South Korea - The Vegetarian et al.

Country: Japan/South Korea (Zainichi)
Book: Tokyo Ueno Station (JR上野駅公園口)
Author: Yū Miri
Publication Year: 2014 (English translation: 2019)
Genre: Fiction

Country: South Korea
Book: The Vegetarian(채식주의자)/Human Actis (소년이 온다)
Author: Han Kang
Publication Years: 2007; 2014 (English translations: 2015; 2016)
Genre: Fiction/Historical Fiction

Turning to South Korea and I find I had already read a South Korean writer in the week before I started this project. Yū Miri was born in Yokohama to Korean parents and writes in Japanese.

The Japanese word, Zainichi, meaning, ‘residing in Japan’, is applied to Koreans who have permanent status in the country. More specifically, to Koreans who emigrated to Japan during the Japanese occupation of Korea and in the years immediately after the end of World War Two.

Alison Fincher has discussed (on the ReadingJapanese Literature podcast) the relative lack of Zainichi writers who have been translated into English in comparison to Japanese writers writing in Japanese. Given the challenges of translating from Japanese to European languages in the first place, this is perhaps not a surprise. There are a few noted Zainichi writers available in English, like Megumu Sagisawa and Masaaki Tachihara (both deceased), and the subject is one of which I would like to write a longer piece further down the line.

For now, I want to briefly touch upon Yū Miri’s novel, Tokyo Ueno Station. The book deals with homelessness in Japan’s capital city, as related by the character of Kazu, who came to Tokyo in the 1960s to work as labourer in the build up to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Through his narrative we witness the destitution of those tent dwellers living around the eponymous Ueno Station and who are now threatened with eviction to make way for construction work for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. We also hear the series of tragedies and misfortunes that led Kazu here.

It is a side of Japan rarely mentioned in other Japanese media. Yet is perhaps something upon which only someone still regarded as an outsider, despite being born and bred in Japan, could draw a spotlight.

I am sure it is something the western mind barely even thinks about, conditioned as we are to think of hyper industrialised South East Asian cites like Tokyo as monoliths of technology and innovation. Yet why should Japan be any different? Wherever there is success, there is also destitution.

Yu Miri

Tokyo is no different in this regard from London, Paris LA or New York. We talk about the richest countries in the world, but that wealth is concentrated into increasingly narrower avenues of power. The average citizen lies closer to the third world than they do the first (NB: I am aware that ‘first world’ and ‘third world’ have specific definitions relating to their historic alignment to Cold War superpowers).

Yū addresses all of this, but does so with a light touch. Tokyo Ueno Station is a personal story, drawing general themes from individual experience (like all the best writers). At the same time, it gives a voice to those living on the fringes of Japanese society.

For a South Korean writer actually living in and writing about South Korea, we turn to Han Kang. Han is herself the daughter of Korean novelist Han Seung-won. The two books under present consideration, The Vegetarian and Human Acts, offer differing views of South Korean life, but the methods Han employs to tell them are similar in both novels.

The central character of The Vegetarian, Yeong-hye, refuses to eat meat again after starting to experience a series of blood soaked nightmares. As with Human Acts, the story is told from the multiple viewpoints of her husband, brother in law and sister as Yeong-hye spirals further and further into psychosis.

Living in the UK, vegetarianism is no big thing. Indeed, the English title of the novel is somewhat of a misnomer, as Yeong-hye refuses to eat any animal products, including fish and dairy, and has strictly become a vegan. Yet the ideas of vegetarianism and veganism are so ingrained in our society that most British restaurants offer meat free options, even if the choice is usually somewhat limited.

In Korea, though, where meals are served in multiple small courses, the options available to vegetarians are even more restrictive. Not to mention the minefield of Korean manners, rituals and social mores. Indeed, the title of The Vegetarian is doubly misleading, as the book is not so much about the obstacles to vegetarianism, as it is about the stigma of mental illness in Korean society and the shame it is seen to bring on the family. The novel is also about exploitation of men against women and the neuro typical against the neuro divergent.

