Stuck in a Book

Every Christmas, I seem to read a book I was given for the previous Christmas. Partly that’s me looking at a particular book and thinking, “Gosh, I’ve wanted to read that for a whole year.” Partly it’s because I have time over Christmas to read anything I fancy, and so I grab a pile of books that look like fun. One of them this Christmas was Ann Morgan’s The World Between Two Covers: Reading the Globe (2015), also published as Reading the World: Confessions of a Literary Explorer. I can’t imagine why the title was changed. Anyway, thanks for buying me this last year, Mum and Dad!

(I say I read this over Christmas – crucially, I finished it this year – so this will be the first link in my Century of Books.)

Ann Morgan runs a book blog to this day, but the title refers to the reading challenge she set herself in 2012: reading a book published by someone from every country in the world. That puts A Century of Books in perspective, doesn’t it? This was back in the peak of the book blogging phenomenon, and when any popular blog seemed to be given a book deal. Morgan’s book is fascinating, even if it doesn’t quite do what it says on the cover.

The World Between Two Covers does start with the genesis of the idea – which came from a comment on her blog. The first chapter is all about deciding to embark on the challenge, working out the list of countries (as you can imagine, not the easiest or most politically neutral task), and wondering if it were possible. Throughout the book we do occasionally get hints about the difficult parts of the challenge (how to get a book from a North Korean? What about South Sudan, which had only existed as an independent country for about six months when Morgan started the project?) and there are mentions of readers and authors who post Morgan their favourite books from any particular country. But, by and large, the mechanics and experience of the reading challenge are largely absent from the book.

I was a bit disappointed by that, I’ll confess. I love reading about reading, particularly the difficult challenges – I think particularly of Tolstoy and the Purple Chair or The Whole Five Feet – and those books often become de facto memoirs. That makes them all the stronger, in my opinion. For whatever reason, Morgan’s book is not that. Perhaps the publisher, or she, decided that readers could already find all that information on her blog. So what The World Between Two Covers is really is a series of essays that are borne of the experience – not about the experience itself. On those terms, is a fascinating and wide-ranging collection.

There are sections on self-publishing and electronic books, on writing under totalitarian regimes, on book banning, on the legacies of imperialism. Morgan covers an enormous spectrum of topics and her research is extraordinary. I didn’t learn a huge amount about the almost 200 books she read, though a fair few are mentioned (almost never evaluatively), but I learned a lot about all sorts of other things. The legacies of her reading, rather than her actual reading. For instance, I loved the chapter on culture shock and the things that are left unexplained for an audience that will not need the holding hand, but which become baffling for an audience in translation. It was also about how we orient ourselves as readers, for better or worse.

In the absence of anything else, we tend to draw on our own experiences to make the best of things as go along. Because reading is an active process in which , as Wolfgang Iser has it , we participate by ‘filling in the gaps left by the text’, we search for things to plug the interpretative holes crying out for our attention. We look for equivalences between what we are engaged in imagining and what we have encountered before – just as in real life we might reach for a comparison to help others picture a place that they have never been, dubbing Montreal the Paris of the West, for instance, or Udaipur the Venice of the East. When I read Libyan writer Ibrahim Al-Kon’s The Bleeding of the Stone during my project, I found myself repeatedly drawn to make comparisons between the novel’s poetic evocation of the age-old practices of the Bedouian and the mournful homage to the rural traditions in the works of Thomas Hardy. The parallel may have some truth to it – both writers have negative things to say about the effect of progress on people who live off, and steward, the land – but it is also distorting, because expectations based on Hardy have no place in Al-Koni’s novel. If I were to give in to the temptation to read the novel in Hardy’s terms, I would find the gory denouement – in which the lone Bedouin protagonist Asouf is crucified – inexplicable and nonsensical. The jolt between what I anticipate and what comes would be too violent and I would have no option but to reject the story as absurd.

It’s a fascinating chapter, and naturally doesn’t come up with any hard-and-fast conclusions. But it did challenge my expectations on how much I can learn about a culture by reading fiction from it – particularly fiction aimed primarily at people also from that culture. And often, of course, in translation.

On that note, I found the chapter on translation particularly interesting. Perhaps the championing of translators isn’t something the book blogging world needs to hear as much as others, but it remains shameful that so few books published in the UK (and other English-speaking countries in the West) are in translation. We see so little of the world’s literature, and the things we do get are often filtered through such rigorous expectations that we only get what the publishing industry knows we won’t find too unsettling. As Morgan notes, that means that Scandinavian crime novels are translated – because they fit our expectations of what crime novels should be – while other cultures aren’t represented in our bookshops at all. I noticed last year that there were enormous numbers of Japanese books about cats available in translation – but not that much else. I can’t imagine that Japanese authors solely write whimsical books about cats (welcome though they are).

Not all the books Morgan reads are in translation. There were, of course, those already written by people from English-speaking countries – but other writers choose English as their language even when it is not their mother tongue. It opens them up to a wider market, and in some cases is a safer language to write in. The only book from her list that I have read is a case in point – Ilustrado by Filipino author Miguel Syjuco – though English is also an official language of the Philippines alongside Filipino (a standardised version of Tagalog).

When I went to look up Morgan’s review of Ilustrado, there was a grumpy comment from someone saying “This was a bad choice for a book representing the Philippines. […] I’m sorry you chose this.” As Morgan points out in her reply, no book could represent an entire country and that isn’t the aim of the challenge. But she also wants something that isn’t too unrepresentative – which is why she isn’t interested in (say) a book by a Brit about visiting the Philippines. Earlier in the book, she discusses whether or not her choice of book needs to be set in the country in question at all:

For the most part, however, just as residency in a place is only part of the picture when it comes to human beings’ sense of national and cultural identity, so setting makes for a rather one-sided approach when it comes to the quest for authenticity in literature from around the world. After all, if national identity is as much about thoughts, feelings and perspective as it is about physical presence in a region, then surely the cultural uniqueness or specialness of a work is likely to be located as much in its voice and mindset and assumptions underpinning it as in its setting, if not far more so. When you think about it, there’s no reason why a Zimbabwean work about a kingdom under the sea couldn’t every bit as enlightening, thought-provoking and culturally specific as the most faithful portrayal of life in Mugabe’s Harare.

This paragraph gave me pause for thought. I don’t think I entirely agree. It’s why, when I was looking for recommendations for Canadian novelist Helen Humphreys, I disregarded the ones set in the UK. I wouldn’t necessarily rule out the ‘kingdom under the sea’ option, but I don’t want to read a Zimbabwean author writing about Nigeria as much as I want to read a Zimbabwean author writing about Zimbabwe. Yes, the ‘cultural uniqueness or specialness’ is going to be found in ‘voice and mindset and assumptions’ (of course, every country will have as many of those as it does citizens) as much as the setting – but why not get both? To truly engage with a country, I want to read a book set in that country by an author from that country – ideally set in a time they know, too. But I recognise that is my own set of wishes and requisites, not a universal law.

Morgan’s book is continually thought-provoking, as well as engagingly written. It feels conversational as well as knowledgeable, and it’s a lovely combination. As I say, it isn’t the book I thought I was getting when I started it – but it’s very good at what it’s aiming to do.