The Propeller Man and Other Stories by Gerard Lewis and Lizzie Shannon-Little – #ABookADayInMay – Day 26

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A quick post today about a book my friend and her partner wrote – The Propeller Man and Other Stories by Gerard Lewis and Lizzie Shannon-Little, illustrated by Alexandra Ricketts. A bit of a cheat for A Book A Day In May, because it is very short, but I’ve been meaning to read and write about it for ages.

It’s a collection of poems in the time-honoured style of Roald Dahl or Hilaire Belloc – i.e. cautionary tales about misbehaving children and the violent ends their misdeeds will fittingly lead to. Whether an untidy bedroom consuming a child or an octopus retaliating to urine in a pool, it’s all pretty macabre but will delight an older child who has a stomach for that sort of thing. And we know that children are often pretty open to the grisly! Each is fittingly illustrated by Ricketts – you can see her work on the cover too:

I’m a more sensitive soul, but I still enjoyed it – certainly a quick read, but one I suspect some children will love to revisit. And, who knows, it might even help improve their behaviour!

As a taste of the writing style, here’s a poem from the book’s website, inviting you in to read… You can also order on the website, if you’d like to get a copy.

Take heed, dear children — have a care,
For many dangers lurk out there.
Stay sharp of mind, but kind of heart,
And fortune’s hand will play its part.
But those who leap before they look,
May find their fates within this book.
Here the foolish, cruel, and cold — 
Their lives are tales that must be told.

A Bookshop in Algiers by Kaouther Adimi – #ABookADayInMay – Day 25

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Holding up A Bookshop in Algiers in the garden on a summer afternoon

The heatwave continues, and I spent some time in the garden reading A Bookshop in Algiers (2017) by Kaouther Adimi. It was originally published as Nos richesses and translated by Chris Andrews as Our Riches, so I’m not sure why the title changed when it appeared in the UK – but I have to admit that ‘bookshop’ in the title is what made me pick it up in a secondhand bookshop a few years ago. So perhaps the marketing folk know what they’re doing.

The novella is about Edmond Charlot, a publisher and bookseller in Algiers, Algeria. As I kept reading the book, and seeing so many real French authors, I began to wonder if Charlot were a real person… and of course he is. Which does raise the issue of novels about real people – particular in Adimi’s case, where she tells his story through diary entries. Making up a real person’s diary is a minefield, but I went along for the ride. Perhaps it helps that the entries are so short.

Through Charlot’s perspective, we see his ambition to open up a bookshop and cultural meeting point in Algiers, called Les Vraies Richesses, and to start publishing some of the greatest names in French literature. He is apparently best known for his working relationship with Albert Camus, and there were other names that I recognised – Giono, Vercors, Gide, Saint-Exupéry – as well as many that are doubtless familiar to people with a better knowledge of Francophone literature than I. He appears to have spent some time in prison, thanks to Gertrude Stein…

March 17, 1942
Just out of prison. A month inside! Thanks to Gertrude Stein who had the bright idea of declaring, in an interview with the BBC: “I have a very dynamic publisher in Algiers, who is resisting…” Vichy already had me under surveillance. Three days after the book was printed, the police came for me in the small hours of the morning.

[…]

This unfortunate episode has held up the publication of Gerturde Stein’s book, but the store stayed open, thanks to Manon and other friends. it’s clearer than ever to me that without friendship there could be no Éditions Charlot. It all depends, essentially, on circumstances, friendship, and encounters.

Before each section of diary entries, there is a page or two summarising the state of Algeria in the time period – from the 1930s through to the 1960s. Now, if I am ignorant about French writing, that’s nothing to my ignorance about the geopolitics of Algeria through the 20th century. In Adimi’s hands, I feel like I’ve had a quick but first-class education. She wears her knowledge and research lightly, and perhaps it’s because we see all these famous names and big events through the eyes of one individual, who is as preoccupied with rude letters and paper shortages as he is with the world stage. Later in the novella, there is an astonishing section on a brutal episode I had never heard of – the massacre of Algerians in Paris in 1961, by police. It is related with a fierce poeticism, and is incredibly striking.

