Latest news with #SmallAxes
The Guardian
08-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Mind-expanding books': International Booker prize shortlist announced
Hiromi Kawakami and Solvej Balle have made this year's International Booker prize shortlist, which for the first time is comprised entirely of books published by independent presses. British translator Sophie Hughes has been shortlisted for her translation of Perfection, originally written in Italian by Vincenzo Latronico. This marks the fifth time Hughes has been shortlisted for the prize, making her the award's record holder for the most times shortlisted and longlisted. On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J Haveland (Faber) Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix, translated by Helen Stevenson (Small Axes) Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Asa Yoneda (Granta) Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated by Sophie Hughes (Fitzcarraldo) Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi (And Other Stories) A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre, translated by Mark Hutchinson (Lolli) Six author-translator teams are now in contention for the £50,000 prize, the winner of which will be announced on 20 May, with the prize money divided equally between author and translator. Japanese writer Kawakami, best known for her novel Strange Weather in Tokyo, has been shortlisted for her novel-in-stories Under the Eye of the Big Bird, translated by Asa Yoneda. Danish writer Balle and Scottish translator Barbara J Haveland have been chosen for On the Calculation of Volume I, the first of a planned septology in which the protagonist Tara is stuck in a time loop. 'These mind-expanding books ask what might be in store for us, or how we might mourn, worship or survive', said author and judging chair Max Porter. 'They offer knotty, sometimes pessimistic, sometimes radically hopeful answers to these questions. Taken together they build a miraculous lens through which to view human experience, both the truly disturbing and the achingly beautiful.' The shortlisted titles are slim, with four coming in at under 200 pages, including Latronico's Perfection. The novel, about a millennial expat couple living in Berlin, 'transcends its satire of 2010s hipsterdom through the depth of Latronico's sociological observations', writes Thomas McMullan in the Guardian. 'This chronicle of contemporary Berlin is strongest in its articulation of how a certain kind of globalisation dislocates us from our surroundings.' Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix, translated from French by Helen Stevenson, was also selected. The book was written in three weeks, and is based on recordings from a real event in November 2021, when a dinghy carrying migrants from France to the UK capsized in the Channel, causing the death of 27 people on board. 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 A book translated from Kannada – a language spoken by tens of millions of people, primarily in the state of Karnataka in southwest India – features on the shortlist for the first time in the prize's history this year: Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi. It contains 12 stories originally published between 1990 and 2023, which capture the daily lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. Completing the shortlist is A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre, translated from French by Mark Hutchinson. Serre wrote the book, about a woman with severe psychological disorders, in six months after the suicide of her sister. 'I wanted to create a memorial to her', said Serre. The other titles longlisted for this year's prize were The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem, translated by Sinan Antoon; There's a Monster Behind the Door by Gaëlle Bélem, translated by Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Loubert; Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu, translated by Sean Cotter; Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia de la Cerda, translated by Julia Sanches and Heather Cleary; Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa, translated by Polly Barton; Eurotrash by Christian Kracht, translated by Daniel Bowles; and On a Woman's Madness by Astrid Roemer, translated by Lucy Scott. Alongside Porter on this year's judging panel are the poet Caleb Femi, writer and Guardian critic Sana Goyal, author and translator Anton Hur, and musician Beth Orton. Authors who have previously won the award include Han Kang, Olga Tokarczuk and Lucas Rijneveld. Last year, Jenny Erpenbeck and translator Michael Hofmann won the prize for Kairos. To explore all of the books on the shortlist for the International Booker prize 2025 visit Delivery charges may apply.
