November 2, 2024
The novels in our selection this week include a Japanese mystery full of heart, an Austen novel reimagined, and a Mexican writer’s historical novel. In nonfiction, we follow a Nobel Prize winner’s love affair through words and pictures, and a treatise on translation from one of its most accomplished practitioners sharing his passion for the process.
Happy reading,
Melanie Fleishman
Buyer, The Center for Fiction Bookstore
Featured Books
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The Restaurant of Lost Recipes
By HISASHI KASHIWAI
Published by G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
Translated by Jesse Kirkwood
If you haven’t jumped on the bandwagon of Japanese cozy mysteries (often featuring cats and food) you are missing out. This is Kashiwai’s second installment of the Kamogawa Food Detectives series but easily stands alone. It stars a father-daughter team who run a diner in Kyoto. Their ‘detective’ work involves recreating their customers’ favorite lost recipes. One is from an Olympic swimmer who wants to reconstruct the bento box his father ate every single day. With each customer the cooks provide both therapy and delicious food. This is the perfect breath of fresh air for these anxious pre-election days.
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The Use of Photography
By ANNIE ERNAUX & MARC MARIE
Published by SEVEN STORIES
Translated by Alison L. Strayer
“Photos cannot capture a span of time. They lock you into the moment,” states Ernaux in a book combining text and photos recording her affair with photojournalist Marc Marie who passed away in 2022. When they met at a dinner in Paris in 2003, Ernaux was about to undergo breast cancer treatment. The provocative pictures record their love affair vividly and yet subtly—rumpled beds with remains of a meal; hastily discarded clothes on a tile floor; unwashed dishes—reminding the viewer that when desire takes over, daily routines fall away. It is a beautiful document, a testament to the merging of art and reality.
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This Motherless Land
By NIKKI MAY
Published by MARINER BOOKS
Who doesn’t like a retelling of a classic? Good ones abound (Demon Copperhead, James) and next up is May’s reimagining of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, transplanted in part to Nigeria. Its protagonists are the quiet Funke, living in Lagos with her family, and her outgoing cousin Liv, who lives in Somerset. When Funke is sent to live in England, the cousins become inseparable. But tragedy intervenes. This coming-of-age story investigates race, identity, and kinship. May also explores these themes in her 2022 novel, Wahala (soon to be a BBC TV series), which she wanted to be “a celebration of [her] two cultures.”
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Season of the Swamp
By YURI HERRERA
Published by GRAYWOLF PRESS
Translated by Lisa Dillman
Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World has become a bestseller at The Center (due, in part, to our bookseller Denisse’s recommendation). This novel, set in 1800s New Orleans, features a real-life protagonist, Benito Juárez, a Oaxacan politician who was arrested and sent into exile. It is documented that he stayed in New Orleans from December 1854 to June 1855, but little is known of his time there. Herrera has chosen to speculate on this year and a half in which Juárez prepared his return to Mexico to become the first indigenous head of state. As in Herrera’s previous work, it is laced with a fervent love of language and, in this case, of his adopted city (where he teaches at Tulane).
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The Philosophy of Translation
By DAMION SEARLS
Published by YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Searls’s impressive résumé includes translations from languages including German, French, Dutch, and Norwegian. In his new book he shares his process with the reader—a challenge to both respect the original yet create a separate and new work of art. He says in his introduction that translators “have to make a text that does something worthwhile in English.” Both intellectually rigorous and accessible, this book provides a way to appreciate a demanding craft and adds a dimension to one’s own reading of books in translation.