The parallel story is in 2017. Through a friend of his father’s, a young man called Ryad is hired to throw away everything left in Les Vraies Richesses, paint the walls, and get it ready to be turned into a shop selling beignets. Though it hasn’t been a bookshop for years, it is still a members’ library, and its final custodian, Abdullah, is living next door. Ryad doesn’t like books at all – the idea of print reminds him of mites – and he is not at all uneasy about his task. But he finds the community are friendly but unhelpful. There is allegedly no paint to be bought in the whole region.

Over his time there, Ryad gets to know Adbullah and other locals. Adimi is too subtle to make him have a Damascan Road turn towards literature, but there is a subtle transformation to him nonetheless. Perhaps it’s because of my well-documented suspicion of historical fiction, but it was the contemporary Ryad scenes that I most enjoyed. He is not your usual literary hero, but I warmed to him and his gradual development.

Despite, as I say, not loving historical fiction, and despite some queries about making up the diaries of a real person – I did really enjoy reading A Bookshop in Algiers. It is quietly powerful about the abuse faced by Algerians over the years, as well as a fascinating insight into a literary circle and the resilience of people who simply love literature. It is not a sentimental book, and it is all the better for that. A lovely way to spend a sunny evening, and perhaps the beginnings of an education about a country and culture I know very little about.

#150: A Q&A special! (part 1)

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Thank you so much for all your questions for episode 150 of ‘Tea or Books?’!

Because we had so many questions, we’re doing it over two episodes – so today’s is the first half. Watch out for part 2, next month.

You can support the podcast at Patreon – where you’ll also get access to the exclusive new series ‘5 Books’, where I ask different people about the last book they finished, the book they’re currently reading, the next book they want to read, the last book they bought and the last book they were given. More to come soon.

And, of course, do get in touch at teaorbooks@gmail.com with any questions or comments – we still need questions for the middle sections of future episodes, of course!

They by Helle Helle – #ABookADayInMay – Day 24

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A copy of They in a sunlit park

The UK has entered something of a heatwave, and I read They (2018) by Helle Helle entirely outside, in a couple of different parks in Oxford. It was originally in Danish, and translated by Martin Aitken – the first time, in fact, that I remember seeing the translator’s name on the cover.

I bought They earlier this year with a voucher from some friends for Caper, an excellent little bookshop in East Oxford, having been beguiled by a review in the Guardian. It’s about a 16-year-old girl and her mother (both unnamed) living in a small Danish community. We don’t know what happened to the father, and we don’t know all that much about the two figures – known usually as ‘she’ or ‘her’ and ‘her mother’. Instead, we are just immersed in the ordinary world they live together, with the only clue of instability being the number of previous houses they have lived in. Some of the short sections deal with previous homes, and we usually don’t know quite why they have been so temporary.

The girl has the same preoccupations of most 16-year-olds. Her school, her friends, including a new one called Tove who is a little wilder and exciting than the ones she is used to. There are her older friends, some boys who are starting to intrigue her, and the neighbourly people she bumps into each day. But most of all there is her mother. They are close with an unspoken intensity. In less subtle hands than Helle’s, we might know if this is an unhealthily close relationship – but she just shows it to us, without judgement.

The story is mundane, every day, with little to disturb the calm surface of their lives. Except the mother keeps getting tired. And then, in the midst of the relentlessly ordinary, is a phone call from the hospital, where the daughter uses impersonation to get the information she correctly thinks she’s being shielded from.

Then the telephone rings, it’s the nurse, she’s Swedish or Norwegian. She speaks clearly but considerately. She reads aloud from the patient file. The patient expresses great surprise at the severity of her illness. Her mother bounds into the living room with two potatoes. She finds a telephone conversation taking place and beats a quiet retreat. Now the music changes, again her mother sings along. The doctors can relieve the symptoms, but the condition can’t be cured. Her school bag is dumped on the floor, she sits in front of it with her back to the rest of the room. Six months, perhaps a year. The dinner’s ready, they can eat now. They eat now.

A rock has been thrown into that pool – but not into the narrative. Helle’s prose continues as slowly, calmly as before. The mother has to stay in hospital, and the girl distracts herself with baking and housework. This is not a novel with heart-to-hearts or emotional outbursts. It is quiet and tender.

