What to read this week: from the International Booker winner to Agnes Owens

BOOK OF THE WEEK

Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and translated by Lin King

“In the US, orange juice is sold with options: ‘no pulp’ and ‘with pulp’,” said the translator Lin King at the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall on Tuesday evening. “A few days ago, I learned that here in the UK, orange juice is either ‘smooth’ or ‘with juicy bits’. I hope we can all start thinking of translation not as the pulp, but as the juicy bits.”

King was speaking as she and author Yáng Shuāng-zǐ accepted the International Booker prize for Taiwan Travelogue. It marked the first book translated from Mandarin Chinese to win the award, while Yáng and King are respectively the first Taiwanese and first Taiwanese-American recipients of the prize.

When I met with the pair on the morning following the prize ceremony, King told me a little more about what she meant by those “juicy bits”, and why the International Booker has made such a difference to public perception of translated fiction.

“I think there continues to be in the Anglophone publishing world a lot of resistance to revealing that a book is translated, as if that’s a huge marketing deterrent,” she said. “Some publishers maintain the position that they don’t want booksellers to think about the fact that [a book is] translated, that if a reader walks into a bookshop and sees ‘translated by’ on the cover, they wouldn’t buy it. The [International] Booker has been reiterating that that’s not true any more, that especially among younger readers, there’s a lot of interest in translated fiction.”

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WHAT TO READ NEXT

I Want You to Be Happy by Jem Calder

Jem Calder is one of this year’s Observer best debut novelists. “He has an impressively microtonal grasp of romantic or para-romantic human interaction, he’s funny, and he can recreate on the page the seamless interpenetration of on- and offline life,” writes Chris Power in his review of I Want You to Be Happy, which follows the writer’s short-story collection Reward System.

All of this means Calder sits somewhere between Sally Rooney, Vincenzo Latronico and Tony Tulathimutte “as a chronicler of the millennial moment”, says Chris.

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Solidarity: The Work of Recognition by Rowan Williams

The aim of the former archbishop of Canterbury’s latest book “is to show us how extraordinarily weird human solidarity is – or how weird it could and should be”, writes Lyndsey Stonebridge. But, she adds, Solidarity “is not what some readers will no doubt imagine it to be”.

The book is “no gentle, liberal, softly God-bothering exhortation to show more empathy and kindness”, she explains. Instead, Williams uses the “tools of the humanities – history, philosophy and theology” to show us “the weirdness at the heart of solidarity: that we are all strangers”. If only we could learn to recognise that, the practice of solidarity might become something more hopeful.

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END NOTES

The Scottish novelist and short-story writer Agnes Owens was born 100 years ago. During her lifetime she was admired by writers such as Ali Smith and Alasdair Gray, yet for years her books have been out of print – until now, as all of Owens’s books are in the process of being reissued by the independent Scottish publisher Polygon.

This week, John Self rereads Owens and discovers a writer of great dark comedy. Here’s John:

“Reissues come and go, but for me the best rediscovery in years is the work of Scottish writer Agnes Owens, who was born 100 years ago this week. Her funny, dark novels and stories of working-class life are half sitcom, half horror story, where a character can die and come back to life a few pages later – then die again further on. I was so bowled over by her books that I wanted to speak to people who knew her. Along the way I learned that she was an influence on Douglas Stuart, who told me her work was ‘a guidepost for me when I was writing Shuggie Bain’. I also spoke to her son John, who inspired the drinking, fighting bricklayer hero of her first novel, and who assured me, ‘I’m not that guy any more – I go to pilates and yoga now.’ And I learned the role that Billy Connolly played – or didn’t play – in the story of how she got published.”

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Illustration by Charlotte Durance