Writers you haven't heard of but you must read...

Lost in translation

Awarding the international Man Booker prize this week to the Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare (who?), the critic John Carey complained that foreign literature is 'neglected' in Britain. Is it? We asked some experts to select 10 overseas writers we should be reading

Wednesday June 29, 2005
The Guardian

Harry Mulisch

The author of more than 30 novels, the Dutch writer Harry Mulisch has also published poetry, plays, criticism and reportage, including an eyewitness account of the Eichmann trial. Born in 1927, he published his first novella at the age of 20, but hardly any of his work was translated into English until the 1980s. His best book is probably The Assault, a brilliant examination of Holland's torturous history under Nazi occupation. Drawing on his own background - Jewish mother, Austrian father - this utterly gripping novel traces the effects of a wartime atrocity, following lines of guilt and responsibility through the postwar decades.

The Assault gave Mulisch a sudden flare of exposure when the film adaptation won the Oscar for best foreign film in 1987, but it didn't turn him into a household name. His novels are profound, thoughtful and more interested in ideas than characters - which may be why he has failed to reach an English-reading audience. But if he finally wins the Nobel prize - for which he is regularly tipped - perhaps that will change.

Josh Lacey, novelist and critic

Stefan Heym

The fiction of this irascible, intellectual German writer, who died in 2001, has long been out of print, even where it has actually been translated. "Stefan Heym" was the nom de plume of Helmut Flieg, a Jewish exile from nazism whose family was murdered in Auschwitz. He fought in the US army and wrote a compelling war novel, Crusaders (1948), before reacting to McCarthyism by abandoning the US for East Germany. Here he became a dissident journalist and wrote two novels, banned for their political content.

Heym's best fiction was of a rare kind: satirical and allegorical. Particularly successful is The King David Report (1972), in which bloody Old Testament stories are given a witty modern significance. Narrated by Ethan, a scribe commissioned by King Solomon to write an official history of King David, it is a story of politics in a totalitarian society, ruled by the righteous. The Wandering Jew similarly makes satirical use of religious stories, as Ahasverus (the Wandering Jew, cursed for denying Christ a resting place as he carried his cross to Calvary) roams through time, arguing with Martin Luther and a Marxist East German professor. Very un-English.

John Mullan, senior lecturer in English literature, University College London


Cees Nooteboom


Born in 1933 in The Hague, the Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom has built a solid reputation as a travel writer, most successfully with a book of essays about Spain, Roads to Santiago. Mingling philosophy, poetry, criticism and description, the book is an elegant pilgrimage through Spanish art and history. But Nooteboom reserves his most fascinating work for his novels, eight of which have now been translated into English. His prose is precise and spare; his characters are rootless, thoughtful and very modern; his plots are playful and deliberately odd. In The Following Story, for instance, the narrator wakes up in a hotel room in Lisbon, having gone to bed the previous evening in his home in Amsterdam. Gradually, he realises that he occupied the same room 20 years ago, during a liaison with the wife of his best friend.

Perhaps this playfulness has prevented Nooteboom becoming better-known in English translation. It's a pity: sophisticated, witty and rarely much longer than 100 pages, each of his small, complex novels has the condensed strength of the best work by Borges or Calvino.

Josh Lacey


Marcel Benabou


In 1986, the Moroccan-born Marcel Benabou published a book called Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books, which proposes to explain why he has not yet got started as a writer, and which spends its pages trying to get him started and failing throughout. But then, he is the sort of writer who likes to try out the notion that the book in your hands that has his name on it is neither a book nor his, and, having made a fairly convincing case (while at the same time anticipating your objections), commiserate with you at the paradox he's created. Since then, Benabou has written three more that have been translated into English, including Throw Out This Book Before It's Too Late, the readerly companion to the writerly Why I Have Not Written. He's a writer of a terribly playful sort of provocation, who, like all the greatest artists, is willing to let you go if you will: "But perhaps it is now you, reader, who, buffeted by all these possibilities, tired of these manoeuvres that have you stamping with impatience at the threshold of this work, have one and for all lost your desire to know more about it. In that case, too bad."

Dan Halpern, writer and critic


Halldor Laxness


If literature is a world map on which, in TS Eliot's words, "all time is eternally present", the novels of the Icelander Halldor Laxness are landmarks as significant as the sagas that cast their oppressively magnificent shadow over Icelandic story telling for 800 years. In the 1920s Laxness, with The Great Weaver of Kashmir, began to lead the Icelandic novel out from that shadow. As first a Catholic convert and then, after visiting America in an attempt to make films, as a socialist, he welded saga and external influences together in fiction that casts an otherworldly spell at the same time as presenting humanity's this-worldly problems in the harshest light.

The first of his books to read is the marvellous The Fish Can Sing (Brekkukotsannall), the story of a boy, Alfgrimur, abandoned to the care of his grandparents on the outskirts of Reykjavik. Read, too, his parable of ambition, Independent People, and his 1948 satire Atom Station, and you'll understand that here is a novelist of world stature.

