Vive La Difference!

 by Abir

 

October is National Book Month in the US. Do you have any plans to celebrate the month?

 

As you probably know, I live in the UK, and while it’s not National Book Month here (I don’t think we have a national book month, though it’s a fantastic thing and, like the All Day Breakfast or the ten-gallon hat, an American idea we should definitely adopt).

 

Nevertheless, October has been a busy month on the book front for me. I’ve spent quite a bit of it in France, at a number of literary festivals, first in Pau in the south, at the foot of the Pyrenees, and then in Bordeaux in the west. What I love about the French is the seriousness with which they take literature. There are approximately five times as many bookshops in France as there are in Britain (despite our populations being roughly similar) and they don’t give away books for 99cents. There’s a floor on book prices (similar to what we used to have in the UK till the Americans got involved) and they’ve recently introduced a law which adds 3Euros to the price of each book sold through Amazon, thus levelling the playing field for physical bookshops. I love this approach. It means a mid-list author still has a chance of making a living from writing – something that is near impossible in the UK these days. Indeed the whole literary ecosystem in France is so much better than in the UK. They have far more paid residencies, and their festivals receive significant funding from local and state government. And then there’s the food, the wine and the Armagnac. Simply put, the French do culture better than we do. They put real value on it.

 

One of the results of these festivals is that I’ve got to meet a whole new bunch of writers whom I wouldn’t otherwise have come across – both French and from other countries – writers whose work is maybe less well known in the UK or who haven’t been translated at all. It’s a huge shame. When it comes to European crime fiction (except say Scandinavian Noir) we in the UK are pitifully under-served by translated works. I understand different markets have different tastes (the French seem to prefer crime fiction with a more intellectual bent – they don’t seem to appreciate thrillers in quite the same way we do on this side of the pond) but still, I don’t know why we don’t have more translated fiction. I have met so many amazing European writers on a par with the best we have in the UK and the US whose work simply isn’t read here. So as a result, this month I’ve been making an effort to read more widely.

 

I started by finishing The Trees by US writer, Percival Everett. This was recommended to me by a friend and it was wonderful. Set mainly in the Deep South, it’s the satirical tale of white men, the descendants of those involved in lynchings, being found murdered, with the same dead black men turning up next to them. It’s powerful, it’s funny, it challenges our views on what constitutes justice and it deserves to be read by everyone.

 

Next up was a gem of a book called The Little Rebel (La Petite Gaulloise) by French author, Jérôme Leroy, a story set in an unnamed port city in the west of France. It’s the story of events leading up to a terror attack at a school, but told once again as satire. Like The Trees, it’s an acerbic into the contemporary mores and culture of a country – it’s hypocrisies and its foibles and their consequences. Leroy is one of the greats of contemporary French crime fiction and yet this is the only one of his works currently translated into English. It comes in at only 70 pages and is one of the most eye-opening books I’ve read in ages.

 

Finally, I’m currently reading Love and Murder in the Time of Covid, by Chinese emigré Qui Xiaolong. Qui left his native Chine in the eighties and was studying in the US when the Tiananmen Square massacre took place. He never returned, instead staying on in St Louis and becoming an academic. His work casts a critical eye over the Communist Party of China and the role it plays in the lives of its subjects and his Inspector Chen novels provide a window into this world for crime fiction afficionados. 

 

If the three books have one thing in common, it’s the spotlight they throw on three societies and their governing systems. As we’ve said before, the best crime fiction not just entertains but widens your horizons. You feel like you’ve come away with a deeper understanding of the world, and these three novels, each very different from the others achieves just that. I wouldn’t have read any of them if it hadn’t been for people I’d met at book festivals or events, people from other parts of the world, brought together by a love of fiction.

 

So yeah, October has been a literary celebration for me. Now, if only I could persuade someone to pay me to move to France.