Jorge Amado, Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon, translated from the Portuguese by James L. Taylor & William L. Grossman (New York: Vintage International, 1958, 1992).
Jorge Amado, Showdown, translated from the Portuguese by Gregory Rabassa (New York: Bantam Books, 1988) (a bit bawdy).
Bernardo Atxaga, The Accordionist's Son, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Cull Costa (Saint Paul, MN: Grayw0lf Press, 2003, 2007).
Anouar Benmalek, The Lovers of Algeria: A Novel, translated from the French by Joanna Kilmartin (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2004).
Laurent Binet, HHhH: A Novel, translated from the French by Sam Taylor (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009, 2012) ("I think I'm beginning to understand. What I'm writing is an infranovel." Id. at 241. Also see Alan Riding, "Operation Anthropoid," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 4/29/2012.).
Laurent Binet, HHhH: A Novel, translated from the French by Sam Taylor (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009, 2012) ("I think I'm beginning to understand. What I'm writing is an infranovel." Id. at 241. Also see Alan Riding, "Operation Anthropoid," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 4/29/2012.).
Friedrich Christian Delius, Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman: A Novel, translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006, 2010, 2012) (From the backcover: "In Rome one January afternoon in 1943, a young German woman is on her way to listen to a Bach concert at the Lutheran church. The war is for her little more than a daydream, until she realizes that her husband might never return. Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman . . . is a mesmerizing psychological portrait of the human need to safeguard innocence and integrity at any cost--even at the risk of excluding reality.").
Shusaku Endo, Deep River, translated from the Japanese by Van C, Gessel (New York: New Directions Books, 1994) ("But now that he was all alone, he had finally come to understand that there is a fundamental difference between being alive and truly living. And though he had associated with many other people during his life, he had to admit that the only two people he has truly formed a bond with were his mother and his wife. 'Darling!' Once again he called out towards the river. 'Where have you gone?' The river took in his cry and silently flowed away. But he felt a power of some kind in that silvery silence. Just as the river had embraced the deaths of countless people over the centuries and carried them into the next world, so too it picked up and carried away the cry of life from this man sitting on a rock on its bank." Id. at 189.).
Shusaku Endo, The Samurai, translated from the Japanese by Van C, Gessel (New York: New Directions Books, 1980, 1982).
Shusaku Endo, Silence, translated from the Japanese by William Johnston (New York: Taplinger Publishing Company, 1969, 1980) ("The guards, too, were men; they were indifferent to the fate of others. This was the feeling that their laughing and talking stirred up in his heart. Sin, he reflected, is not what it is usually thought to be; it is not to steal and tell lies. Sin is for one man to walk brutally over the life of another and to be quite oblivious of the wounds he has left behind. And then for the first time a real prayer rose up in his heart." Id. at 89."To help others is the way of the Buddha and the teaching of Christianity--in this point the two religions are the same. What matters is whether or not you walk the path of truth." Id. at 146.).
Shusaku Endo, Deep River, translated from the Japanese by Van C, Gessel (New York: New Directions Books, 1994) ("But now that he was all alone, he had finally come to understand that there is a fundamental difference between being alive and truly living. And though he had associated with many other people during his life, he had to admit that the only two people he has truly formed a bond with were his mother and his wife. 'Darling!' Once again he called out towards the river. 'Where have you gone?' The river took in his cry and silently flowed away. But he felt a power of some kind in that silvery silence. Just as the river had embraced the deaths of countless people over the centuries and carried them into the next world, so too it picked up and carried away the cry of life from this man sitting on a rock on its bank." Id. at 189.).
Shusaku Endo, The Samurai, translated from the Japanese by Van C, Gessel (New York: New Directions Books, 1980, 1982).
Shusaku Endo, Silence, translated from the Japanese by William Johnston (New York: Taplinger Publishing Company, 1969, 1980) ("The guards, too, were men; they were indifferent to the fate of others. This was the feeling that their laughing and talking stirred up in his heart. Sin, he reflected, is not what it is usually thought to be; it is not to steal and tell lies. Sin is for one man to walk brutally over the life of another and to be quite oblivious of the wounds he has left behind. And then for the first time a real prayer rose up in his heart." Id. at 89."To help others is the way of the Buddha and the teaching of Christianity--in this point the two religions are the same. What matters is whether or not you walk the path of truth." Id. at 146.).
Roy Jacobsen, Child Wonder: A Novel, translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett with Don Shaw (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2009, 2011).
Yukio Mishima, The Decay of the Angel: The Sea of Fertility, a Cycle of Four Novels, translated from the Japanese by Edward G. Seidensticker (New York: Vintage International, 1974, 1990) (This is the final volume in Mishima's tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility. It was completed on November 25, 1970, on which date Yukio Mishima committed seppuka (ritual suicide). He was 45.).
