A book for every country — B
I find it hard to get excited about the books on the shelf of the average book shop. How often do you find something really different, from somewhere you did not know? I’m going A to Z through every country to discover a good book to read from each one.
Here are books from countries that begin with ‘B’ rated from one to three but like Michelin Stars, where one out of a possible three still denotes a very good book, two is a must-read and three is an absolutely essential classic.
Bangladesh
Tahmima Anam — A Golden Age (2007)
Setting: Bangladesh’s 1971 War of Independence
What it’s about: A beautifully paced story of a widow in war, who starts the story trying to recover her children taken away by her late husband’s family, but who the reader watches become stronger and more confident through every ordeal she goes through.
Through her we see brutal scenes of war, with the plight of refugees particularly current.
Anam with compassion but also brutal honesty about the protagonist and about war itself. The scenes of violence resonate because they are interspersed with intimate descriptions of daily life — preparing meals and household chores:
“From Mrs Chowdhury’s roof, Sohail and Lieutenant Sabeer watched the fires of the lit-up city. Suddenly they heard everything: the killing of small children, the slow movement of clouds, the death of women, the sigh of fleeing birds, the rush of blood on the pavements.”
It’s also a book about home - specifically, her home: a home that keeps family together, a sanctuary against the horrors on the street and city beyond, a home that shelters refugees, and later rebels and their weapons, a home that must be abandoned:
She wondered if it made her a refugee, this train, this distance, the sheets on the furniture…
You’ll like this if you liked: Half of a Yellow Sun or Colm Toibin.
The best book from Bangladesh? Yes. I would like to pick something more obscure, but it’s the most famous Bangladeshi book of recent years for a good reason. However, there are several classic and emerging writers worth checking out, such as K. Anis Ahmed’s satire of a dictatorship run by a committee of NGOs — The World in My Hands.
Rating: *** (A Must Read — and more than once because of its style and subject matter)
Barbados
George Lamming — In the Castle of my Skin (1953)
Setting: Colonial Barbados in the throes of independence (pro-empire characters call it “Little England” in the book)
What it’s about: Through the lens of a coming-of-age tale we see a portrait of an entire colonial society: the regimented conformity of school and church, the remote superiority of the colonialist and the corruption of the local politician who rallies the village only to betray it in heart-breaking scenes at the end of the book.
It bursts with vivid characters, who tell the story as much as the autobiographical boy protagonist. The heroes are the simple villagers making their way through life, like “Pa” and “Ma”, an old couple who watch as the village changes forever.
This was a hugely influential book for a generation of Caribbean writers, not just because of the colonial and racial themes but the poetic, subtle way Lamming addresses them, and his own alienation from his society that results. Three boys spend a night horsing around on a beach, but in the telling it becomes a deep reflection on fear and fate, politics and class:
“When you up here, on a night like tonight you see how it is nothin’ could change in the village. Everything’s sort of in order. Big life one side an’ small life a next side, an’ you get a kin’ o’ feelin’ of you in your small corner an’ I in mine. Everything’s kind of correct.”
To read if you liked: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
The definitive Barbadian novel? Defining not only of Barbados but of post-colonial societies everywhere. More recently, see Lamming’s mentor Frank Collymore, or Nailah Folami Imoja’s Pick of the Crop (2004) a charming novella for a younger audience about a young man’s brush with local fame. Its a ode to calypso and the lost innocence of youth. Both books are from the peerless Caribbean Writers Series, which has produced some of the best books I have ever read, but seems to have run out of steam in recent years.
Rating: ** (deeply philosophical and political, without being academic)
Belarus
Svetlana Alexievich — Chernobyl Prayer (1997)
Setting: Chernobyl — 1986 and the events that followed the nuclear disaster.
What it’s about: In a work not quite fiction, not quite reportage, people from Chernobyl tell their story to investigative journalist and writer Svetlana Alexievich: like the old woman who still lives in the contaminated zone, after hiding during the evacuation, and constantly evokeing the memories of people being taken away during the war.
