Books about Reunion & worldwide literature

A recent exchange with Ann Morgan, who's currently reading her way round the world, got me thinking about Reunion Island books in English. As far as I'm aware, with the exception of 'Bourbon Island 1730', the list I came up with contains only books that I have been written directly in English and not translated. In fact as far as I know there are no English translations of books by well-known Reunionese authors like Daniel Vaxelaire or Axel Gauvin, although the latter's books have been translated into German.

Books about Reunion I haven't read myself (but which are all on my Bookmooch wish list!):

• Reunion: An Island in Search of an Identity by Laurent Medea
• Monsters and Revolutionaries: Colonial Family Romance and Metissage by Françoise Verges
• Island Born Of Fire: Volcano Piton de la Fournaise by Dr Robert B. Trombly

Bourbon Island 1730

Books I've read myself:

• Crags and Craters: Rambles in the Island of Reunion by William Dudley Olivier (this is my favourite).
• The Last Colony: An Experience of Reunion Island by Michael Steane (an e-book but full of inaccuracies)
• Six Months in Reunion: A Clergyman's Holiday, and How He Passed it by Patrick Beaton (I didn't like this much).
• Bourbon Island 1730 by Appollo & Lewis Trondheim (a graphic novel)
• Island Awakening by Lynne Martin (romantic fiction).
• Dead Sexy by Kathy Lette (a "satire on the sex war")
• Second Chance and its sequel Second Chance Sister by Linda Kepner (romantic fiction - thinly disguised sequels to François Truffaut's film The Mississippi Mermaid)

I've written reviews of all of the above books.

Also: Bonnes Vacances!: A Crazy Family Adventure in the French Territories by Rosie Millard is about a 4 month tour of the DOM-TOMs Rosie made with her husband and four young children to make a documentary series for the Travel Channel ("Croissants in the Jungle"). Its final chapter covers Réunion (briefly); see my review of the book here.

In the introduction I mentioned Ann Morgan who is currently reading her way around as many of the globe’s 196 independent countries as she can, sampling one book from every nation. (She's also recently included a Rest of The World wildcard section, hence our exchange about Reunion Island). However as she asked herself: what counts as a story? Is it by a person born in that place? Is it written in the country? Can it be about another nation state? While in some respects she's still answering that question she had to lay down her terms and so decided to limit herself to all narratives that could be read to full effect by one reader on their own e.g. memoirs, novels, short stories, novellas, biographies, narrative poems and reportage, but not non-narrative poetry and plays.

It got me wondering about which countries I'd already read literature from, and after a quick tour of my bookshelves (and my memory!) this is the (non-exhaustive) list I came up with, in English and French:

• Algeria - L'étranger [The Outsider] - Albert Camus [Author/Setting]
• Australia - The Secret River - Kate Grenville [Author/Setting]
• Belgium - L'Enfant de Noé - Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt [Author/Setting]
• Botswana - The Kalahari Typing School for Men - Alexander McCall Smith [Setting; Author is British]
• Brazil - Rouge Brésil [Brazil Red] - Jean-Christophe Rufin [Setting; Author is French]
• Cameroon - La saison de l'ombre - Léonora Miano [Author/Setting] (added November 2013)

The Kalahari Typing School for Men

• Canada - Where White Horses Gallop - Beatrice McNeil [Author/Setting]
• Central African Republic - Princesse aux Pieds Nu - Evelyne Durieux [Author/Setting]
• Burma - The Piano Tuner - Daniel Mason [Setting; Author is British]
• China - Leaving Mother Lake: A Childhood at the Edge of the World - Yang Erche Namu [Author/Setting]
• Czech Republic - L'Insoutenable légèreté de l'être [The Unbearable Lightness of Being] - Milan Kundera [Author/Setting]
• Cuba - Our Man In Havana - Graham Greene [Setting; Author was British]
• Democratic Republic of Congo - The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver [Setting; Author is American]
• Denmark (& Greenland) - Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow - Peter Høeg [Author/Setting]
• Egypt - Woman at Point Zero - Nawal El Saadawi (translated by Sherif Hetata) [Author/Setting]
• French Polynesia (Tahiti) - Breadfruit: A Novel - Célestine Hitiura Vaite [Author/Setting] [August 2014 - I read the French translation L'Arbre à Pain by Henri Theureau]
• Germany - The Book Thief - Markus Zusak [Setting; Author is Australian]
• Haiti - Island Beneath the Sea - Isabel Allende (translated by Margaret Sayers Peden) [Setting; Author is Chilean American]

"Island Beneath the Sea"