I’ll be honest. For the first 50 pages or so, I wasn’t sure about They. To be frank, I found it boring. The voice didn’t feel quite as distinctive as I’d hoped – but which I mean that it didn’t have the oddness or off-kilter elements that might make Helle’s prose stand out. But, as I kept reading, and as the prose washed over me, I succumbed. I got into the rhythm of the writing, and started to understand what made it special. Ultimately, They won me over. It took a bit of time for me to connect with it, but once I had, I appreciated the gentleness, everydayness of it.

It was also one where I wish I could compare the translation with the original. There were some moments where the English didn’t quite make sense – a ‘goes’ that should have been ‘went’; a ‘since’ which should have been ‘in case’ – but I assume these discordances were in the original? Maybe?

Apparently it is the first of a trilogy, with the other two books focusing on one of this novel’s background characters. I can see myself going back another time, and hoping for that same connection to appear, once I let the novel take me over.

Kick the Latch by Kathryn Scanlan – #ABookADayInMay – Day 23

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At the end of Kick the Latch (2022) by Kathryn Scanlan, there is quite a curious note from the author. She writes:

Kick the Latch is based on interviews recorded in person and by phone in 2018, 2020, and 2021. With Sonia’s permission, I transcribed those recordings and used them to write this book, which is a work of fiction. My gratitude to Sonia – and to my mother, who introduced us – is profound.

I don’t remember reading any of the many reviews that circulated about this book a couple of years ago, but I’m sure they’d all have highlighted this curious mixture of fiction and non-fiction. If the main character is called Sonia, sharing her experiences in the first person, where does the real Sonia end and the fictional one begin?

The novel – if such it is – is told in many vignettes, or extremely short chapters. They are broadly in chronological order, from her early childhood through her career as a horse trainer, with a slightly unexpected addendum of life working in a prison at the end. But Kick the Latch is really a window on a world that most of us know nothing about: the visceral, often violent, all-encompassing world of horse trainers and jockeys. While the horse owners are at the peripheraries of the book, this not their stage. This is a clear-eyed, direct account of a world that Sonia loves, even while it treats her with apathetic brutality.

You get hit. I got kicked in the head. The horse was kicking at a fly and my head got in the way. Riders would go down. They’d get steel rods put up their spine. You were on top of the world or the bottom. You’d get hurt and be laid up with no money coming in, but there’d be other weeks where you made real good.

It’s a sport, you’re competitive – you want to be tops, you want to win, you want your name on the program, in the standings. A trainer’ll try to swipe an owner from another trainer. A jockey’ll say to another jockey – What the fuck are you doing, sniffing around my stable? Bad feelings, hard feelings, friction – nobody loves everybody. But if someone gets hurt, laid up, down on their luck, loses a loved one – even if their truck breaks down on the way to the next track – we’d work together to help. We’d have a big benefit.

Sonia’s voice is clear and unapologetic, and she skates along the surface of this dizzying world. Whether describing the dubious ways that jockeys keep their weight down, the muckier side of horse rearing, or her own rape and, later, domestic violence, she gives us the information in staccato summary. She seldom dwells on anything. It gives the book a break-neck pace.

Scanlan isn’t afraid to immerse us in the idiolect of horse training. We get some glossing, but I still felt rather at sea with paragraphs like this:

Dark Side had been ruled off for flipping in the gates. You can get a flipper reinstated, but it’s a lot of work. You have to get reapproved by the starter and you have to have eight clean breaks.

I’m none the wiser, to be honest, but I think it’s better to be thrown into this world than to have everything explained – or, goodness, footnotes.

And we are very much thrown into the world of the book. It is short, spiky, and totally consistent. Perhaps it is too visceral for my liking, and it certainly doesn’t have the elegance or intertextuality of other vignette-based books I’ve read like Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill or Blue Postcards by Douglas Bruton. But it is confidently, unflinchingly its own thing – and, on those terms, very much a success.

Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation by Rachel Cusk – #ABookADayInMay – Day 22

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I know Rachel Cusk is revered by many, but I have to confess my only attempt with her fiction was a mixed blessing. I thought the writing was stunning, and the book had no momentum at all. I don’t normally mind the absence of plot, but Outline tested my limits. And yet, I wanted to try her again – and today I did, with Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation (2012). I thought I might have more luck with her non-fiction.

