I loved the way this book played with language and translation, and the way our words are tied up with our identity. I found the actual events of the book quite opaque, though, and couldn’t always follow what was happening. So I found it hard to connect with it on that front.

‘How We Are Translated’ is a bit of a strange, whimsical book. I was rather taken with the premise and as someone interested in translation, I suppose I had high expectations of where it might go and what territory it might explore. (To cut a long story short, it's fair to say this did not happen... I am all for authors taking their readers down unexpected or even tangential avenues, but in this novel's case I started to find it verging on the incoherent.) I did finish it, as in spite of the previous comment, it’s fairly readable but overall the characters never really blossomed for me and its quirkiness came to seem a little forced (vaguely reminiscent of a lesser Wes Anderson film, if that’s not strange a comparison).

With thanks to NetGalley for an advanced copy in exchange for an unbiased review.

This is quite a strange book. We meet Kristin who is Swedish and lives with her Scottish boyfriend Ciaran, who after discovering that Kristin is pregnant starts to learn Swedish. The story is told in a kind of diary form from Kristin’s narrative.

I really struggled to read this book, it was a lot of rambling and quite disjointed with not much actual plot or reason. I didn’t connect to the character and didn’t really get the humour. I understand d what the author was trying to do, the links between language and identity but it just didn’t quite work for me.

Oh, and I was so looking forward to this one… in this story, we meet Swedish Kristin and her Scottish boyfriend Ciaran, who decides to learn Swedish by immersing himself in the language after finding out that Kristin is pregnant – a fact that she herself has not quite accepted. And, well, that is pretty much it. It is almost like reading a diary of Kristin’s, since a lot is directed at Ciaran in the second person narrative. Kristin goes to work a few times, comes home, and Ciaran is learning some Swedish. Repeat. Repeat again. While I don’t expect high-octane action in every scene I read, I kept waiting for the story to get going and it just didn’t.

I love language and find literal translations endlessly fascinating, but there are a handful at most in the book. It is mainly just a few days in the life of a woman which can be fascinating in some instances, but just isn’t here in my opinion. I can see why others would love this style of writing, but I found little plot, the sentences were meandering, and the whole story left me puzzled as to what I was supposed to have taken from what I just read. Maybe that is on me as the reader but, either way, this one wasn’t for me I’m afraid. The cover is great, though.

My thanks to the author, NetGalley, and the publisher for the arc to review.

Kristen is a Swedish young woman living in Edinburgh with a Scottish man of Brazilian heritage. She works in the Castle Museum, the National Museum of Immigration, that celebrates the history of Scotland by providing a living exhibition of all the peoples who have contributed to Scottish history. She is part of the Nordic peoples exhibition, a Norse woman who came with the raiders to find a new place to farm. Her team speak Icelandic, which she doesn’t understand, and Norwegian of which she understands a little. They aren’t allowed to speak English during their shifts, not even with colleagues who don’t understand them.

As the novel opens, Kristen’s partner who is training to be a nurse, has decided to take a break and immerse himself in a new project: learning Swedish. He is so dedicated he refuses to speak English. Though it’s her language, this shuts Kristen out.

In amongst all of these translations, are the mutable shifts of her body that carry her from child to adult to possible parent, for Kristen is pregnant. The subject is avoided. More time is spent thinking about how languages use words in ways that hold a nuanced vision of the world. More time is spent thinking about who will lead the museum’s parade through the Edinburgh festival. More time is spent staring at the preserved animals in her partner’s jars, a hobby he picked up as a child.

There are some thoroughly enjoyable contemplations of the meanings of words and phrases:

People say ‘I’m sorry’ all the time when it can mean both ‘I’m sorry I hurt you’ and ‘I’m sorry someone else did something I have nothing to do with’. It’s like the English language gave up on trying to find a word for sympathy which wasn’t also a word for guilt.

