NB: This guest post is from Rebecca Pawel, who attends an annual literary festival Semana Negra in Gijon, Spain. She thought this year’s sessions might be of interest to the Bitchery, and I heartily agreed. The panels and conversations this year focused on the representations of violence against women, so TW for that. Thank you for writing all of this up for us, Rebecca! Muchas gracias!
Last month Carrie S published an entry about why explicit scenes of rape in both novels and (especially) films and television series are frequently unnecessary titillation, and may glorify violence while pretending to condemn it. That generated a robust discussion, so when I saw that there was going to be a series of presentations on representations of violence against women at the upcoming Semana Negra de Gijón, which I was planning on attending anyway, I thought I would try to attend them and see what an academic, several novelists, and a true-crime writer had to say about the subject. Then, Elyse published her essay about Gone Girl and women in psychological thrillers, which provided me with a jumping off point for talking about women in thrillers in general.
First, some background: the Semana Negra or “Black Week” is a combination literary festival/street fair/art exhibit/gigantic party/space for political activism, held every summer in the city of Gijón, on the northern coast of Spain. It’s name comes from the term “novela negra,” a Spanish translation of the French “roman noir” meaning mystery or detective novel.
It’s a bit like RWA and ComicCon and an old fashioned State Fair (with giant Ferris wheel and bumper cars and carnival rides and of course food) all rolled into one, and if you’re ever in northern Spain in July, you shouldn’t miss it. (It obviously helps to know Spanish if you’re talking about a fair with row after row of bookstalls, and tons of meet the author events, but even if you don’t know Spanish you can come for the food and the music and the rides, and the general ambience. Find someone labeled “organización” and ask for help if you want to try to get info on a specific panel event. They may or may not be able to arrange an interpreter, but the chances are good you can try to chat with the author in person afterward, especially if you do something kind like offer to buy them a beer.) You should also be prepared to spend a week recuperating afterward, because the activities run from 5:00 in the evening until dawn for ten days in a row.
The Semana Negra also comes from a tradition of unabashed political activism (more on that later), and this year’s theme involved raising awareness about violence against women in all parts of the world. For that purpose, they invited Cathy Fourez, a professor at Charles de Gaulle University in Lille (France), who specializes in contemporary Latin American fiction. I attended Cathy’s presentation, and also the panel discussion about why a number of writers choose to write about violence against women, and finally on Friday got to sit down and chat with Cathy and two participating Argentine authors, Tatiana Goransky and María Inés Krímer. My summary of what they said, and somewhat confused thoughts about it, follow below.
Cathy kicked off a series of talks and discussions about violence against women on Monday, with a lecture which started out by defining what she calls “gender violence” including some real life examples and some explanations of how Latin American novelists have worked these into their fiction. She defined “gender” violence as any form of violence against a person because she is (or identifies as – and yes, she noted that this affects members of the transgender community especially) a woman. Cathy went out of her way to point out that she was discussing “gender” not sex, and that the former is a socially and historically constructed category, which is not essential or natural but which does involve certain traditionally defined behaviors. She also made a point of noting that gender violence may take a sexual form, but may also involve other types of maltreatment, up to and including murder, and that if a woman is murdered because she is a woman (rather than say for her money, or in revenge, or for any of the personal reasons men are murdered), it is a form of hate crime.
Having established this background, she went on to say that while gender violence exists across the globe, in parts of Latin America it has reached the status of a “public health problem” for women, one that is winked at by the authorities because the murder of women who are young and poor is a way of maintaining a power structure in which young, poor women are at the bottom of a social scale.
Then she moved on to talking about how novelists have dealt with gender violence because, “when I don’t find answers in real life, I turn to literature.” Cathy definitely subscribes to the general slant of the Semana Negra, which is that detective fiction is literature written “from the margins” examining the lives of the powerless and showing the cost of the power and prosperity of some at the expense of others. (If you hadn’t guessed, detective fiction readers are nearly as sensitive as romance readers about the comments that the genre is “pulp” or “escapism” or “beach reading” – even though Gijón does have a lovely beach.)
