Transliteration redux

A few weeks ago I went on at length about how much I adore crime fiction in translation. Now the Observer’s Louise France picks up on this and asks around as to why European crime novels are so compelling to read:

Nicci Gerrard, whose

thrillers co-written with her husband Sean French are best sellers in

Holland and Germany as well as Britain, argues that many European crime

books are more compelling than their American counterparts because

‘life is not cheap. While the American style is more hard-hitting, with

high body counts and terrorists dropping from the sky, European books

are more intimate.’

Norwegian

writer Karin Fossum creates simple stories with psychological depth,

and is more interested in the crime than the criminal. She tells me:

‘If I have a mission, it is to show the perpetrators as human beings.

To show that they didn’t want the crime to happen either, that it

wasn’t something they dreamed about.’ ¼ » Perhaps this is why European

thrillers are often more popular with women readers than men. For me,

they’re a compelling alternative to homogenised British fiction: given

the choice between a train journey in the company of a murderer with a

dark secret or a distant cousin of Bridget Jones, I know which I’d

rather choose. Characterisation and atmosphere are often more important

than the bald mechanics of whodunit. Gianrico Carofiglio, an Italian

writer who will be published in Britain for the first time this summer,

barely includes any detective work in his thriller Involuntary Witness,

but the novel still manages to build up to a climax which keeps us

guessing. We discover new horizons; landscape is often a character,

too. The fascination in Eugenio Fuentes’s award-winning novel The

Depths of the Forest is the fact that the woods, described in menacing

detail and inspired by the countryside of Extremadura, are a metaphor

for the murder.

Whether

they reveal a country’s attitude to manners or morals, food or sex, a

European thriller is the antidote to guidebook flummery. These are

often novels with a social conscience grappling with the issues of

21st-century Europe: people-trafficking in the Ukraine, the rights of

immigrant workers in Paris sweatshops, racism in Italy. Liza Marklund’s

Swedish thrillers are often based on the real-life stories she covered

when she worked as a crime reporter on a national newspaper. She says

she needs to actually witness what she wants to describe before she can

write about it. In fact, many European authors have lived what they’re

writing about: in the past six months I’ve read thrillers by a Dutch

cross dresser, an Italian ex-con and a German drug addict.

Translated crime novelists mentioned at length include Carofiglio, Marklund, Fred Vargas, Fossum and Eugenio Fuentes.

I’ll just keep on sounding the same drum again: there are fabulous writers who aren’t known to the English speaking public and thanks to the effort of small presses like Arcadia and Bitter Lemon (as well as larger ones like Harvill Secker) they are getting attention and readership. May the pie grow and add more pieces for more authors.