The Universal Language of Books by Eric Beetner

I love reading books from other cultures. Sadly, I’m not fluent in any other languages to read in the original, but I adore the art of translation. I’ve read French novels, Japanese, Icelandic, Italian and Spanish. Here are a few of my favorites:

A Dog In Water and Shield Of Straw by Kazuhiro Kiuchi. From what I can tell these are the only two books of Kiuchi’s translated into English, which is a shame because I love both of them. There have been several Japanese novels to break through to American markets in recent years, like Out by Natsu Kirino and Bullet Train by Kotaro Isaka. Kiuchi’s work is less well known, but I champion these books whenever I can.

A Dog In Water is really more like there novellas tied together by a common character. Kiuchi’s writing is sparse and straightforward and his action unpredictable. These don’t feel like American crime novels.

Shield Of Straw is high concept in it’s plot of a prisoner being transported across Japan via train to face trial while citizens all along the route are trying to get at him to kill the murderer and claim the multi-million dollar reward offered by the victim’s father. Good hook, right? But it goes much deeper than just a chase story as the officer charged with escorting the criminal is torn between his duty and just letting the mob have him so justice is served. 

Both are excellent novels with a feeling unlike any American or English-language crime novels I’ve read.

The French crime fiction master Jean-Patrick Manchette is no stranger to many English-reading crime fans. Most of his work has been in translation, and works like The Prone Gunman should be essential reading. Manchette’s particular brand of existential crime drama is so very French. The action and violence is all tempered with meditations on life, death and meaning. If George Simenon is the most popular French crime writer, and with his prolific output it’s hard to argue at least on sales figures, Manchette is perhaps the most French, at least from this American’s point of view. Simenon hits many of the traditional beats of an American or UK police procedural in his long-running series and his standalones so they are not unfamiliar to those audiences. Manchette feels like reading something from another culture.

I discovered the short story collection Crime/Guilt by Ferdinand Von Schirach quite by accident and I bought it purely because I hadn’t ever read anything translated from German before. What I discovered was another writer who I enjoyed very much, but whose stories felt very foreign, even in my own language. There is a coldness and matter-of-fact tone to the writing that is at once what we think of as very German in it’s humorless bluntness and that fits the subjects very well. Von Schirach is a defense attorney and these stories are inspired by many real life cases. They read as if written by someone who has seen it all and is maybe a little jaded by it. I kept marveling at the depths of the awful crimes being discussed in such a plainspoken voice. I can’t think of any English-first writers to compare it to.

When thinking of diving into the Vimal series by Indian writer Surender Mohan Pathak, it’s easy to be intimidated. Since the debut of the series in 1971 there have been 46 novels, and those compromise only a fraction of Pathak’s over 300 works. Luckily I got a good tip that The 65 Lakh Heist was the place to start, and it quickly become one of my favorite heist novels ever. 

Reading a book as culturally different as this Hindi novel, yet one that retains so much of what I love about a series like the Parker books by Richard Stark, was thrilling. This was the 4th Vimal novel and this series ranks alongside the Parker books for simple, straightforward criminal-as-protagonist crime novels. The anti-hero in India is fascinating to read about and I still have a whole lot more to go.

The Whisperer by Donato Carrisi came recommended to me by one of my favorite crime writers, Ken Bruen. That’s endorsement enough.  

A fascinating novel, I found it more influenced by Nordic crime writing than by American or UK authors. It was interesting to me to see the hugely popular Nordic crime style being written by an Italian, rather than the usual dominance of English language crime writing. It makes total sense, too. Why not be influenced by authors who are much closer, sell in huge numbers and are popular the world over?

The Whisperer should definitely be on the list of anyone who likes Lars Kepler, Stieg Larsson or Jo Nesbo.

I look forward to finding more hidden gems in translation. It’s a skill not often recognized in the literary world. Making the words comprehendible to an English-reading audience while still maintaining the cultural differences and subtle nuance in voice is a challenge. But when done right, it does what the best fiction does which is to take us to another place and expose us to other worlds.