Around the World in 10 Books

Paris, France:
In the award-winning translation by Lydia Davis — herself a Booker Prize-winning writer — the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time sets the stage for one of the greatest (and longest!) masterpieces of modern fiction. Yet Swann’s Way stands on its own, even before anyone goes on to the remaining six volumes. I’d always known how important the book was said to be, but until I first read it, I had no idea how delightful it is to sink into its luxurious sentences. From young Marcel’s struggle to become a writer to Charles Swann’s tortured love affair with the faithless Odette, Swann’s Way creates a matchless portrayal, at once satiric, nostalgic, and profound, of Parisian life at the fin-de-siècle.

Poland, and points beyond:
Flights won the Man Booker International prize in 2018, and Tokarczuk was awarded the Nobel Prize the next year. The heroine of this darkly ironic novel travels the world to visit medical museums. She’s fascinated by preserved corpses and body parts, but what she’s really doing is collecting vivid stories along the way. As Tokarczuk said in her Nobel acceptance speech, “The world is a fabric we weave daily on the great looms of information, discussions, films, books, gossip, little anecdotes.” She notes that dictators know well that whoever weaves the story is in charge, and her fragmented tales work against any monolithic, authoritarian narrative. As she says: “When this story changes, so does the world.”

Lagos, Nigeria:

Both individually and together, this collection of short stories forms a bracing antidote to what Adichie has called “The Danger of a Single Story” — the title of a TED talk that’s been viewed some 24 million times. Adichie divides her time between her native Nigeria and the United States, and she often portrays Nigerians at home in a globalized Lagos or abroad in an often provincial USA. Adichie’s stories probe the consequences of decisions made or not made, as women deal with disappointing marriages or a widower is comforted by his wife’s ghost at night. In their blend of revelation and restraint, Adichie’s stories reveal the moral and psychological depths of the most everyday events.

Shiraz, Iran:
This collection by the eminent Persianist Dick Davis offers sparkling translations of love poems by the great 14^th-century poet Hafez and two of his contemporaries: Jahan Malek Khatun – a major woman poet, unusually for the time – and Obayd-e Zakani, who is exceptional in his frank eroticism, though less profound than Hafez. As Hafiz proudly declares in one of his poems, “No one has drawn aside the veil of Thought as Hafez has, / Or combed the curls of Speech as his sharp pen has, line by line.” For all three poets, Shiraz was a paradise on earth, where they created a garden of poetry amid the desert of mortal life.

Bengal, India:
Tagore published his novel in 1916, three years after he unexpectedly became the first Asian winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. His central characters — the aristocratic landowner Nikhil, his restless wife Bimala, and the seductive political firebrand Sandip — all describe themselves as split personalities, as they struggle to reconcile the forces of tradition and modernity in a colonial Bengal that itself was split in two in 1905, when the British divided Bengal into Hindu and Muslim regions. Tagore was a major poet and composed more than 2,000 songs, and his lyricism infuses his novel.

Beijing and Shanghai, China:
Lu Xun was a leader of the “New Culture” movement that revolutionized Chinese writing in the early twentieth century. He’d shifted from medical studies to literature; as he wrote in the preface to his first collection of stories, Outcry (1923), he’d decided that “however rude a nation was in physical health, if its people were intellectually feeble, they would never become anything other than cannon fodder. . . . The first task was to change their spirit.” This he sought to do in a series of brilliant satires, including his novella The Real Story of Ah-Q. Condemned to death for a crime he didn’t commit, Ah-Q reflects that a “in the rich tapestry of life, a man is destined sometimes to have his head cut off.” Chinese literature would never be the same again.

Edo to Ogaki, Japan:
Bashō (1644-1694) is the most prominent Japanese poet in world literature. Starting in the late nineteenth century, readers around the world were struck by the contemplative beauty of his haiku, and Ezra Pound and the European Imagists were strongly influenced by poems such as his famous haiku on a frog in a pond: “an ancient pond / a frog jumps in – / the splash of water.” Bashō was an inveterate traveler; as he says in The Narrow Road to the Deep North: “The gods seem to have possessed my soul and turned it inside out, and roadside images seemed to invite me from every corner, so that it was impossible for me to stay idle at home.” His travelogues blend poetry and keen social observation, meditative solitude and deep human solidarity.

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil:
No one could have predicted that the son of a mixed-race house painter and a laundress would emerge as the most important Brazilian writer of the nineteenth century, but Machado de Assis created himself as a major writer by recreating the novel. The deceased narrator of his comic masterpiece, Brás Cubas, says that he is writing “with the pen of mirth and the ink of melancholy.” In his life as well as in what he called his “free form” novel, Machado de Assis made his way, like some Yosemite free climber, up the cracks and fault lines of Brazilian society. He left us an incomparable map of a distinctly un-utopian Brazil in the melancholy comedy of his deceased yet immortal hero’s journey around life.

Islands worldwide:
Schalansky’s book is subtitled Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will. Her atlas pairs a map of each island with a facing description, really a page-long prose poem. These miniature epics are typically based in some document that she has uncovered in her library in Berlin and then imbued with a poet-novelist’s vision. As she says: “An island offers a stage: everything that happens on it is practically forced to turn into a story, into a chamber piece in the middle of nowhere, into the stuff of literature.” She feels a special affinity for Jules Verne, whose novels she describes as “daydreams for everyday use, atlases for those who stay at home.” No better way to travel, at least just now.