At this point I was frantically scribbling question marks about Carrie S’s essay about how repeatedly portraying violence against women may actually normalize it. But then Elyse’s essay about Gone Girl came out, and I realized that a major difference between the type of work Cathy was talking about and the works criticized by Carrie and Elyse is that the women picked as victims are not “petite, blonde and middle class.” Rather, they are the poor, the desperate, and the already marginalized — immigrants, victims of human trafficking, and others who are considered of “little value” to society and are therefore easy prey.
This theme came up again and again in the panel discussion Cathy moderated on Wednesday when she asked the participants what form the violence against women in their novels took, and why they had chosen to write about it. Almost all of them mentioned the desire to give a voice to the otherwise voiceless, and to record stories that people otherwise would not hear. In short, to fight against the media stereotype that most victims are blonde and middle class.
Selva Almada, whose book Chicas muertas [Dead Girls] is a non-fiction account of three unrelated murders of women and girls in Argentina in the 1980s, noted that she wanted to return humanity to the victims of the crimes by refusing “to recognize “Woman” as a category, but rather to acknowledge that there are women who are individuals.” Gabriela Cabezón Cámara also spoke about giving voice to victims by telling the story from their point of view, rather from that of either the detective or the criminal. (I’ve read a few romantic suspense novels where the killer/bad guy gets alternating point of view chapters, and it struck me that while as readers we’re used to this device, and also of course to seeing things from the point of view of the eventually triumphant heroine and/or hero, we don’t get to see things from the point of view of the other victims – aside from the moment when the bad guy temporarily and unsuccessfully captures the heroine – as much.)
The Catalan anthropologist Miguel Pajares, who admitted shyly but graciously to being “the only man and the only Spaniard” on a panel of Argentine women, said that his novel Cautivas [Captive Women] was a natural extension of his work for NGOs dealing with immigrants in Spain, and his desire to raise awareness of how the most vulnerable women and also men are exploited and killed with impunity because they are granted few legal rights.
While the authors above focused on the connections to real world crimes, and on the ways in which the media fails to cover them, the remaining authors on the panel mentioned more personal connections. María Inés Krimer explained that the first of her novels featuring a middle-aged archivist who ends up as a detective (who is a single woman of a certain age who she does not want compared to Miss Marple!) explored the rather dark subjects of human trafficking and forced prostitution because of a piece of family history: she learned as an adult that a great aunt of hers was lured to Argentina by a ring of human traffickers in the early twentieth century, and forced into prostitution while still in her teens. Her great-aunt – who sounds like an impressive person – escaped the simple label of “victim” by eventually marrying a pimp, and ending up as the madam of an exclusive brothel in Buenos Aires.
For Tatiana Goransky, the experience of avoiding the label of victim was even more immediate: she actually took both the threats of a stalker against the title character in her novel ¿Quién mató al cantante de jazz? [Who Killed the Jazz Singer?] and the reaction of the police to these threats, from her own experience receiving death threats after the publication of her first novel. Tatiana (who has a recording career as a jazz singer in addition to being a novelist, and therefore obviously has more talent than it is fair for one human to possess) mentioned that part of the point of writing the novel was to stop feeling like a victim, and to deal with the way women are objectified with a certain sense of humor.
The panel was an interesting look at how various crime writers justify portraying violence, not least because it pointed up some cultural differences that I ended up talking about quite a bit informally afterward with Cathy and Tatiana and María Inés. They all agreed that crime novels in Spanish operate around a completely different set of political, social and literary assumptions than those in English, even though some of the genre conventions may be superficially the same. Some of the assumptions reflect differing political realities in Latin America and in the United States and England (the two Anglophone countries that gave birth to the modern crime novel). Some also reflect different cultural attitudes toward gender. Perhaps most interestingly, they involve different assumptions about the political slant of genre fiction.