• Hawaii - Comfort Woman - Nora Okja Keller [Author/Setting]
• Iceland - L'homme du Lac [The Draining Lake] - Arnaldur Indridason (translated by Eric Boury) [Author/Setting]
• India - A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry [Author/Setting]
• Indonesia - Krakatoa - Simon Winchester [Setting; Author is British]
• (Inner) Mongolia - Wolf Totem - Jiang Rong (translated by Howard Goldblatt) [Author/Setting]
• Iran - Jamais Sans Ma Fille [Not Without My Daughter] - Betty Mahmoody [Author/Setting]
• Ireland - Angela's Ashes - Franck McCourt [Author/Setting]
• Israel - The Red Tent - Anita Diamant [Setting; Author is American]
• Italy - The Baron in the Trees - Italo Calvino (translated by Archibald Colquhoun) [Author/Setting]
• Jamaica (& Dominica) - Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys [Author/Setting]
• Japan - Out - Natsuo Kirino [Author/Setting]
• Kiribati - Paradis [avant liquidation] - Julien Blanc-Gras [Setting; Author is French] (June 2014)
• Lebanon - The Fifth Mountain - Paulo Coelho [Setting; Author is Brazilian]
• Madagascar - Muddling Through In Madagascar - Dervla Murphy [Setting; Author is Irish]
• Malaysia (Borneo) - My Life in Sarawak - Margaret Brooke [Author/Setting]
• Mauritania - Le Tambour des Larmes - Beyrouk [Author/Setting]
• Mauritius - Paul & Virginie - Bernardin de St Pierre [Setting; Author was French]
• Mayotte - Mon Mari Est Plus Qu'un Fou : C'est Un Homme - Nassur Attoumani [Author/Setting] 
• Netherlands - Girl with a Pearl Earring - Tracy Chevalier [Setting; Author is American]
• New Zealand - Behind Closed Doors - Ngaire Thomas [Author/Setting]
• Nigeria - Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe [Author/Setting]
• North Korea - The Aquariums of Pyongyang - Kang Chol-Hwan [Author/Setting]
• Norway - Sophie's World - Jostein Gaarder (translated by Paulette Møller) [Author/Setting]
• Pakistan - The Reluctant Fundamentalist - Mohsin Hamid [Author/Setting]
• Rodrigues - Voyage à Rodrigues - JMG Le Clezio [Setting; Author is French]
• Russia - Dans Les Forets de Sibérie - Sylvain Tesson [Setting; Author is French]
• Seychelles - Travelling Hopefully - Maggie Makepeace [Setting; Author is British]
• South Africa - Disgrace - JM Coetzee [Author/Setting]
• South Korea - Who Ate Up All The Shinga? - Park Wan-Suh (translated by Yu Young-nan) [Author/Setting]
• Spain - The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafón [Author/Setting]
• Sweden - Millennium Trilogy - Steig Larsson (translated by 'Reg Kreeland') [Author/Setting]
• Tibet - Voyage d'une Parisienne à Lhassa [My Journey to Lhasa] - Alexandra David-Néel [Setting; Author was French]
• Trinidad  - A House for Mr Biswas by V.S. Naipaul [Author/Setting]
• Tromelin - Les Naufrages de l'ïle Tromelin - Irène Frain [Setting; Author is French]
• Turkey - My Name Is Red - Orhan Pamuk (translated by Erdağ Göknar) [Author/Setting]
• United Arab Emirates - The Wink of the Mona Lisa and other stories from the Gulf - Mohammad Al Murr (translated from the Arabic by Jack Briggs) [Author/Setting] [October 2015]
• Uzbekistan (& Iran) - Samarcande [Samarkand] - Amin Maalouf [Setting; Author is from Lebanon]
• Vietnam - L'Amant [The Lover] - Marguerite Duras [Author/Setting]
• Zimbabwe (Southern Rhodesia) - The Grass is Singing - Doris Lessing [Author/Setting]  [August 2014]

Samarcande

Notes:

• I've arbitrarily excluded the UK, France and the USA as I've read so many books from these countries I'd have trouble choosing just one!
• If I've read several books from a country I've generally just listed my favourite.
• I've also taken liberties by listing some non-independent regions (e.g. Rodrigues, Hawaii, Tibet, Tromelin).
• I excluded some books (such as Ann Patchett's Bel Canto, or William Boyd's African novels) that take place in unidentified countries.
• I also excluded books (such as Elie Wiesel's Night) whose action takes place in several countries.
• If I've read a book in French but an English translation exists I've added the English title in brackets [].
• I've included books not written by natives of the country in question.