These kinds of conservative attitudes are not exclusive to Korean society of course and The Vegetarian highlights similar misogynistic and neuro typical attitudes as found in the novels, like Earthlings and Convenience Store Woman by Japanese writer, Sayaka Murata. In both books, Murata’s protagonists pretend to be in relationships with men in order to fend off the matchmaking efforts of their families.

Human Acts is perhaps less personal but no less disturbing in its focus. The books concerns  the Gwangju Massacre committed by the South Korean army during the student uprising of 1980. Through a series of episodes, the killing of one student, Dong-ho, is mourned and reflected upon over more than thirty years.

As The Vegetarian is told through the eyes of multiple characters, so Human Acts moves from Dong-ho’s best friend searching for his body among the thousands brought to the morgues around Gwangju, to Dong-ho’s soul departing his mangled body, to his mother’s grief thirty years after the fact. We also witness more misogyny and the physical assault of a female journalist investigating the massacre half a decade later. Finally, Han portrays her own experience and we learn that Dong-ho was an actual victim of the Gwangju Massacre, even if the book’s portrayals are largely fictional.

Korea is a country I was already thinking about, having become interested in the Korean War. It is almost never talked about, despite having resulted in the deaths of an estimated 2,000,000 Koreans and another 900,000 Chinese soldiers, as well as the large scale destruction of the north. Yet unlike almost every other war in history, no great literature or poetry emerged from its ashes. No wonder it is known as the ‘Forgotten War’.

The only thing we think about when we think of Korea is M*A*S*H. Yet as Bruce Cumings notes in his book, The Korean War: A History, M*A*S*H is really about Vietnam, not Korea, with many of the tropes of the series being anachronistic and specific to the Vietnam War.

Just as Shakespeare focused on the War of the Roses and the assassination of Julius Caesar to discuss contemporary events from a safe distance, so the producers and writers of M*A*S*H used the obscurity of the Korean War as a smokescreen to discuss the national disaster that was Vietnam. Which makes sense. Although it is also an insult to the six to seven million victims of American aggression in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.

The only other place I have seen the Korean War referenced in western media is in HBO’s adaptation of Lovecraft Country (the scenes of which, credit to the show's writers, were written for the series and do not feature in Mark Ruff’s novel). The war is well overdue a retrospective.

All of which is to say that Yū Miri and Han Kang have fired my interest further in South Korean literature and culture. They are both writers to whom I will return sooner rather than later. Deeper dives into Korean and Zainichi writing are to come. Maybe in a year or two.

I undertook this project to learn more about the nations of the world through their literary artists. So far, though we are only on the fourth country, I have chosen well. Or been well directed by search engine algorithms (probably a bit of both). Long may it continue.

Han Kang

 

Mongolia - The Blue Sky

Country: Mongolia
Book: The Blue Sky (Der blaue Himmel)/The Grey Earth (Die graue Erde)
Author: Galsan Tschinag
Publication Years: 1994/1999 (English language versions 2006/2010)
Genre: Fiction

Next on this journey through the countries of the world and their writers, we find ourselves well and truly off of the beaten track. To Western Mongolia and the steppe region that sweeps for 5,000 miles from the mouth of the Danube to Manchuria in China.

The Egypt and Cairo of Nawal El Saadawi (see: Egypt) are easily reached, even if tourists come largely to visit the pyramids. Paasilinna’s Finland (see: Finland) is a plane flight and train journey away; though his native Lapland is a little harder to reach. 

The setting for The Blue Sky trilogy, on the other hand, is 2,000 miles from even the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar. In opening Galsan Tschinag’s books, we are stepping into the wilderness and stepping back in time.

The central character of Dshurukawaa is a thinly veiled avatar for Galsan Tschinag himself. Both the writer and his young protagonist are Tuvan, a Turkic people indigenous to Mongolia, China and Russia. Most westerners probably know them through the practice of Tuvan Throat Singing.

Dshurukawaa’s parents are nomadic goat and sheep farmers who live in a yurt, that most evocative of Mongolian dwellings (though the word yurt is Russian  and is slowly being replaced with the Mongolian equivalent, ger). They roam the steppe with their herd, close to the border with Kazakhstan, staving off wolves, Kazak horsemen and Dshurukawaa’s older siblings trying to take him off to school.

