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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• Press article round-up
• Cimetière Marin, St Paul
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• The 'blogosphere'
• Bourbon Island 1730: book review

Vladivostok To Moscow : Travelling Across A Quarter Of The Globe by Train

Pour lire cet article en français cliquez ici 

Walking down the street, I came face to face with a bus heading for downtown Seoul. As I live in Seoul you might think that's normal – except that I was in Vladivostok, city at the start of the legendary Trans-Siberian train route ! 

Its proximity to Korea and Japan mean that most of Vladivostok's vehicles are imported from these countries (in the latter case it leads to right-hand drive cars driving on the right-hand side of the road.

Vladivostok port (home of Russia's Pacific fleet)

After three days exploring the city which was forbidden to foreigners until 1991, my husband and I went to the station to discover the train in which we were going to spend the next 70 hours non-stop as far as Irkutsk, our first stop.

Vladivostok station

We had two months holiday to look forward to, and the first two weeks would be spent travelling the Trans-Siberian across Russia, back to Europe. By the way, there's no regular train called 'The Trans-Siberian' (which is the common term for the train route), rather a series of working trains that run east- or west-bound all or part of the way between Moscow and Vladivostok. 

We soon settled into life on the train. Trans-Siberian trains are comfortable rather than luxurious. 

compartment interior

carriage corridor

Time passed reading, watching the view, eating, watching the view, listening to music, watching the view, and learning to decipher the Cyrillic alphabet in order to read station names. 

typical view from the train

Ulan Ude station

(As non-Russian speakers we'd used the services of a specialised agency to book the train tickets and hotels, but once in Russia we were totally independent). We also spent a lot of time adjusting our watches as the train travels through seven time zones - but all the timetables run on Moscow time. This often led to some complicated mental arithmetic !

We travelled through mile upon mile of steppe and taiga, past villages whose average January temperature is -33°C. Contrary to popular belief, however, summer in Siberia is scorching. In these conditions it was difficult to believe that the tipsy-looking telegraph poles we saw were caused by year-round permafrost.

Our ablutions (shared 'bathroom'; no shower, no hot water, no sink plug !) were both gymnastic and perfunctory. Feet braced against the train's rocking, you had to avoid your personal belongings falling down the toilet hole, all the while holding the hand basin's tap down with one hand to extract a trickle of cold water. And beware of needing the toilet at the wrong time – they were closed for thirty minutes before and after all stops … I enjoyed descending from the train whenever our provodnitsa (carriage attendant)

provodnitsas

allowed us to, getting some exercise by walking up and down the platform during short stops. I think I gave my husband a few grey hairs as I was invariably the last person back on the train before it moved off again with no warning !

Thanks to the samovar in every carriage 

carriage samovar 

and its unlimited supply of hot water, our diet was very varied in the train … it varied between instant noodles, instant pasta, instant mashed potato … . Although there is a restaurant wagon on every train our initial trips there didn't make us want to return. At our stop-off points (Irkutsk, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg) food was delicious : omul (a fish only found in Lake Baikal), pelmeni and vareniki (types of filled dumplings), blinis, borscht all washed down with kvas (a summertime beer-like brew made from fermented bread, yeast, malt sugar and water), and the occasional vodka. On train platforms we bought home-grown cucumbers, boiled eggs and juicy tomatoes from wrinkled babuchkas.

train platform seller
(but not a wrinkled babuchka !)

Irkutsk, a former Siberian exile point, is now a gateway to the beautiful Lake Baikal, 64 km away, where we enjoyed scuba-diving in water at 4°C! 

Lake Baikal

In Irkutsk we also came across the first Western tourists we'd heard since we'd left Seoul six days previously. 

Back in the train for 'only' thirty hours, 

our next port of call was Novosibirsk, Russia's geographical centre and the sprawling capital of Western Siberia. 

Novosibirsk

Later, a trip of only 21 hours brought us to Yekaterinburg for a day, infamous as the place where the Romanovs were murdered, where we straddled the Europe-Asia boundary marker.

Yekaterinburg

Twenty-six hours later, after travelling through the Urals we arrived in our final Russian destination of Moscow, where we spent several days visiting in the company of a Russian friend – including the wonderful Bolshoi Theatre. 

Bolshoi

St Basil's, Moscow

Moscow subway

All too soon it was time to move on to the next leg of our journey – unfortunately by plane !

The next trip we made in Asia was to Bali.


This article was originally published in SIWA's "Discovery" magazine (October-November 2009 issue).

Vital ? Statistics 

· Russia is the world's largest country – twice as big as the USA.

· The Trans-Siberian runs 9289 km from Vladivostok to Moscow, making it both the world's longest train route and the longest domestic train route.

· Non-stop, the train journey lasts 146 hours. 

· More than 30% of all the world's trees grow on the Siberian plains.

· Lake Baikal is the world's deepest, biggest lake, with 20% of the world's fresh water.

· The train's average speed is just 69 kmph (43 mph).


If you enjoyed this post you might also like:

• The Highest Railway in the World - the train journey from Xining to Lhassa 

Suggested reading and listening:

• The Great Railway Bazaar, by train through Asia by Paul Theroux
• The BBC's From Our Own Correspondent programme aired a despatch from Vladivostok in November 2011. You can listen to it here, or read the accompanying article here.