Latest news with #ItalianLiterature
The Guardian
08-08-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘It's another form of imperialism': how anglophone literature lost its universal appeal
When I heard that a major international broadcaster would be producing a TV series based on Claudia Durastanti's Strangers I Know, as a millennial Italian writer I was enthusiastic. Durastanti's book – a fictionalised memoir about growing up between rural southern Italy and Brooklyn, and between identities, as the hearing daughter of two deaf parents – was the first literary novel of an Italian writer from my generation to reach a global public. Published in English by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2022, in a translation by Elizabeth Harris, its success was widely seen as a good omen, the sign that international publishers were starting to show interest in a new crop of Italian literature. A further reason for my enthusiasm was that a big part of Strangers I Know takes place in Basilicata, where my father is from. It is one of the country's poorest regions, right at the arch of Italy's boot, a place so derelict and forgotten that the one nationally renowned book about it, Carlo Levi's wartime memoir Christ Stopped at Eboli, owes its title to the idea that the saviour, crossing Italy from the north, stopped at a village before the region's border: Basilicata was never saved. Its breathtaking limestone canyons and ancient Greek temples notwithstanding, the region offers little in terms of recognisable, picturesque Italianness – the Tuscan hills, Venetian canals and clothesline-strewn Neapolitan alleys which, I felt, Italian novels were often expected to offer if they wanted to appeal to an international audience. Strangers I Know seemed poised to broaden the range of what we understand as an Italian story – because it was also an American one, and because it eschewed all stereotypes about Italy. Not for long. After a pilot was written and slated for production, the broadcaster asked for a rewrite. The Italian backdrop, they said, was too unfamiliar. Why not set it in Ireland? It would be easier for audiences to relate to, and in its crucial aspects (Catholic, poor) it was kind of the same. The project was ultimately shelved. The history of the novel is deeply entwined with European nationalisms and national identities. Walter Scott's historical novels drew from (and consolidated) Scotland's history into a shared mythology; Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed is still studied in Italian schools as the crucible that forged a unified language from a plethora of local variants; Goethe, Austen, Dostoevsky and Balzac all captured what they felt was the nature of a specific place and time, offering nations a mirror in which to see or imagine their national ethos. As books were translated and read across borders, a slightly paradoxical notion of two-layered reading emerged: novels offered, on the one hand, a very precise depiction of a specific place and time and national spirit; but through the specifics, something general could be glimpsed outside the national confines – about what it feels like to be a person, which to me sounds like a serviceable approximation of what the art of the novel is about. This gave rise to an idea of literature as a kind of exchange or conversation between national literatures, each with their allotted seats at the canon – Fernando Pessoa or Robert Musil, Henrik Ibsen or Émile Zola: of course, they were almost exclusively male seats. The imperialistic premise in this idea of literature as an egalitarian conversation between national traditions is blatant: as Milan Kundera remarked, what it took for a country to be awarded its own national literature – instead of being grouped into an ill-assorted umbrella term such as 'Mitteleuropa' – was a colonial past. And yet that was still the way literature was taught and read, in Italy, until a couple of decades ago. We read Gustave Flaubert and Georges Perec. We read Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf. We read Thomas Mann and Ernesto Sábato. And then we didn't. The consolidation of the English-language publishing industry in the 1980s and 90s gave its most successful writers a worldwide reach and a critical impact that no authors from other countries could aspire to. The Italian contemporary canon, at the beginning of the millennium, was composed of David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith and Jonathan Franzen; the country's first creative writing programme, established in the mid-90s, owes its name to Holden Caulfield; its students (some of whom have been my students) learn technique by reading Ernest Hemingway and Joan Didion, who show; not Anna Maria Ortese and Elsa Morante, who tell. Their Italian syntax and style – as measured in Eleonora Gallitelli's groundbreaking computational studies – are more influenced by English than the Italian of translators working from English. This didn't happen only in Europe. As discussed in Minae Mizumura's The Fall of Language in the Age of English – an essayistic memoir about the author's having to choose between being an American and a Japanese writer, and choosing the latter, and regretting it – at the turn of the millennium the idea of national literatures, modelled as a system of literary discourses on a somewhat equal footing, no longer held. Instead, we moved into a world in which