Reading around the world

Erle Monfils

Hi! I’m Erle, developer on the data visualization team. I’m currently undertaking a trip around the globe, and today I would like to bring you along. Don’t worry, you can do this one from your comfy chair!

At the start of 2023 I made a resolution: I wanted to read at least one book by an author from every country in the world. I started by crossing off all the countries that I had already covered at some point during my reading life, since I wanted to focus on the regions from which I had never read any literature. Then, I slowly started assembling a list of books that seemed interesting. Two years later, this is where I stand:

To me, reading is a way to put yourself in the shoes of another person, someone who might have experiences and ideas completely different from your own. For example, I hugely enjoyed reading "The First Wife" by Paulina Chiziane, the first woman from Mozambique to publish a novel. The book follows a woman who discovers that her husband is cheating on her with several women from different parts of the country. This causes her to reflect on what it means in her society to be a man or a woman, Northern or Southern, traditionalist or a modern Christian. While she is in a Christian marriage, and has been taught that a woman's role is to serve her husband, she cleverly uses her community's traditional views on polygamy and a man's duties to his wives to put her husband in his place.

Moreover, reading brings your mind places that you might otherwise never visit. Great examples of this are "The Impossible City" by Karen Cheung, a book that is in essence a love letter to Hong Kong, or "An African in Greenland" by Tété-Michel Kpomassie (put on my radar by my colleague Elliot!), in which a young man from Togo literally takes the reader on a tour through Greenland, teaching them about two very different cultures in the process.

I’ve always been an avid reader, the kind of kid that spent every waking hour of her day in the library. But when I think back on the authors I read as a child, I struggle to remember any names that aren't Dutch, German, Scandinavian, or English-sounding. Especially as a teenager, when I working my way through what, in my mind, were "The Classics," I was really covering those books considered classics by the culture I grew up in. Which meant, basically, European and North American writers.

While I remember those childhood favorites fondly, not many of them invited me to look through the eyes of someone with a cultural background that was very different from my own. And that pattern persisted in my adult life up until I made this resolution in 2023.

With some countries, it’s pretty difficult to find books that are written by an author who has lived in that place all their life and that are translated into a language I understand. I decided to count any authors who had at least grown up in a certain country as a child, long enough to have been shaped by its culture. For these charts, I counted any place with substantial international recognition as a “country” (including, for example, Taiwan). For my personal resolution, I'm most interested in maximizing diversity, and am really interested in any region that considers itself independent in some measure.

Alas, reading takes time and the world is a big place. It's a bit daunting to see how much ground I still have to cover. And this isn't even counting the fact that many countries are so big, or so diverse, that I feel it would do them more justice to try and read something from each region or state! On the other hand, it really is the journey that counts in this case — even if it might very well take me eight more years.

To my great pleasure, I can report that I enjoyed almost every book I've read on this global journey! I want to highlight three in particular that I won’t forget any time soon:

Chile

I recently read "Clean" by the Chilean author Alia Trabucco Zerán. In this book, a woman tells her story from a prison cell. She spent years working as a maid for a rich couple, and it is almost immediately revealed that her employment ended with the death of the couple’s child. It's the kind of book that is both hard to put down and hard to continue reading, a gripping mixture of a murder mystery and a sharp exploration of social class.

North Korea

"The Girl with Seven Names" by Hyeonseo Lee was another book I couldn’t stop reading. The author is a defector from North Korea and an incredibly resourceful woman. Her real story reads like a fast-paced thriller and gives a fascinating insight in what it’s like to live in a country so closed off from the outside world.

Zimbabwe

I’ve read many great novels from the African continent, but the most epic one by far is "Glory" by NoViolet Bulawayo. This satire follows the anthropomorphic animal politicians and citizens of the fictional country Jidada during the day-by-day events of a military coup. The author drew inspiration both from George Orwell’s "Animal Farm" and from Zimbabwean folktales about animals to paint an allegorical picture of Zimbabwe during the fall of Robert Mugabe.

A last tip for anyone who feels up for taking on a similar global reading challenge: the website readaroundtheworldchallenge.com is a great help if you’re having difficulty finding authors from specific countries. Happy reading!

I hope I have inspired you to run over to your local bookshop and browse the “World Literature” section! Next week, my colleague Shaylee will be back with a new Weekly Chart.

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Erle Monfils

(she/they) is a data visualization developer at Datawrapper. Having studied anthropology, she is interested in both the technical and the human side of technology. When not working on one of her many unfinished side projects, Erle enjoys reading and making music. She lives in Italy.

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