Fiction in Translation

By Marie Vieux-Chauvet

Translated by Kaiama L. Glover 

492 pp. Archipelago, paper, $18.

Trying to weave a fairy tale life from a horror story reality, Vieux-Chauvet’s heroine, Minette, rides her beauty and talent out of poverty in late-18th-century Port-au-Prince to fame onstage as a singer. The “colored” daughter of a former slave and her white master, Minette breaks race barriers in the theater, but can’t escape the inhumanity of life outside the bubble of her art. She dreams of earning enough money “to buy all the slaves in the country so that I can free them,” then falls in love with a freedman, himself a slave owner who is as cruel as the white planters Minette so loathes.

Through Minette’s story, Vieux-Chauvet tries to navigate the Gordian politics of prerevolutionary Haiti — then called Saint-Domingue — with all its racial and caste divides, from slaves to black freedmen, to maroons, mulattos, planters, poor whites, people of color and all the detailed counting of blood fractions in between.

The author is perhaps best known for her 1968 trilogy “Love, Anger and Madness,” which took critical if disguised aim at the Duvalier dictatorship and prompted her to leave Haiti for exile in New York. “Dance on the Volcano” was first published in English in 1959, and it’s heartening to see a new translation of this important book, best read as a slice of Haiti’s past rather than as a work of fiction.

THE GRINGO CHAMPION

By Aura Xilonen

Translated by Andrea Rosenberg

316 pp. Europa, $17.

Punches, profanity and streams of offbeat argot fly from the first page of this idiosyncratic debut novel about a Mexican immigrant living on the edge of survival in an unnamed American city. Maybe 17 and “skinny as a shoelace,” Liborio has suffered enough hardship for several lifetimes, including a near-fatal border crossing, a brutal cotton-picking job and a raid by a band of “migrant-hunting gringos.” When the novel opens, he’s working in a bookstore for a boss with a penchant for vulgar verbal abuse and is madly in love with the girl next door.

Xilonen, a novelist and filmmaker from Mexico, was 19 when she wrote the book, and the prose, with all its madcap neologisms, has a youthful wildness, rather like Liborio when his blood’s running hot in a street fight. And it’s his talent for dishing out and taking beatings that ultimately offers him salvation, and a little bit of fame, via the boxing ring.

The novel’s language can be distracting (“passiflorally” speaking, but not in a “wlobalicidal” way) and the profanity wearing, but this book won’t be shelved among the “dull novels” frequently excoriated by Liborio, who is reading his way through the bookstore and has strong opinions about literature — opinions that one suspects hew closely to those of his creator. Those dull books “were fettered by the superficial task of effectuating sentence after sentence, soulless, lifeless, simply tossing out pretty words right and left. That’s how I imagined writers thread their novels together, wormy, airless, disemvoweled.”

THE NINETY-NINTH FLOOR

By Jana Fawaz Elhassan

Translated by Michelle Hartman

288 pp. Interlink, paper, $15.

It’s hard to imagine a deeper gulf than the one that separates Majd and Hilda, the main characters at the heart of this gloomy reflection on love, war and not belonging. Majd is a Palestinian who lost his mother and was himself badly wounded in the 1982 massacre in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut, while his Lebanese girlfriend, Hilda, is “one of those enemy girls” from a family of Christian Phalangists.

Luckily, they live in neutral territory — pre-9/11 New York City — where Hilda studies dance and Majd is a successful video game developer (with an office on the 99th floor). It’s Hilda’s decision to return to Lebanon to visit her family that sets off the extended bouts of introspection by Majd that make up much of Elhassan’s novel. The story’s theme of forbidden love upended by war, combined with the stranger-in-a-strange-land motif, have too long a history in literature to make a fresh telling easy. And Majd’s long-winded soul searching can be tedious. “My relationship with Hilda is impossible. Yes, impossible. She is South and I am West. She is North and I am East. She is fire and I am water. She’s over there and I’m not anywhere. She dances and I can barely move my leg.” It’s the political rather than the personal that’s most engaging for the foreign reader, since there are some truths only a storyteller can tell.

THE GREAT AND THE GOOD

By Michel Déon

Translated by Julian Evans

288 pp. Gallic, paper, $14.95.

At 22, Arthur Morgan has left his home in France bound for the United States to fulfill his mother’s ambition that he make a life for himself among “the great and the good,” whoever they might be. It’s 1955, and Arthur has won a Fulbright to study commercial law at a New England college. During what turns out to be a pivotal six-day voyage from Cherbourg to New York aboard the Queen Mary, he falls in with a threesome of 20-somethings — a Brazilian brother and sister of decent breeding but waning wealth, and an American heiress with ambitions for the stage.

None of the three are particularly great or good, and Arthur’s entanglement with them, as the outsider among entitled troubled youth, has a “Brideshead Revisited” feel, but with less theology and purpose. Arthur falls in love with the Brazilian sister (Augusta) while the heiress (Elizabeth) falls in love with him. Yet both these affairs of the heart are oddly passionless in Déon’s telling, and as the years pass Arthur does little about either, all the while making boatloads of money. Or, as he himself observes late in the novel, “I’ve delegated every decision about my personal life to fate, while my public life has been entirely bent to my will.” Déon, who died Dec. 28 at the age of 97, is such an elegant and reflective writer that his protagonist’s chronic detachment from his own life doesn’t matter in the end.

Alison McCulloch, a former editor at the Book Review, is an author and journalist living in New Zealand.