Lost in Translation Reading Challenge

guest review: the alchemist

 

David from Absorbed in Words just posted this review of The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho. 

Have you read this one too? Email me the link to your review, and I will add it to this post. 

Tonight I’ll write a short, formal letter to my boss stating my intention to resign from the company. I’ll bring the letter with me to work tomorrow, and as I hand it over I’ll explain that I’ve decided to pursue my own “Personal Legend”. I’ll tell my boss that I had a dream—no, a vision even—that my place in this world is to be a writer, and if I don’t chase after this dream then it’d be like going against nature and my life would deem to be a failure. He won’t understand me right away, of course, so I’ll just tell him to get a copy of Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist and read it. 

Yes, that is what I will do after having read The Alchemist . . . if I really thought that life is all that simple. 

The book’s real message, I believe, goes beyond feeling a spark of inspiration or taking big leaps out on a whim. In fact, it wouldn’t really be wise for a reader to take the book in its plain, literal sense. For instance, it obviously would be irrational to believe that “when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you achieve it”. Perhaps more than half the world’s population have life stories that attest to how that isn’t the real case in our universe. And unlike “the alchemist” himself, many people wouldn’t think it fair that if a woman’s love is really “made of pure matter”, then a man can go away to concentrate on his own personal aspirations and expect that he “can always come back” to his woman who will patiently and selflessly await his return. Indeed, these wouldn’t be good lessons to absorb from the story. 

With several references to Biblical and Islamic precepts as well as ancient proverbs, the book is like a string of tied-up parables with the epic twist of an adventure story. And throughout the protagonist’s journey, he meets different characters offering different philosophies, and sometimes even contradicting points of view. An old king encourages the boy Santiago to follow his dreams, while another character teaches him about being truly happy by concentrating on the present. Contradicting as they may sound, both are actually lessons about having a positive attitude. Some lessons are outspoken in unadorned sentences while others are bound in mystery, almost entirely vague. And if you think about it, the book doesn’t really claim to teach a single absolute truth. Indeed in order to assimilate something good out of the story, one must look past the mystical elements and focus on how it should influence him personally. 

...and when each day is the same as the next, it’s because people fail to recognize the good things that happen in their lives every day that the sun rises. —The Alchemist 

Coelho stated that The Alchemist is a “metaphor” of his own life. Much like the story’s protagonist, he already had a job from which he took pride and pleasure in doing, a woman whom he surely loved, and as well as other necessities in life for which to be content with. What he didn’t have, however, was the fulfillment of his dream. His “Personal Legend”, as it’s constantly called throughout the book. I guess for some, the idea relates to their concept of destiny, or for others perhaps their so-called purpose in life. Others might simply call it their ambition, or lifelong aspiration. But whatever it is, Coelho’s story endeavors to inspire the reader to pursue it. And this is what the novel is ultimately all about—to have the passion, the courage, the faith and the unfailing determination to follow something you believe in. The book also teaches that in our pursuit to find our life's treasure, what we pick up along the journey—the people we meet and the experiences we get—is sometimes even more valuable than what we had set out to look for, and the original treasure becomes more of a trophy for what we've already accomplished. 

That’s the point at which most people give up. It’s the point at which, as we say in the language of the desert, one ‘dies of thirst just when the palm trees have appeared on the horizon.’ —The Alchemist 

In any case, this of course does not make the book unique. Coelho’s allegorical novel is essentially a romanticized self-help book. What actually makes it good, however, is the story itself. The story of Santiago's quest is simple and pleasant. But like any good fable, the book’s simplistic form is only somewhat of an innocent deception that masks its highly philosophical quality. The short prologue by itself is a lovely story. Retelling the tale of Narcissus with an amusing twist, the book begins with a wonderful lesson from an unlikely story—the lesson that if we reflect the beauty of others, allowing them to see through our eyes that they are special, we too in effect make ourselves beautiful and special. 

All in all, The Alchemist is an entertaining read that, more often than not, will leave its reader in a delightfully good mood. 

The Alchemist - Gift Edition is a hardcover edition that contains colorful illustrations by artist James Noel Smith and comes with an elegant bookcase. 