My conclusions:

I have vast swathes of the planet where I haven't read any literature from, for example South America or the Pacific! Places like South East Asia or Central Asia are patchy too. Although I list Paul Coelho and Isabel Allende the books of theirs that I read were not set in their native countries. And despite living and travelling for three years in Asia I've mainly read Korean books (North and South) but very little from the many other countries we travelled to in the region. I need to broaden my horizons even more.

What about you? Do you enjoy reading books from other countries? Do you have any books to recommend? Is literature from your native (or adopted) country easy to find in English?

P.S. Here's the link to Ann Morgan's site: A Year Of Reading The World. Other reading around the world blogs I've come across are: Reading the World, The Rushlight List and World Lit Up.

This post originally appeared on A Smart Translator's Reunion.

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Borneo - visiting Kuching and Brunei

After climbing Mount Kinabalu and diving at Sipadan we flew to Kuching, the state capital of the other Malaysian province in Borneo, Sarawak.

The symbol of Kuching is a cat, as "Kuching" may or not have taken its name for the word for cat, depending on who you talk to and which language they speak.

city symbol

The province was governed by three generations of white rajahs, the Brookes, during 19th century and first half of 20th century. Some remnants of this period still remain :

square tower

Today the state capital building is very modern :

Kuching mosque

Leaving Kuching we headed north to the Sultanate of Brunei, where we stayed in the small capital city, Bandar Seri Begawan, (commonly abbreviated as BSB).

The city is dominated by the attractive Omar Ali Saifuddien Mosque, which was built in 1958 :

but we also come across a Chinese temple :

A must for all visitors to BSB is the Royal Regalia Museum, which charts the life of the present Sultan of Brunei and contains all the trappings of Bruneian royalty.

Royal Regalia Museum

Another quintessential part of BSB is the stilt villages where up to a quarter of the population prefers to live. These villages are equipped with electricity, piped water, TV ... We visited the closest village to the city centre, Kampung Ayer :

primary school

We ended our visit of BSB with a trip to the Tamu Kianggeh day market :

suggested reading :
My life in Sarawak by Margaret Brooke. An account of life in 19th century Sarawak by the wife of the Second "White Rajah".

Borneo - diving at Sipadan

Sipadan, an island off the eastern coast of Sabah near the intersection with Indonesia and the Philippines is well known in the diving community as one of the world's best dive sites. 

What makes Sipadan special is the fact that it is composed of a limestone pinnacle that rises up 600m from the sea bed. Since 2005 it's been prohibited to stay overnight, so most divers stay at the nearby island of Mabul (our case), with some opting for Kapalai island, or the town of Semporna, about 1 hour away. Some choose the following accommodation, which can be found just next to Mabul island :

a different type of dive resort !

Mabul is well known for its muck diving. We saw lots of turtles, fish and nudibranches.

Nudibranch

Access to Sipadan is limited to only 120 divers per day (from all resorts), and this is the all important board at our resort where we saw whether we'd be diving at Sipadan the next day. The reason it's written SMART is that it's the abbreviation of the resort's name. I didn't realise when I booked it that my surname would be plastered everywhere !

On Sipadan

Turtle, Sipadan

During a surface interval on Sipadan between dives we saw a monitor lizard:

On our last day we couldn't dive as we were taking a flight from Tawau, so we walked around the local part of Mabul Island, and saw some more non-marine wildlife ;-)

local village mosque

On the way back to Semporna from Mabul

Suggested reading :
A Diver's Guide to Reef Life
Diving Malaysia (Periplus Action Guides)

Borneo - climbing Mount Kinabalu

At 4095m Mount Kinabalu is the highest mountain in SE Asia between the Himalayas and the island of New Guinea, and is a real challenge for anyone who likes mountain hiking. 

Mt Kinabalu is about 80 km from Kota Kinabalu, the capital of the Malaysian province of Sabah and the gateway to Borneo for most people. 

You start hiking at about 1500m altitude and the view after an hour or two is like this :

Along the way it's possible to see pitcher plants, which eat insects :

Also hiking up are many porters carrying heavy loads to the Laban Rata resthouse where most hikers spend the night.

Laban Rata at 3270m altitude is very comfortable. Most people arrive during the afternoon, have any early night, and get up at 2am to attempt the summit before dawn to see the sunrise. This is the dining area of the resthouse :

 These are views from the summit :

And this is a view of the summit :

Back in Kota Kinabalu we saw an orang-utan at the nearby Lok Kawi wildlife park. Unfortunately we never got to see any in the wild:

Finally, Kota Kinabalu, which faces west, is apparently famous for its sunsets. We certainly saw some nice ones, of which one is below:

suggested reading :

Borneo (Lonely Planet Travel Guides)