Translated literature has taken strong roots recently, especially for people under the age of thirty-five. They are picking up more and more translated works from across the countries. Translated literature rose to fame due to trending reels on BookTok and Bookstagram. There is also a need among the readers to explore other cultures and diversify their horizons through literature. This reading trend is often associated with being “cultured”, apart from Murakami or Dostoevsky. There is a new generation of contemporary authors who are in the spotlight because of the numerous awards their work has received.
So if you are looking for a contemporary fictional translated literature reading list, then The Bombay Circle Press is here to solve your quandary and provide you with the best recommendations!
- Cobalt Blue by Sachin Kundalkar, Jerry Pinto (Translator)
This novel was originally written in Marathi. Following the story of a pair of siblings, a brother and a sister who fall in love with the same man, it explores complex inter-personal relationships of the characters with their family and with each other. A story about love, grief, identity and the omniscient social constructs that govern all of their lives. This novel is written from two perspectives, divided in two halves. One by Tanay, the brother who is figuring out his identity, and Anuja, who feels trapped in the proposed traditional setup of her life as ultimately being someone’s wife. Both of them find an escape, when their family hosts a charming paying guest. Set in the backdrop of a traditional Marathi familial setting, all hell breaks loose soon.
- Happening by Annie Ernaux, Tanya Leslie (Translator)
In 1963, Annie Ernaux, twenty-three and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a plague. Understanding that her pregnancy will mark her and her family as social failures, she knows she cannot keep that child. This is the story, written forty years later, of a trauma Ernaux never overcame. In a France where abortion was illegal, she attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist, and ended up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly died.
In Happening, Ernaux sifts through her memories and her journal entries dating from those days. This memoir urges the reader to not only be aware about women’s rights in the 21st century, but also compels you to rethink your perspective on society where women still do not have autonomy over their body.
- Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree, Daisy Rockwell (Translator)
An eighty-year-old woman slips into a deep depression at the death of her husband, then resurfaces to gain a new lease on life. Her determination to fly in the face of convention—including striking up a friendship with a trans woman—confuses her bohemian daughter, who is used to thinking of herself as the more “modern” of the two. At the older woman’s insistence they travel back to Pakistan, simultaneously confronting the unresolved trauma of her teenage experiences of Partition. Rather than responding to tragedy with seriousness, Geetanjali Shree’s playful tone and exuberant wordplay results in a book that is engaging, funny, and utterly original. At the same time, being an urgent and timely protest against the destructive impact of borders and boundaries, whether between religions, countries or genders.
- I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman Ros Schwartz (Translator)
A young woman is kept in a cage underground with thirty-nine other females, guarded by armed men who never speak; her crimes unremembered…if indeed there were crimes.
The youngest of forty—a child with no name and no past—she survives for some purpose long forgotten in a world ravaged and wasted. In this reality where intimacy is forbidden—in the unrelenting sameness of the artificial days and nights—she knows nothing of books and time, of needs and feelings. A young woman who has never known men—a child who knows of no history before the bars and restraints—must now reinvent herself, piece by piece, in a place she has never been…and in the face of the most challenging and terrifying of unknowns: freedom.
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