The wondrous Georgia sent me a link to Dan Vyleta's 'Top 10 Books in Second Languages' this morning -- it is a fascination article, and well worth a read. Vyleta says of his own multilingualism:
"The answer is that English is my own, never mind when I acquired it. That I chose it the way one chooses a spouse, which is to say I fell in love with it. I wrote my first cheque in English; met my life's companion in English. I can no longer remember a day when I did not think, and dream, in English. There was never a question in my mind that I would write my books in anything else"
Here is the curated list:
The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
Conrad, aka Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, is the patron saint of exophonic authors. A latecomer to English – he only mastered it in his 20s – Conrad reads like he taught Greene and Maugham how to write. The Secret Agent is perhaps his funniest book, a wonderful exposé of the interdependency of the intelligence community and domestic terrorists which surely must have left its stamp on Le Carré.
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Nabokov is not the most perfect example of an exophonic writer – he learned English as a young child, from his parents and tutors, and reputedly was able to write in English before he could write in Russian – but Lolita is simply too good a book to be left out. Opening with what may be the best paragraph written in the English language ("Lolita, life of my life, fire of my loins."), it features a Lynchean journey through an America made up of highways, anonymous motels, and tennis courts. That and a paedophile's confession of a murder. Unforgettable.
Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler
A Hungarian by birth, Koestler penned a trilogy of books on the pitfalls of communism, of which the first volume, The Gladiators, was written in Hungarian, the second, Darkness at Noon, in German and the third, Arrival and Departure, in English. Darkness at Noon, published in 1940, offered a chilling analysis of the Stalinist purges of the late 1930s and ranks with Solzhenitsyn's and Grossman's work on the subject. Orwell was bowled over by it – and raided it for his 1984.
Waiting by Ha Jin
A true emigré writer, a Chinese exchange student who stayed on in the US in the wake of Tiananmen Square, Ha Jin has dissected the politics of writing in an adopted tongue in the essay collection The Writer as Migrant. Achingly beautiful, quiet and graceful, his award-winning novel Waiting is a love story superimposed on a political allegory. A man waits 18 years for his divorce so he can re-marry for love, while China is changing.
The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon
I heard Hemon interviewed at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto some years ago. He related a story about his wife reading through one of his manuscripts. "You can't say this in English," she told him. He shook his head. "You can now." A Bosnian writer stranded in the US by the Yugoslav War, Hemon switched to English and became a national sensation. The Lazarus Project captures the American immigrant experience, present and past.
The Bridge of the Golden Horn by Emine Sevgi Özdamar (translated by Martin Chalmers)
One of the first German writers who arrived in the country as a guest worker and successfully made the giant leap into the (closely guarded) German literary canon. Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn literally spans the worlds between Özdamar's Turkish home and 1960s Germany. Aesthetically daring, funny, moving: a quintessential guide to that ill-understood term, "migration".
Less Than One by Joseph Brodsky
When Joseph Brodsky was asked whether he was American or Russian after receiving the Nobel prize for literature in 1987, he answered: "I am Jewish – a Russian poet and an English essayist." Less Than One is a collection of essays – call it memoir, call it literary criticism, or that modern, catch-all term "literary non-fiction", it is a modern masterpiece. Look out also for Brodsky's translations of his own Russian poems: only a genius would dare to rhyme "omelette" with "vomit" and get away with it.
True History by Lucian of Samosata
Like much of his biography, Lucian of Samosata's native language is a little hard to establish with certainty (Assyrian is a top contender). True History dates from the second century AD and was written in the classical Greek of an era that must have already seemed ancient to his contemporaries. One of a handful of Greek novels that were passed down to us, True History reads like a 1920s science fiction story from a pulp magazine, featuring aliens, interplanetary war, and a truly humongous whale. Great fun.
Molloy by Samuel Beckett
It is easy to forget, somehow, that Beckett wrote much of his most remarkable work in French. Molloy is the end of all detective fiction: private eye Jacques Moran seeks the vagrant Molloy, now living in his mother's room and not, it seems, entirely sure how he got there. Dense, funny, wise, and presented on the page in a manner (two paragraphs of unbroken text) that has put the fear of God into whole generations of readers.
Peter Schlemihl's Wondrous Story by Adelbert von Chamisso
Fleeing from the revolution in his native France, young Adelbert became the author, in 1813, of one of Germany's most famous tales. Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte, tells the story of a man who sells his shadow for gold and is henceforth exiled from the brotherhood of man. Today, Chamisso lends his name to a German national prize for exophonic and migrant writing.
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