Join the Ohio Center for the Book and Clevo Books (1026 Euclid Ave in downtown Cleveland) a bookstore that specializes in translated literature, for engaging discussions of recent works of international literature.
All discussions take place from 6:00 pm to 7:00 pm.
Thursday, January 16
Kairos by Jenny Erpeneck (2023, translated from German by Michael Hofmann)
Erpenbeck’s new novel Kairos—an unforgettably compelling masterpiece—tells the story of the romance begun in East Berlin at the end of the 1980s when nineteen-year-old Katharina meets by chance a married writer in his fifties named Hans. Their passionate yet difficult long-running affair takes place against the background of the declining GDR (German Democratic Republic aka East Germany), through the upheavals wrought by its dissolution in 1989 and then what comes after. In her unmistakable style and with enormous sweep, Erpenbeck describes the path of the two lovers, as Katharina grows up and tries to come to terms with a not always ideal romance, even as a whole world with its own ideology disappears. Winner of the 2024 International Booker Prize. (Excerpt from publisher)
Thursday, March 20
Divided Island by Daniela Tarazona (2024, translated from Spanish by Lizzie Davis & Kevin Gerry Dunn)
Divided Island is the story of a woman with a neurological disorder. The day she goes in for the encephalogram that will lead to her diagnosis, she finds herself splitting in two. One of the two women she becomes decides to travel to an island to take her own life; the other remains behind. Scenes and images real and imagined gradually coalesce into the story of a life told from a singular location: a way of perceiving and describing the world, guided by cerebral dysrhythmia. Written in scraps and fragmented chapters, Divided Island is a nonlinear narrative best read as a poetic experience, in which the protagonist’s memories and dreams recompose the world and, in doing so, trouble the very notion of the self. (From the publisher)
Thursday, May 15
Blue Lard by Vladimir Sorokin (2024, translated from Russian by Max Lawton)
Denounced as an abomination on publication in 1999 … this ferocious takedown of Russian greatness has since found its way into the canon of Russian literature itself. The book begins in a futuristic laboratory where genetic scientists speak in a dialect of Russian mixed with Chinese. There they work to clone famous Russian writers, who are then made to produce texts in the style of their forebears. The goal of this “script-process” is not the texts themselves but the blue lard that collects in the small of their backs as they write. This substance is to be used to power reactors on the moon—that is, until a sect of devout nationalists breaks in to steal the blue lard, planning to send it back in time to an alternate version of the Soviet Union, one that exists on the margins of a Europe conquered by a long-haired Hitler with the ability to shoot electricity from his hands. What will come of this blue lard? Who will finally make use of its mysterious powers? Max Lawton’s translation of Blue Lard, the first into English, captures this key work in all its grotesque, havoc-making, horrifying, visceral intensity. (Excerpted from the publisher)
Thursday, July 17
On the Clock by Claire Baglin (2025, translated from French by Jordan Stump)
Claire Baglin’s On the Clock packs a family saga, a penetrating picture of social inequality, and a coming-of-age story into a compact tale told in two alternating strands. The first follows the 20-year-old narrator’s summer job at a fast food franchise and the other shows us moments from her childhood with her family, with a particular focus on her hapless, infuriating, good-hearted father, a low-paid but devoted electrician in a factory. These two skeins sketch out in swift turns two stories of underappreciated work: one covering several decades, the other a summer; one constituting a sort of life, the other a stopgap on the way to something different (the narrator is a college student). With a keen eye for eloquent details and a sharp ear for workplace jargon, dry humor, and a crisp compelling style, Baglin’s depiction of their lives is particularly rich, at once affectionate and alienated. (From the publisher)
Thursday, September 18
Comrade Papa by GauZ’ (2024, translated from French by Frank Wynne)
A Financial Times Best Book of 2024: Fiction in Translation. Mourning the recent deaths of his parents, a young white man in nineteenth-century France joins a colonial expedition attempting to establish trading routes on the Ivory Coast and finds himself caught between factions who disagree on everything—except their shared loathing of the British. A century later, a young Black boy born in Amsterdam gives his account, complete with youthful malapropisms, of his own voyage to the Ivory Coast, and his upbringing by his father, Comrade Papa, who teaches him to always fight “the yolk of capitalism.” In exuberant, ingenious prose, GauZ’ superimposes their intertwined stories, looking across centuries and continents to reveal the long arc of African colonization. (From the publisher)