There is a quiet defiance over the ongoing ways in which we interpret others through our understanding of their skin colour, gestures, language, clothing, hair, job, hobbies. There is a desire for people to try and break down the ways in which they view these translations from a specific viewpoint that has its own biases and social expectations. And in the middle of these larger unpickings there is a very specific story about a young couple attempting to find their own way through life amidst the confusing displays of behaviour dramatised around them.

Meticulous, sometimes bewildering, How We Are Translated is a quirky coming of age novel that lives, loves and questions our multicultural world.

I agree with those who say the book is incomprehensible. It has some beautiful sentences that one grasps like a lifeline in the choppy waters of  incongruity and opaqueness.  However, I found it frustrating and stressful to read. Gave up.

The premise is absolutely to my liking, however the execution failed to meet my expectations, as there were little to none insights into the immigrant experience.

How We Are Translated by Jessica Gaitán Johannesson is all about incommunicability.

This topic is presented on multiple levels. Let’s start from the title.

If we need to be translated it means that whatever we say has no meaning for who receives the message unless our words are transferred into another language. We coul be able to successfully convey the meaning but there is always something lost in translation from language A to language B.
In the novel the main character is Swedish and her partner was born in Brazil but grew up in Scotland. One speaks Swedish, the other speaks Portuguese, and they meet in the middle ground that is the English language until he decides to stop using English to start an immersive learning of Swedish, being unable to properly communicate in that language.

Stepping into the novel, the first thing we learn from the voice narrating us the story is that she is not speaking to her partner, or that he is not speaking to her anymore. We are faced with a lack of communication between them, the key component in a fully functioning relationship.

Our protagonist works in the fictional National Museum of Immigration in Edinburgh, where all the peoples that have come to Scotland and have left a mark across the centuries are on display. She is one of the Vikings who have come to the Scottish shores in the 15th century. While on shift, the employees are forbidden from using English with each other so they end up saying things in their own languages but they are left unable to understand any of it.

Johannesson touches other topics as well, such as migration, xenophobia, relationship issues and parenthood.
The museum should celebrate the arrival of different peoples to Scotland as they brought innovation and contributed to the cultural canvas that we can now find in the country; instead, the same employees have rivalries and are ready to suspect certain groups based on stereotypes and prejudices; they fear the arrival of new peoples in the museum to be represented with their own installation as they would take up some of their space.
Two young people with stable jobs, although not great, are able to become a family? To become parents? Will their languages always be a barrier between them, preventing to fully understand each other?

Moving on to the style, How We Are Translated is a pleasant novelty that explores linguistics in different ways.
We can find some experimentalism where the author tries to show a parallel between English and Swedish but we also have some thoughts expressed by the protagonist that could easily be relatable for anyone coming to the UK from a different country:

“People say ‘I’m sorry all the time when it can mean both ‘I’m sorry I hurt you’ and ‘I’m sorry someone else did something I have nothing to do with’. It’s like the English language gave up on trying to find a word for sympathy which wasn’t also the word for guilt.”

Don’t we all feel like the things we say sometimes lose part of the meaning we give them when we speak them out loud? Why is it so? If not answers, this book will spark some brilliant considerations in the reader’s mind.

Whilst I liked what the author was trying to do here - examine the links between language and identity, and how these change those who are bilingual switch between different languages - the novel itself was far too slippery and disjointed for this reader to work out if anything insightful was actually being said. 

This topic of identity differing through using one's second language is of particular interest to me, and one I've discussed at length with friends who I studied Mandarin with, and it is also one which has a lot of potential for a novel. Unfortunately the way this was written was a bit too experimental and kooky, which made the narrative hard to connect with. Not for me!

I had really high hopes for this book. I was pulled in by the focus around language and communication, and as a languages graduate I thought I would really connect with the narrative. Unfortunately, I could not finish the book. The writing style was disruptive, I didn't really know what was going on in terms of plot, so as a result the story was going straight over my head. Maybe it just wasn't for me, but it did not meet my expectations.