one of those traditions had expanded beyond the national, becoming de facto universal. There is nothing intrinsically lamentable about this, which can be seen as a way out of nationalisms. But there can be only one universal; and as the anglophone tradition ascended, other national literatures shrank to become increasingly local. In a system in which English-language literature deals transnationally with general issues, the specifics that had characterised national literatures (Austen's England, Dostoevsky's Russia) lose their role and become local colour, picturesque. When a story has universal ambitions, such as Durastanti's Strangers I Know, it thus makes sense to recast it someplace more relatable, in a setting where the exoticism won't get in the way. Something similar happened to me. Years ago, a German publisher declined to translate my second novel – a story of ambition and financial speculation – because the Italian backdrop might have confused a German readership used to imagining corporate raiders in New York, or perhaps in Frankfurt. But, he said, the chapters in which the protagonist visited his father in Venice were great, so poetic. Had I considered setting a book in Venice? Italy, for him, had ceased to be seen as a legitimate context for corporate ambition, as it was in Paolo Volponi's Le Mosche del Capitale, and become a set of exotic backdrops: Naples, Puglia, Rome, the Tuscan hills, or Venice. This, in a way, is a division of labour: a way the international market for literature has tried to become more efficient by allocating the general discourse to a set of mostly English-speaking writers, while a peripheral circle of local colleagues are outsourced with producing gondolas, popes, crying madonnas, and pizza. But the landscape described by Mizumura has drastically rearranged itself over the past few years, and the primacy of anglophone literature seems to have faded. The authors in today's contemporary canon – celebrated by critics worldwide, and imitated by aspiring novelists – come from much more varied backgrounds and write in many more languages. Roberto Bolaño, Annie Ernaux, Han Kang and Karl Ove Knausgård are the Franzens and Wallaces of two decades ago. Of course it is impossible to draw a precise line for a general shift of this kind, but 'Ferrante fever' could be as good a watershed moment as any. Elena Ferrante was a relatively niche writer (both in her country and abroad) whose novels achieved a spectacular, worldwide success, reaching the kind of ubiquity previously associated with people performatively reading Infinite Jest to show off. It also sparked a growing international interest in Italian literature, involving both younger writers (such as Durastanti, or myself for that matter) or allegedly 'forgotten' classics, such as the works of Elsa Morante and Alba de Céspedes. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion There could be several reasons for this. The further consolidation of the US publishing industry has made it harder for innovative, ambitious novels to emerge. It could be an effect of the trendiness of 'literature in translation' in the English-language market – even though the notion that it would have its own niche is largely unfathomable to non-native English speakers, used since childhood to reading literature in translation and calling it 'literature'. It could also be that different books are being written. Since the turn of the century, writers from all over the world have felt the dual literary citizenship that Minae wrote about: seeing themselves as part of both a local and a universal tradition, reading Anna Maria Ortese at the Scuola Holden. It would have been natural to try to combine the two, working into their writing a thin veneer of exoticism to lead readers to engage with its deeper ideas. Of course there is much, much more to, say, Ferrante's novels than a picturesque Italian backdrop. But the backdrop's recognisability – indeed, its very picturesqueness – has probably played a role in making them relatable to a wider audience. Bolaño's The Savage Detectives similarly toys with cliches about Mexico, both subverting them and contextualising them into a wider picture. Han Kang's The Vegetarian plays into a strain of body horror that western readers have come to stereotypically associate with east Asian literature – only to explode it with a psychologically harrowing and politically powerful fable about resisting patriarchy. On the other hand, this increased international interest in non-anglophone literature could have another source: no matter where these books originated, their worldwide success often came as a result of their success in English. This was the case with, for instance, both Ferrante and Bolaño, who only caught on abroad after resonating with the English‑language market. It is particularly evident in Han's case: The Vegetarian was published in South Korea in 2007, but gained international acclaim after Deborah Smith's spectacularly successful translation was published almost a decade later. In a particularly significant twist, its Italian edition was translated from the English instead of Han's Korean, not because no translators could be found but because the editor, who read it in English, found Smith's prose more effective – more relatable? – than the renditions they initially commissioned from the original. This is not limited to recent, successful novels: two