In recent years, "Women in Translation" month has emerged as a critical platform for questioning the underrepresentation of women authors in translated literature and exploring the significance of bringing their works to a global audience. At its core lie the vital and pressing questions: Why aren't more works by women being translated, and why are women in translation so important?
Three Historical Novels Explore the Strength of Human Connection
By Alida Becker
It’s easy to see why Julia Claiborne Johnson filled
BETTER LUCK NEXT TIME (Custom House, 288 pp., $28.99) with movie-star look-alikes. Doesn’t a romantic comedy set on a 1930s Nevada dude ranch teeming with about-to-be-divorced women owe a certain debt to the era’s big-screen classics? Then again, it’s hard to believe a cinematic version could be any more fun than the small-page antics of the aptly named Flying Leap’s two hired hands and the pair of wealthy “guests” who seem determined to make their required stint as legal state residents as memorable as possible.
Mikael Niemi’s historical mystery
“To Cook a Bear” (Penguin, 426 pages, $17.99) features the real-life Lars Levi Laestadius (1800-1861), a Swedish botanist and revivalist minister who campaigned against the drinking of alcohol. The teetotaling pastor, in Mr. Niemi’s telling, wrestles with fundamental moral questions. “What makes a good person?” he asks Jussi, the humble young man he rescued from a wretched childhood and who narrates much of the book. “Which of us walks the right path? How should we live, essentially?”
One thing Laestadius feels compelled to do is investigate the violent death of a local milkmaid in his Northern Sweden town. The boorish local sheriff declares the victim was killed by a bear, but the pastor is certain she was murdered. “The killer bear,” he claims, “is walking about in human form.” Soon a second young woman disappears.