Yukio Mishima, Runaway Horses: The Sea of Fertility, a Cycle of Four Novels, translated from the Japanese by Michael Gallager (New York: Vintage International, 1973, 1990) ("For the vast majority of men, romantic dreams are inevitably bound up with a woman. And so when his colleagues intuitively diagnosed the affliction lodged within him since his fall trip to Tokyo as involvement with a woman, they were at least correct in giving it a romantic coloring. Their intuition was indeed remarkable in shrewdly picturing Honda as one who has strayed from the way of reason and was now wandering aimlessly along some overgrown path of emotion. But what might have been expected in a twenty-year-old youth was deemed improper in a man Honda's age, entirely human though the failing was. And this was where most of the disapproval was focused." "Members of a profession in which reason was of the essence, his colleagues could hardly be expected to view with respect any man who, unknown to himself, had contracted the disease of romanticism. And then from the viewpoint of national righteousness, though Honda had not gone so far as to commit any crime, he had certainly defied himself with an 'unwholesome' attitude." "But most surprised of all at this state of affairs was Honda himself. The eagle's nest that he had constructed at a dizzying height in the structure of legalism, which by now had become second nature to him, was--something wholly unforeseen!--threatened with the floodwaters of dreams, with the infiltration of poetry. More awesome yet, the dreams that assaulted him did not destroy either the transcendence of human reason, which he had always believed in or his proud pleasure at living with more concern for principles than for phenomena. The effect was rather to strengthen his beliefs, to heighten his pleasure, For he could now glimpse towering up brightly beyond the principles of this world an unbreachable wall of principle. Once he saw it, so dazzling was this glimpse of the ultimate that he was unable to go back to the placid, everyday faith he had known before. And this was not to retreat but to advance. It was not to look back but to look ahead. Kiyoaki had certainly been reborn as Isao, and from this fact, beyond one kind of law, Honda had begun to see into the essential truth of law." "He suddenly remembered that in his youth ... the European philosophy of natural law had lost its appeal for him, and he had been much attracted by the ancient Indian Laws of Manu, whose provisions extended even to reincarnation. Something had already taken root in his heart then. A law whose nature was not to impose order upon chaos by to point to the principles that lay within chaos and so give form to a legal code, just as the surface of the water caught the reflected image of the moon--such a law could well have sprung from a source more profound than the European worship of reason that undergirded natural law. Honda's instinctive feeling therefore, may have been sound, but this was not the kind of soundness looked for in a judge, the guardian of the operative law. He could easily imagine how unsettling it must have been to his colleagues to have a man of this sort working with them in the same building. To have one dust-covered desk in a room filled with the spirit of good order. From the viewpoint of reason, nothing so resembled the stains on an untidy man's clothes as an obsession with dreams. Dreams somehow turn on into a slovenly figure. A soiled collar, the back of the shirt winkled as though slept in, trousers baggy--something similar overtakes the garment of the spirit. Though he had done nothing, though he has said nothing, Honda had, at some time or other, come to violate the code of public morality, and so he knew that, in the eyes of his colleagues, he was like wastepaper scattered along the path of a neatly kept park." Id. at 306-308.).
Yukio Mishima, Spring Snow: The Sea of Fertility, a Cycle of Four Novels, translated from the Japanese by Michael Gallager (New York: Vintage International, 1972, 1990) ("The study of law was certainly a strange discipline. It was a net with mesh so fine as to catch the most trivial incidents of daily life, yet its vast extension in time and space encompassed even the eternal movements of the sun and stars. No fisherman seeking to increase his catch could be more greedy than the student of law." Id. at 59-60.).
Yukio Mishima, The Temple of Dawn: The Sea of Fertility, a Cycle of Four Novels, translated from the Japanese by E. Dale Saunders and Cecilia Segawa Seigle (New York: Vintage International, 1973, 1990) ("[Honda] had even given up his judgeship. It had led to naught, and he had experienced only a shattering failure that had borne home to him the total futility of altruism." "Having abandoned altruistic ideals, he had become a much better lawyer. No longer having any passions, he was successful in saving others in one case after the other. He accepted no assignment unless the client was wealthy, no matter whether the case was civil or criminal. The Honda family prospered far more than in his father's time." "Poor lawyers who acted as though they were the natural representatives of social justice and advertised themselves as such were ludicrous. Honda was well aware of the limitations of law as far as saving people was concerned. To put it candidly, those who could not afford to engage lawyers were not qualified to break the law, but most people made mistakes and violated the law out of sheer necessity or stupidity." "There were times when it seemed to Honda that giving legal standards to the vast majority of people was probably the most arrogant game mankind had thought up. If crimes were often committed out of necessity or stupidity, could one perhaps claim that the mores and customs upon which such laws were based were also idiotic?" Id. at 16.).