canonical 20th-century Italian authors, Natalia Ginzburg and Alba de Céspedes, have been translated internationally mostly after their English editions. Conversely, classic Danish author Tove Ditlevsen's trilogy appeared in Italian after its US translation. If anglophone culture no longer beams its literature from the centre to what Umberto Eco called 'the peripheries of the Empire', it still acts as a transit hub between them, the arbiter of what is allowed to go beyond the confines of the local. My own novel, Perfection, has been acquired for translation in languages from Thai to Lithuanian only after its reception in English, and its International Booker shortlisting. This could be seen as another, subtler form of imperialism; and yet it also allows more room for agency. Our peripheries are closer to each other than the long way through the centre makes it seem: readers in Buenos Aires or Naples could very well find a story set in Seoul more relatable than one set in Franzen's Minnesota. Durastanti's latest novel, Missitalia, has a section set in Basilicata, mixing the true story of the women-only gangs that haunted its forests in the 19th century with the parallel-history discovery of oil there. As it is currently being translated into 10 languages (including English), she recently told me that her translators sometimes reach out to ask for help in rendering the region's atmosphere. 'Just think Appalachia,' is an answer she gives. Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated by Sophie Hughes, is published by Fitzcarraldo (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
08-08-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘It's another form of imperialism': how anglophone literature lost its universal appeal
When I heard that a major international broadcaster would be producing a TV series based on Claudia Durastanti's Strangers I Know, as a millennial Italian writer I was enthusiastic. Durastanti's book – a fictionalised memoir about growing up between rural southern Italy and Brooklyn, and between identities, as the hearing daughter of two deaf parents – was the first literary novel of an Italian writer from my generation to reach a global public. Published in English by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2022, in a translation by Elizabeth Harris, its success was widely seen as a good omen, the sign that international publishers were starting to show interest in a new crop of Italian literature. A further reason for my enthusiasm was that a big part of Strangers I Know takes place in Basilicata, where my father is from. It is one of the country's poorest regions, right at the arch of Italy's boot, a place so derelict and forgotten that the one nationally renowned book about it, Carlo Levi's wartime memoir Christ Stopped at Eboli, owes its title to the idea that the saviour, crossing Italy from the north, stopped at a village before the region's border: Basilicata was never saved. Its breathtaking limestone canyons and ancient Greek temples notwithstanding, the region offers little in terms of recognisable, picturesque Italianness – the Tuscan hills, Venetian canals and clothesline-strewn Neapolitan alleys which, I felt, Italian novels were often expected to offer if they wanted to appeal to an international audience. Strangers I Know seemed poised to broaden the range of what we understand as an Italian story – because it was also an American one, and because it eschewed all stereotypes about Italy. Not for long. After a pilot was written and slated for production, the broadcaster asked for a rewrite. The Italian backdrop, they said, was too unfamiliar. Why not set it in Ireland? It would be easier for audiences to relate to, and in its crucial aspects (Catholic, poor) it was kind of the same. The project was ultimately shelved. The history of the novel is deeply entwined with European nationalisms and national identities. Walter Scott's historical novels drew from (and consolidated) Scotland's history into a shared mythology; Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed is still studied in Italian schools as the crucible that forged a unified language from a plethora of local variants; Goethe, Austen, Dostoevsky and Balzac all captured what they felt was the nature of a specific place and time, offering nations a mirror in which to see or imagine their national ethos. As books were translated and read across borders, a slightly paradoxical notion of two-layered reading emerged: novels offered, on the one hand, a very precise depiction of a specific place and time and national spirit; but through the specifics, something general could be glimpsed outside the national confines – about what it feels like to be a person, which to me sounds like a serviceable approximation of what the art of the novel is about. This gave rise to an idea of literature as a kind of exchange or conversation between national literatures, each with their allotted seats at the canon – Fernando Pessoa or Robert Musil, Henrik Ibsen or Émile Zola: of course, they were almost exclusively male seats. The imperialistic premise in this idea of literature as an egalitarian conversation between national traditions is blatant: as Milan Kundera remarked, what it took for a country to be awarded its own national literature – instead of being grouped into an ill-assorted umbrella term such as 'Mitteleuropa' – was a colonial past. And yet that