing for "Les Manants du Christ" (= Die Saat) from 1951 and something titled "La Sarre en feu" which I assume is "In Kreuzfeuer", evidently published more or less simultaneously with the original in 1934, so tracking down a copy might prove to be difficult.

Petit Guide de la science-fiction au Québec (Short Guide to Québec Science-fiction) by Jean-Louis Trudel



Reading SF and speculative fiction in languages other than English is an ongoing project of mine (BTW, there are lists that you can add to, such as https://www.librarything.com/list/9915/all/SF-Fantasy-in-Translation and http://www.librarything.com/list/214/all/Best-Science-Fiction-Originally-Publish.... I also tag my books “SF in languages other than English”. I’d be overjoyed if other people used it.) SF written in French by non-French authors is particularly interesting to me. This is why I bit the bullet and bought this thin book despite its fairly steep price (15 Euros, $19,95). ). Some English-speaking authors are mentioned in passing, and there are some French-speaking authors who occasionally write in English, but by and large, the book is about French Québécois SF, or SFQ as it’s apparently known.
Author Jean-Louis Trudel talks us through Québécois SF in chronological order, from its beginnings in the 19th century with Napoléon Aubin. He gives just the right amount of historical context. Jules Verne looms large, as do alternative histories where Québec stays out of the British Empire, and texts featuring First Nations people. Female authors are well-represented, starting with precursor Marie-Ange de Roumier-Robert (Le Voyage de Milord Céton dans les sept planètes, ou le Nouveau Mentor (1765) – and because good old Milord Céton takes his sister along on his voyage, the novel actually contains a female character. Woot!)
Authors are the main focus, but magazines, publishers, films, TV series and games are also included. I found all the writers I knew about or read (Vonarburg, Bérard, Champetier…) and plenty of others too! If there are names missing, I’m not knowledgeable enough to notice it. From where I’m standing, it seemed comprehensive without being waffly. I found a number of titles I’d like to try (Le Char Volant, et relation d’un voyage dans la lune, Voyage à Vénus, Plan de la République canadienne, Mon Voyage de Québec à la Lune, L’impératrice de l’Ungava, Amblystome, 2054), which is exactly what I wanted from this book.



Informative and useful

I finished The Zelmenyaners: a Family Saga by Moyshe Kulbak.

The Zelmenyaners is considered a classic of Yiddish literature. The novel is a comedy spanning several generations of an extended Jewish family in Minsk, the capitol city of Byelorussia (now Belarus), but centering on the period from 1926 through 1933 or so. The family all lives together, in a single courtyard on the outskirts of town originally built by the family's patriarch, one Reb Zelmen, who came to the city from somewhere in "deep Russia" in the 1870s. By the time the action of the novel begins in the late 1920s Reb Zelmen has died, though his widow lives on, and the family is led by Zelmen's four sons, whose own children and sons and daughters-in-law and their children populate the courtyard's many old buildings. (One building is even made of brick!)

The tale centers around the older generation's desires to retain their old ways, including the vestiges of their Jewish beliefs and practices, in the face of the growing incursions of Soviet society and economic collectivisation. As the younger generation grows to maturity, they less interested in the old ways and more interested in being good Bolsheviks. Even the older Zelmenyaners are pushed to end their independent lives as tradesmen (tailors, tanners, carpenters) and go to work in the factories, like good Soviet workers.

The story is in fable-like, farcical narrative. Rumor, scandal and gossip, feud and loyalty, busybodies and misanthropes swarm and swirl about the courtyard. Knowledge of the outside world is minimal, sometimes comically so, for most of the Zelmenyaners. Our affection for this crowd is cemented early on, and though the story is played for comedy, the pathos is evident throughout as the family fights a losing battle to retain their way of life, their heritage and their family identity in the face of societal forces from without and betrayal from within.

I found this book moving for many reasons. For one thing, it describes the place my grandparents came from, the place where they would have lived, and most likely would have died within a decade of the action of this novel, had they not left for America in the early 20th century. Furthermore, Kulbak was also a poet, and his descriptions, especially his uses of natural settings to set mood, are often wonderful. The winter snow and freezing cold becomes almost a character, a member of the family. But here is a description of the end of one summer:

"The first thin, slanting autumn rains began to fall. Beneath them the silent summer, its myriad colors squelched and soiled, was snuffed out in the gardens. Disconsolate beet leaves with hard, purplish veins lay cast between the vegetable beds. Dirty yellows, oranges, and browns were trodden silently underfoot. On days like that you didn't need an antenna to hear distant cries."

Adding poignancy to the reading was this note on the book's back cover:

Moyshe Kulbak (1896-1937) was a leading Yiddish modernist poet, novelist and dramatist. He was arrested in 1937, during the wave of Stalinist repression that hit the Minsk Yiddish writers and cultural activists with particular vehemence. After a perfunctory show trial, Kulbak was shot at the age of forty-one.