Anton Hur's Reading List

"This is a tricky book to summarise. Basically, an antique book dealer finds herself trapped within a single repeating day and she slowly figures out what she can take from each repeating day and what she cannot. It is a very quiet book that conveys an intense sense of time being lived. I think what we ultimately love about this book is how different it feels from the way we tend to live life now, going about our day with our senses deadened and our fingers scrolling through social media feeds, completely in denial of time as it passes. The whole book is a real antidote to the toxic warping of our sense of time and space."

"This is a novel that is written from the perspective of a rescue boat dispatcher who fails to dispatch a rescue team for a group of migrants who subsequently sink to their deaths. This book will hopefully disturb you and make you question why you feel so disturbed. It is a short book that is nevertheless full of horror and rage and guilt. As a translator, I am constantly being asked if I sacrifice accuracy for aesthetics or vice versa, and my answer always is that this is a false binary. You cannot separate social or political value from literary value. You cannot divorce a text from the context in which it exists, as language exists within a culture, and literature is made of language. Too many people regard translation as the separation of a text from its source culture when it is just as much the integration of a text into a new context."

"The unexpected! This book is about nothing less than the very future of humanity. It is a feat of the imagination and a great translation. There is just so much anxiety in our post-pandemic world. We had to get used to thinking of ourselves as not just communities or nations but as an entire species. But will we ever manage to do so, really? This novel is about the end of humanity as we know it. But it is full of hope, at the same time. Absolutely. Think about how many readers were terrified by the opening of The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. Think about how we still use terms invented by George Orwell in his Nineteen Eighty-Four . Some of the best writers in English—like Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro and Ian McEwan –have shifted to writing speculative fiction. Because the unimaginable and the unprecedented keeps happening, we keep turning to the speculative."

"Yes, it is indeed a skewering of the contemporary millennial lifestyle as it pertains to digital nomads in the gig economy—they’re even front-end engineers, the ‘superficial layer’ of tech—but I really hope that when people read this very entertaining novel that they also take note of the sharp critiques of privilege throughout, like that indelible description of that world-infamous image of the drowned Syrian child on the beach. The funny thing was that none of the judges noticed the lengths of the books we chose for the longlist until we saw them all together. Slim books are very common in East Asia, so I thought nothing of it, but I guess I do now see that publishers in the Anglosphere are more willing to embrace shorter-length works of prose ? Welcome to the club!"

"Oh, many things. But I have got to say that for me it was the translation—so daring and textured and vitalic. The stories also, for a book that has the word “heart” in the title, kept breaking mine. The way these women keep colliding with both tradition and modernity is so acutely observed. Anyone—of any gender or age or country—can’t help but relate to their struggles between past and present. We’re all doing that. It depends on the collection for me. Some are very uneven, but for Heart Lamp , I loved every story and read in anticipation of each ‘turn’ in the plot, the emotional hinge in which the story, and the reader, transforms. Short stories in translation do tend to rely on their translators even more than novels do, because every word counts about ten times more."

"I think this book in particular, while surely a fine work of literature in the original French, really takes on something extra in translation. It is a work of great empathy and, therefore, love, a careful attempt by a narrator who is trying to understand a friend who is inaccessible to him, as we are all ultimately inaccessible to each other. But he tries anyway. And the fact that there’s an extra narrative layer to filter through—the translator—makes the conceit hit home even harder. With great trepidation! On the one hand, I knew we had such a great shortlist that it seems impossible to pick a bad winner. On the other hand—and this would sound terribly pretentious coming from anyone who isn’t a professional literary translator, but hear me out—the question of who wins the International Booker Prize has real historical consequences for our field at large. Either way, I’m prepared to spend the rest of my life celebrating our longlist cohort."