The topic of Aftermath is, as the subtitle suggests, her marriage to the photographer Adrian Clarke, though he is unnamed in the book. It is a concession to privacy that is seldom paid much attention in the disconcertingly honest book – while some characters, including her daughter’s friends, are represented by an initial, it would be hard not to identify them if you knew them. Remorseless, relentless honesty is the order of the day.

Cusk uses the fire of their separation as the jumping-off point for a discussion of many different things – starting with a look at gender roles in marriage, and what feminism is or is not. Like many women, she found that the division of labour in the home was extremely unequal.

My notion of half was more like the earthworm’s: you cut it in two, but each half remains an earthworm, wriggling and fending for itself. I earned the money in our household, did my share of the cooking and cleaning, paid someone to look after the children while I worked, picking them up from school once they were older. And my husband helped. It was his phrase, and still is: he helped me. I was the compartmentalised modern woman, the woman having it all, and he helped me to be it, to have it. But I didn’t want help: I wanted equality. In fact, this idea of help began to annoy me. Why couldn’t we be the same? Why couldn’t he be compartmentalised, too? And why, exactly, was it helpful for a man to look after his own children, or cook the food that he himself would eat? Helpful is what a good child is to its mother. A helpful person is someone who performs duties outside their own sphere of responsibility, out of the kindness of their heart. Help is dangerous because it exists outside the human economy: the only payment for help is gratitude. And did I not have something of the same gratuitous tone where my wage-earning was concerned? Did I not think there was something awfully helpful about me, a woman, supporting my own family?

It is a battle cry heard over and over again by anybody dissecting the ways in which gender norms create inequality in marriage. Cusk describes it well, and perhaps it was more novel a cry in 2012, though it will not surprise anybody any more. Not that things have changed since 2012, I suspect. It’s just that the reader is more likely to nod their head and roll their eyes than think that Cusk has uncovered something shocking and new. The opening is quite abstract. And because it is retreading now-familiar ground, it didn’t have the impact it could have done if she were a bit sharper with specifics.

Thankfully, she does exactly that in the next section – what a wonderfully specific detail this is:

The day my husband moved his possessions out of our house I had toothache. It was raining, and all morning the door to the street stood open. The wet air gusted in and the dim hall lay like an opened tomb in the grey daylight. I stood at the bottom of the stairs, my hands over my mouth, like a mime artist pantomiming dismay.

She is on far surer ground when relating actual events than she is when trying to philosophise about them in the abstract. The strongest, most memorable parts of Aftermath, in my opinion, were these sharp moments – for example, a story about renting terrible accommodation while her children went horse-riding, or the awkward experience of a lodger moving into the spare room after her husband’s departure, or the extraction of the aforementioned tooth. Cusk is seldom generous in her descriptions of anyone, including herself, and she is vicious in her physical depictions of even the most casual background ‘character’. Make of that what you will.

Along the way, Cusk broadens out from her own experiences to seek parallels in a shared cultural history. There is a lot drawn from Greek mythology, though my knowledge of Clytemnestra et al is very shaky – I’m grateful for Cusk including the details we need to know to make the comparison (though if her understanding of them is as weak as her understanding of the Bible, then I have some doubts if I’m actually any the wiser).

Still, the best parts of the book – which I enjoyed reading a lot, despite some misgivings – were those parts where she put aside the abstract and went for the concrete. The irony of the book is that there is very little that is precise about her marriage or separation – and far more drawn from later events, or events with other people. As the book progresses, she turns her attention to ‘X’, ‘Y’, and ‘Z’, three people with whom she forms some sort of connection. Y, for example, is some sort of counsellor.

It is strange to discuss my marriage in this room; its neutrality is almost chastising, makes the story both more lurid and more sombre, like the orderly courtrooms in which suited committees analyse war crimes, carefully dissect individual acts of thoughtless brutality and havoc over matching coffee cups. It is aftermath, the thing that happens once reality has occurred.

