Nilanjana S Roy: Beyond Macondo - reading foreign fiction in India

SPEAKING VOLUMES

If you grew up reading in English in the India of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, you were probably reading in several languages, not just one.

The literary fiction popular in the India of the 1970s and 1980s was strongly dominated by Russian and Latin American writers in translation. As for books published in English in India, translations from other Indian languages were relatively more visible in the absence of a strong body of work written in English by Indian writers.

In the 2000s, the book trade has changed, and the domination of the UK and US bestseller lists, as well as the availability of Indian books written in English, means that today’s readers in India read a lot more in the way of books originally written in English than previous generations did. This isn’t necessarily a good thing; as the UK and US markets have discovered, a reluctance to read in translation can make us very insular readers.

 

It’s also not natural for the Indian reader to be restricted to one language — the tradition of reading bilingually overflowed into English, with many readers gravitating almost organically to reading classics originally published in their mother tongues (Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali, Kannada) in English translation. It can take something like the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize to remind readers of what we lose if you stick only to reading works written originally in English, despite the wealth of talent that language represents.

The longlist for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize was released this weekend, and it’s fascinating to see the range covered by the 15 titles on the list. Orhan Pamuk (Museum of Innocence), Per Petterson (I Curse The River of Time) and David Grossman (To The End of the Land) will be familiar names for many Indian readers, and to see their names on the foreign fiction prize is, for me, a reminder of how easily we read in translation.

It’s only when you encounter a rough translation of a Pamuk or a Grossman novel that you become aware that they’re not writing in English; the way we’re programmed to read, the story takes over, and the fact that we’re reading in translation rarely registers for most.

Germany, Poland and Sweden are represented by Juli Zeh, Mical Witkowski and Per Wastberg. Zeh, a young, acclaimed writer in Germany, is less well-known outside its borders; Witowski identifies as a radical gay writer; and Wastberg is also well-known for his work on free speech issues with International PEN. None of their books, however, are easily available in India, and they represent one of the frustrations of reading in translation — authors who write in languages other than English have usually written about four or five books before their works will become widely available. The list includes works by Czech and French writers as well — and then come the Latin Americans.

Marcelo Figueras’ Kamchatka is set in the Argentina of the 1970s; a young boy flees with his family to a safe house, and then the family is separated. The title is taken from a word whispered to the boy by his father; Kamchatka is the final territory in the game of Risk, a last retreat.

Juan Gabriel Vasquez made a brilliant debut with The Informers, perhaps one of the best novels about what he called the “dark corners” of Colombian history written after Garcia Marquez. The Secret History of Costaguana brings Joseph Conrad to Colombia as a character in Gabriel Vasquez’s brilliant reimagining of Colombian history. And Peruvian writer Santiago Roncagliolo cut his teeth writing television soap operas before tackling more ambitious work. Red April, a taut, complex and compelling thriller, pits a misogynistic, incompetent district prosecutor in Ayacucho against a serial killer.

For some time now, writers like Horacio Castellanos Moya have been pointing out that Latin American fiction didn’t die after Jorge Luis Borges, and that there has been life beyond the broad banyan sprawl of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and company. What changed in the last few decades was the marketing of books in that continent, not the way they were written — which perhaps is why a Jorge Volpi takes so long to find his way to English-speaking audiences, or why a Roberto Bolano was discovered more or less posthumously.

India once had a giant appetite for Latin American fiction — the bookshops in Kerala and Bengal are still generously sprinkled with the works of Neruda and Vargas Llosa. But the new generation of Latin American writers — just as inventive as their predecessors, just as confident, and just as original — haven’t had the same impact in India. It would be ironical, but only a little, if it took a British prize to convince us that we should return to the Colombians and Peruvians once more.

nilanjanasroy@gmail.com