Building Bridges Between Cultures

Here is a selection of world fiction I came across on the Vintage Books website. Books especially literature, like films can open windows on foreign cultures enabling us to understand each other better, thereby allowing bridges to be built across cultural and geographical divides. So if you love books as much as I do then I hope you can enjoy some of those below:

DENMARK
Johannes Reis, editor at Gyldendal, would give his best friend a novel he worked on after the author’s untimely death: Jakob Ejersbo’s Liberty (forthcoming in English from the Maclehose Press). The novel is the third volume in Ejersbo´s Africa Trilogy, and is the story of two friends, Christian from Denmark and Marcus from Tanzania, alternating between their points of view. It explores friendship, love, loss, good intentions and corruption. ‘I admire it not least because of its insistence that we all exist in a larger context than our own immediate concerns,’ says Johannes.
FRANCE
Jean Mattern, Editor at Gallimard chooses an Icelandic novel by Jon Kalman Stefansson called Himnariki og Helviti (Heaven and Hell). ‘It's simply one of the most beautiful novels I have read in my whole life,’ he says.

GERMANY
Hans Juergen Balmes, editor at Fischer Verlag, would give his best friend Alberto Manguel’s wonderful puzzle of a novel All Men Are Liars, about a French journalist investigating the unexplained death of a brilliant South American writer Alejandro Bevilacqua, found lying on his balcony floor in Madrid in the mid-1970s.
GREECE
Angela Sotiriou, Editor at Psichogios, distinguishes between the sexes. To her best male friend she would give Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy. Her best girlfriend would receive a Greek novel: Thodoris Papatheodorou’s Mothers of Empty Embrace, which is about mothers losing their children during the Greek civil war.
ITALY
Fabio Muzi Falcone, editor at Feltrinelli, picks a French novel: Laurent Mauvignier’s Des hommes (About Men). Set in a small French village, it tells the story of Bernard, a man reduced to a shadow of what he used to be. In his past, there is a tremendous wound that hasn’t healed: the war in Algeria. ‘It’s the best contemporary novel I’ve read in a long time,’ says Fabio. ‘The first quarter of the book is amazing: written in a kind of quick slow-motion, the smallest detail becomes a revelation. Pure pleasure!’
JAPAN
Kazuto Yamaguchi, editor at Kodansha, chooses a children’s picture book by the well-known Japanese author Yoko Sano: The Cat Who Lived a Million Times. ‘It teaches us,’ he says, ‘a profound truth about life.’
HOLLAND
Michele Hutchison, editor at De Arbeiderspers, would give The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker, winner of this year's IMPAC Prize. ‘I loved the purity of the prose,’ she says, ‘the heart-wrenching bleakness of the setting and the solitude of the characters – it is painfully beautiful and utterly unforgettable.’
INDIA
Chiki Sarkar of Random House India picks Rabindranth Tagore’s  Three Women. The three novellas collected in the book are deeply felt, nuanced stories of upper-class Bengali women at the turn of the century, each one inadvertently caught up in an illicit love. ‘If you like Turgenev's First Love, Kate Chopin's Awakening or Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, then this is the book for you,’ says Chiki. ‘Perfect to curl up with in front of the Christmas fire.’
MEXICO
Mexican critic Angel Gurria would give Chico Buarque’s Leite Derramado (Spilt Milk). The author is Brazil's most celebrated singer-songwriter, but he has proved he is also one of his country's most remarkable novelists. The book is a masterfully nuanced riches-to-rags family saga narrated by an unreliable centenarian, offering a rich and melancholy evocation of Rio de Janeiro's decadence.
MIDDLE EAST
André Gaspard of Saqi Books suggests Hassan Massoudy’s The Calligrapher’s Garden. ‘This book is about all that is beautiful and loving,’ he says.
PORTUGAL
Clara Capitão, editor at Objectiva, would give Antonio Tabucchi’s Requiem, the only novel the Italian novelist wrote in Portuguese. ‘It is a wonderful book with a dreamy texture,’ she says, ‘which pays homage to the beautiful city of Lisbon and to the immortal poetry of Fernando Pessoa.’
RUSSIA
Russian literary agent Elena Kostioukovitch chooses Imago by Ludmila Ulitskaya, a novel about three gifted friends in seventies Moscow who get caught up in the dissident movement. ‘It is full of humour and philosophy, emotion and artistry,’ says Elena. ‘Episodes pass, often in a single paragraph, from high tragedy to almost Svejkian comedy: a very serious and very funny book.’
SPAIN
Miguel Aguilar, editor at Random House Mondadori, chooses Javier Cercas’s Anatomia de un instante (The Anatomy of a Moment), ‘a fascinating exploration of loyalty and treachery by an extraordinarily gifted writer, who set out to write a novel and ended up writing the best (non fiction) book on the coup d’etat of 1981 in Spain.’
TURKEY
Muge Sokmen, Editor at Metis Publishers, would give her best friend a novel by ‘the sage of Turkish literature’ Bilge Karasu: The Garden of Departed Cats. This ‘surreal, utterly unique’ novel is about a game of chess played with human pieces in an ancient Mediterranean city. In between the chapters are a dozen fable-like stories set in different times and places which explore themes of power play and the impossibility of love.

http://www.vintage-books.co.uk/books/International_writing/WorldFavouriteBooksInTranslation/