Herta Muller, The Hunger Angel: A Novel, translated from the German by Philip Boehm (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009, 2012) ("When the hunger angel weighs me, I will deceive his scales. I will be just as light as my saved bread. And just as hard to bite. You'll see, I tell myself, it's a short plan with a long life." Id. at 215. From the bookjacket: "It was an icy morning in January 1945 when the patrol came for seventeen-year-old Leo Auberg to deport him to a camp in the Soviet Union. Leo would spend the next five years in a coke-processing plant, shoveling coal, lugging bricks, mixing mortar, and battling the relentless calculus of hunger that governed the labor camps: 1 shovel load = 1 gram of bread.").
Gregor von Rezzori, An Ermine in Czernopol, translated from the German by Philip Boehm, and with an Introduction by Daniel Kehlmann (New York: New York Review Books, 1966, 2011) (See John Wray, "Changing of the Guard," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 3/4/2012.).
Georges Simenon, The Man Who Watched Trains Go By, translated from the French by Marc Romano & D. Thin; with an Introduction by Luc Sante (New York: New York Review Books, 1938, 2005) ("I'm not crazy. I'm not a sex fiend. I just decided, at the age of forty, to live as I please, without bothering about the law or convention. I'd learned late in life that no one else does anyway and all that time I'd simply had the wool pulled over my eyes." Id. at 132.).
Yukio Mishima, The Decay of the Angel: The Sea of Fertility, a Cycle of Four Novels, translated from the Japanese by Edward G. Seidensticker (New York: Vintage International, 1974, 1990) (This is the final volume in Mishima's tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility. It was completed on November 25, 1970, on which date Yukio Mishima committed seppuka (ritual suicide). He was 45.).
Yukio Mishima, Runaway Horses: The Sea of Fertility, a Cycle of Four Novels, translated from the Japanese by Michael Gallager (New York: Vintage International, 1973, 1990) ("For the vast majority of men, romantic dreams are inevitably bound up with a woman. And so when his colleagues intuitively diagnosed the affliction lodged within him since his fall trip to Tokyo as involvement with a woman, they were at least correct in giving it a romantic coloring. Their intuition was indeed remarkable in shrewdly picturing Honda as one who has strayed from the way of reason and was now wandering aimlessly along some overgrown path of emotion. But what might have been expected in a twenty-year-old youth was deemed improper in a man Honda's age, entirely human though the failing was. And this was where most of the disapproval was focused." "Members of a profession in which reason was of the essence, his colleagues could hardly be expected to view with respect any man who, unknown to himself, had contracted the disease of romanticism. And then from the viewpoint of national righteousness, though Honda had not gone so far as to commit any crime, he had certainly defied himself with an 'unwholesome' attitude." "But most surprised of all at this state of affairs was Honda himself. The eagle's nest that he had constructed at a dizzying height in the structure of legalism, which by now had become second nature to him, was--something wholly unforeseen!--threatened with the floodwaters of dreams, with the infiltration of poetry. More awesome yet, the dreams that assaulted him did not destroy either the transcendence of human reason, which he had always believed in or his proud pleasure at living with more concern for principles than for phenomena. The effect was rather to strengthen his beliefs, to heighten his pleasure, For he could now glimpse towering up brightly beyond the principles of this world an unbreachable wall of principle. Once he saw it, so dazzling was this glimpse of the ultimate that he was unable to go back to the placid, everyday faith he had known before. And this was not to retreat but to advance. It was not to look back but to look ahead. Kiyoaki had certainly been reborn as Isao, and from this fact, beyond one kind of law, Honda had begun to see into the essential truth of law." "He suddenly remembered that in his youth ... the European philosophy of natural law had lost its appeal for him, and he had been much attracted by the ancient Indian Laws of Manu, whose provisions extended even to reincarnation. Something had already taken root in his heart then. A law whose nature was not to impose order upon chaos by to point to the principles that lay within chaos and so give form to a legal code, just as the surface of the water caught the reflected image of the moon--such a law could well have sprung from a source more profound than the European worship of reason that undergirded natural law. Honda's instinctive feeling therefore, may have been sound, but this was not the kind of soundness looked for in a judge, the guardian of the operative law. He could easily imagine how unsettling it must have been to his colleagues to have a man of this sort working with them in the same building. To have one dust-covered desk in a room filled with the spirit of good order. From the viewpoint of reason, nothing so resembled the stains on an untidy man's clothes as an obsession with dreams. Dreams somehow turn on into a slovenly figure. A soiled collar, the back of the shirt winkled as though slept in, trousers baggy--something similar overtakes the garment of the spirit. Though he had done nothing, though he has said nothing, Honda had, at some time or other, come to violate the code of public morality, and so he knew that, in the eyes of his colleagues, he was like wastepaper scattered along the path of a neatly kept park." Id. at 306-308.).
