Literature's invisible arbiters

We never get to read them, but reader's reports for publishers can make or break
books -
particularly so for translations. Esther Allen 'fesses up about her shadowy
trade

Tuesday November 20, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

The reader's report is the most silent of literary genres, its existence
publicly
acknowledged only in attacks or parodies. In Umberto Eco's Misreadings,
spectacularly
obtuse flunkies advise publishers to reject the Divine Comedy and The Trial.
("Why is the
protagonist on trial?" the report queries in exasperation, adding that if this
and other
issues could be clarified, the novel might eventually become publishable.) Few
if any real
reader's reports are ever published; they're written for an extremely limited
audience: the
editors and publishers who will decide whether to bring out the book in
question. Hence
the hostility the reader's report inevitably generates. The lowly minion who
authors it can
do something no after-the-fact reviewer, however powerful and unkind, can
accomplish:
stop the book from being published in the first place.

Reader, I confess: For more than a decade, I've been writing reader's reports. I
evaluate
books written in or translated into French or Spanish for editors who, for the
most part,
can't read those languages. Writing the reports is a time-consuming, often
frustrating, and
always financially unprofitable pastime, and there can't be many of us willing
to do it;
sometimes two or three different publishers in sequence will, unbeknownst to
each other,
send me the same book to evaluate. I often wonder - particularly when a deadline
is
looming - why I do reader's reports at all.
Certainly there is pleasure akin to idly spinning the radio dial; the books I
receive offer
random, occasionally enlightening glimpses into the international literary
marketplace,
and there's always the chance of stumbling across something really good I would
never
otherwise have read. But there's more to it than that.

There is, for example, the fact that only two real tests of a book's merit
exist: time and
translation. Both tests are essentially collective and impersonal, and neither
is ever
definitive - none of us knows which 20th century books the 22nd century will
value most.
Nor can either one help in making the old-fashioned distinction between high
culture and
low - Ulysses versus Winnie the Pooh. Nevertheless, the reader's report offers
an
opportunity to put a given book to the more immediate of these tests - that of
translation.
Will this piece of writing retain meaning and interest for a different set of
readers in a
different linguistic context? As a translator by profession, I find this
question one of the
most interesting that can be asked of a book, and I'm always eager for an
opportunity to
try to answer it.

Coming up with an answer is often tough, and would be even if the question had
to be
decided on literary merit alone. But alas, literary merit usually ends up being
a minor
component of a decision that is also inescapably political, and, most of all,
economic. For
of course what most editors really want to know is whether the book will sell in
the US
marketplace.

Sometimes the question is easy, though; so easy that I wonder what mindless
domino
effect has sent a book into my hands. There were, for example, the memoirs of a
Madrid
cleaning lady, an immensely popular book in Spain which had catapulted its
author into
minor celebrity. I was startled that any agent would have submitted such a book
to a US
publisher: it was full of references to Spanish TV shows and their stars, soccer
players and
teams, Madrid neighbourhoods and local trends that were bound to baffle rather
than
amuse even the small subset of US readers who are fans of the films of
Almodóvar. But
then - it took me a while to realise - any number of books filled with local
references to
our own culture have been successful in translation around the world. The Nanny
Diaries,
to pick an example at random, has already been translated into four languages.
Ours is an
export culture, which means that a significant group of readers in Madrid,
Tokyo, Bombay,
and just about everywhere else are, after a lifetime of watching our TV shows
and movies
and reading our novels, either well acquainted with or very curious about our
celebrities,
domestic habits, and in-jokes. The agent who was shopping around the Madrid
cleaning
lady's book had just forgotten, momentarily, that it doesn't go both ways.

"Why," a German writer complained at a conference last year, "will people all
over the world
read about divorce in New Jersey, while almost no one in the English-speaking
world
seems to have the faintest interest in reading about divorce in Bonn or Haifa or
Seville?"
Several writers of English have proposed a facile, triumphalist answer to this
question,
happily attributing the global dominance of the English language to their own
prowess -
which is a bit like murdering your competitors to achieve a monopoly and then
gloating
over the vast superiority of your product.