In the United States, some authors of commercial fiction claim they are “apolitical” or attempt to avoid introducing politics overtly into their work. Those who do take strong political stances either in literature or in real life are relatively evenly divided between the right and the left. According to Cathy Fourez, writing detective fiction in Spanish (in both Latin America and Spain) “automatically labels you as left wing.” Since writing in Spanish is understood as automatically a political act, I suspect the use of violence against women as shorthand for “this character is evil” or “we are supposed to sympathize with this hero” may be less widespread than it is in English, where authors may be less attuned to the political implications of their work.
Coming from countries with a relatively recent history of violent suppression of freedom of press, I think many authors who write in Spanish are also very aware of the way conventional media narratives more or less deliberately omit or falsify stories about “innocent” victims. It’s worth remembering that in the 1940s and 1950s while writers in the US were happily publishing pulp magazines “built on the bodies of fictional dead women” as Elyse put it, respectable newspapers in Spain were reporting deaths of real people taken from their homes and shot without trial by police as death by “cardiac arrest” because that was the only safe thing to put in an obituary. No blame to the newspapers – those editors didn’t want to be next. I’m far from an expert on modern Spanish-language fiction in general, but my instinct is to say that when Latin American or Spanish authors say they are interested in telling a story about gender violence that isn’t being told by the mainstream press, they’re serious, and not merely trying to draw the reader in by having an attractive victim with whom to empathize. Of course, if it does work as a draw, that’s nice too from a commercial standpoint, but I don’t think that’s the primary goal.
I think this is the point where I offer belated apologies to English-speaking readers for some of the author links above that only exist in Spanish. I did try to find author links in English, but sadly none of the authors above are translated in English yet, which is in my opinion a crying shame. (I read half of Who Killed the Jazz Singer? one night after I returned from the Semana, and finished it on the way home, and it’s tremendously good, although also extremely sad.) In fact, given the extremely different attitudes toward writing, and the huge quantity of really excellent books that don’t make it into English, I ended up doing a little research as to why people who only read in English are missing out on so much. This being the Semana Negra, it was pretty easy to do research, since all I had to do was hunt down a professional translator and ask him.
Martin Roberts, who’s translated several thrillers from Spanish to English, says the problem is that any translation into English faces the “three percent barrier.” That is, only 3% of books published in English are translations from all the languages of the world. On a best seller list of one hundred books, only two or three will be translations, and they are likely to be of authors who are already well known and established. Bookstores don’t want to stock translations and distributors don’t want to promote them. Given these obstacles, publishers are very reluctant to spend the money on a translation, especially of a relatively unknown author. Translators are paid an advance based on the word count of a novel, and at between eight and ten cents per word, a full length novel costs a publisher between $6,000 and $10,000 to translate. Most publishers aren’t interested in taking the risk.
I realize as I write that while people on this site pretty regularly mention novels that they read translated from English, I can’t think of a single romance novel translated into English from any language. I can name a sprinkling of well known mystery novels translated from Spanish and French, as well as the “Scandinavian invasion” of Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell and similar (translations subsidized by the Swedish government as a form of economic development, by the way, so that the publishers didn’t pay the full costs initially). But while a few very successful crime novels manage to break into the English-language market, almost no romances do.
Given the number of readers who enjoy foreign and exotic settings for their romances, it seems stupid to not go to authors who actually are in these settings for their work. It would be nice if there were a translation subsidy for romance. I know RWA has an “Outreach International” chapter. Perhaps they should consider subsidizing one translation a year, as a way of supporting international writers.
[NB from Sarah: Interestingly, at RWA this year, I learned that Kensington has just acquired in translation a book by a Swedish romance novelist, Simona Ahrnstedt. Her novel, All In, will be published next year. I also met Simona, who is so very excited to be reaching American romance readers.]
I realize my “more authors should be translated” rant is a little off topic. But as a long time “semanera” (that is, an addict of the Semana Negra, including its churros, Ferris wheel, discussions of feminism and all) I really value the international community of eager writers and readers who assemble in Gijón every summer. And I really value the SBTB online community as well, for some of the same reasons. This was my effort to introduce two sets of friends, who care about books that are read for fun and also about important things like gender violence. It’s frustrating when language gets in the way of the introductions. Especially because I think both communities would be richer and more inclusive for knowing each other.
