Chasing a Novel
In 2009, I read The Swedish Book Review and came across the review of a novel concerning asylum-seekers drowning at sea. This had been one of my obsessions for a long time (for my translation of an Italian article on Lampedusa’s casualties, click here). When it became known that migrants were drowning in the Strait of Gibraltar in the late nineties (at the rate of two thousand a year – though largely ignored), I did a little research and found that this reality was not new. In the seventies when Spain and Portugal were outside the European Community, illegal immigrants from those countries were trafficked over the Pyrenees, where many of them died of exposure and there were also stories of traffickers abandoning them on the snowy heights.
Before the massive migrations that followed the trashing of the Middle East, punishment for having damaged geopolitical interests with its Arab Spring, the tragedy of these migrations continued to be ignored. Some films examined the similar processes that occurred on the border between Mexico and the US, but Europe retained its sense of moral superiority undeterred. Translation rights to the novel, entitled A Happy Little Island, were something I wanted to get – passionately.(for review of the novel click here)
It was not easy, as the route was through a French agent, and when I went to see her at the London Book Fair, she was already packing up her things to go, probably in search of a cup of coffee. I had turned up two or three minutes early, so I was able to stop her but it soon became clear that she wasn’t interested. Though we reached an agreement, nothing came of it. Eventually I gave up.
Later I published another Swedish-language author, Magnus Florin and his book The Garden, who very kindly took the trouble to find a way to contact the author, and after that things went ahead easily. Nevertheless, the book was not published until 2016, and a great deal of time had been lost. This was perhaps a good thing: it was now much more topical and everyone was aware of the problem, both our excellent cover designer Mark Mechan and our excellent layout designer Craig Brown didn’t start providing their freelance services to Vagabond Voices until 2012, and even more importantly for this book we had the simply brilliant translator Peter Graves, who was able to bring out the subtle Swedish humour and Sund’s literary acrobatics.
Unfortunately when the promised funding for the translation came in, it was at a much lower level than we’d been told. Ever an understanding partner, Graves helped us out on this too by waiving part of his fee, but it still lost us thousands of pounds, and small publishers cannot afford that. This led me to price the book too high at £12.95, a decision I now regret.
Why is this book so important to me? It does exactly what I want our translated novels to do: it presents a literary approach and a technique that are unfamiliar in the English-speaking world, and it does so with skill and panache (both author and translator obviously take the credit in the English version). It also brings up subjects and themes that literature should properly address – that reflect the humanity we want to develop and often fail to (so the odd prod is not a bad idea). Let me make clear that this novel says very little about who the asylum-seekers are, as they are already dead when they wash up on the beaches of a small island at the top of the Baltic Sea. It is concerned with the ways in which the islanders react to such events, even when the victims are dead. There are elements of magical realism here, but this is mixed with very acute social observation of island life, and anyone who has lived on an island for some time will recognise it. The islanders’ reactions are not however typical or just typical of island society, because surely the island represents inward-looking Western society that is unconcerned about the horrors that occur beyond its borders, which it may – at least in part – be responsible for. Graves explained that this intriguing mix is in fact part of a long tradition in Swedish literature that goes back to the interwar years.
We plan to bring out an economy edition at £9.95 or even £8.95, but first we have to sell through our existing stock. So we will be selling it on our website at £6.50 (that is 50% off, as salesmanship unfortunately obliges us to point out) with no delivery charge within the UK. If this lifts sales, we will continue at that price until we can launch the second edition (which will be without frills – no flaps and no images inside the cover). We would as always be very interested in feedback on this book or our other books from any of our readers who feel moved to do so (click here for e-mail).
Allan Cameron, Glasgow, March 2020