The advantage of writing in English is obvious: Empires come and go, but the sun
never
sets on the English language. Access to English is access to power; it speaks
louder than
any other language in the world, and its juggernaut position as global lingua
franca is
further consolidated each day. At the same time, harder writers of other
languages find it
harder and harder to break in. The English book market is the world's largest
and most
transnational, but the elite group of writers across the globe who can feel sure
that their
books will be translated into English could all fit around a medium-sized
conference table
(and a very interesting meeting it would be).

The reader's report struggles to swim against this current but also has to take
it into
account. It's a bit like being an admissions officer at the world's most
selective institution:
even the Nobel prize for literature is no guarantee you'll get in. The bar has
to be set
terribly high because every translation into English that fails to sell makes
its publisher
that much less likely to do another one. Worse, the power of a reader's report
is almost
entirely negative. Barbara Epler of New Directions famously decided to publish
the great
WG Sebald on the strength of a negative reader's report, but in general a bad
report
guarantees that a book won't be published. A good report, however, is likely to
be
ignored. Worst of all, even when a good report does lead to publication - and
the
publisher finds a translator who's up to the task - the translated book will
probably be left
to its own devices in the marketplace, with little or no publicity, and will
therefore
ultimately be deemed a failure. All of which leaves those of us who write
reader's reports
in a rather ambiguous position.

One of the most enthusiastic reader's reports I ever wrote - for a novel called
Paradise of
the Blind, written in Vietnamese by Duong Thu Huong- was dismissed out of hand
by the
head of the prestigious publishing house I evaluated it for: No matter what I
said about it,
the novel was "too minor" for his house. The book was picked up by another
company and
has sold 20,000 copies in English. A later work by Ms Duong was nominated for
the Dublin
IMPAC award as one of the best novels published in English in 1996. Now that's a
reason
to write reader's reports: the private satisfaction of seeing your opinion
confirmed. But it's
not usually that simple.

Last year I evaluated a recent European novel, a sprawling, multigenerational
family saga
that had a curiously American flavour. It was set in a brand-new housing
development
near the sea, where the central characters had moved into adjacent houses to
shuck off
their past lives and reinvent themselves. An American naval base stood nearby,
and the
novel concluded with an image of Thanksgiving turkeys wrapped in coloured
cellophane,
on sale at the local market. The author took care to include an American suitor,
a Navy
captain, flawlessly fit, trim, and white-toothed, but not the least bit sexy,
whose advances
are soon rejected. It's a well-plotted novel, with some memorable characters and
situations, but I thought it was far too long. I also worried that the social
hierarchies
around which it revolves - a sequence of complicated relationships between
household
servants and their employers -play out in ways that American readers of this
type of
fiction are unlikely to find as satisfactory or as moving as European readers
had. I
recommended against it.

Not long after, I was having lunch with an old friend, a European academic who
mentioned
that he, too, happened to have written a report on the same book. Living on a
diet of
literary theory and the latest postmodern metafictions, my professor friend had
been
impressed by the novel's daring embrace of realism and thoroughly enjoyed the
unusual
experience of reading a straightforward narrative with clearly defined
characters and a plot
full of suspense and drama. He was annoyed at me for not having backed the
novel. I tried
to explain my misgivings about the differences between American and European
social
hierarchies. "Then Americans should read it so they can understand European
society!" he
snapped. On that point, at least, we were in agreement.

In the end, that same book was sent to me by three different publishers. I
imagined and
pitied the poor agent, doggedly sending it back out after each new rejection,
not knowing
that my report had already shot it down. Then I found myself sitting in that
agent's office. I
was the one who'd brought up the difficulty of getting foreign books published
in English.
"Yes!" he exclaimed. "I've been submitting this wonderful novel everywhere" - he
named
the title - "and no one will do it!" My heart sank. He spoke of the book with
admiration,
convinced that an American audience would take it to heart.

I remained silent, hoping that my deeply sympathetic expression was showing no
sign of
strain. I made no mention of the fact that it was my report which has, for the
moment,
kept the book off the Barnes & Noble shelves.

And I also hoped that he was right and I was wrong, that he will persevere and
find the
right publisher for the book, and that American readers will buy it in droves,
immerse
themselves in its multigenerational sprawl, and find its social hierarchies
intriguing rather
than mystifying or objectionable. I hoped all those things, and said not a word.

· A version of this article has previously appeared on American PEN's website,
www.pen.org