Mahmoud Dowlatabadi

Mahmoud Dowlatabadi is a renowned Iranian author with a unique voice. He was born in a rural area and has only an elementary school education, making him very different from his Western-educated, urban counterparts. His language is rich with influences from traditional Persian poetry, and he purposefully avoids using Arab loan words. In an effort to capture this effect, Tom Patterdale avoided Latinate words in favor of the Anglo-Saxon as much as possible in his translation. Patterdale also wrote a very helpful afterword and extensive notes, because there are a lot of historical figures and cultural references which a non-Iranian might miss.

The book opens with "the colonel" sitting in his dark house waiting for the knock at the gate that he knows is coming. As he nervously smokes and watches the rain run down the window, he begins to reflect on how he ended up here, with his oldest son going mad from the torture he sustained at the hands of the Shah's police, one son dead since the early days of the revolution, another away at the Iraqi front, and his 14-year-old daughter missing. Throughout the next day, the present melts into the past, both the colonel's and his eldest son's, as well as the historical past.

In his novel, Dowlatabadi is critical of the Shah and the foreign powers that propped him up as well as the Islamic revolution. Generations are sacrificed to professed ideals that all end in corruption and death. Needless to say, the book has never been published in Iran (or in Persian), but the author remains free and is a proponent of artistic freedom in Iran. I highly recommend this difficult, but rewarding, novel to anyone interested in Iran.… (más)

This collection of literature has been drawn from ten leading writers from all around the world. The themes of freedom and movement are quite prescient at the moment; and it is this that the authors have chosen to explore in their writing. These stories come to us from all around the world, from places of conflict like Syria and Palestine; an author tries to define where they live and another chooses to defy. We have stories of growing up and another author who feels links to his home country.

The best thing about this is its diversity. Each author has a distinct voice and perspective on their life and the world around them. As there are ten authors and each piece is translated by another person, you don’t get a seamless and even quality; but then that is an aspect of life too. Worth reading for a world view different from my own.

I received a free copy of this from Netgalley for providing a honest review.… (más)

2.5 stars

I have been reading a lot of world literature lately, both in translation and originally written in English, so Life from Elsewhere easily hooked me with its subtitle, "Journeys through World Literature." The collection contains entries translated from seven different languages (Arabic, French, "Israeli" (I think the publisher meant Hebrew), Persian, Polish, Russian, and Spanish), written by authors from such diverse countries as Iran, Poland, Congo, and Hong Kong. Accordingly, I expected the contributors to speak to their common themes - "movement, freedom and narrative" - with equally diverse voices.

Instead, almost all of the authors focused on the concept of the "other" and its role in human culture, and, not surprisingly, they all agreed that exposure to different cultures through literature is an important tool in the struggle for mutual understanding over incomprehension and its frequent companion, fear. In the words of Samar Yazbek, "What art does is make us look into each other's eyes and into the eyes of those who are portrayed as our enemies, transforming them into human beings." While I echo and applaud this sentiment, most of the pieces in Life from Elsewhere were "singing to the choir": those who need to hear this message are not the people who will buy this book.

The outstanding exception was "Lily," written by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen and translated by Sondra Silverston. In this (perhaps autobiographical?) story, an author, attending a reading from his novel in a language he does not speak, discovers that his translator may have contributed more to his book's success than he expected:

"Listening to her, he recalled how surprised he had been at the success of the book in this country. It hadn't been that successful anywhere else. The reviews at home were lukewarm. The ones abroad were even cooler. If his previous books hadn't done so well, it was doubtful that anyone would have bothered to translate it. And in this country - enormous success. Reviewers raved. Readers shook his hand, their eyes moist. And now he suddenly knew that it was because of her. Because of Lily Sigalovitch. His anger turned to bafflement - what had she done to his story? What secret ingredient had she added that made it all work?"

Gundar-Goshen eschews the blunt stick used by her fellow essayists in favor of the delicate nudge; she shows us how the literature of one culture may find its place in the hearts of readers halfway around the world.

Life from Elsewhere was written to commemorate the tenth anniversary of English PEN's Writers in Translation program, and as a celebration of that program, it fulfills its purpose. However, if the true aim is "to celebrate books of outstanding literary quality, which ... promote ... intercultural understanding," a better approach would have been to actively promote the books themselves. Take the $8.95 you might spend on a paperback copy of Life from Elsewhere and use it to buy Gundar-Goshen's Waking Lions (available on February 28, 2017, for $13.99 in the Kindle version) or any of the other novels written by the contributors to this collection.

I received a free copy of Life from Elsewhere: Journeys through World Literature from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.… (más)

A short decade of essays and fiction pieces about what it means to be other or an outsider or identity or -- I'm not really sure what the prompt was for these essays precisely. I think it's identity, maybe. That seems like a big enough umbrella to fit all these essays underneath.

And they aren't all essays either. Both Ayelet Gundar-Goshen's and Hanna Krall's submissions are fiction (or at least, intentionally read like fiction), and of course, with my love of narrative and difficulty following non-narrative arguments, those are the two that'll probably stick with me (and not just because Gundar-Goshen's story is very similar to a story idea I had a few years ago so it's time to put on my tin-foil hat so she doesn't steal any more of my ideas). But the white space in the snippets by Hanna Krall -- I have put the only Hanna Krall book in the library on hold so I can read more from her. I suppose that's the point of collections like these, hit or miss, it's unlikely that all is a miss. So you find someone new you wouldn't have found otherwise. The rest just sort of fades.

Life From Elsewhere by various authors went on sale June 21, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.… (más)