It’s as much about the end, and in some ways a dark apotheosis, of the Soviet Union as it is about the catastrophe. All the old tropes of communist rule are exposed the denials (“the sheer volume of lies”), hiding the true nature of the disaster, sacrificing soldiers and workers in the thousands while motivating them with the cult of heroism and blaming external enemies.
Soldiers tell of being sent in to clean up the contamination, drinking vodka and fruit from the zone, getting big bonuses and then finding they have terminal cancer or leukaemia — in extreme cases their bones and organs literally melt away. Doctors and scientists obey the authorities and keep the scale of the disaster secret, even from people at risk of contamination.
“The dairy factories were fulfilling their Plans. We tested what they were producing. It was not milk, it was radioactive waste…It was all on sale in the shops. When people read on the labels that milk was from Rogachev, they rejected it and the stocks piled up. Then jars suddenly started appearing without labels.”
Its striking how many witnesses talk about the disaster as war, as the writer herself says:
“…war was, we could say, the yardstick of horror. In Chernobyl, we appear to see all the hallmarks of war: hordes of soldiers, evacuation, abandoned houses….The history of disasters has begun.”
Or as a hunter hired to kill stray animals says:
“I’m telling you,, it was a war zone. Cats looking into people’s eyes, their dogs howling, trying to get on their buses. The soldiers were pushing them out again, kicking them. They ran after the buses for ages. Evacuation…God forbid we ever have another!”
The most powerful story is from a campaigner who runs a museum about Chernobyl and talks about the miners and soldiers who prevented a greater disaster (p 171 in the most recent Penguin edition). “They call it an accident, a disaster, but it was war”.
Read this if you liked: Dispatches by Michael Herr.
The best book from Belarus? Its certainly about a defining moment and the way the country responds to and remembers it. I’d also point you to Chagall’s autobiography for a picture of a lost Belarus — the shtetl.
Like Chagall, this book uses animals to express emotions beautifully. Chagall uses animals to express joy, birth and happiness, in Chernobyl they express fear, contamination, death and the absence of life:
“The helpless cries of the animals. They were shrieking in all their different languages”
Although they also provide comfort to the lonely people who refused to leave the contaminated zone.
Rating: * (powerful testimony, but the multitude of voices hinders the flow as a novel somewhat.)
Belgium
Hugo Claus — The Sorrow of Belgium (1983)
Setting: Belgium during the Second World War
What it’s about: A biting satire of Flemish nationalists collaborating with the Nazi collaboration. Life in Flemish villages passes by with only passing mentions of the horrors of war happening elsewhere. Its full of drunks, scoundrels, and degenerates who are empowered by collaboration with the Nazis.
The protagonist is a horny teenager: cynical, sardonic, pervy, unscrupulous. He joins the Hitler Youth but leaves when the other boys mock his penis in the shower.
His mother works for the Nazis in a aircraft supply office, starting an affair with a German officer. His father, forbidden by his grandfather to actively collaborate, vents racist and nationalist spleen while stockpiling food. He develops a habit of cooking his own sweets. “Papa, secret, selfish nibbler”, says the boy when he finds toffee wrappers on the floor of father’s workshop.
Claus’s book is about the people who do nothing to let evil triumph, who allowed ordinary life to continue under Nazi rule. The book is full of cowardly, drunken, immoral characters. There are no hero, and the “front” is something very far away, talked about it in bars, where young Louis drinks and listens to father and other pseuds mouthing nationalist principles of the day without ever acting them out:
“In Russia…men were freezing to death in their hedgehog positions. Small wonder then that the men in the Groeninghe crowded around the roaring potbellied stove kept lavishly fed with coal nuts by Noel.”
It starts slowly with a series of chapters set in a Catholic school just before the war starts (the part of the book called “of Belgium”), but picks up steam in the second part which is a stream of consciousness flow of ever more frenetic, bizarre depravity as the war grows to a close. For the collaborators, the early years of occupation remain relatively calm, it is only the arrival of the Allies that throws their lives into chaos and fear. The book could be criticised for being to kind to them, but it does a far better job of mocking them mercilessly, especially when the war ends and life goes on:
“Because all this time we have been living in a nightmare, did you know that, you old rascal? That’s what it says in the new newspapers…We are heading for a dream of equality, fraternity, and liberty. Yes, with the same people.”