Yukio Mishima, Spring Snow: The Sea of Fertility, a Cycle of Four Novels, translated from the Japanese by Michael Gallager (New York: Vintage International, 1972, 1990) ("The study of law was certainly a strange discipline. It was a net with mesh so fine as to catch the most trivial incidents of daily life, yet its vast extension in time and space encompassed even the eternal movements of the sun and stars. No fisherman seeking to increase his catch could be more greedy than the student of law." Id. at 59-60.).
Yukio Mishima, The Temple of Dawn: The Sea of Fertility, a Cycle of Four Novels, translated from the Japanese by E. Dale Saunders and Cecilia Segawa Seigle (New York: Vintage International, 1973, 1990) ("[Honda] had even given up his judgeship. It had led to naught, and he had experienced only a shattering failure that had borne home to him the total futility of altruism." "Having abandoned altruistic ideals, he had become a much better lawyer. No longer having any passions, he was successful in saving others in one case after the other. He accepted no assignment unless the client was wealthy, no matter whether the case was civil or criminal. The Honda family prospered far more than in his father's time." "Poor lawyers who acted as though they were the natural representatives of social justice and advertised themselves as such were ludicrous. Honda was well aware of the limitations of law as far as saving people was concerned. To put it candidly, those who could not afford to engage lawyers were not qualified to break the law, but most people made mistakes and violated the law out of sheer necessity or stupidity." "There were times when it seemed to Honda that giving legal standards to the vast majority of people was probably the most arrogant game mankind had thought up. If crimes were often committed out of necessity or stupidity, could one perhaps claim that the mores and customs upon which such laws were based were also idiotic?" Id. at 16.).
Herta Muller, The Hunger Angel: A Novel, translated from the German by Philip Boehm (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009, 2012) ("When the hunger angel weighs me, I will deceive his scales. I will be just as light as my saved bread. And just as hard to bite. You'll see, I tell myself, it's a short plan with a long life." Id. at 215. From the bookjacket: "It was an icy morning in January 1945 when the patrol came for seventeen-year-old Leo Auberg to deport him to a camp in the Soviet Union. Leo would spend the next five years in a coke-processing plant, shoveling coal, lugging bricks, mixing mortar, and battling the relentless calculus of hunger that governed the labor camps: 1 shovel load = 1 gram of bread.").
Gregor von Rezzori, An Ermine in Czernopol, translated from the German by Philip Boehm, and with an Introduction by Daniel Kehlmann (New York: New York Review Books, 1966, 2011) (See John Wray, "Changing of the Guard," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 3/4/2012.).
Georges Simenon, The Man Who Watched Trains Go By, translated from the French by Marc Romano & D. Thin; with an Introduction by Luc Sante (New York: New York Review Books, 1938, 2005) ("I'm not crazy. I'm not a sex fiend. I just decided, at the age of forty, to live as I please, without bothering about the law or convention. I'd learned late in life that no one else does anyway and all that time I'd simply had the wool pulled over my eyes." Id. at 132.).
S. Yizhar, Midnight Convoy and Other Stories, Second Revised Edition, translated from the Hebrew, and with an Introduction by Dan Miron (Milford, CT: The Toby Press, 2007) (" 'Well, that's how it is, and what can I do? Didn't we once think of something else? Once we wanted lots of things, and what has become of it all? Things that today you don't even want to talk about--you'd rather put them out of your mind like your youthful peccadilloes. Who would suspect these fellows as they are today, of the ideas and exploits of yesterday? Well, never mind. Human beings. One like this and one like that. And it's really best to go on holding your tongue. But now, look here. I myself, others too, all 0f us--tell me: are we really what we are because this is what we are actually like? This is what we ought to be, this is our real self, the thing that was latent in us them like a bud in the bosom of the leaf? I mean, couldn't it have been different? Surely it isn't reasonable, is it? After all, it all happened just like that, by blind chance, by accident! Just by chance. It's only chance that I'm here and I'm this, chance that I'm not there, somewhere else, that I'm not different and not like this . . . chance! And then we look for logic and law... necessity... you understand?' " From "Ephraim Goes Back to Alfalfa" (1938), translated by Misha Louvish, Id. at 1, 22.).
