Five translated novels of recent or somewhat earlier harvest is recommended by APE-MPE for our summer readings.

Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian or The Blushing of the West translated by Giorgos Kyriazis, Gutenberg, is an ideal mix of the western and the historical novel. Historical novel because the narrative time begins after the end of the war between the USA and Mexico, after the conflict between them about where exactly the border with Texas was located. The US imposed an area that reaches west from the Rio Grande to the Pacific Ocean. They are the areas in which the fictional heroes move between 1848 and 1849 together with the gold hunters and their unrestrained adventure. It is additionally the years of cooperation of the Glandon gang with the Mexican authorities. This context is loosely given to McCarthy’s novel, supporting, however, even so its historical sign. As for the western, it is better to speak of western parody or anti-western since none of the typical features of the western (struggle to enforce the law, tough but honest men, unyielding will to settle on the land and ambitious plans for the future ) does not apply in his case – none of which even gets to be raised in order to be overturned. There remains the magical fictional world, which captures our breathless attention without aesthetically glorifying Evil – it will only be quick to commemorate its demonic presence.

His book Zulfi Livaneli “On the tiger’s back”, translated from the Turkish by Frangos Karaoglan, Pataki publications, is a historical novel, based on exhaustive research and free from ideological distortions and national, racial and cultural prejudices right from the start.

Livaneli turns to the last period of the Ottoman Empire, the years of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, who, being paranoid about his security, lived locked in the palaces. After the uprising of the Young Turks, the sultan was completely isolated as even his personal guard abandoned him. The government was taken over by the revolutionary committee “Union and Progress”. As for the sultan, he was exiled in 1909 to Thessaloniki and remained guarded in the Allatini mansion. The narration of Livaneli’s novel begins with the sultan’s imprisonment in Allatini, to then shed light, with successive flashbacks, on his entire life. Livaneli turns Doctor Atif Hussain into a backbone of the narrative. The doctor was a real person. And Livaneli outlines the dethroned sultan’s personality piece by piece – always through the eyes of his doctor. A sworn Young Turk at first, the doctor hates Abdul Hamit as a slaughterer of peoples and a ruthless dictator. Little by little, however, and through the daily friction with him, another, particularly complicated person emerges, as always happens in good literature.

The heroine of “Obsession”, Metaichmio, translated by Rita Kolaitis, lives a distance from someone with whom she has broken up after her own initiative (as if she is tired of him anymore, as if she is having too much trouble with him). However, she begins to desire him strongly when he announces to her that he has moved on to a new relationship. The heroine will never meet her rival as the former lover will refuse to even say her name. But day by day the unknown woman acquires a huge weight on his mind and consciousness: he sees her everywhere in front of him on the street, he is tormented by persistent speculations about her personality, profession and appearance, he thinks incessantly about her sexual movements with the former partner’s body and ends up hating her with all the strength of her soul. Every taboo and agreed-upon limitation of modern culture will go for a walk along with any sense of dignity and self-respect – even if the protagonist is a cultured woman with social status and widespread recognition, even if she drags with her a long-term marriage, which she broke up in the of which she was composed before she created the bond whose loss she now mourns inconsolably.

We have been used, for several years, to watch in Ju Nesbo’s detective novels bloody family and social conflicts or complicated thrillers about the primaries of power, where, suddenly, his conversation with Shakespeare’s tragedies. With the novel, however, “The night house”, translated by Grigoris Kondylis, Metaichmio, a new writing path opens. Road where Nesbo will encounter “The Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka, “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding, “The Catcher in the Rye” by J. D. Salinger (see also the apt remarks of Gr. Kondylis in his introductory note), but also the dark world of Stephen King, which probably also sets the dominant tone, at least in what has to do with the first chapter of the book. If we follow the sequence of influences or sources that Nesbo receives or works with, we will immediately find the thematic connections and sequences. First are the creepy outgrowths: houses that sprout roots, people that turn into insects, telephone booth headsets that devour human limbs. Then there are the ever-anxious teenagers, ready to rebel or self-destruct, set in a geographically undefined small town in the US (remember Nesbo is Norwegian), called Balladine, who raises her children in an extremely frightening way, in a time which is none other than the 1970s.

“The King of the Elves” first published in France in 1970 and awarded the Goncourt prize. In 1996 it was adapted into a film by Volker Schlendorf, starring John Malkovich. The book is published by Stereoma publications, in an excellent translation by Lizis Tsirimokou (I also remind you of the earlier, also good translation by Sapphos Diamantis when the work was titled “The Dragon”). The present translation is accompanied by very enlightening notes plus the translation of the great epimeter by Philippe de Mones. King of the Elves stars a hulking auto repair shop owner who spends nightmarish years at the college of St. Christopher in Beauvais and is only saved from his torment when the building is destroyed by fire on the day he is to suffer the ultimate punishment of his teachers. Rational analysis, synthetic ability and the look of a watchful observer: these are the characteristics of Tifoz, who is ready to make the big leap when, just before his unjust conviction for the rape of a minor, the conscription of 1939 comes and once again the road to freedom opens wide before him. Tifoz is captured as a prisoner of war and taken to East Prussia, where he discovers the core of the secret meaning of his mission: to collect unsuspecting young Germans on behalf of the Nazis, who are being trained in Kaldenborn to become fodder for the invading Soviet troops I am in the country. And when he meets a young Jew, who has just escaped from Auschwitz, he joins him forever and accompanies him with total devotion until their common death. The hero may collect children on behalf of the Germans, but he gradually realizes that he feels only revulsion, both for their infernal scientific experiments and their mass ethnic exterminations. Philippe de Mones is right to insist on the status of mother-nurturer and the figure of Saint Christopher when the burden of the world is shouldered. Dragons, however, in Tournier’s novel, loaded with the menace and terror of their purging ideology, are only the Nazis, who worship the flesh as an object of dismemberment, annihilation and universal discredit.