You’ll like this if you liked: Ulysses, Lucky Jim, Milan Kundera,
The definitive Belgian novel?: In both style and subject — Hugo Claus is like a father figure of contemporary Flemish literature. Around the time of his death in 2008, his influence appeared everywhere when I was living in Brussels, and in the work of younger Flemish writers like Peter Verhulst or Thomas Gunzig, (who published a collection of short stories built around animals). Through them all, Magritte’s esoteric, playful irony seems to flow through Belgian literature.
Viewed through surreal visions of the pervy little boy, Claus’s ridiculous, hypocritcal bourgeois characters jump straight out of Magritte painting. While Magritte paintings turn the mundane into the fantastical, Claus creates mundanity in a time of great upheaval. It is the preservation of their own mundanity that condemns the characters.
Rating: * (great writing, killer one-liners and witty dialogue, but too much bland anecdotes about school children and others messing about that could be cut out without harming the story)
Belize
The Festival Of San Joaquin — Zee Edgell (1997)
Setting: Modern Belize
What it’s about: Sadness drips from every page. The story jumps back and forth between different scenes in a tragic life of a woman just released from jail after killing her violent, alcoholic husband. It is a hard read because the sheer force of emotions, delivered in simple, unadorned prose just takes your breath away as the hero, Luz Marina (meaning light of the sea), struggles against poverty, class divisions and domestic violence, compelling you into deeper sympathy with the doomed effort to rebuild a life.
This book is another hidden gem from the flawless Caribbean Writers Series which exposes a world beyond the tourist photos that most people think of.
Luz Marina tells us how she saved a rich woman’s life and was sent to work for her — (how she saw the food on the table, feels hungry, but asks for nothing, and hides her dirty feet):
“I though of telling her that I wanted to be a teacher but I didn’t and the moment passed….My parents were hoping that with my help, Concha and Perla would go to high school.”
The best book from Belize? Yes, because of the subtle mix of politics and culture, full of rich characters and haunting family histories, with religion and superstition intermingling, especially around the festival:
“A house, it is said here in San Joaquin, has, depending on the circumstances surrounding its construction, the power of destroying the families who live in it.”
Zee Edgell, journalist, professor, activist, has written more books in a similar vein, including the critically-acclaimed Beka Lamb.
For you if you like: A Golden Age above (a mother trying to build a life so that she can convince society to let her raise her children), or, again Colm Toibin or Alice Munro.
Rating: *** (A breathtakingly (you literally need to pause for breath at times) tragic account of lives destroyed by alcohol and poverty.)
Benin — A Dahomian Greek Tragedy
Olympe Bhely-Quenum — Snares Without End (1960)
Setting: Colonial 20th-century Benin
What it’s about: the story of a peaceful farmer turned into a murderer.the story begins with an injustice from which all other miseries follow.
His father, a WWI veteran, refuses to comply with an order from colonial authorities to join a chain gang building a railway and is beaten in front of his son. He stabs himself to end the humiliation. Its an incredibly powerful scene as the French officer shouts at the wealthy, proud farmer demanding he submit:
“Ten times he was asked the same question without answer, while the commander’s whip furiously marked the usually peaceful, soft face, nobly framed by a beard, that I loved so well…blood gushed from his ears and head, his face started to cry blood.”
You can feel a whole nation, a whole continent cry blood when you read these passages. But the vast majority of the books, like Things Fall Apart, plays out away from colonialists.
The tragic hero, his son, builds a good life in his absence for his family, only to be undone by his wife’s insanity. The more he tries to do the write thing, the worse he makes the situation, just like a Greek tragedy. He leaves the family home to the howls of his beloved dogs.
The central premise is:
“It’s possible that everyone has a monster inside, but nobody has the right to wake that monster in us if it doesn’t show itself of its own accord.”