Producer Harvey Weinstein announced plans for a Hollywood film adaptation of The Alchemist. It is reported that Laurence Fishburne will both direct and star on the film.

guest review: ambiguous adventure

Matt from Matt’s Book Blog just posted this review of Ambiguous Adventure by Cheikh Hamidou Kane. 

Have you read this one too? Email me the link to your review, and I will add it to this post. 

Taking What Heaven Gives vs. Paddling Your Own Canoe 

Written in the early 1960s, Ambiguous Adventure by Cheikh Hamidou Kane is an early example of an African intellectual writing about his experience reconciling traditional culture with a western education and expatriation in Europe. The protagonist attends a madrasah in rural Senegal and distinguishes himself with his memory, voice, and manners that befit the son of a local chief. His aunt points out, however, that due to the French, their people have the “choice” “that we should agree to die in our children’s hearts and that the foreigners who have defeated us should fill the place, wholly, which we shall have left free.” Indeed, the protagonist is such a fine student that he sent to France for university. He loses all sense of God, ease with himself, and firmness of purpose. He seems to himself “like a musical instrument that has gone dead.” Obviously, this is a sad novel, but it examines still relevant issues.

guest review: real world

Harvee from Book Bird Dog just posted this review of Real World by Natsuo Kirino.  

Have you read this one too? Email me the link to your review, and I will add it to this post. 

How would you react to a writer who names her books Grotesque and Out? I read the latter some time ago and found it so fascinating, I readily picked up Real World, (by Natsuo Kirino of Tokyo) when I found it on the New Releases shelf at the library.

Out portrayed the lives of a group of women harassed at work and/or at home in a male dominated society. They support each other through thick and thin in an "unholy" alliance of women. They get even, as I remember it, and cover for one another.

This new book, Real World, is about four teenage girls who suspect a local boy of committing a murder and are curious enough about him that they go out of their way to befriend him. Two are bored with their humdrum lives and want to be part of a new "adventure," so they befriend the boy, helping him in his escape. One gives him her bike and a new cell phone. Another takes the train to join him for a time while he runs from the authorities, paying for a cheap hotel where he can take a bath and get some sleep. A third is coerced into writing a "story or poem" of confession for him, which he wants to carry around in case he is ever caught by the police and has to answer to them. They all carry on conversations with the boy by cell phone.

The boy fantasizes that he is the Japanese soldier he saw in a film in grade school, a soldier being beaten and stabbed by an old Filipino woman and a man, evidently as a revenge for the Japanese occupation during WWII. This image seems to haunt him, and he sees his own demanding and nagging mother as the Filipino woman.

The four teenage girls who are curious about the boy and the 17 year old boy himself try to escape the reality of their lives, humdrum or horrific. They feel that what people see on the outside is different from what they are.

Real World is another noir novel by Kirino, this time about teens facing the consequences of the decisions they make.

***** Five stars for this novel!

guest review: blindness

 

Jackie from Farm Lane Books just posted this review of Blindness by Jose Saramago. 

Have you read this one too? Email me the link to your review, and I will add it to this post.

Translated from the Portuguese by Giovanni Pontiero 

Blindness is the most powerful book I have ever read. From the beginning, to the end my adrenaline levels were high, and my heart was beating so fast you’d have thought I’d been out running! 

Blindness is a terrifying account of what could happen to us, if we were all to lose our sight. The book begins with one man suddenly losing his vision while waitng at traffic lights in his car. Someone offers to help the blind man back home, and it isn’t long before he becomes blind too. It quickly becomes obvious that the blindness is highly contagious, and so all the blind people, and those who have been in close contact with them, are rounded up and sent to an old mental hospital. Trapped in this old building, with an increasing number of people, conditions quickly deteriorate. Fights break out over the small amount of food, sanitation becomes almost non-existent, and it isn’t long before people are dying. 

There is one woman who has not gone blind; she lied in order to stay with her husband. At first it seems as though she is the lucky one, but as time goes on this is not necessarily true. Would it be better to be blind than to see the horrors that are all around her? 

