Ann Morgan's Reading The World: Confessions Of A Literary Explorer
'Reading the World: Confessions of a Literary Explorer' (also published in the United States as 'The World Between Two Covers') is Ann Morgan's account of how she read a book from every country in the world after realizing that her literary diet was primarily comprised of British and American authors. Rather than replaying Morgan's reviews of the 197 books she read in 2012, which are already freely available on her excellent blog A Year of Reading the World, her bibliomemoir investigates issues such as what constitutes a good translation, how to define a sovereign nation, and what the future holds for world literature and the publishing industry.
Morgan's experiences locating books from all over the world are as diverse as the texts themselves. She had difficulty obtaining a single book from certain sovereign states, such as a collection of short stories from So Tomé and Prncipe, which had been specially commissioned and translated for her by volunteers. Because of the English language's dominance, some of the books Morgan read were written specifically with a Western audience in mind, with varying degrees of success. Other texts, on the other hand, are virtually impenetrable to those who lack the specific cultural and historical references required to comprehend the context.
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As I've discovered while reading books like Kenzaburo Oe's Death by Water, my personal expectations of how stories are told don't always correspond with how an author may write for a non-Western audience. I was particularly taken with the traditions of Chinese crime fiction, which rarely revolves around a mystery that needs to be solved.
Although Morgan has not copied a single paragraph of her original blog content into her book, some of her extensive research on topics such as postcolonial literature is rather dry and academic in tone. The personal stories of the authors and translators involved in her project, on the other hand, are the most interesting parts of the book. These authors include Hamid Ismailov in Uzbekistan and Dr Julia Aker Duany, who provided Morgan with an autobiographical text representing South Sudan, the world's newest state, which gained independence in 2011 just a few months before Morgan began her project.
As my interest in translated fiction has grown over the last few years, 'Reading the World' has provided excellent food for thought as I've been working my way through the Man Booker International Prize longlist in recent weeks. The thirteen books, as diverse as they are, are only the tip of the iceberg in terms of what literature from around the world has to offer. 'Reading the World' is thus a timely reminder of why stories matter, no matter how they are told or where they come from, and I recommend it to anyone looking to broaden their literary horizons.
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