was still the way literature was taught and read, in Italy, until a couple of decades ago. We read Gustave Flaubert and Georges Perec. We read Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf. We read Thomas Mann and Ernesto Sábato. And then we didn't. The consolidation of the English-language publishing industry in the 1980s and 90s gave its most successful writers a worldwide reach and a critical impact that no authors from other countries could aspire to. The Italian contemporary canon, at the beginning of the millennium, was composed of David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith and Jonathan Franzen; the country's first creative writing programme, established in the mid-90s, owes its name to Holden Caulfield; its students (some of whom have been my students) learn technique by reading Ernest Hemingway and Joan Didion, who show; not Anna Maria Ortese and Elsa Morante, who tell. Their Italian syntax and style – as measured in Eleonora Gallitelli's groundbreaking computational studies – are more influenced by English than the Italian of translators working from English. This didn't happen only in Europe. As discussed in Minae Mizumura's The Fall of Language in the Age of English – an essayistic memoir about the author's having to choose between being an American and a Japanese writer, and choosing the latter, and regretting it – at the turn of the millennium the idea of national literatures, modelled as a system of literary discourses on a somewhat equal footing, no longer held. Instead, we moved into a world in which one of those traditions had expanded beyond the national, becoming de facto universal. There is nothing intrinsically lamentable about this, which can be seen as a way out of nationalisms. But there can be only one universal; and as the anglophone tradition ascended, other national literatures shrank to become increasingly local. In a system in which English-language literature deals transnationally with general issues, the specifics that had characterised national literatures (Austen's England, Dostoevsky's Russia) lose their role and become local colour, picturesque. When a story has universal ambitions, such as Durastanti's Strangers I Know, it thus makes sense to recast it someplace more relatable, in a setting where the exoticism won't get in the way. Something similar happened to me. Years ago, a German publisher declined to translate my second novel – a story of ambition and financial speculation – because the Italian backdrop might have confused a German readership used to imagining corporate raiders in New York, or perhaps in Frankfurt. But, he said, the chapters in which the protagonist visited his father in Venice were great, so poetic. Had I considered setting a book in Venice? Italy, for him, had ceased to be seen as a legitimate context for corporate ambition, as it was in Paolo Volponi's Le Mosche del Capitale, and become a set of exotic backdrops: Naples, Puglia, Rome, the Tuscan hills, or Venice. This, in a way, is a division of labour: a way the international market for literature has tried to become more efficient by allocating the general discourse to a set of mostly English-speaking writers, while a peripheral circle of local colleagues are outsourced with producing gondolas, popes, crying madonnas, and pizza. But the landscape described by Mizumura has drastically rearranged itself over the past few years, and the primacy of anglophone literature seems to have faded. The authors in today's contemporary canon – celebrated by critics worldwide, and imitated by aspiring novelists – come from much more varied backgrounds and write in many more languages. Roberto Bolaño, Annie Ernaux, Han Kang and Karl Ove Knausgård are the Franzens and Wallaces of two decades ago. Of course it is impossible to draw a precise line for a general shift of this kind, but 'Ferrante fever' could be as good a watershed moment as any. Elena Ferrante was a relatively niche writer (both in her country and abroad) whose novels achieved a spectacular, worldwide success, reaching the kind of ubiquity previously associated with people performatively reading Infinite Jest to show off. It also sparked a growing international interest in Italian literature, involving both younger writers (such as Durastanti, or myself for that matter) or allegedly 'forgotten' classics, such as the works of Elsa Morante and Alba de Céspedes. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion There could be several reasons for this. The further consolidation of the US publishing industry has made it harder for innovative, ambitious novels to emerge. It could be an effect of the trendiness of 'literature in translation' in the English-language market – even though the notion that it would have its own niche is largely unfathomable to non-native English speakers, used since childhood to reading literature in translation and calling it 'literature'. It could also be that different books are being written. Since the turn of the century, writers from all over the world have felt the dual literary citizenship that Minae wrote about: seeing themselves as part of both a local and a universal tradition, reading Anna Maria Ortese at the Scuola Holden. It would have been natural to try to combine the two, working into their writing a thin veneer of exoticism to lead readers to engage with its deeper ideas. Of course there is much, much more to, say, Ferrante's