Here are a few pictures from this year’s Semana Negra.
A presentation of Spanish author Carmen Moreno’s novel Una última cuestión, with Marta Menéndez (left) and Elia Barceló (right) in the central tent.
Book presentation at the Semana Negra. (You can head over to the mural in the distance for beer or soda, or out of the back of the open tent to go to the fairground.)
The fairgrounds of the Semana Negra, with book tents in the distance.
Rebecca, thank you for the post. Prior to this, I’d never heard of Semana Negra, and would that my Spanish was up to the task as it sounds fascinating.
That said, I find it difficult to wrap my mind around the idea that by writing in your native language in a particular genre is, by itself, considered to be a political act.
Although I’m saddened to hear that violence against women in some L.A. countries has reached such levels, on the other hand I’m not really surprised. The poor & desperate have always been victimized, and frankly, I believe they will continue to be until there is a seismic societal shift to repudiate it. Not towards political correctness, but to the idea that EVERYONE counts, regardless of gender, orientation, religion, etc. And then backing that up with prosecuting & incarcerating violators without regard of their wealth or political connections. To be honest, considering what we’re like (as humans in general), I don’t see this as ever happening or at least not for centuries to come.
Damn but I want a correction button.
I meant to say that seismic shift would have to be worldwide in order to have any significant impact in general.
Maybe one day…
This sounds fascinating! I had a Spanish teacher some 11-12 years ago who came to the US as a teen. She was the daughter of a Argentinian politician, and her family came here to escape the upheaval of the time – this was during the Allende period. The told us about “los desaparecedos”, the people – especially young people – who were killed by the government for protesting. Some were taken up in planes and thrown out alive. We often take our literary freedom for granted here, but I know many people in Spain remember the censorship of Franco all too well. I would love to go to this festival – and I think my Spanish would be up to the task. I’ve recently begun collecting Spanish-language books because I want to increase my vocabulary and retain what I already know. South Carolina isn’t exactly a bottomless font of linguistic opportunity. Living in Spain is on my bucket list.
@Heather – Good luck getting to Spain! It’s a beautiful country. One quick thing: if your teacher was from Argentina, you probably mean Videla (late 70s, and yes, they used helicopters that way). Allende was from Chile, which is a different country. (Argentina and Chile share a long border, and basically hate each other.) For the record, Allende was democratically elected and his government never “disappeared” anyone. He was overthrown and murdered in a violent coup backed by the U.S. and his successor General Pinochet DID “disappear” people (which was why a Spanish judge in the 1990s tried to prosecute him for war crimes). The current Chilean president, Michelle Bachelet, is the daughter of one of Pinochet’s victims. It’s important to get these kinds of details right, if only to honor the memory of Salvador Allende, who was murdered because he tried to serve his country.
I’m glad you came to my country and enjoyed it! Although I’ve never been to the Semana Negra, I know Gijón, and I’m sure you had, at least, wonderful weather (in summer), tasty food, and lots of friendly people to talk to.
Politics and books. Yes, you’re right, for us everything is a political statement. Even those books that try to ignore that part of life are perceived as political.
Translations of romance novels. I’m always asking why certain wonderful romance writers are not translated to Spanish, but you have made me think about the other way round. Yes, there are good writers in this genre, not only in Spanish, but guess it’s just a market protecting itself from foreign products, and that’s all. That’s the reason why only 3% of the books sold are translated. Probably it’s the same with cars or any other product.
But don’t be wrong about the content of romance novels written originally in Spanish. Many of them, the ones I love most, are very well written and set in the country of the writer -it could be Spain or Argentina or any other Spanish-speaking country-. But there are sooooooooooo many boring & run-of-the-mill Regencies or Scottish Highlanders, which I don’t like, and I guess they would be of no interest for someone who can buy a similar product with a lower price.