Telegraph
17-03-2025
- General
- Telegraph
Migrants are people too – this intricate novel shows why
If you're at sea level, and of average height, the horizon is about three miles away. At its narrowest point, the English Channel is about 20 miles wide. Hence, if you're halfway between Calais and Dover, and even if you're sailing on heavy swell, you'll sight no land to the north or south. Such, we can imagine, was the experience of 33 migrants, heading in a dinghy from France to Britain in the early hours of November 24 2021. Their engine failed; the boat took on water; they repeatedly called for help from the cliffs they could no longer see. None was sent. All but two survivors drowned in the Channel, which, in due course, threw 27 corpses back onto France's shore. This event, re-imagined for fictional purposes from the migrants' point of view, comprises the second of three parts in Small Boat, a short and relentless novel by Vincent Delecroix. It's the Frenchman's fourth book, but his first to be translated into English; as Naufrage (Shipwreck), it was nominated for the Prix Goncourt, and the International Booker has now longlisted Small Boat too. (In publishing it here, Small Axes joins And Other Stories and Les Fugitives as the best guides to new fiction from overseas.) Delecroix is both a novelist and a Kierkegaard expert; both pursuits lend themselves to the imagination of ethics at crisis point. Think of Small Boat as a philosophical ghost-story. The drowning scene is patient and cool: 'The growing light did nothing to warm them, but it roused their spirits slightly, as though they were actually emerging from the abyss and from their ordeal, as though they had survived and their victory was definitive. Some of them, floating on the water, were already dead.' Yet this is also the shortest section and the only third-personal one: the first and last parts of the novel are told, or rather thought, by a coastguard radio operator, also a fictionalised version of a real-life figure, who's being interrogated by the police. Small Boat is about failures of several kinds, and their centrifugal form: how attributing blame for what happens to migrants can only lead us into the political register to which Delecroix's title, in English, belongs. (What Britons uniformly call 'small boats' are known in French by a range of names: 'embarcations gonflables', 'bateaux de fortune'.) The accusation faced by the operator is that, despite taking several calls from the panicking migrants, she failed to dispatch a rescue boat because she judged they were almost in British waters – at which point her counterparts would be responsible. Nor did she heed the British request to send a French boat first, their own being on assignment some distance away. (There's wounded pride in the policewoman's anger that not only did the French lose those 27 lives, but the British, elsewhere in the Channel, saved 98.) Worst, the operator was recorded grumbling aloud to a colleague, as she ended one call, 'I didn't ask you to leave' – a recording that's now the lead item across the newspapers and TV. But the operator refuses to take the blame, or accept that blame should be personalised. What she asks, infuriating her interrogator as only unanswerable questions can, is 'when this sinking started'. What she means, she clarifies coldly, is that 'they were sunk long before they sank'. The disaster, to her, had a web of causes, from the migrants' own decisions to the greed of the smugglers exploiting them; or the British society that offers them – so they're promised – milk, honey and benefits; or even the upheaval in their homelands that drove them here, some of which was spurred by the very countries to which they've come. Such causes are denounced or promoted or overlooked according to political taste. So yes, she reiterates, you might say, 'who's asking them to leave?', and not mean it rhetorically. Names and quotations drift through the novel, often cited by the operator in an irritable, sarky tone: Pascal, Eichmann, Christ. (What could I have done in the end, she wonders – 'sing Nearer My God To Thee down the radio?') Her interrogator would rather cleave to legalities: she hammers away at whether the operator 'assessed the situation correctly', framed by the latter in sceptical italics, in English as in the French. Full marks to Helen Stevenson's translation, understated yet alert, catching the to-and-fro of these vocal currents, as the interview rolls testily on. Where Delecroix's coastguard recalls muttering to a colleague that the sinking migrants are 'gonflés' (cheeky), and he quips back 'dégonflés' (deflated), Stevenson renders the words as 'cheeky' and 'leaky'. The rhyme translates with unpleasant ease. Small Boat's only problem is structure. The drowning sequence reads dreadfully well, but sits awkwardly in the drama of guilt, or non-guilt, that both precedes and follows it. Delecroix's philosophising has a powerful pull; stronger, even, than the witness of death. Odd as it might seem, I would have better felt the weight of his point – that migrants, simply, are people, and their lives, however easily forgotten, are equal to yours and mine – had we never met the migrants themselves. In the first and third sections, they hover in the dialogue, and that voiceless presence, in the words of the living, has an insistence of its own. One answer to the coastguard's question – 'Who's asking them to leave?' – is 'no-one'. Another is 'all of us'.