This book is worryingly realistic. What would our governments do if there was an epidemic of blindness? How quickly would society break down? I thought I’d be able to cope without electricity, but when you stop to think about the infrastructure, you realise how soon you’d run out of food, and water. It’s enough to make me want to move to the country and become self sufficient as soon as possible! 

This book took a little bit of time to get used to. The characters are all nameless, and there is little punctuation to break up the paragraphs, so the text is unusually dense. It was, however, completely gripping from beginning to end. I’m not sure I can say that I enjoyed reading it though. It will stay with me for a long time, and is a powerful statement about the fragility of our society, but I’m not sure enjoyable is the right word! 

Highly recommended, as long as you can cope with the stress!

possibilities: brothers

Would you like to win a copy of this book? Go the Nonsuch Book main page to enter through end of day Monday, February 23.

Brothers

By Yu Hua

Translated from the Chinese by Eileen Cheng-yin Chow and Carlos Rojas

Pantheon

"Baldy li, our Liu Town’s premier tycoon, had a fantastic plan of spending twenty million U.S. dollars to purchase a ride on a Russian Federation space shuttle for a tour of outer space. Perched atop his famously gold-plated toilet seat, he would close his eyes and imagine himself already floating in orbit, surrounded by the unfathomably frigid depths of space. He would look down at the glorious planet stretched out beneath him, only to choke up on realizing that he had no family left down on Earth." 

"A bestseller in China, recently short-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize, and a winner of France’s Prix Courrier International, Brothers is an epic and wildly unhinged black comedy of modern Chinese society running amok. 

Here is China as we’ve never seen it, in a sweeping, Rabelaisian panorama of forty years of rough-and-rumble Chinese history that has already scandalized millions of readers in the author’s homeland. Yu Hua, award-winning author of To Live, gives us a surreal tale of two brothers riding the dizzying roller coaster of life in a newly capitalist world. As comically mismatched teenagers, Baldy Li, a sex-obsessed ne’er-do-well, and Song Gang, his bookish, sensitive stepbrother, vow that they will always be brothers--a bond they will struggle to maintain over the years as they weather the ups and downs of rivalry in love and making and losing millions in the new China. Their tribulations play out across a richly populated backdrop that is every bit as vibrant: the rapidly-changing village of Liu Town, full of such lively characters as the self-important Poet Zhao, the craven dentist Yanker Yu, the virginal town beauty (turned madam) Lin Hong, and the simpering vendor Popsicle Wang. 

With sly and biting humor, combined with an insightful and compassionate eye for the lives of ordinary people, Yu Hua shows how the madness of the Cultural Revolution has transformed into the equally rabid madness of extreme materialism. Both tragic and absurd by turns, Brothers is a monumental spectacle and a fascinating vision of an extraordinary place and time." (from the publisher)

Reviews:

Washington Post

Los Angeles Times

NPR

The New Yorker

guest review: yalo

Tim from Progressive Prairie just posted this review of 

Yalo by Elias Khoury. 

Have you read this one too? Email me the link to your 

review, and I will add it to this post. 

Lebanon, particularly Beirut, was torn asunder by the civil war that raged in the country from 1975 to 1990. Both external forces and internal strife contributed to the depredation. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that the war is the backdrop and more to Yalo, the most recent work of Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury to appear in the U.S. 

Originally published in 2002, Yalo is the story of Daniel Yal’u, a Beirut native in his 20s repeatedly tortured while under arrest for rape and robbery. Going by the nickname that gives the book its title, he becomes almost a metaphor for Beirut as his torturers force him to write his life story. The torture and Yalo’s own internal strife produce a kaleidoscopic, at times hallucinatory, tale as his life is torn asunder physically and psychologically. 

Yalo, translated from the Arabic by Peter Theroux, is not for everyone. While undoubtedly accurate (and even somewhat innovative), some of the torture scenes are graphic. More important, the book is not those who prefer a linear narrative. Yalo’s recounting of his life has loops within loops and at times contradictory flashbacks that run into and merge with each other. As Yalo, who tells most of his story in the third person, puts it, “Yalo was confused as to how he should organize his memory. He was confused because things came to him all at once and the images intermingled in his head, times overlapped in his consciousness, as if he were an old man.” 