novels than a picturesque Italian backdrop. But the backdrop's recognisability – indeed, its very picturesqueness – has probably played a role in making them relatable to a wider audience. Bolaño's The Savage Detectives similarly toys with cliches about Mexico, both subverting them and contextualising them into a wider picture. Han Kang's The Vegetarian plays into a strain of body horror that western readers have come to stereotypically associate with east Asian literature – only to explode it with a psychologically harrowing and politically powerful fable about resisting patriarchy. On the other hand, this increased international interest in non-anglophone literature could have another source: no matter where these books originated, their worldwide success often came as a result of their success in English. This was the case with, for instance, both Ferrante and Bolaño, who only caught on abroad after resonating with the English‑language market. It is particularly evident in Han's case: The Vegetarian was published in South Korea in 2007, but gained international acclaim after Deborah Smith's spectacularly successful translation was published almost a decade later. In a particularly significant twist, its Italian edition was translated from the English instead of Han's Korean, not because no translators could be found but because the editor, who read it in English, found Smith's prose more effective – more relatable? – than the renditions they initially commissioned from the original. This is not limited to recent, successful novels: two canonical 20th-century Italian authors, Natalia Ginzburg and Alba de Céspedes, have been translated internationally mostly after their English editions. Conversely, classic Danish author Tove Ditlevsen's trilogy appeared in Italian after its US translation. If anglophone culture no longer beams its literature from the centre to what Umberto Eco called 'the peripheries of the Empire', it still acts as a transit hub between them, the arbiter of what is allowed to go beyond the confines of the local. My own novel, Perfection, has been acquired for translation in languages from Thai to Lithuanian only after its reception in English, and its International Booker shortlisting. This could be seen as another, subtler form of imperialism; and yet it also allows more room for agency. Our peripheries are closer to each other than the long way through the centre makes it seem: readers in Buenos Aires or Naples could very well find a story set in Seoul more relatable than one set in Franzen's Minnesota. Durastanti's latest novel, Missitalia, has a section set in Basilicata, mixing the true story of the women-only gangs that haunted its forests in the 19th century with the parallel-history discovery of oil there. As it is currently being translated into 10 languages (including English), she recently told me that her translators sometimes reach out to ask for help in rendering the region's atmosphere. 'Just think Appalachia,' is an answer she gives. Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated by Sophie Hughes, is published by Fitzcarraldo (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Irish Times
28-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Forget the guide book: Immerse yourself in these location-based novels
ITALY I always like to match my reading to my trips. I'm back with Elena Ferrante for an upcoming holiday in Naples, and loving the simmer of Italian heat, culture and family life throughout the Neapolitan Novels. As a long-term EM Forster fan, I'd say that A Room with a View is perfect for gorgeous first impressions on Florence, mixed with depth, humour and clandestine love. Elizabeth Bowen 's Italian stories, scattered through the Collected Stories, are divine, full of boating on lakes and individualistic characters rubbing along badly. One of my favourite Bowen novels, The Hotel, is set on the Italian Riviera, and features her usual collection of snobs, maverick young ladies, odd encounters and stunning descriptions. Sharper than Forster, she conjures the light and leisure of Italian holidays perfectly. Nuala O'Connor Nuala O'Connor's latest novel is Seaborne (New Island) An exceptional memoir of a year in Rome is André Aciman 's My Roman Year. In 1966, teenager André was a refugee from Alexandria, a victim of President Nasser's campaign to 'Arabise' Egypt. He hates Rome initially, but gradually falls in love with the city, first with the historical centre, but also with the less picturesque parts – and with various Romans. With André you cycle around the city, you gasp at the sudden dramatic appearance of the Colosseum in the bus window, you savour the smell of bergamot. Even if you're not in the eternal city. But it would be wonderful to read it while there. Heading to Trieste? Nothing is better than Jan Morris 's Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere. All her travel books are brilliant. Éilís Ní Dhuibhne Éilís Ní Dhuibhne's latest book is Selected Stories (Blackstaff Press) READ MORE UNITED STATES Music-loving visitors to the United States will enjoy Imani Perry 's Black in Blues, a remarkably beautiful book exploring black culture from Thelonius Monk to Toni Morrison. Bob Dylan 's Chronicles: Volume One is not only the best book about Bob Dylan, it is the best book about New York. Other masterful evocations of the Apple include Frank O'Hara 's Lunch Poems and Patti Smith 's