The Blue Sky trilogy is set during the 1950s. The eponymous first book takes place during Dshurukawaa’s young life up to the age of 7. The Grey Mountain follows him as he is finally enrolled in school and brought face to face with the Marxist indoctrination of Communist Mongolia. The final part of the trilogy, The White Mountain, has yet to be translated into English, although there does seem to be an English translation due for release in 2027.

Of the two books available in English, the second installment is the more interesting. The events of The Blue Sky could take place in the 1650s for all the difference it would make. You get the sense that the lives of Tuvan nomadic farmers have changed very little in centuries. 

The first book is an interesting window on to this world and the mysticism and shamanistic beliefs of Dshurukawaa and his family. Yet with a cast of characters all but limited to his mother, father, grandmother and Dshurukawaa’s dog,  Arsylang, the action is limited.

It is when we reach school that the narrative becomes more dynamic, if Dickensian in tone. Dshurukawaa wishes to become a shaman (something Tschinag achieved in real life, whatever you think about that), which is heretical in a hardline Communist country in the final years of Stalinism.

I guess many of us on this side of the former Iron Curtain don’t think about Mongolia as a Communist country. Yet despite retaining relative independence from Russia to the north and China to the south, Mongolia had its own Communist revolution in the 1920s and remained  a Communist country until the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s.

Into this political torrent, Dshurukawaa is thrown and left to sink or swim. Navigating the waters is made all the more treacherous by the fact that the Principal or Head Master of the school is his older brother. He is threatened with prison 2,000 miles away in Ulaanbaatar if he does not renounce his shamanistic ambitions and become a good Communist, with all of the doublethink that involves. Yet his inchoate shamanism becomes essential at various points in his first year at school, until tragedy strikes when he is still only 9 years old.

We have spoken before about the universality of the human experience (and will again, I am sure). How much of these first two books in the Blue Sky trilogy is fiction and how much is autobiography is less important than the themes of child exploitation and mind control contained within.

The Grey Earth in particular is as relevant as anything Dickens wrote. Dshurukawaa’s experiences are as universal as those of Oliver Twist (although Dickens’s great flaw was that he could seemingly only feel empathy for boys like himself who had suffered the same indignities he experienced). Dshurukawaa’s fate is ultimately less bleak than Oliver Twist. He at least has two living parents to whom to return.

Mongolia is another of those places that exist in the periphery of the western imagination. Genghis Khan and his Mogul hordes; vile, ablest language given to us by eugenicists, as well as other fallacies of white supremacism that depressingly still inform much of western thought and policy making. So we turn to writers like Galsan Tschinag to bring these places into sharp focus.

Tschinag’s life continued to be buffeted by the forces of Communism. He studied German at Leipzig University in the 1960s (then called Karl Marx University), before becoming an university German teacher in Mongolia. In 1976, his teaching licence was revoked for "political untrustworthiness".

Approaching his 80^th year, Tschinag still lives in Mongolia and continues to write, mostly in German. The Blue Sky books were all originally written and published in the German language, with English translations of the first two books not being released until a decade or more after their original publication.

Der weiße Berg (The White Mountain) was released in German in 2000. The English translation is slated for release in 2027. However, as the date given is New Year’s Eve 2027, I am not holding my breath tht this will actually happen. If I want to finish the trilogy before that date, I might have to learn German. It’s not impossible, but seems unlikely.

The question is, will I finish this project before The White Mountain is finally released in English? Watch this space to find out.

Galsan Tschinag

Finland - The Year of the Hare

Country: Finland
Book: The Year of the Hare (Jäniksen vuosi)
Author: Arto Paasilinna
Publication Year: 1975 (English language version: 1995)
Genre: Fiction

"Finland , Finland , Finland.
The country where I quite want to be.
Your mountains so lofty.
Your treetops so tall.
Finland , Finland , Finland.
Finland has it all."

With 197 countries to pass through, sometimes you have to pick the most well known novel from that country and go on your way. For the tiny European country of Finland, that novel is arguably The Year of the Hare by Arto Paasilinna.