@KitKat – as Bona says, it’s more that writing AT ALL is a political act. I think that’s because the definition of “political” in the US tends to be a rather narrow “who do you vote for?” one, whereas most Spaniards (and I think most Europeans in general) would class a lot of the discussions on this blog as “political”; just within the last couple of weeks reviews here have talked about (among other things): (a) does a book glorify organized crime families? (b) Is the idea that “respect and equality” are antithetical to sexual intercourse anti-feminist? (c) What are the professional penalties for coming out in a business where successful people are expected to be straight? By European standards these are all “political” questions, even without mentioning parties or elections or laws.
I absolutely believe all writing is political (and that “not taking a side” is the same as tacitly endorsing the status quo, whatever that may be). Where I hesitate is the assumption that an entire genre comes down ON ONE SIDE of the great political debates of our time. In fairness, I think the key may be what you said about “incarcerating violators without regard to wealth or political connections.” That doesn’t always happen in crime novels (just as it doesn’t in real life) but when it doesn’t happen that’s considered a sad and upsetting ending, and something that makes the reader angry. I think a lot of Spanish-language writers would argue that the very idea that wealth and political connections aren’t *supposed* to matter (along with the recognition that they *do*) is intrinsically left wing, hence the feeling that the genre belongs to one side of the political spectrum. (The right wing in Latin America has a history of throwing people out of airplanes and getting away with it, as well as basically exterminating various people they consider the underclass. They don’t make much pretense about caring about the poor and downtrodden.) Saying all crime novels dealing with Latin America are left wing may be an oversimplification (especially when it comes to women’s issues in a genre dominated by men), but I think that’s where it’s coming from.
@Rebecca Patel:
I’ve lived in Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela, and have interacted closely with people from Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, Paraguay, and Argentina, and my experience is that we understand political in a very similar, if not exactly the same, way as Spaniards and other Europeans.
I haven’t lived in other parts of the Americas, which was why I specifically limited myself to the U.S. and Europe, where I do have experience. But I don’t quite understand your point. Do you think most people in the U.S. would think the discussions I mentioned were political, or that most Europeans (or people in the rest of the Americas) wouldn’t?
This looks and sounds fabulous.
Since my nephews, who are being raised bilingual, actually burst into tears when I try to speak Spanish, I suspect that my skills are not up to this. But you can’t let a little thing like tearful begging – or hysterical laughter, which is another response I’ve garnered the world over – inhibit your language practice. I should probably have just picked a language and stuck with it, but I’m a romantic in this regard: I’m searching for that one right language to come along, where the chemistry is there and we just *understand* each other.
So I probably won’t be translating anything any time soon.
Thanks for the breakdown, and yes please if anyone’s thinking to do something about the 3% barrier.
@Rebecca Pawel,
I wasn’t clear–I was trying to say that, in my experience, most people in Latin America share the European viewpoint that those questions are political.
Re: Translated Books
I wonder if part of the reason so few books are translated goes back to what I thought before I stumbled upon Arturo Perez Reverte–that translated books were all “literature” and nothing I was particularly interested in.
Then I discovered The Fencing Master and Everything Changed. I read a lot of mystery, so that makes finding translated books easier, but I’ve also found a Russian author I adore (Sergi Lukyanenko) and some marvelous stories.
I’m not sure that I agree with the lack of translated romance–Isabelle Allende came immediately to mind, somewhat for Daughter of Fortune, but more Zorro (which is how I discovered Isabelle Allende–I LOVE Zorro).
But I also wonder whether different cultures have different expectations when reading a specific genre. I found that I had to drop my preconceived expectations when reading many translated genre books (for example, in some of the Italian mysteries I’ve read, the cop discovers whodunnit, but the criminal frequently goes unpunished, because they have political connections or money etc).
There was an American author named Leighton Gage who died in 2013. He wrote the Chief Inspector Mario Silva Investigations which were based in Brasil, a country he’d lived in for 20 years. The books are excellent and according to the author notes in the back, based on real-life crimes/occurrences.
