The Tale of the 1002nd Night, by Joseph Roth

I started The Tale of the 1002nd Night just after finishing Dora Bruder. Something about Dora Bruder put me in mind of Joseph Roth, who was living in a hotel in Paris at the time of his death in 1939 – like Dora Bruder and her parents. A Jew born at the eastern reaches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Roth spent most of his adult life living in hotels in various cities in an increasingly inhospitable Europe. I took a break from The Tale of the 1002nd Night to read two book club books (one of which I have yet to finish), but I went back to it yesterday. It seems this was his last novel, published a few months after his death. 

The book opens in the court of the Persian Shah sometime in the 19th Century, who in a fit of ennui decides to pay a visit to Vienna. The first several chapters of the book are something of a comedy in which the Shah sees a woman at the ball thrown in his honor and decides he'd like to spend the night with her. She's a married member of the nobility, so this certainly can't be allowed, however a Captain in the army who has been attached to the Shah and his retinue knows of a prostitute whom he believes resembles the desired woman enough that they can trick the Shah. The plan goes off and the Shah goes home, but the book stays with the characters in Vienna, whose lives take turn after unexpected turn. There was a point maybe three quarters of the way in when – taking it all in – I believed I saw the reference to The Thousand and One Nights. The story kept shifting, the central characters were rotating, the book had drifted so far from the Shah's first visit, but it was the event that changed the course of all the character's lives. The book wraps up nearly twenty years later when the Shah makes a return, but everything is different after all that time.

Scattered All Over the Earth, by Yoko Tawada

My reading continues to be irregular, but at least I have my Women In Translation book club to motivate me from time to time. Scattered All Over the Earth was our selection for this month. I previously read Tawada's book The Emissary, and this could almost be a companion book – one could imagine the events from The Emissary describing the situation in Japan as the events of Scattered All Over the Earth take place. 

In Scattered All Over the Earth, Japan (without ever being named) has disappeared from the map, though it's not entirely clear what has happened to it. Hiruko, a Japanese woman living in Europe – and stranded there now that her home country doesn't exist – sets off from Denmark to Germany to find one of her compatriots to she can speak Japanese again. This turns into an unexpected adventure with an accumulating number of traveling companions of various nationalities, and accompanying native tongues. 

While I think of Hiruko as the center of the book, we hear from all the characters who join in her travels, and the character who begins and ends the book is a Danish linguist named Knut, who hears Hiruko speaking a language of her own invention, which she uses to communicate across Scandinavia. Other characters speak German as a native or second language, or Danish as a first or second language. One character no longer speaks at all. English is used as a common language, but also avoided because of its associations with imperialism and domination. Much of this book is about language and communication, making it a particularly interesting choice for a book club about books in translation.