The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) by Mark Twain

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)

 by Mark Twain

Hannibal, Missouri

Missouri: 9/12

   Huckleberry Finn is as relevant as it has ever been by virtue of the controversy it continues to engender by being both a stone-cold literary classic for young people AND the biggest remaining bastion of the use of the "N-word" left in society.  Listening to the Audiobook made me think of the relationship of Twain to Cervantes and Don Quixote.  It also put me in mind of The Confidence Man by Herman Melville.  As to the former, Twain was surely familiar, as to the later, he surely was not- Melville being well forgotten and The Confidence Man having made no contemporaneous impression.  That got me thinking about Huckeberry Finn itself, and the publication history- turned out that Twain started his OWN publishing company and sold Huckleberry Finn, the contemporary equivalent of selling your fashion line on QVC or self-publishing on Amazon.   I know that the publication history of Don Quixote itself was somewhat complicated in the English language- it is an epic tale and translation standards in the 18th century were loose to the point of non-existent in terms both of care and fidelity of the source material. 

Schoolgirl (1939) by Osamu Dazai

Book Review

Schoolgirl (1939)

by Osamu Dazai

Translation from Japanese 

Allison Markin 2011

  Japanese fiction is interesting because it combines a centuries long tradition of native fiction- mostly literature of the court type stuff with mostly twentieth century developments in Western literature, with many published authors coming from a background in western literary studies.   The limit on absorption of these authors by western readers has been a lack of translation and the general lack of interest of English-speaking readers in non-English fiction, but times have been changing.  These days, there are well respected yearly literary awards on both sides of the Atlantic for best translated fiction into English.  Personally, I believe both the E-book and Audiobook format have opened some doors for translated fiction as publishers refine their ideas of what and how they can sell books not written originally in English. 

  I thought Schoolgirl was interesting because it is a kind of proto-existentialist text written from the POV of a young woman at a time (the 1930's) when the idea of a "youth culture" was still emerging in the west. This makes Dazai a trailblazer in this regard, and it is interesting that the English translation I read didn't even happen until 2011. It's a brief read and well worth the time for anyone interested in pre-World War II literature from whatever part of the globe