The rudiments of Yalo’s story are straightforward. Born in 1961, Yalo is raised by his mother and his grandfather, a Christian cleric. Yalo is in his teens when the Civil War breaks out and the family is forced to move from predominantly Muslim West Beirut to predominantly Christian East Beirut. A few years later, he joins “the Lebanese Forces,” most likely an Israeli-backed militia, where he serves as “a fighter” for 10 years. In 1989, he and an army buddy steal money and escape to Paris. Yalo’s friend abandons him, leaving him penniless and begging in Paris subway stations, where he is unable to speak the language. A Lebanese arms dealer comes across Yalo and brings him back to Lebanon to be a bodyguard for his family near a village outside Beirut. Yalo has an affair with his rescuer’s wife and then takes to robbing lovers in parked cars in the surrounding forest, occasionally raping the women. He falls in love with one of his victims, Shirin, and while it is unclear whether she also has an interest in him, she is the reason for his arrest and detention. 

The torture is designed to not only obtain Yalo’s confession to rape and robbery, but to force him to admit involvement in a bombing plot. To avoid further torture, Yalo is required to write the story of his life. But what he writes is often unacceptable to his captors, resulting in more torture. The torture reaches the point “felt that time was frozen, and that I was living the last moments of my life; yet that my life was long — never-ending. I wanted it to end so that the pain would be over, but it stopped ending. That is eternity.” 

In struggling to write his life story and avoid torture, Yalo examines the events of his life and that of his mother, the question of love and the events which led him to his present situation. The scenes are at times confusing. Did Shirin love him or was he simply stalking her? Which ruminations on who his father was are correct? Which recounting of his love affairs and his crimes are accurate? But, ultimately, the torture and the burden of coming to grips with and articulating his life become too much for Yalo. 

You were wrong to ask him to write the story of his life. Yalo cannot write because he has gone to another place, where they do not write, where they have no need to write. I, Daniel, am writing, and will write everything you want about him and about me and about everyone. But Yalo, no. I want to be frank with you and say that Yalo left me and went far away. I am body and he is spirit. I suffer and he soars. 

And to what conclusion does this suffering lead Daniel? “Yalo’s story, sir, has a name — war.” 

Undoubtedly, the experiences of the Civil War, like the miasma of the prison cells and torture chambers, influence how Daniel/Yalu experiences and perceives the events of his life. Yet even that is too simplistic an answer. Yalo may well have been formed and he may seek to justify his action by the Civil War. But is the same true of Daniel? Are the events of childhood and struggles with the concept and meaning of love part of Daniel or Yalu? And how is Daniel different from Yalo? Or is he? And, ultimately, is he even capable of ever finding the answers to or in the story of his life? In fact, Khoury asks, “if I don’t find the end of the story, how will I be able to write it?” 

It’s a question that applies equally to life, Lebanon’s experience and the Middle East as a whole. As such Yalo is as much a political novel as one that explores the human psyche and our capacity for both love and violence. 

Yalo discovered that a man was capable of anything.

guest review: around the world in eighty days

Amanda from 5-Squared just posted this review of Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne. 

Have you read this one too? Email me the link to your review, and I will add it to this post. 

In summer of 2007, while visiting my brother in Chicago for his graduation, my dad told me that each time he traveled, he read this book. My dad's a meticulous sort of person, just like the main character here, Phineas Fogg, and he gets ruffled easily when things don't follow his schedule or plan. He hates delays of any sort, and gets real irritable. At least he used to. Now, he's much less easily ruffled, and he attributes his newfound calmness to Around the World in Eighty Days. Phineas Fogg stays calm and collected on his journey, despite delays, and by reading this book, my dad says he's been able to do the same. 

It's a silly little story, but it made me want to read this book, and I've finally gotten around to it. The basic premise is simple - Phineas Fogg bets that he can travel the world on a predetermined route in 80 days or less. The people he bets against don't believe that's possible, and indeed Mr. Fogg meets an incredible amount of delays along the way that attempt to stop him. I won't say whether or not he succeeds, or what he learns on the way, but I will say I can see why my dad loves this book so much. It suits him. 