Julian Evans, writer on European literature


Juan Goytisolo


Exiled from Franco's Spain and still living in Marrakech, Juan Goytisolo is Spain's greatest living writer, and its most scathing iconoclast. His milestone Marks of Identity trilogy (1966-75), which began with an exile returning to Barcelona after the civil war, skewered political tyranny and Catholic repression to reclaim Spain's long-buried Moorish and Jewish heritages. His bisexuality (explored in his masterpiece memoirs of the 1980s, Forbidden Territory and Realms of Strife), spurred his rejection of the church and Spain's obsession with cultural "purity". The Spanish civil war - in which his mother was killed - haunts his fiction, whether he uses it to evoke Lorca's links with the Arab world (The Garden of Secrets, 1997) or the bombardment of Sarajevo and Baghdad (State of Siege, 1995).

At 74, Goytisolo is still passionate about Islamic culture (see his essays on the Muslim Mediterranean, Cinema Eden, 2003), and invaluable in his long view of the Muslim world's ties with Europe. As he once told me, when Catalan was forbidden: "I realised that to have two languages and cultures is better than one; three better than two. You should always add, not subtract."

Maya Jaggi, journalist and critic


Jaan Kross


Jaan Kross, now 85, was deported with countless other Estonians to Siberia in 1946 and spent eight years in the gulag. When his first novel to appear in English, The Czar's Madman, was published in 1992 by Harvill, it seemed a remote candidate for greatness. It is the story of a Baltic German baron, Timo von Bock, who in the 1820s commits political suicide by telling Tsar Alexander I exactly what is wrong with his empire. Yet entering Kross's historical world you found an allegorical tale of sumptuous readability.

Kross's latest novel in English, Treading Air, deals with the 20th century, but is no less slow-burning and exhilarating. Most of Kross's work is historical and he has said that he has always believed that "somewhere, history is preserved". The truth is that he is its preserver, a punctilious and playful chronicler of magisterial conviction and power.

Julian Evans


Marie Darrieussecq


Some novels are enjoyable exactly because you can see what sources they have exploited. Marie Darrieussecq's first book, Pig Tales (1998), is clearly a version of Kafka's The Metamorphosis for a later age. Appearing in France in 1996 under the more subtle title Truismes, it is the first-person narrative of a young woman working in a massage parlour who is slowly turning into a pig. She writes in "piggle-squiggles". "I know how this story might upset people," she begins, but her parable of our beastly fleshiness - via Greek myth and George Orwell - is chastely, if chillingly, told.

Written when Darrieussecq was in her late 20s, Pig Tales made her a star in France, though Anglophone reviewers flinched from it. She has since published four more novels, perhaps too rapidly, each one with some odd, inventive frame for the narrative. The literary influences can be deadening, but where she is peculiar she is intriguing. Her latest, White, sets two oblivion-loving strangers down in the Antarctic and then lets their memories creep up on them. Properly étrange .

John Mullan


Shen Congwen

His bittersweet, nostalgic tales of his southern Chinese homeland, pulled apart by civil war and revolution in the early 20th century, deserve to be much more widely read. (Some are translated by Jeffrey Kinkley, including Imperfect Paradise, University of Hawaii Press, 1995.) Born in 1902 in Hunan, in southern China, Shen joined the army in 1918, and spent the next few years of his life gathering the raw material that he later worked and reworked, through ever more ambivalent eyes, into the short stories and novellas that he produced in Beijing between the 1920s and 1940s: the execution of modern revolutionaries by confused old traditionalists; harsh village morality; rural love affairs that smoulder beyond the grave; fathers lost in war to their unknowing families.

Although he stayed in mainland China after the communist revolution of 1949, the ambivalent nostalgia towards rural China's traditional past expressed in his fiction, and the elliptical elegance of his language, branded him as out of step with Mao's proletarian literary prescriptions and fulminations against the evils of "old" (pre-1949) China. He more or less stopped writing fiction after the communist takeover, before being enthusiastically rediscovered by the first generation of writers to break with Mao-style socialist realism in the 1980s.

Julia Lovell, translator and writer

Dubravka Ugresic

As a novelist, Dubravka Ugresic displays the eerie genius for detail that can be found in her essays The Culture of Lies (1998) and Thank You For Not Reading, published last year. Once negligible facts or events suddenly reveal themselves as central to the tragedy - an element of the Balkan catastrophe familiar to anyone who witnessed it (Ugresic is Croatian, but prefers not to be identified as a "Croatian novelist"). In Ugresic's novel The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, a photo album is the one object the narrator cannot bear to part with; in her forthcoming novel The Ministry of Pain a class of refugee literature students constructs a shrine to familiar objects from "home". These connections, pathetic and all-important, are the foundations of identity and home, of their construction and their loss. If fiction is to build bridges, it must surely communicate that whatever identity we may have is composed not merely of ourselves but of the otherness of others. Few novelists succeed more poignantly at this than she does.

Julian Evans