I’ll be the first to admit that as good as they are I’ve only managed the first 4 of the seven book series as I simply could not handle the violence and callous disregard to humanity displayed.
I’ve read all sorts of crime fiction, including true crime stories. But these books are in a class by themselves. There is so much antipathy towards people in general and the underclass in particular within these books. Knowing that they were based on real life evokes a whole new level of horror at the atrocities some will commit, whether for profit, hate or, may the gods have mercy on us all, just because.
At some point, I will finish the series but I will need to do so in slow increments with a fair number of comfort reads in between. Because the nightmares from reading those 1st four back-to-back were not a good thing.
There’s so many interesting points in this article it’s going to take me a while to digest it. My initial feeling is that agree with quite a lot of it, especially the part about the weak and the poor being common victims or violence and abuse.
Having skimmed through the comments – one of the best novels I’ve read that talks about “los desaparecedos” is Senor Vivo and the Coca Lord by Louis De Bernieres. It was written in English and is set in a fictional country in South America. It also has a heartbreaking love story in it. I cried for days.
I may be wrong, but I’m pretty sure that Isabel Allende wrote both Daughter of Fortune and Zorro in English. I believe Ms Allende has lived in the US since the mid 1990s.
I’m super-flattered by all the long thoughtful comments here! At the risk of being long-winded, a couple of further thoughts:
I had the chance to meet Leighton Gage and his wife around the time his first novel came out. A gracious and interesting man, and much missed. He mentioned to me that he was basically glad his novels hadn’t been published in a Portuguese translation in Brazil, because he was scared of what the repercussions might have been. Which sort of goes back to why writing is political. Foreigners and expatriates have the luxury of writing in a foreign language and flying under the radar, but if you record the crimes of any country’s all-powerful in their own language they may come looking for you.
I think the discussion here sort of illustrates how the 3% rule shapes Anglophone attitudes about fiction. Upthread Bona politely said that of course English readers wouldn’t be interested in romance novels of the Regency or Scottish Highlanders written in Spanish (even though any number of Regencies reference the Peninsular War, in Spain and Portugal, and any number of “English” writers of these books are actually Americans or Australians, who are considerably geographically further from the settings). But a lot of people went on to mention foreign SET books written in English by Americans or Brits or by writers like Isabel Allende who have lived in the US for decades as examples of fiction about Latin America. We arrogantly assume that we can speak for others, although other people are very hesitant about the reverse, precisely because a huge number of books are translated FROM English although a tiny proportion are translated TO English. It becomes a vicious cycle.
It’s great that Perez-Reverte is such a success in the US. But why not translate Jeronimo Tristante or Lorenzo Silva (both of whom are equally big in Spain, and have in fact had films and tv series made of their novels) or any of a half dozen other equally fun novelists? Not sure if Isabel Allende writes in English at this point (certainly she’s simultaneously translated) but she’s also not your standard author, partly because she’s lived in the US for so long, and partly because as a near relative of the assassinated Chilean president Salvador Allende she has a VERY famous last name, that made her something of a celebrity even before her books were published.
I don’t mean any reflection on the quality of the Leighton Gage’s, or Louis de Bernieres’, or Allende’s books. Full disclosure: I’ve written four novels set in Spain myself, so obviously I’m guilty of writing about other people’s history too. I’m flattered when English speakers tell me they’ve learned things from the books, but if I’m honest I have to say that if you really want to know about Spain in the 1940s (as opposed to just reading a story that’s playing with someone else’s history) you should seek out those Spanish authors who HAVE been translated (Merce Rodoreda, Carmen Martin Gaite, Dulce Chacon, Javier Cercas, etc.), rather than rely on a foreigner.
Margaret Sayers Peden translated “Zorro” for certain, which may be how I found Allende–Margaret Sayers Peden’s translated for Arturo Perez Reverte and IIRC, I prefer the books she has translated to his other translator.
