ASIAN REVIEW OF BOOKS
Several translations from French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Russian, both fiction and non-fiction had links with Asia. Several classics from Arabic and Farsi appeared in translation, as did a children’s picture book, a contemporary Turkish novel and a translation of Hebrew poetry by an ethnically Vietnamese Israeli poet. Click on the title for the review.
French, Spanish & Italian
Khalil by Yasmina Khadra, translated from French by John Cullen
Khalil, a young Belgian, is set to blow himself up near France’s national stadium, in the outskirts of Paris, along with his best friend. Khalil reaches for the detonator of his explosive vest in a packed suburban train. There is a twist: he survives, and he wasn’t meant to. Algerian writer Yasmina Khadra’s latest novel explores European home-ground terrorism in a gripping psychological first-person novel.
Em by Kim Thúy, translated from French by Sheila Fischman
“I’m going to tell you the truth,” begins the narrator on the first page of Kim Thúy’s latest, Em, “but only partially, incompletely, more or less.” To put an even finer emphasis on the point, she tells us a couple pages later, that “truth “is fragmented”—as indeed it must be when dealing with a topic as vast as the troubled history of Vietnam. Departing from its brutal colonial entrapment as a rubber producing outlet for the French, cascading through the desolation of the Vietnam War, finally culminating in the strain of exile that became the sole reality available to those who managed to survive, Em accomplishes in some 160 pages what has taken many historians volumes to tell.
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