Review: A True Novel, by Minae Mizumura

 A True Novel, by Minae Mizumura. Fiction. Translated from Japanese by Juliet Winters Carpenter. 2013, Other Press.

I've had A True Novel on my shelf more or less since it came out in 2013; I bought it at Porter Square Books, in Cambridge, where I used to work, and it's followed me to New York and New Jersey. It's intimidating; at two volumes and over 800 pages, it's not a quick read, or a light one. And yet it read quickly, and it felt relatively undemanding at that.

At its most basic level it is a 20th-century Japanese retelling of Wuthering Heights; Heathcliff is Taro Azuma, a poor boy who becomes wealthy and hopes to win Yoko, a woman from a wealthy family adjacent to Taro's. The two grow up together but social mores keep them apart as well as Taro's itinerant life and search for wealth. Until they don't anymore.

The story is told in a circular fashion, first through the eyes of a young Japanese girl living in the United States who knows Taro as a young man working as a chauffeur for a wealthy Long Island neighbor. In volume 2, the focus, and the narration, shifts to Fumiko, a servant working in one of the Taro-adjacent wealthy homes. She and Taro form a bond; she's a young woman when he is a child but their relationship lasts for years. She tells Taro and Yoko's love story in a somewhat dry, detached manner, observing here and speculating there, but mostly she is around for everything she narrates. That doesn't make her a reliable narrator, though.

I read the book relatively quickly for such a long book, in a little over a month. I burned through the first 200 pages in a weekend at my in-law's house. After that I just read steadily and like I said it's not a difficult or challenging novel but it is very engaging and stuffed with details of Japanese life and the changes in Japanese society over the 20th century.  The first part is also a meditation on writing and fiction.

I would definitely recommend it to literary fiction readers, maybe a nice thing to take on vacation or read over the summer when you have some time to stretch it out. I'm glad I finally got around to it.

 

FTC Disclosure: I did not receive this book for review.

Women in Translation Month 2022

Women in Translation Month 

To celebrate, here's a list of some of my favorite books by women translated into English from various languages. I will link to reviews where I can; here is the shopping list for this post on Bookshop.org. I receive a small commission on sales.

Nathacha Appanah writes in French and has had two books translated that I've loved, The Last Brother and Waiting for Tomorrow. Her books are searing and moving and challenging.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Therese Bohman writes in Swedish and her novels The Other Woman and Drowned are favorites of mine. The Other Woman is a low-key portrayal of a woman having an affair with a married man, and Drowned in a white-hot suspense read about another, less happy, love affair.

Sara Mesa's Four by Four is a bizarre and suspenseful story of shenanigans at a private school in Spain. (Bias alert: the translator, Katie Whittemore, was a classmate of mine at a Bread Loaf translator's workshop I attended.)

Norah Lange's Notes from Childhood is an interesting and compelling coming of age story set in Argentina. She wrote in Spanish.

Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk won me over with Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of Dead, an unusual crime novel. She writes in Polish and I can't wait to read more of her work.

Jenny Rogneby writes great crime novels in Swedish. I recommend By Any Means Necessary, starring her detective Leona Lindberg.

Natuso Kirino wrote the thrilling Out, a crime novel set in Japan that will keep you turning pages all day and all night. She writes in Japanese.

I loved Tamar Yellin's masterful Genizah at the House of Shepher, an Israeli novel about  a woman, a book and a mystery. She writes in Hebrew.

I wrote another post on Women in Translation month in 2015 with a completely different slate of authors; you can see that post here.

Women in Translation Month

August is Women in Translation Month; all around the bookish world you will see displays, blog posts, Instagram stuff and lots of articles and conversation about books by women translated into English, or women translators- or both.

In 2015 I posted about some of my favorite translated women; here is that list. In the last two years I've added a couple of names to that favorites list:

Therese Bohman is a Swedish writer who turns out reliably good thrillers. The latest to be translated into English is The Other Woman, about a young woman who gets involved in an affair with a married man. It's suspenseful but also very psychologically realistic.

Francesca Melandri's novel Eva Sleeps is moving and absorbing historical fiction about the Tyrol region of Italy post-World War 2. It's about a young unwed mother and her daughter.

And there are a bunch of new releases coming up this summer and fall to keep an eye on:

Suzanne, by Anais Barbeau-Lavollette comes to us from Quebec, is a woman's recreation of her grandmother's life- her grandmother who abandoned her family and became an artist. Translated by Rhonda Mullins. It came out in April and is available now from Coach House Books.

Go, Went, Gone, by Jenny Erpenbeck, is a German novel about the European refugee crisis. It comes out in September from New Directions. Translated by Susan Bernofsky.

Clara Beaudoux's Madeleine Project is the book form of a series of tweets documenting a treasure trove Beaudoux found in the basement of her Paris apartment building- the belongings of a 20th century woman named Madeleine. It was originally published in French and was translated by Alison Anderson. It comes out in September from New Vessel Press.

Belladonna, by Daša Drndic is "A timely parable on the perils of of growing old and infirm an unforgiving modern world." It was translated from Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth and comes out in September from New Directions.

And there are more! But more on that later.