I think more and more these days about novels and their translations, how much of the quality of what we read in English is thanks to the translator, and how non-English speaking readers must be responding to American novels translated into their languages. I recently finished The Hunger Angel, Herta Muller, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009. It’s a fascinating book, more for stylistic qualities than theme — life in a Russian-run concentration (or worker) camp in the mid- to late 1940s.

As the title suggests, hunger not only is the central fountain of suffering but also the savior of the main character/narrator, helping him to “feel the rawest connection to life.” The bulk of the action takes place in the camp, depressing enough, but the alienation the narrator undergoes when he returns home is worse. The form of the novel is of the narrator writing in a journal of sorts. For the most part, the unjust, brutal, and downright strange life in the work camp is alternately described directly and bluntly (“1 shovel load = 1 gram bread”) and then with a powerful prose/poetry style:

“Hunger is an object. The angel has climbed into my brain. The angel doesn’t think. He thinks straight. He’s never absent. He knows my boundaries and he knows his direction. He knows where I come from and he knows what he does to me. He knew all of this before he met me, and he knows my future.”

An oddity of the novel is that the work camp is a coke processing plant (coke is made from coal and is used in steel production) and the reader is treated to some interesting details of industrial processing through chapters with titles like “Cement, On Coal, On Yellow Sand, On Slag, Cinder Blocks, and On Chemical Substances.” Of course, I am intrigued because I am a chemical engineer, but the beauty of the language is striking, as in this example:

“Anthracene is another chemical substance. It lurks on every path and eats through your rubber galoshes. Anthracene is oily sand, or oil that has crystallized into sand. When you step on it, it instantly reverts to oil, inky blue, silver green like trampled mushrooms.”

The passage alternately reads like entries in a textbook, then poetic descriptions of an evil monster.

Mostly, I note The Hunger Angel, not only as worth your reading time, but as another example of how the “big” non-American novels and novelists choose vastly different central themes, an observation I dwelled on in an earlier post: http://jasonmakansi.com/the-global-american-footprint-in-fiction/

This continues to fascinate me. It’s only an observation based on my own recent reading selections, but there seems to be such a divergence in what American novelists write about and the rest of the world’s authors. There’s plenty of suffering going on in America, but our literary world is more lathered up about the ironic intersection of pop culture, high art, moneyed society, low-brow professionals, media sensationalism, social media, and corrections to the historical record for maligned segments of the population. Perhaps that is the luxury of a largely academically trained literary community writing in the lone superpower country. Even one that just came through the “Great Recession.”

Beyond that, I would love to be privy to the mind meld of author and translator for these non-English authored novels I’ve been reading. It must be difficult enough between writer and editor.