Croatian War Nocturnal, by Spomenka Štimec; Taiwan Travelogue, by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ

I was excited when my book club chose Croatian War Nocturnal to read because I'd never read anything written in Esperanto before. As a lover of languages and utopian projects, I've always liked the idea of Esperanto. I visited the Esperanto Museum in Vienna several years back and loved looking at all the documentation there and the pictures from the Esperanto congresses over the years. It wasn't until I read this book that I discovered Yugoslavia was a hot spot for Esperanto, though on reflection, it made sense. How better to unify the multiethnic multilingual population of a new nation than under the banner of a utopian created language that is foreign to all. You see this sometimes in formerly colonized countries that keep using the language of the colonizer as the official language rather than favoring any ethnic group in particular. And isn't a language with idealistic foundations better than a language associated with empire? Of course, like the languages of the colonizers, Esperanto is a Western construct. And apart from all the brutality that comes with a colonial language, they also come with a certain kind of access. (As becomes clear in Croatian War Nocturnal, Esperanto also comes with a kind of access: to a small but devoted international community of Esperantists. A very narrow power, but an interesting one.) 

The book itself recounts the 1991 war period in Croatia, mostly in vignettes. The author's own experience in Zagreb, that of some members of her cross-border family, and the wartime losses of some of her colleagues in the Esperantist community. She describes very clearly the way Yugoslavia fractured, with fault lines that were barely under the surface suddenly splitting, dividing families and neighbors and communities. It was a slim book and, as someone who has developed a strong interest in the region, I wished there had been more. 

I started Taiwan Travelogue about 3 weeks ago and had to take a short break from it to read Croatian War Nocturnal. It took me nearly all those 3 weeks to read the first half, and I read the second half in just a couple sittings yesterday and early this morning. 

It's clear to see why Taiwan Travelogue won the National Book Award for Translation. Language is such an important part of this book. It demands a translator who knows both Chinese and Japanese, and the translator's notes (mixed in with the author's notes, as well -- occasionally -- as notes from the fictional author in the book) provide quite a lot of context that is helpful to a reader who is unfamiliar with Taiwan and the languages in the book. 

This feat of translation surrounds a conceit in the book that it is itself a translated work. The book claims to the recently rediscovered manuscript of a Japanese writer's book about a year she spent in Taiwan in the 1930s when it was under Japanese rule, recently retranslated into Mandarin in the twenty-teens. I found this frame to be an unnecessary distraction. 

The story at the center of the book is about the relationship between the Japanese writer and her local Taiwanese translator and guide, which turns out also to be a story about empire and power and self-determination. And food. Above all, you could say this book is about food. Each chapter title is a dish, and each chapter recounts how the two women came to eat this dish, as well as often how the dish came to be, with other events seeming almost incidental. I found the food discussions occasionally fascinating and occasionally overlong. I think the best way to read this book would be as part of a culinary experience, because one does truly feel one is missing out by not having the opportunity to taste these foods that are described with so much detail as to their history and preparation.