Just Kids. The United States' greatest wordsmiths have been songwriters, and most had immigrant roots. As your flight crosses the Atlantic, it would be lovely to listen to Van Morrison 's stunning new album, Remembering Now, a moving and thrilling memoir that unfurls into glorious life the soul, blues, jazz and gospel that have been the United States' richest artistic gifts, the soundtrack of its better angels. Joseph O'Connor Joseph O'Connor's latest novel is The Ghosts of Rome (Harvill Secker) NETHERLANDS I became a fan of Gerbrand Bakker when I read The Twin about 10 years ago. His new novel The Hairdresser's Son (also translated by David Colmer) examines loneliness and grief as quiet-living Simon puzzles over the long-standing mystery of his father's disappearance. William Golding's The Lord of the Flies regularly appears on '100 best books' lists, and for its 70th anniversary, in 2024, the Dutch illustrator and author Aimée de Jongh reimagined it as a beautiful and evocative graphic novel. De Jongh's version celebrates the original text yet is also entirely original and fresh. Set in the Dutch countryside in 1961, Yael van der Wouden 's Women's Prize-winning debut, The Safekeep , is both a psychological thriller and love story, a marvellously unsettling portrait of desire, possessiveness and the creep of obsession. Henrietta McKervey Henrietta McKervey's latest novel is A Talented Man (Hachette Books Ireland) FRANCE The writing of the Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux tracks her experiences as a working-class woman and offers a more prosaic version of France than we are used to. Try Happening to begin with. Leila Slimani 's Goncourt-winning Lullaby was a shocking novel about a nanny who kills the children in her care, but it also examines the Parisian bourgeoisie, class divisions and the dilemma of domestic labour in the age of equality. Hervé Le Tellier 's The Anomaly is a mind-bending speculative mystery that sees a planeful of people duplicated during a storm. Le Tellier explores the different paths the duplicate characters' lives take, and what it might mean. This too won the Prix Goncourt. Finally, the crime writer Clémence Michallon 's The Quiet Tenant is a psychological thriller about a woman held captive by a serial killer. Edel Coffey Edel Coffey's latest novel is In Her Place (Sphere) PORTUGAL José Saramago 's career can be roughly divided into pre-Nobel, when his novels intimately examined Portuguese history, and post-Nobel, when they evolved into less geographically specific parables. His sole work of nonfiction, Journey to Portugal, translated by Amanda Hopkinson and Nick Caistor, is a fine meditative travelogue set in post-Salazar Portugal in 1979. The other giant of contemporary Portuguese literature is António Lobo Antunes . A trained psychiatrist who spent three years as an army medic in the colonial war in Angola, Lobo Antunes is one of literature's greatest living stylists, a radiographer of late-20th century Portugal, especially the messy reflux of decolonisation. A good starting point is his 1988 novel, The Return of the Caravels, translated by Gregory Rabassa. Fernando Pessoa 's 'autobiography without facts', The Book of Disquiet, translated by Richard Zenith, might be a hackneyed suggestion, but few books capture the essence of a city for a visitor so well as it does of Lisbon. Oliver Farry Oliver Farry is a foreign correspondent and book reviewer CROATIA I firmly believe that, had she not died in 2018, Dasa Drndic would feature in the Nobel conversation today. Monumental novels such as Trieste (translated by Ellen Elias Bursac), Belladonna and EEG (translated by Celia Hawkesworth) encapsulate so much about personal and European history in the 20th century and resonate loudly today. Exciting younger writers have also broken through. Tea Tulic 's debut novel, Hair Everywhere, translated by Coral Petkovich, is surprising and tender in depicting a family upended by cancer. Olja Savicevic has had two excellent novels translated into English: Farewell, Cowboy and Singer in the Night (both translated by Celia Hawkesworth). Those looking to lose themselves in an epic historical family saga should certainly look out for The Brass Age by Slobodan Snajder (also translated by Celia Hawkesworth). Rónán Hession Rónán Hession's latest novel is Ghost Mountain (Bluemoose) SPAIN Spain is associated with light, colour and the pleasures of the palate. It is also a country that suffered a devastating civil war in the 20th century and decades of dictatorship. The tensions and legacies from that period are still present in contemporary Spanish society. Javier Marías , who died in 2022, was one of the most perceptive and able chroniclers of the deep divisions in Spain that resulted from the brutal repression and all-pervasive surveillance of the fascist years. In novels such as The Infatuations (2013), Thus Bad Begins (2016), Berta Isla (2018) and Tomás Nevinson (2021), Marías offers a forensic exploration of how a society is indelibly marked by political violence and by the consequent temptations of compliance and betrayal. One of the enduring delights of Marías's writing is his utterly distinctive voice, which at once draws the reader into his sensitive and richly detailed description of his home country. Michael Cronin Michael Cronin is professor of French at Trinity College Dublin For Lanzarote, you could do much worse than grab