Throughout, Cusk’s writing is exceptionally good. It was only when I finished it that I realised – despite the tone and feel of total honesty – that I didn’t really know anything at all about her marriage or her separation. You never get a sense of what drew Cusk to Clarke, or any of his positive qualities (presuming he has them). You don’t even get a sense of his particular negative ones, besides an unenlightened approach to marital roles, which is admittedly a significant one. Perhaps the most revealing description of their marriage really comes in a curious short story that concludes the book, which has a moment of revelation that made me gasp.

It’s odd for a work of memoir to feel so blisteringly open, often in ways that it would be hard to advise, while also being something of a closed book. And despite not really being the book I expected, I’d still recommend it. I’m not sure it’s the book Cusk thinks it is, or that I imagined I’d be reading, but it’s a very good one nonetheless.

Old Soldiers by Paul Bailey – #ABookADayInMay – Day 21

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I really should read more by Paul Bailey. Whenever I do, I’m reminded what an excellent writer he is. And Old Soldiers (1980) is another tour de force from him.

It feels odd to call a novella a tour de force, but in 130 pages he manages to create a world – or perhaps several. It opens with this excellent line:

Too sick with grief for tears, Victor Harker arrived in London smiling.

Victor Harker is starting a new life without his wife, Stella. Throughout the novella, Stella floats in snapshots – she was clearly a plain-speaking, kind, lively woman. Perhaps it is easier to show a successful marriage in retrospect than on the page, but Bailey does a very impressive job, in these fleeting glances of a marriage, to show how deeply they loved and needed each other – and how alone Victor Harker now feels without her.

But Harker is not allowed to be lonely for long. Bursting into assumed friendship with him is Captain Hal Standish. He is boisterous, vulgar, and unstoppable. Harker doesn’t necessarily want to stop him. While he finds a lot about Standish overpowering, he is also passively open to whatever overtures are being made. You get the sense that he is most content in passivity.

After a funny, energetic scene, we follow Captain Hal. Or, as the narrative says, ‘The man who was sometimes known as Captain Hal’. It quickly becomes clear that this is only one of several aliases he goes by – apparently for his sheer self-entertainment.

And a curious entertainment it is, too. You might assume he masquerades as a relatively well-to-do Captain to swindle people of a higher class – but his next character is a beggar with no teeth and filthy clothing. He stumbles into a shelter, hob-nobbing with down and outs. It is clear that whatever is motivating him to adopt these different personalities, it is not avarice.

Old Soldiers follows the two of them, together and apart, and Bailey manages to hold humour and poignancy in tension expertly. There are some lines that wouldn’t be out of place in one of the more literary dirty magazines…

Sex with Augusta or Myfanwy was always a robust business; with Chloe it had gone beyond the merely lively into a state that verged on gladiatorial.

…but there are also moments, particularly with Harker, which are beautiful reflections on lost love. He is also very adept at dialogue, and much of the book is in that form. I think the humour stands out more than the poignancy in the novella over all, and Bailey has a lightness of touch to it all that means Hal’s oddities are played for curious oddness rather than psychologised. Until… well, the ending is very satisfying, I’ll say that.

I’ve read three or four Bailey novels/novellas now and they’re always masterly. And yet I seldom see his name mentioned in the blogosphere. Any recommendations for others to try?

The Driveway Has Two Sides by Sara Marchant – #ABookADayInMay – Day 20

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I’m continuing my reading of Fairlight Moderns with The Driveway Has Two Sides (2018) by Sara Marchant – with another lovely cover illustration by Sam Kalda. Honestly, I can’t speak highly enough of these editions. Their size and feel and the care taken over them are all wonderful.

And thankfully, in this case, the book is also excellent! I really enjoyed The Driveway Has Two Sides, and it has made me interested to read more by Marchant.

It’s set on an East Coast Island, onto which moves Delilah. She is a young woman who is, we are told quite often, beautiful and sexy (if the book were written by a man, I’d have questioned how often we needed to know that!) On the small island, any outsider is treated with a little suspicion – and she clearly doesn’t want to be at the heart of the community. But she shares her driveway with the yellow house next door, and the resident there is even less keen to communicate. They can be recluses near each other.