In referring to Finland as tiny, I mean only in terms of the number of people who live there. With a population of less than 6,000,000, Finland is a tenth as densely populated as the UK (while being bigger in terms of surfce area). Yet like all Scandinavian countries it has a high standard of living and its infrastructure is said (on YouTube architectural channels I have watched) to be insanely well designed.

Finland is in many ways the odd one out among the Nordic countries. The official language of Finnish is not a Germanic language like Swedish, Norwegian or Danish. On the Indo-European language tree, it sits on the Finno-Ugric branch, along with Hungarian, Estonian and a number of minor languages spoken in isolated parts of Russia.

Like England, Finland was under occupation by its neighbouring Sweden for several hundred years and as French was the official language of the English court for a period of 300 years, so Swedish became the official language of the state. Finnish was relegated to a language spoken by the peasantry as English was only spoken by serfs from 1066 until the time of Geoffrey Chaucer. Swedish remains one of the two official languages of Finland.

If Finland is small, Lapland to the north of the country is even smaller with a population under 200,000. It is traditionally the region of the world where Santa Claus lives. It is also the birth place of our writer of choice, Arto Paasilinna.

Paasilinna is one of the most well known writers outside of Finland. His books have been translated into nearly thirty languages and The Year of the Hare was a bestseller when it was released in 1975, although it was only translated into English in the mid 90s, despite being popular in other countries, especially France, from the time it was released.

The book is basically a shaggy-dog story. Or a shaggy-hare story (to quote from the Forward by Pico Iyer). Journalist, Kaarlo Vatanen, goes through a comical series of aventures after the car he is travelling in injures a young hare on the road. The animal becomes his pet and travelling companion as he evades his agent, editor and wife, heading deeper into the Finish wilderness.

The hare is a metaphor here for madness. Mad As a March Hare and all that, as popularised by Lewis Carol on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Indeed, Vatanen’s behaviour becomes more and more unhinged as he goes, going on a month long bender at one point and becoming engaged to a lawyer, despite being still married to his now very much estranged wife.

Other calamities and comic misunderstandings are not entirely Vatanen’s fault. He tries to get medical assistance for an old man who turns out to have died the day before. He causes a priest to shoot himself in the foot chasing the hare through his church. He chases a dangerous bear for days on skis and travels all the way into Soviet Russia.

Vatanen is arrested by the Russian army, extradited to Finland and imprisoned for a litany of offences. Yet this shaggy-hare story keeps one more twist at the end of its tale.

Writers invariably cherry pick from their own lives (half of Conan-Doyle’s characters are doctors, as he was himself a GP). Vatanen’s year of pilgrimage (to borrow from both Liszt and Haruki Murakami) mirror Paasilinna’s career. He starts life as a journalist, as Paasilinna was a journalist. He works as a forester and agricultural labourer, as Paasilinna did at points in his life.

Like many books that appeal to an audience beyond their host country, the narrative tropes of The Year of the Hare are universal. The journey of the comic, haphazard protagonist goes back to Cervantes’s Don Quixote and arguably all the way back to Homer’s Odyssey. We can place The Year of the Hare in a cannon that includes, Gulliver’s Travels, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Orlando, Travels With My Aunt and On the Road. Not too shabby at all.

Arto Paasilinna is another author to whom I am sure to cycle back around at some point in the future. I am acutely aware that the first few countries on this literary list will receive short shrift due to my keenness to sink my teeth into the project and blitz through some authors so I have to have something to write about. Finland is a country that intrigues me and I might do a deeper dive into its literature at a future point in time. For now, The Year of the Hare will have to suffice.

Travel, humour, forest fires, alcohol, sauna, bears, tundra and tilting at helicopters. The Year of the Hare, like Finland, has it all.

Arto Paasilinna

 

Egypt - Woman At Point Zero

Country: Egypt       

Book: Woman At Point Zero (امرأة عند نقطة الصفر‎)
Author: Nawal El Saadawi
Publication Year: 1977 (English language version: 1983)
Genre: Fiction/Creative Non-Fiction

Pharaohs, pyramids and hieroglyphs. These are the images we conjure up in the west when thinking of Egypt. Our image of North Africa’s most well known country is dry baked in images from more than 3,000 years ago.

