The Best Reviewed Literature in Translation of 2021

Well, friends, another grim and grueling plague year is drawing to a close, and that can mean only one thing: it’s time to put on our Book Marks stats hats and tabulate the best reviewed books of the past twelve months.

Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2021, in the categories of (deep breath): Memoir and Biography; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror; Short Story Collections; Essay Collections; Poetry; Mystery and Crime; Graphic Literature; Literature in Translation; General Fiction; and General Nonfiction.

Today’s installment: Literature in Translation.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.”

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1. Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri, trans. by Jhumpa Lahiri
(Knopf)

19 Rave • 21 Positive • 7 Mixed • 1 Pan
Read Jhumpa Lahiri on the joy of translation as discovery, here

“.. oddly compelling. The narrator vibrates with unexpressed emotion, sealed inside her painstaking detachment. Her observations are minute, precise, poetic … Detachment—this notion of the individual passing through—has long been a preoccupation in Lahiri’s work, but here it feels obsessional, woven into the very structure of the novel, with each chapter a self-contained unit, pinned to a location that the ghostlike narrator barely touches. Even the delicate precision of the language contains this watchful separation: every word, inevitably, has been carefully chosen … [Lahiri] has taken her writing apart and reconstructed it, sparely, to make something new, where silence matters. If the antidote to a year of solitude and trauma is art, then this novel is the answer. It is superb.”

–Lucy Atkins (The Sunday Times)

2. The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen, trans. by Tiina Nullally and Michael Favala Goldman
(FSG)

23 Rave • 4 Positive
Read an excerpt from The Copenhagen Trilogy here

“… beautiful and fearless … Ditlevsen’s memoirs…form a particular kind of masterpiece, one that helps fill a particular kind of void. The trilogy arrives like something found deep in an ancestor’s bureau drawer, a secret stashed away amid the socks and sachets and photos of dead lovers. The surprise isn’t just its ink-damp immediacy and vitality—the chapters have the quality of just-written diary entries, fluidly translated by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman—but that it exists at all. It’s a bit like discovering that Lila and Lenú, the fictional heroines of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, were real … A half-century later, all of it—her extraordinary clarity and imperfect femininity, her unstinting account of the struggle to reconcile art and life—still lands. The construct of memoir (and its stylish young cousin, autofiction) involves the organizing filter of retrospection, lending the impression that life is a continuous narrative reel of action and consequence, of meanings to be universalized … Ditlevsen’s voice, diffident and funny, dead-on about her own mistakes, is a welcome addition to that canon of women who showed us their secret faces so that we might wear our own.”

–Megan O’Grady (The New York Times Book Review)

3. First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami, trans. by Philip Gabriel
(Knopf)

13 Rave • 17 Positive • 7 Mixed • 5 Pan

“… a blazing and brilliant return to form … a taut and tight, suspenseful and spellbinding, witty and wonderful group of eight stories … there isn’t a weak one in the bunch. The stories echo with Murakami’s preoccupations. Nostalgia and longing for the charged, evocative moments of young adulthood. Memory’s power and fragility; how identity forms from random decisions, ‘minor incidents,’ and chance encounters; the at once intransigent and fragile nature of the ‘self.’ Guilt, shame, and regret for mistakes made and people damaged by foolish or heartless choices. The power and potency of young love and the residual weight of fleeting erotic entanglements. Music’s power to make indelible impressions, elicit buried memories, connect otherwise very different people, and capture what words cannot. The themes become a kind of meter against which all the stories make their particular, chiming rhythms … The reading experience is unsettled by a pervasive blurring of the lines between fantasy and reality, dream and waking … Most of the narrators foreground the act of telling and ruminate on the intention behind and effects of disclosing secrets, putting inchoate impulses, fears, or yearnings into clear, logical prose … This mesmerizing collection would make a superb introduction to Murakami for anyone who hasn’t yet fallen under his spell; his legion of devoted fans will gobble it up and beg for more.”

–Pricilla Gilman (The Boston Globe)

4. The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez, trans. by Megan McDowell
(Hogarth)

15 Rave • 2 Positive
Read a short story from The Dangers of Smoking in Bed here

“There’s something thrilling about other people’s suffering—at least within this collection’s 12 stories of death, sex and the occult. Horrors are relayed in a stylish deadpan … Enriquez’s plots deteriorate with satisfying celerity … Largely it’s insatiable women, raggedy slum dwellers and dead children—those who are ordinarily powerless—who wield unholy power in this collection, and they seem uninterested in being reasonable. And Enriquez is particularly adept at capturing the single-minded intensity of teenage girls … If some of these stories end vaguely, the best ones close on the verge of some transgressive climax … To Enriquez, there’s pleasure in the perverse.”

