Ihsan Kouddous, trained as a lawyer and employed as a journalist, wrote fiction about the Arab world way ahead of its time, pared down and powerful (he argued for a new literary Arabic that would eschew formalities and flourishes). However, Kouddous’s prose deserves more than simple comparisons to Nabokov’s. Both novel and film adaptation caused an uproar, with the narrator Nadia’s look back at her 16-year-old revenge behavior scandalous. This shouldn’t require much more introduction than “This is the Egyptian Lolita” because, when Kouddous released it in the 1950s, that’s how it was received. Since it’s an Austrian town, get ready for some tough, sad stories from wartime, but Seethaler remains a master of modulation and provides much of it through perspectives on marital conflict. Seethaler’s previous five novels include the International Booker Prize finalist A Whole Life and The Tobacconist and the thing he does best here is to show not just who once lived in this Austrian town, but how their lives actually shaped its fields, streets, businesses, and current outlook. In the hands of author Seethaler and his translator Charlotte Collins, who infuse equal amounts of melancholia and dark humor into these character tales, The Field comes alive (sorry, sorry, I couldn’t help it). The Field is a version of a common trope, the “cemetery novel” if you will-an elderly man who sits on a bench each day by the graveyard in Paulstadt becomes convinced he can hear its residents’ voices, and before long, they’ve taken over the book. Thank you, literary translators, for allowing us to read works from around the globe. While not all of this month’s Books You May Have Missed are works in translation, as always, when I do include translated works here, I like to keep the names of the translators on the same line as those of the authors. I’m in the latter camp, less due to any protracted thought about the problem than due to having spoken with translators and knowing how hard they work and how carefully and seriously they take that work. Others believe translators are full collaborators who help to create a new work of art from a work in its first language, to another, and deserve equal billing. Some consider a translator to be like a musical accompanist, someone necessary who remains largely in the background-the only name needed for promotion is the principal musician. Recently debate has raged (well, raged as hard as any debate in literary circles can) about whether or not the names of translators should be placed on book covers, either below or in close proximity to the authors’ names.
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