When we do think of present day Egypt, it is usually through the eyes of western travelers. Michael Palin passing through on his way around the world, or travelling from one polar region to the other. Indiana Jones digging up the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark (the scenes were actually filmed in Tunisia). Or Agatha Christie’s various novels set in Egypt and the Middle East, of which Death on the Nile is surely the most famous.

In arriving in Egypt on the first stop of this literary journey around the world, it is surprising how much I have read set in the country without actually seeing it through Egyptian eyes.

I have read Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandrine Quartet, set in the city from which it takes its name. The four books feature a motley band of expat Europeans in the years leading up to the Second World War. While Egyptian life is heavily represented in the series, it is almost always seen through the eyes of colonisers and administrators rather than from viewpoint of the indigenous population.

Even this year, I have read P Djeli Clark’s, A Master of Djinn, a steampunk novel set in an alternative version of Cairo in which djinn and other fantastical creatures live and work in the city. Also, S A Chakraborty’s Daevabad Trilogy, which partly takes place in Cairo. However, both authors are American by birth and aren’t of Egyptian heritage. As well written as these book undoubtedly are, they hardly represent Egyptian life.

To find something more representative, I turn instead to Nawal El Saadawi’s 1977 novel, Woman At Point Zero. I’m sure there will be objections in choosing this book, both for its length (108 pages in translation) and its subject matter. However, I think it’s the perfect book with which to start and it’s my project, so if you don’t like it you can go lick a Sphinx. I’m joking of course.

Woman At Point Zero claims to be a true story. The account of a woman, Firdaus, who has been sentenced to death and tells her story to El Saadawi in her cell shortly before she is taken away to be hung in the prison courtyard.

That story is depressingly familiar. Good schooling that can’t result in a decent job for a woman living in a domineering male society. FGM. Arranged marriage. Abuse and exploitation, leading to a life of sex work and further abuse. Even when our hero achieves the only kind of success open to her, her victory is still results in a broken neck at the end of a rope.

The trope of the condemned prisoner telling their story on the eve of their execution is a well worn one in literature. I have no doubt the bulk of Firdaus’s story is based on real events, but when you’ve read and written as much as I have, you can spot the set pieces and embellishments quite easily. Yet no story is ever truly based on reality. Not even autobiography (especially not autobiography).

Woman At Point Zero moves like a freight train through Firdaus’s life and leaves you with dozens of  questions at its end. Which is what good books are meant to do. A book is a symbiotic relationship between reader and writer. When the final page is read and the book is closed, it is up to you as the reader to decide what to do with the story. What to read between the lines.

The irony is that Nawal El Saadawi was herself later imprisoned in the same prison for criticising President Sadat in 1981. It wasn’t her last brush with the Egyptian judicial system. Indeed, she was forced into exile in the 1990s after death threats from Islamists and spent a number of years teaching in the United States.

I said there would be objections to picking Woman At Point Zero to represent Egypt in this project and the criticism that is leveled at the book is that it presents a stereotypical view of Islam for western audiences.

This is a talking point I’m sure we will encounter many times during this project, because people always want to portray their own culture as some kind of socialist utopia and will brook no criticism.

Yet there is little in El Saadawi’s book that isn’t universal to all patriarchal societies, whether they be Muslim, Christian, Hindu, or Chinese Communism. Many of the scenes in Woman At Point Zero could be set on the streets of Soho with little difference in tone or male scuzziness. Pimps and punters are the same the world over.

Which is the ultimate testament to Nawal El Saadawi and Woman At Point Zero. That the novel is both local to Egypt and at the same time universal. It is also timeless. It could be set in the Egypt of Lawrence Durrell’s Justine or Mountolive and seem just as contemporary. Or even the 1910s of A Master of Djinn, or the Napoleonic era of the Daevabad Trilogy. It is the triumph of the novel: It is the tragedy of the world.

Nawal El Saadawi remained staunchly political her entire life. She founded the Arab Women's Solidarity Association shortly after her release from prison in 1982. She took part in the protests in Tahrir Square in 2011 during the Arab Spring. She died in 2021, aged 89. Which, as they say, is not a tragedy.

