Foreign fiction gets a raw deal. It’s usually quarantined away in the dustier enclaves of the bookshop, along with all the other worthy but immovable fare: short story collections, regional poetry
and non A-level drama.
Perhaps buyers and sellers think that ‘non-UK stuff’ has been dealt with by that merrily inclusive idea of ‘world literature’ – the prose often still in English, but
with a refreshingly exotic spice (see Salman Rushdie). But the size of the knowledge gap, mine included, is frightening. The Independent recently announced the long-list for their
Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2011. Scanning down the chosen fifteen, the alien names brought a blush to my cheek: Jenny Erpenbeck, Marcelo Figueras, Per Wästberg, Juli Zeh etc. The only
one I’d heard of (or could pronounce) was Orhan Pamuk, and then simply because he found favour with the Nobel committee a few years ago.
The malaise goes deeper. There’s a growing school of thought that says we are, as a nation, a tad unadventurous with our cultural pickings. When push comes to shove, we’d rather have that
glitzy re-run of Hamlet than ever think of tackling Hugo. First off, in the Telegraph, Simon Heffer rightly lamented the dictatorship of the Bard in school classrooms, bullying
all others off the curriculum. Then Richard Brooks, Arts editor of The Sunday Times, wagged a stern finger on last week’s edition of The
Culture Show at the predictable choices for the cultural olympiad next year (the RSC, the Globe, the National Theatre, the British Museum and the BBC are all doing Shakespeare). Could we not, he
argued, vary the menu with some Marlowe, Sheridan or Galsworthy?
Which brings us back to the more general itch about narrowness and foreign-fiction. What would it look like, say, to give Per Wästberg’s The Journey of Anders Sparrman (one of the Independent’s long-listed titles, originally in Swedish), a
plug in the 2-for-1 stand? A bit of translated Wästberg could facilitate a well-earned sabbatical for Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals. It would be an admirable idea, surely.
Of course, there is always the option of tackling the original text, cue the GCSE primer, a dictionary and several years of slog…On second thoughts, perhaps I better try and get through The Moor’s Last Sigh first.
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