Margaret Drabble 's The Dark Flood Rises, which is largely set on that island. Éilís Ní Dhuibhne GREECE I recently researched a novel set in Greece that I didn't write, so I have ideas, with the caveat that these are anglophone books about living in Greece rather than Greek literature in translation. Sofka Zinovieff 's Eurydice Street is an attentive, observant account of moving to Athens with a young family. Charmian Clift 's two memoirs, Mermaid Singing and Peel Me a Lotus, will take you to Hydra in the 1960s with Leonard Cohen passing through. Patrick Leigh Fermor 's Letters invite you to a bohemian English villa, under construction and then hosting European artists and writers, in postwar Kardamyli. And of course there are the Durrell brothers – Lawrence for preference. Sarah Moss Sarah Moss's latest novel is Ripeness (Picador) MALTA Brian Blouet 's The Story of Malta (Ninth Edition), first published in 1967, remains the best introduction to the intriguing history of this country, from the wonders of its neolithic temples to its successive colonisation by different groups, most famously the Knights of St John, who defended it from the Ottomans in a famous 1565 siege. Blouet, coincidentally a neighbour of mine when I was growing up, first came to Malta as an RAF pilot in the 1950s, when it was still part of the British Empire. Malta might not be the first place that comes to mind when you think of queer history, but Beloved Malta: Stories of Sexual and Gender Identity offers a riveting alternative history of the country that is ironically enabled by the immaculate records kept by the Knights of St John. Today Malta is one of the most LGBTQ-friendly countries in the world despite the persistent influence of the Catholic Church. Daniel Geary Daniel Geary is professor of American history at Trinity College Dublin MEXICO I loved You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue , translated by Natasha Wimmer. It's zippy and humid, which makes it ideal for when the sun is getting to you. The twists and turns of its paragraphs and sentences mimic not just the palaces where its characters – Cortés, Moctezuma and a cohort of conquistadores having a bad trip – find themselves lost but also the dreamy unfurling of the alternative history that it narrates. I won't spoil what happens, but if you read it on holidays in Mexico you'll look up from the end of it with a heartbroken ache at what you see around you. 'Plot twist' doesn't cover it: it's more enigmatic than that – a wrenching of the mood, maybe. Really quite something. Might ruin the holiday, albeit in a fruitful way. Tim MacGabhann Tim MacGabhann's latest book is The Black Pool: A Memoir of Forgetting (Sceptre) AUSTRALIA In case we begin to believe that Australia is a country with a few big cities let us remind ourselves that it is a continent only slightly smaller than Europe, so clearly a few books won't cover it. But it is far away, so if you're undergoing the journey, you can read many books. I'd suggest The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes for a drenching in essential history, and True Stories, or Everywhere I Look, by Helen Garner , one of Australia's great essayists – and there are many. I've said before that her work is put together with sentences that begin on the low ground but rise into expressions of joy, marvellous pictures as clear as a well-dusted photo album. I'd pack any anthology of short stories, because they have the capacity to illuminate in shades; be sure they include some of the more modern work, including those of First Nations voices. In fact, sorting books for the journey – did I say long journey? – is part of the pleasure. Include some poetry; that's for somewhere over the ocean spread, when you've asked yourself 'Why am I here?' while realising that, all things considered, it does make sense to travel to Australia by ship. You could then have Jon Cleary for dessert. Although not considered a literary gem, his Scobie Malone thrillers give a well-crafted glimpse into suburban Australian life, its concerns and foibles. Evelyn Conlon Evelyn Conlon's latest book is After the Train: Irishwomen United and a Network of Change (UCD Press), edited with Rebecca Pelan BULGARIA Usually when I visit a country I like to read some of its classic works. If you're heading to the Black Sea, why not read Ivan Vazov 's Under the Yoke, a passionate, rather sentimental novel about the Bulgarian fight for freedom in the late 19th century? You'll get it on your ereader. And the contemporary writer Georgi Gospodinov 's The Physics of Sorrow will give you an insight into more recent times in that intriguing country. Éilís Ní Dhuibhne TURKEY 'From a very young age, I suspected there was more to my world than I could see: somewhere in the streets of Istanbul, in a house resembling ours, there lived another Orhan so much like me that he could pass for my twin, even my double.' So begins Orhan Pamuk 's Istanbul: Memories and the City, translated by Maureen Freely, an enchanting memoir that's both scholarly and confessional. Drawing on a broad range of writers, from Baudelaire to Resat Ekrem Kocu, Pamuk evokes the city's complex history and politics, its derelict grandeur and collective melancholy – hüzün – weaving in his own coming-of-age story amid Istanbul's post-imperial decay. Ruby Eastwood Ruby Eastwood is a postgraduate student at Trinity College Dublin and a book reviewer