If you looked underneath you noticed certain signs that all was not as it should be. The man next door hardly ever went out and no visitors ever went in. When he did go, it was in his own car that he kept in the garage at the front of the shared drive, and he left the island on the ferry. He made no overtures of neighborliness to the girl, and to the villagers’ eyes she seemed either uninterested or maybe not even aware of his existence. This was odd because they shared a driveway.

But then Delilah gets to know the local sheriff, Ted. He is a widow, and I particularly enjoyed the detail that local women brought him meals a lot… until he saw Delilah for the third time, and the overtures and offerings ceased. All small communities are the same! Ted’s kindness starts to wear Delilah down a little… leaving her with three men to decide between. Ted, the mysterious man next door, and the married boyfriend who is paying for her home.

That makes The Driveway Has Two Sides sound like a romcom, and it probably doesn’t help that the Amazon subheading is ‘the perfect escapist beach read’. Because this novella is so much more interesting than a ‘who will she choose?’ plot (though I have to admit that Ted is one of the lovelier characters I’ve come across in a while). I found it much more a calming, beautiful look at someone trying to forge a home – and being gradually brought into contact with other people. Delilah is particularly interested in gardening, and over the course of the short book she manages to breath life into the gardens at the front and back of the house – causing gossip among the locals, and also inadvertently opening up a connection with her neighbour.

There are a few bigger ‘plotty’ moments, including a twist or two, and they did feel a bit like they belonged to a different, longer novel. The Driveway Has Two Sides was on firmer ground when it was about the subtle, poignant shifts in relationships between two people that happen almost reluctantly. I found it a beautiful, absorbing little book, creating a community I felt I knew well. Whether or not it had the ending I was hoping for is another question, but the fact I was invested in the outcome is a strong endorsement…

Queen by Birgitta Trotzig – #ABookADayInMay – Day 19

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It is appropriate that I follow a book by a translator with a book in translation. Queen by Birgitta Trotzig was published in Swedish in 1964 and has just been published in a translation by Saskia Vogel by Faber & Faber, who sent me a review copy. I am always interested in reading more Scandinavian literary fiction, and its description as a ‘haunting Swedish family saga’ won me over.

It’s very different from most novels I read. There is almost no dialogue in the whole book – I thought there would be none at all, but there are four or five exchanges throughout the book. Instead, it is all narrative, and often for page-long paragraphs. It is a poetic, atmospheric depiction of a melancholy family in a rural community. Judit is also known as ‘Queen’, which is a part of her personality that often wars with the more sombre, even hopeless, part of her that is ‘Judit’. She has a taciturn brother, Albert, and a much younger brother, Viktor. At length, Trotzig depicts the dysfunction of this family unit, who scarcely communicate or connect with each other. This is a paragraph about the relationship between Judit and Viktor:

And she sensed how she was being left alone. As young as he was he had made himself unreachable, slick and smooth like a sea-glazed stone, no longer to be grasped. Gray sky, black nettles, chicken scratch, the cat upon the rat, down among the meadows the gray expanse of sea – what did she have to do with this whole world? Alone were they, each and every one unto themself, like cast stones scattered in the empty water-dawn.

It’s beautiful writing, but I have to admit to feeling a bit oppressed by the amount of beautiful writing in this book. Obviously it was a choice to keep the characters’ voices from us, but the lack of dialogue did make the family seem cold and remote from the reader, as well as each other.

In the final 40 pages, a new character arrives – she is foretold by the blurb, but I shan’t spoil it – and it could have been transformative. And yet she, too, is curiously distant from us all. Even a sudden burst of plot couldn’t change that.

So I’m not sure I’m necessarily the right reader for Queen. I could tell it was beautiful, but I couldn’t connect with it. Perhaps that was the point… and yet it felt like a book I couldn’t really get to grips with.

Catching Fire by Daniel Hahn – #ABookADayInMay – Day 18

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I knew I had to buy Catching Fire (2022) by Daniel Hahn as soon as I heard about it – and, boom, it’s not even three years since I bought it and I’ve read it! Such speed and agility. I don’t know why it took me so long, since I was pretty certain I would love it – and I definitely did.