For me, I enjoyed it, but honestly found it a little boring. It's an adventure novel, and I'm not really an adventure sort of person. I'm more into people, not plot. That's not to say it isn't good. It’s just not my cup of tea, so to speak. But, I do see why this is a classic and why it's worth reading, and I can see why people love it. My eldest son loves it, and immediately started talking to me about the end as soon as I finished. He thought it was an exciting book. 

I wish I could read this book in the original French. It's simple enough, and I might try that one day.

guest review: the bride from odessa

Jackie from Farm Lane Books just posted this review of The Bride From Odessa by Edgardo Cozarinsky.

 Have you read this one too? Email me the link to your review, and I will add it to this post. 

Translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor. 

The Bride From Odessa is a collection of eleven short stories written by Argentinian author, Edgardo Cozarinsky. Spanning over 100 years, and several continents, the stories show an impressive range of cultural knowledge. 

The stories are mainly based on Jewish migration around the Second World War, but the oldest one is about Russian Jews, who find refuge in Argentina in 1890, and the most recent, is about an Argentine-American Jew who travels to Lisbon to unravel the threads of his grandparents’ wartime affair. It is difficult to go into more detail about what happens without giving things away. Even the back cover of the book ruins one of them - so if you do decide to get your hands on this book - please don’t read the back cover first! 

Although each story is only about 15 pages long, the characters are vivid, and each one is compelling. Cozarinsky also has a career as a filmmaker, and I think this comes across in the eye for detail he has in the book’s construction. 

I really enjoyed reading this collection - it has made me realise how little I have read from South American authors, and how poor my knowledge of their history is. The small snippets of information I now have, has left me craving more! I ordered one of Cozarinsky’s novels as soon as I finished reading this book, and can’t wait to read more, from both him, and other Argentinian authors. 

Recommended, especially for the first short story.

guest review: nobody's home

John from Bad Texas just posted this review of Nobody’s Home by Dubravka Ugresic.  

Have you read this one too? Email me the link to your review, and I will add it to this post. 

I love the title. At first, I didn't even notice it, like I read the words without really taking time to read their full meaning. But the wonderful experience of doing a double-take on the title happened to me. A few essays into it, I closed the book and looked down at the title and realized the multiple meanings. What a kid says when a person calls the house and asks for the parents and they are n't home and the kid says "Nobody's Home." Or what we could imagine a sign saying at a house that wanted a robber. Or how we feel when we are left on hold for hours by a company's customer service specialists. Or what we say about someone who just isn't all that bright. And then finally, the big meaning: that in this postborder world where we all end up moving so much (or some of the us), as it turns out we all end up in a condition of not-being-at-home. That, as another writer I admire pointed out recently, we all have multiple homes (place of birth, growing up, adulthood, parents' birth, ancestors' graves, etc.) and no home at all. 

Dubravka Ugresic writes about all of these homes with an amazing ease. As she moves across borders in Europe and the Americas, she casually leads the reader with her. I never thought I would be deeply interested in Amsterdam, but Ugresic makes the city (her exile home) a symbol of all that the "First World" purports to be--efficient and welcoming and stultifying and soul-numbing. She muses on cities, personalities, peoples' quirks, literary theory, political history, post-Communism in a way that never seems heavy or difficult. She is kind to her readers (which might be due to the fact that most of these essays appeared originally in newspapers which need to attract readers and keep them and which pay Ugresic for her writing.) 

Her musings on memoir are especially interesting, this cultish fad that threatens to make every life worthy of being recounted and that adds to the religion of celebrity the world is invaded with today in outlets from tabloid journalism to blogs to Facebook. We are all celebrities, memoir would have us believe. We all have a a story to tell. Ugresic points out: 

While most people around the world are barely surviving (starvation, wars, illness, poverty), and can do nothing but bite their tongues, a powerful minority is howling publicly about their misfortunes. 

Ugresic writes about Wynonna Judd's recent memoir in which she purports to write "straight from the heart" and teach the reader some "life lessons." As Ugresic points out, socialist textbooks insisted that the point of literature was to teach life lessons. Ugresic has a keen ability to draw the eerie parallels between socialist screed and uber-capitalist products. As she points out: 

The problem is that the genre of memoir is registered as a literary genre, yet all its elements--intention, author, language, substance, interpretation, and reception--are edging over into the realm of religion. 

