This summer, the Loyola Libraries are excited to bring you the World Cup of Books, an interactive program to encouraging reading books from other countries. Show your support for your favorite team by reading books from and about their country!
Today’s match-ups include Sweden v Korea Republic, Belgium v Panama and Tunisia v England.
SWEDEN: 1947 by Elisabeth Asbrink, translation by Fiona Graham
Not many people know that the concept of genocide as an international crime didn’t exist until Raphael Lemkin, a Polonized Jewish lawyer who lost many relatives among the millions killed in Nazi concentration camps, coined the term and lobbied for its official use as adviser to the chief counsel at the Nuremberg Trials. Just as few know that Henry Ford is the only American mentioned in Mein Kampf, due to Hitler’s approval of his anti-Semitic essays. Unearthing many forgotten details, Åsbrink illuminates this pivotal year after the end of WWII, adroitly revealing how profoundly 1947 shaped the decades that followed. Åsbrink takes an expansive, month-by-month look at world events, from the partitioning of India to escaping SS soldiers in Argentina to the grand mufti of Jerusalem to Billie Holiday topping the charts in DownBeat magazine to Simone de Beauvoir visiting New York for the first time. Åsbrink writes with sardonic passion in an immediately striking tone, no doubt informed, in part, by the fact that her father was a survivor of a camp in Hungary. A sweeping cacophony of modernity. -Booklist
Request it here or grab it at the IC Display!
KOREA REPUBLIC: Ah, Mouthless Things: Poems by Seong-Bok Lee translated by Brother Anthony of Taizé, Chung Eun-Gwi, and Myung-Mi Kim
Excerpt: “Whose House Shall I Say”
The wind roaming in sunlight―
what stories it has heard before it comes to visit me,
trudging along gravelly roads
into my agony.
Whose home shall I say this is?
Shall I say it’s the home of winds wandering in sunlight?
I am not at home in my agony.
See, sorrow walking along carefully,
one hand grasping a petticoat.
Request it here or grab it at the IC Display!
BELGUIM: Belgium: War and Turpentine Stefan Hertmans, translated by David McKay
On medical leave from the hellish violence of WWI, Urbain Martien wanders into a small chapel where he unexpectedly finds the face of his own father incorporated into the altar mural. In this minor episode, Hertmans distills the larger dynamic governing a novel in which the mysteries of art illuminate the complexities of life. Complemented by photos and reproduced paintings, the poignantly nuanced narrative unfolds Urbain’s life through the eyes of a grandson poring over his grandfather’s candidly autobiographical notebooks and his more cryptically autobiographical paintings. Clue by clue, notebooks and paintings reveal that alongside his visible war wounds, Urbain carries the invisible wounds of an artist forced to exchange paint and canvas for helmet and rifle. Subtly hinted at in his postwar paintings, another lacerating exchange scars his soul when the love of his life suddenly dies, leaving him to marry her frigid older sister. Retracing the private pilgrimage his grandfather sustained through religious devotion to Our Lady of Sorrows and imaginative devotion to Schubert and Beethoven, van Dyck and Velázquez, the grandson finally reaches the peace that accompanies hard-won understanding. Appreciative readers will thank an exceptional novelist (and a skilled translator) for their share of that peace, that understanding. -Booklist *Starred Review*
Find it here or at the Lewis Library Display!
PANAMA: The New Panama Canal: A Journey Between Two Oceans by Rosa Maria Britton and Edoardo Montaina (Photographer)
“One century after the epic feats of the pioneers who built the legendary Panama Canal, the gargantuan plan to expand the locks has brought the world’s attention back to this work of engineering and to the stunning environment all around it. … It is a universe that we have crossed – armed with a notebook and a camera – from the Atlantic to the Pacific, visiting Portobelo and San Lorenzo, the natural paradises of Gatun Lake and the Chagres River, and the many facets of Panama City. This is the story of a journey between two oceans and a thousand worlds.” -Back cover description
Find it here or at the Lewis Library Display!
TUNISIA: Tunisia: The Scents of Marie-Claire by Habib Selmi, translation by Fadwa Al Qasem
This novel from one of Tunisia’s leading writers, the first of his works to be translated into English, narrates a love story in all its stages, in all its glorious and inglorious details. Moment by moment we become acquainted with the morning rituals, the desires of the flesh, the turbulence of the spirit, and even a few unattractive personal habits. It is a journey that takes us inside the nuances of what passes between two lovers, from the first glances of attraction to the final words of anger. It is a journey filled with all the hallmarks of the complex relationship between one man and one woman the mystery and the ambiguity, the intricacy and the confusion which, in the end, serve to expose its fragility. This is an intimate tale that manages to tell not only the story of two individuals, but also that of the collision of two cultures.
Request it here or grab it at the IC Display!
ENGLAND: Elmet by Fiona Mozley
A young man, dirty, hungry, and determined, is searching for his sister on the moors of Yorkshire, once the ancient kingdom of Elmet, now a land poisoned and impoverished. The page turns; the seasons roll back; and readers learn the story of how Daniel, 14, Cathy, 15, and their father, John, a giant of epic strength, abandoned town life and built a simple home deep in the woods. “Our world was about muscle,” Daniel observes, and about the traditional skills needed to live off the land and off the grid. John hopes to keep his self-reliant children safe in this “strange, sylvan otherworld.” But this man of steadfast integrity and “old-world morality,” this bare-knuckle boxer and enforcer, has enemies, and the land is not theirs. Shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize, Mozley’s preternaturally accomplished debut novel is a riveting and disquieting fable of a family reaching back to life’s essentials and embracing nature’s beauty, abundance, and challenges, yet remaining caught in the perpetual twist of human good and evil. In pristinely gorgeous and eviscerating prose, Mozley, who chimes with Hannah Tinti, Lydia Millet, and Daniel Woodrell, sets ablaze a suspenseful family tragedy stoked by social critique, escalated by men’s violence against women, and darkly veined with elements of country noir. -Booklist *Starred Review* Find it here!