Catching Fire is a subtitled ‘A Translation Diary’ and that’s exactly what it is. Hahn is a literary translator, and the book documents his process of translating Diamela Eltit’s Jamás el fuego nunca from Spanish into English. It would eventually appear as Never Did The Fire, though in the earlier sections of the translation diary it is called Never The Fire Ever. Catching Fire began life as a blog, and it retains the structure of a series of dated entries, responding to people’s comments and occasionally referring to real-world events. Because it was a blog, Hahn cautions (in his introduction) against reading it all in one go. Well, Hahn, I have not taken your guidance, and it didn’t stop me absolutely loving this book.

Even the very best translators will acknowledge this: essentially, theoretically, translation is impossible. It’s one of the paradoxes inherent in literary translation, I think. it’s easier to do it, or at least to do it well, once you’ve understood that in theory it cannot be done.

So Hahn writes in his introduction, before going on to explain exactly how he does it. I like his own description of translation: ‘Translation is like copying a work of art in a different medium. We’re art forgers attempting to reproduce an oil painting using only pencils, but so skilfully you won’t be able to tell the difference.’

Like most readers, perhaps, when I read a work in translation, I’m not trying too hard to see the original text behind the text I’m reading. Indeed, I tend to sort of pretend it doesn’t exist. Trying to balance the book I can’t access without the translator’s help into my reception of the book I am reading feels too fraught with challenge. It’s that suspension of disbelief (or something like that) that makes reading a translation possible. And perhaps the translator’s job is to make that possible.

I don’t read any languages other than English, with the possible exception of a very easy children’s book in French, so I already marvel at anybody who could speak more than one language – let alone have the skill to do what Hahn does. My appreciation of translators was already pretty sky-high, but after reading Catching Fire, it has stratospheric.

His process starts by doing a quick translation of everything. It is speedy and unapologetically shoddy. Hahn courageously shares examples of this initial parse through, and it is littered with ‘this/that’ options, words still in Spanish because he can’t think for that moment how best to translate in context, and sentences that, if complete, are ugly. It is, I suppose, the sort of translation that AI is trying to convince us is sufficient – and it shows exactly why it isn’t, especially for literary fiction.

After this, he goes through and looks at many words to check their precise meaning – and, since Eltit is Chilean, this also includes checking for different uses that are specific to Chile. Future drafts are about getting the nuance exactly right, trying to capture what is in the original even when English doesn’t accommodate an easy transfer.

The bulk of Catching Fire are about these nuances. I loved it, and it didn’t matter at all that I don’t speak Spanish. Hahn explains very well for the monoglot. How to capture the way that Eltit lists adjectives after a noun? How to translate words which tell you the gender of the speaker in Spanish, but don’t in English? What to do about allusions that refract across the novel when the same reaching-out moments don’t make sense in English?

One of my favourites of these was a character complaining of pain in his wrist – muñeca – which Hahn at first translates unquestioningly as ‘wrist’. It is only in the ensuing dialogue does it become clear that muñeca’s other meaning (‘doll’) is also significant. How on earth do you retain this in translation? (I may have missed the answer, or he didn’t tell us.)

I mentioned very early in this diary that ambuity can be the hardest thing to translate. I think some people imagine ambiguity as a kind of vagueness, but to my mind you might better consider it exactly the opposite, as an extreme sort of precision, and that’s what makes it hard.

If that sort of thing appeals to you, then Catching Fire is rammed full of them. It reminded me a lot of Kate Briggs’ This Little Art, though they are tonally and structurally very different – both equally fascinating about translation.

It also helps that Hahn is great company for the ride. Perhaps because we are similar ages, I appreciated his humour and his character shines through as someone intellectually curious while also being a good hang. I also appreciated his evident patience with the number of non-translators who were clearly giving their thoughts in the comments – perhaps he liked getting these, though I suspect I would have found it hard to deal with quite so many non-experts sharing their thoughts on my job. Maybe Hahn is just a better person than me.

Well, it’s ridiculous that I waited so long to read this when I knew I’d fall for it completely. Now I wish every book in translation came with exactly this sort of companion book. I have to confess that nothing in it made me want to read Eltit’s novel, which doesn’t sound like my cup of tea at all, but that is beside the point. Catching Fire is a total triumph, and it feels like a privilege to have had this window into the translator’s world.