Ugresic helped me to understand why I feel so uncomfortable with the public journalling element of blogging and with the explosion of memoir as a genre. The ability to speak about one's personal life when so many people can't. Obviously, I don't condemn people who write personal blogs or memoirs, but I do have a great discomfort with this idea that the text is the person is a lesson is a life is the truth revealed. And yes, there also seems to be something profoundly religious about writing one's story down, i.e. as Ugresic points out: 

The prophetic messages are qualified as authentic if they are a) simple and coherent; b) truthful...; and c) in line with the accumulated wisdom of humanity..., in other words, compilatory. 

In another section of the book, Ugresic writes about a strange scene of Vladimir Putin kissing a fish on national television and she uses it to talk about the contemporary hunger for the limelight. 

It was once considered vulgar and a sign of bad upbringing to speak of yourself, to tell the public about your private life, to cosy up to people you don't know, and to show undue interest in the private lives of others. How did it happen that what used to be vulgar has become an essential part of daily life? 

In the end, Ugresic ends up writing a lot of small details of her life of travel and bordercrossing, from rides on trains to her Amsterdam, from her travels in the US to taxi cab drivers in Moscow. She writes about her very personal experiences of Tito's Yugoslavia (and the anti-fascist creation of that state) and Tudjman's ultra-nationalistic Croatia. She writes about feminism in pre-"democratic" Yugoslavia and the Brittany Spears Girl Power Eve Ensler Vagina Power feminism of today. Constantly writing about her self, she illuminates so much more. Kind of an anti-memoir. Her self-deprecatory, casual, fast-paced style draws the reader in without cheapening the prose. 

Before I close, I should comment on the translation by Ellen Elias-Bursac. Honestly, it was a pleasure to read the prose because it flowed in such a natural, clear way. At times, I forgot the foreignness of the subject matter--Tito's Yugoslavia, Amsterdam's suburbs, Estonian tourism--because the tone lulled me into such easy reading. Thanks.

guest review: senselessness

Sherri from Café Shree just posted this review of Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya 

Have you read this one too? 

Email me the link to your review, and I will add it to this post. 

Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya, translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver 

“I am not complete in the mind” is the first sentence of this short novel. It’s referring to a survivor of genocide but could also refer to the narrator. The title fits the story as well as what the narrator is helping to do. The narrator is living in exile having written some things about the President of his country. His friend hires him to edit a 500 page report the Church & a Human Rights group have written about the indigenous survivors of genocide (it turns out to be 1,100 pages). The novel is sort of a long rambling about the report and the narrator’s life as he works on it and the usefulness/pointlessness of the attempt. 

This short novel has some beautiful passages and some long rambling, please end the sentence passages. The narrator hates the Church, is living in exile and is paranoid, probably for good reason. He finds some of the report “literary”, certain sentences speak to him and he keeps a list of these, partly for their beauty and partly because he thinks he may use them as inspiration for a novel. 

This story is more about him than the atrocities and the search for justice which the report aims to do, and the title completely covers the entire experience, of the narrator and what the report is attempting to do. The story was compelling but the style was a bit hard to get into, long rambling sentences, paragraphs a page long, I felt like I wasn’t breathing while reading. Much of it was beautiful, some of it violent and some of it confusing. 

There were many beautiful sentences/passages in this story, here’s part of one that I particularly liked: 

“Planet Earth doesn’t want to know anything nor does she understand what the comet tells her, for she is happy in her orbit and hates to be disturbed by someone who appears only every once in a while from who knows where, I thought that day at dawn while leaning on the bar at Peter’s, staring into the mirror where I saw my face reflected over a row of bottles, where in fact dozens of drinkers next to me and behind me were reflected…” (and that’s not the complete sentence!) 

The author, Castllanos Moya was born in Honduras but grew up in El Salvador, lived and worked in Mexico, Spain, Germany, Guatemala and now lives in exile in Pittsburgh Pennslyvannia. How much of him was the narrator, I don’t know, but it seems like it could be autobiographical to some extent.