January Translations: Fiction (Update)

After posting the initial list of January translations yesterday, I got info about three titles I missed (see below). I’m sure there are a few more, so if you know of anything, please feel free to post it here or contact me.

Also, I’ll put up the poetry translations later today, and literary nonfiction tomorrow, but just so everyone knows, if you click on the “2008 translations” tag at the bottom, you can access all of the posts listing these titles. And later this year we’ll post an Excel file with all the relevant info.

For now:

• The Voyage of the Short Serpent, Bernard du Bucheron, translated from the French by Hester Velmans (Overlook, $24.95, 9781585679201)

The Booklist review makes this sound very dark and funny: “A medieval bishop travels to the most desolate, forgotten regions of Iceland to investigate reports of paganism among the wretched settlers, whose major choice in life is to die of starvation, freezing, or, once the bishop arrives, torture (for the salvation of their souls, naturally). The story comprises mostly a report from the bishop, whose matter-of-fact tone is so ridiculously incongruous to the atrocities that he encounters (“the crew had partaken of human flesh, even on fish days”) and that he perpetrates (burning a fallen priest at the stake slowly in seal-oil, wood being too scarce for the task) that it is laugh-out-loud funny and revolting at once.”

• The Jewish Messiah, Arnon Grunberg, translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett (Penguin, $27.95, 9781594201493)

Arnon Grunberg is the most prolific Words Without Borders blogger in history. And it seems like he has a new novel out in Dutch and in English every year . . . Other Press did a number of his early books, and this title about a “confused young man from a family with a Nazi past who decides he will devote his life to redeeming the suffering of the Jews in his own unorthodox way” sounds promising as well. One of the funniest Grunberg stories is that he is the only author to win the Anton Wachter Prize for a Debut Novel twice—once as Grunberg, and once under the pseudonym Marek van der Jagt.

• Homecoming, Bernard Schlink, translated from the German by Michael Henry Heim (Pantheon, $24.00, 9780375420917)

Arguably the “biggest” translation of the month (from one of the biggest translators), Homecoming is the latest book from the author of the Oprah bookclub pick The Reader. Michael Dirda does a great job summarizing this book: “These elements — The Odyssey, a temporary return home, restless change, even the nature of the law — are all fundamental to Schlink’s fine new novel, Homecoming. In a quiet, conversational style similar to that of The Reader (and to so many classic European r¿cits), Peter Debauer recalls the major events of his life: his visits to his grandparents in Switzerland, childhood with his hard-edged but beautiful single mother, the books he read, the women he loved.”