Literature at its best is fractal. It gives us important insights on one place or one point in time. Yet when we zoom out to the world, its focus and its impact remain just as razor sharp. Woman At Point Zero passes this test for great literature. It is exactly the kind of book that set me out on this global path. It’s a great place to start. It is somewhere to which I will no doubt return.

Nawal El Saadawi

 

Introducing the Project

What is the Reading the World Project?

The Short Answer

The Reading Our World Project is my attempt to read at least one book from a writer from every country in the world.

The Long Answer

I think it’s fair to say that anyone who’s known me for more than, say, an hour would describe me as a voracious reader. I have probably read somewhere in the region of 3,000 books during my adult life, having read very little as a child.

In that time (32+ years), I have read the classics and modern classics. I have read horror and science fiction. I have read graphic novels and comic book collections. I have read poetry, plays and history. I have read politics, philosophy and economics. I have read books in French, Spanish and Dutch (though my verbal skills in each of these languages remain rudimentary). I have read a lot of everything.

Recently, I’ve been reading a lot of Japanese literature after listening to the excellent Reading Japanese Literature podcast, hosted by Allison Fincher. Which started me thinking. How many different nationalities do those 3,000 books represent?

The answer, it turns out, is not very many. Out of 193 countries recognised by the United Nations, plus 4 countries granted ‘observer’ status (Kosovo, Palestine, the Holy See and Taiwan), I have read books by authors from 31 of them. Which is a pitiful amount. And there are some pretty glaring omissions in there too. Although I’ve read books by many British Indian writers, for instance, I have never read a book by an actual Indian writer. And while I have read books set in certain countries (Egypt for instance), I have yet to read a book written by someone born or native to that country.

Hence the current project, which is to read at least one book of any genre, fiction or non-fiction, from every country in the world.

Yet as the old cliché goes, journeys are more important than destinations, and so the aim is not merely to read one book from each country, but to learn about the countries and their culture as I go.

Inevitably there will be authors I discover and fall in love with along the way who will become part of my normal reading experience. In some countries I am also bound to find several authors I wish to read (as with Japan) and will want pause or return to those countries at a later date.

Indeed, I do not intend to read continuously for this project, but spend 3-4 years reading from the remaining 164 countries on the list, mixing them in with the things I would be reading anyway. I might read several books by the same writer, or several authors, before I decide to write about that country and its literary culture.

There is also the very important question: what is a country? As someone whose demographic classification can be best described as: white, able-bodied, hetero-normal male, I am well aware that people who look a lot like me have decided what constitutes a country over the previous two centuries and been pretty arbitrary in drawing the boundaries between the nations they invented. Many of the conflicts going on in the world to this day are the direct result of those acts of international carelessness, ignorance and outright neglect.

As such, this project is not straightforward and I will try to address issues of national and ethnic division as I go. When I read an Iraqi writer, for instance, whom do I chose? A Sunni writer? A Shiite writer? What about the Kurds? Or Yazidis, Assyrians and Turkmens? When I turn my attention to Rwanda, do I read a Hutu or a Tutsi writer? Is it culturally insensitive to even ask that question, born as it is from a western gaze that only sees Africa as continent of conflict and disaster?

These are not questions I can answer at the moment, but they do give another impetus to embark on this project. I want to read Kurdish writers and Tibetans. Books by first nations peoples from all over the world, as well as from other marginalised groups. Borders are arbitrary and the point of doing something like this is to learn something about the world. As a result, I hope the project will evolve as it proceeds.

The easy option would be to read one book from each country on the list, pat myself on the back, and slide further into middle age. However, the UN list is merely a roadmap and a political roadmap at best.

Moreover, it is no exaggeration to say that a country like China is much bigger than, say, Djibouti. How do I deal with the disparity in sizes of country? The answer here, I think, is to pay less attention to the larger (culturally and economically) countries and do more research when I come to somewhere that we, at least in the solipsistic west, do not think about every day. We don’t need to know the cultural history of Japan, China or America to enjoy their literature. Whereas places like Vanuatu, Dominica or Djibouti probably need more context in discussing their culture and how it relates to the writer(s) under consideration.