The best book from Benin? It’s mysteriously allegorical. The impact of colonialism is only felt at the beginning. Is the tragedy that unfolds later, with no direct colonial interference, supposed to stem from it?
To read if you liked: Things Fall Apart, The Kreutzer Sonata, The Outsider.
Rating: ** (At times the story drags on but the powerful imagery of key scenes makes it an important read)
Bolivia
Victor Montoya — Violent Stories (1991)
Setting: Cold War era Bolivia, under military dictatorship.
What it’s about: A collection of short, brutal, vicious short stories centred around the crushing of miners by various Bolivian military regimes. The collection starts very meaningfully with stories of the Conquistadores invading Latin America. When the Incas hand over generations of ornate and precious objects, the Spanish melt them down:
“The oven swallowed gold and ornaments and vomited up ingots of gold and silver.”
The rest of the stories depict the brutal swallowing up of human lives. The torture scenes are not for the faint-hearted, but an important document bearing witness to the many forgotten victims of the 20th century. But they are short and sharp, like a vaccincation. Like Up Against the Wall, a page-long story that begins with a coup (“The Generals seized power with their customary violence”) and ends with a worker Pablo being summarily executed.
You can download it as an ebook for next to nothing here. Montoya himself was imprisoned but allowed to go into exile in 1977 after a campaign by human rights group Amnesty International.
You’ll like this if you liked: 1984, Darkness at Noon, The Open Veins of Latin America
The defining Bolivian book?: It’s defining of an entire century of repression. It could be any country under military rule. If only more novels about miners and indigenous people from Bolivia were translated into English (like Augusto Cespedes’s The Wells).
There is also an attempt at a national Bolivarian epic, Juan de la Rosa: Last memories of a soldier of independence. But its boring. I particularly dislike novels where the hero is destined to be a great leader despite living in poverty because their father was secretly a member of the elite. As if someone can’t challenge the status quo without the genes for leadership already in them — but the manifest destiny asks too much patience of the reader, and halfway through you are still waiting for something to happen.
Rating: * (An important and harrowing read, but intentionally limited and sparse)
Bosnia & Herzegovina
Ivo Andric — The Bridge over the Drina (1945)
Setting: Ottoman & Habsburg Bosnia
What’s it about: A Bosnian town under centuries of Ottoman rule. It is detailed and layered without being tiresome. Every new era introduces a new cast of memorable scenes and characters.
The bridge is basically a metaphor for the Ottoman Empire itself, at once dividing and unifying people.
The bridge is built by a Grand Vizier who suffers a personal separation, and with a desire to unify both community. The evocative scenes of the building of the bridge over many years again is both redemptive and violent.
Once built the bridge is a meeting place where different parts of the community mingle, but also a place where brutal, graphically-described punishments are meted out. But it ends up as a balanced picture of the pros and cons of Ottoman Balkans.
When the Habsburg Empire captures the town, it becomes a microcosm for a whole society changing hands:
“everywhere and for everyone there was fear. The entering Austrians feared an ambush. The Turks feared the Austrians. The Serbs feared both Austrians and Turks. The Jews feared everything and everyone since, especially in times of war, everyone was stronger than they.”
Andric wants to show how lives and customs go on through periods of change, but also shows the lives changing like the seasons, like when the leaders of the community wait on the bridge for the new rulers to arrive:
“So they sat on the kapia [the middle of the bridge] as they had once done when they were young and carefree and like the rest of the young people wasted their time there. Only now they were all advanced in years…They looked at one another closely and long in the fierce summer sun, and each seemed to the others grown old for his years and worn out. Each of them remembered the others as they had been in youth or child- hood, when they had grown up on this bridge, each in his own generation, green wood of which no one could tell what would be.”
The definitive Bosnian book? There is quite some controversy here, but that aside, lets just call it a Balkan epic novel. See also The Fortress by Mesa Selimovic.
You’ll like this if you liked: Orhan Pamuk
Rating: *
Botswana
Bessie Head — The Collector of Treasures (1977)
Context: Botswana, just before and after independence — rural societies in a time of change.
What it’s about: Tales of tradition meeting modernity in village life, told with a healthy scepticism that neither condemns nor coddles old customs and traditions.
