A spotlight on translated fiction this month
This month we're reading novels translated from Japanese, Chinese, German and Italian.
Honeybees and Distant Thunder by Riku Onda (translated from Japanese by Philip Gabriel)
In a small coastal town just a stone’s throw from Tokyo, a prestigious piano competiton is underway. Over the course of two feverish weeks, three students will experience some of the most joyous – and painful – moments of their lives. Though they don’t know it yet, each will profoundly and unpredictably change the others, for ever.
' ... a novel that will have your stomach in knots with suspense. It’s an intense world, one in which issues of class and culture, talent and devotion, loyalty and rivalry seem tightly bound to creativity and nature.' — Elke Power, editor of Readings Monthly
Owlish by Dorothy Tse (translated from Chinese by Natascha Bruce)
In the mountainous city of Nevers, there lives a professor of literature called Q. He has a dull marriage and a lacklustre career, but also a scrumptious collection of antique dolls locked away in his cupboard. And soon Q lands his crowning acquisition - a music box ballerina named Aliss who tantalisingly springs to life. Guided by his mysterious friend Owlish and inspired by an inexplicably familiar painting, Q embarks on an all-consuming love affair with Aliss, oblivious to the sinister forces encroaching on his city and the protests spreading across the university that have left his classrooms all but empty.
'You could call it surreal, otherworldly, hypnotic, or even oneiric if you had a thesaurus on hand, but nothing shapes Owlish quite so much as the language of dreams.' — Joe Murray, Readings bookseller
Siblings by Brigitte Reimann (translated from German by Lucy Jones)
1960. The border between West and East Germany has closed. "I will never forgive you for this," says Uli, to his sister Elizabeth.
For Elizabeth, the GDR is her generation's chance to build a glorious, egalitarian socialist future. For Uli, it is a place of stricture and oppression. Separating them is the ever-wider chasm of the party line; over them looms the twin spectres of opportunity and fear. In prose as bold as a machete stroke, Brigitte Reimann – herself a loyal socialist – battles with the clash of idealism and suppression, familial love and individualist desires, in this celebrated classic of postwar East German literature.
Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Cespedes (translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein)
Out running errands, Valeria Cossati gives in to a sudden impulse – she buys a shiny black notebook. Hiding it from her husband and children, she begins to record and scrutinise her life, writing of the daily domestic routine, her children's struggles in love and minor rifts in her marriage. Gradually, the solid structure of her family life crumbles away, and Valeria discovers the dissatisfaction that has been lurking behind her devotion to her family for years.
'To read Forbidden Notebook is to be equally captivated and devastated. The realities of domestic life are chillingly dissected to perfection.' — Kara Nicholson, Readings bookseller