Which brings me to another point: the translators matter a lot. As I said, I prefer Perez-Reverte books translated by Margaret Sayers Peden and an Andrea Camilleri Inspector Montalbano novella not translated by his usual translator Stephen Satarelli was disappointing, and felt “off”.
It seems to me that good translators would be far harder to find than good authors, so is that a limiting factor on translations?
I personally would love more historicals set in other countries and written by natives of said country. Which is what drew me to Isabelle Allende. (If you’re writing an historical, does it really matter where you currently live?)
Focusing on one small thought out of many raised by this excellent article: Not many novelists write from the point of view of a victim, all the way to their homicide, death by neglect or murder, or complete, debilitating despair, namelessness. Not only would the unrelenting horror be difficult on many levels, the portrayal would break many conventions. A negative character arc. What a task.
Random Michelle said
About translators – yes, they’re important. But the major problem is that they don’t work for free.
That’s…. not a problem? That’s a feature, not a bug?
Since a good translator can make or break a book (IMO, they’re more important than copy-editors, but not much more important), they should be well-paid, and would also be (I assume) sought after?
Thanks for closing the cite tag! Sorry about that. Totally agree a good translation is super-important. (The difference between good titles is illustrated by the U.S. hit “Smilla’s Sense of Snow.” The title of the English edition was “Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow.” Not so much of a hit.) There are plenty of books that are known in “definitive” translations, and people get pretty angry about the translation being “wrong” if a new one comes out. But, at least if you’re talking about widely spoken languages, there’s no shortage of good translators. The problem is that publishers don’t want to invest the extra money for a translation. They’ll publish a translation if the translator is paid on someone else’s dime (the Swedish government for Swedish books, or if it’s a labor of love), but otherwise it’s not a risk they want to take.
As a side note, since you mentioned Montalbano, if you enjoy light-hearted Italian mysteries, may I recommend Amara Lakhous’ “Dispute Over a Very Italian Piglet” which is hysterically funny. (Haven’t read his “Divorce Islamic Style” yet, but it’s gotten good reviews from the people I know who have read it.) Translated by Ann Goldstein, probably with considerable input from the author (who speaks fluent English since his wife is American).
Ooooh! That looks awesome!
I also love Donna Leon’s Italian mysteries, but she’s an English transplant writing in English, so although I’m sure she has the feel of modern Venice correct, it’s not quite the same thing. (Same for John Burdett, who’s Sonchai Jitplecheep series I also love.)
I’ve noticed something interesting in the last couple translate books I’ve read/re-read, which is that often the author often name-checks other authors. When I re-read “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” I noted 8 different authors mentioned. And I went and looked to see if I could find any of the foreign-to-American authors, and didn’t have very much success.
I do find it somewhat frustrating to know there are awesome books out there that I can’t read because I’m mono-lingual, but then, my TBR pile is already huge, so perhaps I shouldn’t feel that terrible about these extraneous limits. 🙂
But to circle back (sort of) to your original point, I tend to read female authors (it’s about a 50/50 split) and so I do notice the way women are treated in books, and I’ve found it interesting to view how women are viewed and treated by male authors–especially detective mysteries.
I’m not particularly bothered by the over-the-top sexism of Ian Fleming, precisely because it is so ridiculous. But I’ve quit several books because of the casual disregard with which the women were treated–objects entirely dependent upon the male hero and without agency of their own.
And really, I personally find that more offensive in some ways that outright violence, since it’s so insidious and subtle. When reading a horrible thing happen to a woman (and I’ll be honest, I tend to avoid that have Really Horrible Things happening to female characters) it’s easy to feel disgust and horror.
But when a book fails the Bechdel test, it’s not always easy to pick up on, but it sinks in just the same.
All of which is why I love Princess Leia so much in Star Wars. Yes, she needs rescued, but she pick up a gun and starts shooting once she’s been released.
[…] Gender, Genre, and Representations of Violence Against … http://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/The panels and conversations this year focused on the representations of violence against women, so TW for that. Thank you for writing all of this up for us, Rebecca! Muchas gracias! Last month Carrie S published an entry … […]