But authority is constantly challenged by challenging characters — single mothers, sex workers — who defy stereotypes and phallocentrism. The traditional village healer, dismissed by the protagonist as someone who cures scorpion bites only when they aren’t poisonous, balks when he hears a new ailment:
“We can never tell what will happen these days, now that we have independence.”
The “treasures” in the title are moments of complicity and compassion that appear throughout.
The definitive book from Botswana? I would like to find some contemporary fiction from one of the post-colonial success stories (for example, Botswana is regularly the best African country on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index). Bessie Head was born in South Africa but, exiled to Botswana, sets almost all of her writing there.
You’ll like this if you liked: Boule de Suif by Guy Maupassant or The Doctor or any other rural short story by Anton Checkhov.
Rating: *
Brazil
Jorge Amado — The Violent Land (1943)
Setting: 19th Century Brazil
What it’s about: A clash between two powerful clans tells a story of patronage and power in Brazil’s cacao plantations.
While events are driven by the powerful cacao barons, we meet a wide cast of characters, workers, vagrants, politicians, lawyers — but all forced to take sides.
You’ll like this if you liked: Upton Sinclair, Emile Zola, Sergio Leone’s “Once upon a time in America…” movies.
The definitive Brazilian book: Close enough. It’s a formative tale of the making of a country. You can find some free ebooks of some other classics like The Slum and Machado de Assis works here.
Rating: * (its good, but fall just short of greatness)
Bulgaria
Wild Tales — Nikolai Haitov (1979)
Stories set in rural Bulgaria populated by bandits, shepherds and farmers.
Its mostly a depiction of a wilder side of peasant life, though wider politics occasionally play a role:
“Then my troubles really began. First came the coup in ’23, when they came after us with bared sabres and I was thrashed good and proper. After that the slump, when a lambskin cost more than a lamb. I got rid of my sheep, bought a couple of mules and set up as a carrier.”
That’s in a story where the weak Shepard idealises a romantic bandit, who ends up getting caught because he wants to sing in a pub.
Read some of the stories here.
The definitive Bulgarian book: There is some esoteric fiction out there, but that has never been my fancy. There is also the national classic Under the Yoke, about a failed revolt against Ottoman rule in the 19th century, but I gave that up because the plot was achingly slow, and the characters very one-dimensional. If you like magical realism (I don’t), you could try Georgi Gospodinov (“I remember being born as a rose bush, a partridge, as ginkgo biloba, a snail…”).
I’d rather read Bogomil Rainov spy novels, but they have not been translated from Russian! However, his short story collection The Road to Nowhere, with the eponymous tale a gripping account of an academic lying in hospital remembering the office politics that destroyed him, seems the best book to get a feel for Communist-era Bulgaria — unless there is a Bulgarian Herta Müller out there?
You’ll like this if you liked: Liam O’Flaherty’s short stories set in rural Ireland (or any rural short stories really).
Rating: Not quite worth a star for me.
Burkina Faso — A postcolonial thriller
Boubacar Diallo — La Nuit des Chiens (2000)
Setting: Contemporary or recent Ougadougou
What its about: Here is a dilemma for you: you are an army officer; an autocratic ruler who has just lose an election asks you to assassinate the democratically-elected leader. Do you carry out the order, or refuse and risk your life?
You’ll like this if you liked: An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris, John le Carre.
Rating: *
Burundi
Roland Rugero — Baho! (2012)
Context: A poetic, stream of thought sprint through contemporary, post-war Burundi
What it’s about: A short story about mob justice thwarted. The story tackles a society traumatised by conflict but intentionally rejects any mention of race.
Rating: *
Pick of the bunch: The Caribbean contenders rate highly but Tahmima Anam’s The Golden Age is somehow so compelling.
What I left out: The Bahamas, Bahrain, Bhutan, Brunei — any ideas?
Next up: The C’s. And there are a lot of them. Cambodia, Costa Rica and Cyprus are the most challenging.
Read more: My review of the “A’s” from Afghanistan to Azerbaijan.