–Chelsea Leu (The New York Times Book Review)

5. In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova, trans. by Sasha Dugdale
(New Directions)

10 Rave • 7 Positive •3 Mixed

“… elegantly translated … Stepanova adopts an oblique, multifaceted approach towards her central project of assembling a family history dating from the late nineteenth century. She lodges memoir like a puzzle box within cultural commentary, historical documents from her ancestors, philosophical discourse, and literary criticism; the result is a densely textured memoir-in-fragments that is alive to the limitations of its project—the lack of historical evidence, the inaccuracies in memory, the fraught relationship between the storyteller and her subjects, and the inevitable incompleteness of the family narrative … Stepanova’s oblique yet layered approach allows her to interrogate the relationship between her personal history, her ancestral history, and the collective cultural history of Europe and Russia … One of the great achievements of this memoir is that it subtly describes the transformation in the narrator’s perspective towards her ancestral past and the project of writing a family history.”

–Darren Huang (Asymptote)

6. Winter in Sokcho by Élisa Shua Dusapin, trans. by Aneesa Abbas Higgins
(Open Letter)

11 Rave • 6 Positive

“Winter in Sokcho is an enigmatic, beguiling book that documents stasis and the helplessness felt by someone trying to overcome it … Dusapin is equally adept at depicting exterior landscapes … The conflict with North Korea makes for interesting background detail … This finely crafted debut explores topics of identity and heredity in compelling fashion. In its aimless, outsider protagonist there are echoes of Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman and Jen Beagin’s Pretend I’m Dead… engaging.”

–Sarah Gilmartin (The Irish Times)

7. Heaven by Mieko Kawakami, trans. by David Boyd and Sam Bett
(Europa Editions)

11 Rave • 5 Positive • 2 Mixed
Read an excerpt from Heaven here

“Have you allowed yourself to forget, perhaps for the purposes of survival, the intense clarity with which you saw the world at 14? … The Japanese novelist Mieko Kawakami has not forgotten … Reading the notes they pass to each other evokes the same hot flush of shame as stumbling upon one’s own letters from that age … Impeccably translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd, the book is full of masterly set pieces of violence, scenes of senseless bullying so lucid you can almost feel the pain yourself. To call these moments cinematic is perhaps to do them an injustice … But the dissonances of the novel align into perfect vision for the breathtaking ending, which is an argument in favor of meaning, of beauty, of life. It is rare for a writer as complex as Kawakami to be so unafraid of closure, to be as capable of satisfying, profound resolution.”

–Nadja Spiegelman (The New York Times Book Review)

8. Wild Swims by Dorthe Nors, trans. by Misha Hoekstra
(Graywolf)

13 Rave • 1 Positive
Read an excerpt from Wild Swims here

“How slippery the work of the Danish writer Dorthe Nors is, how it sideswipes and gleams … The stories are vivid the way a flash of immobilizing pain is vivid … Perhaps because they’re so very short and because they mostly sketch slight interior shifts in her characters, Nors’s stories all feel a little bashful, a little tender. Surely this is intentional … Most of her stories are too short to linger deeply in time or consciousness; the characters spin back into their silence almost as soon as they emerge on the page. Nors is a master at portraying female rage, but here there is also no violent explosion outward, instead a sort of inner collapse; her characters assiduously resist confronting their fury until it rises up against them and attacks their bodies … The sense of simultaneous, furious upwelling into text and retraction into shame or reticence gives the stories a powerful undercurrent, as if they were constantly wrestling with themselves. Inherently self-contradicting, they wobble interestingly on their axes, pulled between outraged individualism and the restrictive Janteloven.”

–Lauren Groff (The New York Review of Books)

9. The Twilight Zone by Nona Fernández, trans. by Natasha Wimmer
(Graywolf)

10 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from The Twilight Zone here

“Overcome with revulsion, I resolved to forget that name, Andrés Valenzuela. As if banishing him from memory could deny his ferocious persistence. Because here he is again, the protagonist of Nona Fernández’s novel The Twilight Zone, translated fluidly into English by Natasha Wimmer … Could anything original still be expressed on the subject? … In fact, The Twilight Zone is wildly innovative, a major contribution to literature, in Chile and beyond, that deals with trauma and its aftermath. Fernández, whose previous works of fiction have been admirably iconoclastic, belongs to a generation of prominent Chilean writers … In order to hold together the novel’s interlocking fragments, all those lives endlessly trapped in ‘dense, circular time,’ Fernández deploys a brilliant literary strategy. She conjures up samples of popular culture, primarily from the TV series The Twilight Zone, and turns them into portals to another dimension … It is up to us to risk entering that history and its blaze, to accompany her into that terrifying landscape and try to communicate with its ghosts.”

–Ariel Dorfmann (The New York Times Book Review)

10. 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows by Ai Weiwei, trans. by Allan H. Barr
(Crown)

9 Rave • 3 Positive • 2 Mixed
Read an interview with Ai Weiwei here

“[Ai Weiwei] is most eloquent when he stops pontificating on art and surrenders, almost despite himself, to the act of remembering. Ai writes evocatively of the nights spent in his detention cell … In 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, Ai does not allow his own scraps to remain buried. To unearth them is an act of unburdening, an open letter to progeny, a suturing of past and present. It is the refusal to be a pawn—and the most potent assertion of a self.”

–Jiayang Fang (The New York Times Book Review)

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Our System:

RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points