And this raises another possible objection. What constitutes a writer from a particular nation? I have already noted that I do not equate a British Indian author with being Indian. This isn’t meant to denigrate anyone with dual heritage. But when there are so many born and bred Indian writers resident in a country of over a billion people, I surely don’t need to read a book by someone born and raised in Britain to fill my ‘quota’ of Indian writers. The optics of a white British man doing so would be problematic to say the least.

The best way I can think to solve this culturally sensitive conundrum is to say that for the most part the person must have been born in that country. Or spent most of their life in residence there. If they are an expat living in another country, then the book or books I am reading must at be least tangentially connected to that country. They could be a Jordanian American, for instance, writing about the history or politics of Jordan.

I imagine there will be at least one country on this list that will force me to stretch these rules to breaking point, but we will cross that international border when we come to it, passport, visa and all.

Most of the books will be novels. That is inevitable. Yet I am also interested in reading poetry, biography, social commentary, or any other genre. Wherever possible, I will try to read writers from Spanish or French speaking countries in those languages.

My other rule for completing this project is that my default choice for each country will be female writers. This is simply because that tally of 3,000 books I have read is largely made up of white, male writers and I want to try and read at least a hundred women as I go. Hopefully many more than that.

3-4 years is a pretty relaxed timescale for someone who reads 100+ books most years, but it does also give me plenty of time to fall down some rabbits holes. If you look up African speculative and science fiction, for instance, you’ll see that most African writers in this genre are Nigerian (the most well known authors at least). Nigerian sci-fi is a subset all its own and needs to be researched, read and written about at some point. There are bound to be similar rabbit holes I fall down as I go.

As I say, there will be countries for which one or two authors are simply not enough to adequately explore the literary landscape and I will go further into national canon as and when the  mood takes me. I have plenty more Japanese authors to read in the meantime and will write something about them and other subjects as additional writing later in the course of the project. Like many people, my entry point into Japanese literature was Haruki Murakami, about whom I have already written. I will include that essay as the first extra publication.

As for countries I had already read before I started on this insane project, I will try to return to each of them in turn and chose some less obvious writers. Choosing Flann O’Brien or James Joyce for Ireland, for instance, is hack, even if they are two of my favourite writers. I think we can find someone who lies further beneath the surface of Irish literature. The same is true for America, the UK, France, Italy etc.

For reference, these are the 31 countries I’ve already read from and will return to periodically:

Algeria, Australia, Austria, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Czechia (Czech Republic), Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Poland, Russia, Senegal, Spain, Switzerland, Uganda, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States of America

If you are a citizen of a particular country and want to send me recommendations for what writers to read from your country , it would be most welcome. I have a collection of hard print and ebooks that should see me through at least the first year of the project, but I will certainly be grateful for any suggestions.

The first few books I have chosen are all quite short (200 pages or less), so I expect to write and publish the first half a dozen entries on these fairly quickly. After that entries might appear weekly, with specialised pieces coming as and when I write them.

Well that’s about it for my introductory remarks. In embarking on writing about this project, I hope to inspire some of you to move beyond your comfort zones and read and learn about literature from other cultures. I can of course never hope to offer a comprehensive review of 193, 197, or however many countries I end up reviewing during this project, but I hope it will at least be a window and introduction to new and interesting places in the world.

Feedback is welcome. Though I am under no obligation to agree with it (humour).

It should go without saying that this will be a curious, critical examination of the writers of the world and the countries from which they come. I will not pull any punches with regards to oppressive regimes or to the damage colonialism and empire have caused.

As such, at times we are going to have to discuss some upsetting acts and attitudes. If this is something that is liable to upset you, it is probably best you stop reading now. I will try to include trigger and spoiler warnings as and when appropriate.

Thank you for reading this overlong introduction. For the sake of brevity (not to mention work load), I will try and keep most of the regular post below 1,000 words. Special editions will usually run much longer.

Happy reading.

Rob

Coming soon…

Egypt
Finland
Mongolia
South Korea
Afghanistan