This debut novel is written by a Bookseller at one of the UK’s leading independent bookshops (Mr B’s Emporium – the type of shop I wish existed in Surrey – a home of opinionated and passionate bookselling) who is also a climate change/ecological activist (and one of the leading figures of the now-dissolved Birth Strike movement).

Further the author grew up with two first languages (Spanish and Swedish) and writes in a third – English and I think has spent time in South America before a Literature degree in Gothenburg and a MSc in Edinburgh.

The book is set in Edinburgh and features a young couple – Kristin and Ciaran and is predominantly written in the first person by Kristin but addressed to Cairan.  

Kristin is a Swedish immigrant. She works at a immersive historical exhibition at a fictional Museum of (Scottish) Immigration in Edinburgh Castle – in which different people groups play the roles of their original forbears (for example a group of Lithuanian miners and Italian restauranters).  Kristin and some fellow Scandinavians play Vikings – Kristin  plays a character Solveig (and at one stage in the book the narrative briefly changes to a third party viewpoint of Solveig voiced by Kristin).  

“We are examples. Joanne Tarbuck says, here to symbolise one of the many Peoples who made Scotland what it is, and to celebrate its rich cultural multiplicity”

The quirk of the exhibit is that the employees are required to speak only in their native language and pretend not to understand any questions from tourists in English – they are even meant to spend 20 minutes before starting work in isolation in a personal Translation Room (often say a small office or even a toilet cubicle) to leave their English speaking behind and mentally revert to their native language.  This is course picks up on ideas of language barriers, and assimilation or language ghettos.

Ciaran was born into a Brazilian orphanage but adopted from there in Scotland as a child. He is a care worker doing home visits to the elderly – but also a passionate activist for climate change (and related causes) and with a hobby as a preserver of animals.

The situation of the book is that Ciaran suddenly decides to learn Swedish in reaction to the news that Kristin is in the early stages of pregnancy – and throws himself at it in a fully immersive way (watching and listening to Swedish radio and television, seeking Bergman films, putting post it notes on household objects) – and this immediately introduces tension in the relationship as Kristin, seeing Swedish speaking as her job, wants to only speak English at home which takes away a key part of the immersive experience for Ciaran.   

Cairan’s enthusiasm for Swedish – and the mapping of his interest in the preservation of animals and his views on the extinction rebellion, to the preservation of language ….

A question for you: in the great range of Great danger, how high do you think an endangered language ranks, especially if it’s not really endangered, only its ego.

… leaves him, ostensibly a left wing activist, naively (and to Kristin’s disgust) voicing the views of (what she realises are extreme right-wing) Swedish groups on the preservation of Swedish from American/English influences.  And to watch documentaries “about the fifteenth century, when Sweden was a European super-power” – again ironical from someone you know (without being told) would be much more attuned to misplaced nostalgia for British imperialism. 

Ciaran’s studies though does cause Kristin to reflect on the quirks of English (with a particular emphasis on expressions she finds misleading – for example being sick which she sees as expelling sickness) and to reexamine her native Swedish (with a particular emphasis here on the etymology of compound words – as with all native speakers the make-up of these is far less obvious than it is to non native speakers).

The text often features Swedish and English side by side as Kristin puts the languages and her own response to them alongside each other – interestingly sometimes words are missed from the translation – particularly towards the end.  Those I Googled seemed mainly about mothers and children (which I think draws on the ambiguity of both Kristin and Cairan to parenthood – the latter voices some of the ideas behind the author’s Birth Strike) although I suspect other omissions pick pu different themes.

At work tension exists between the different people groups – competing for example over the popularity of their exhibits and who gets to lead the annual parade through the festival.   Kristin proposes that her character becomes pregnant which leads to her manager buying a convincing “fat suit” and some of the other groups stealing the idea albeit with knock-off versions of the suit – and again the ideas of parenthood and conflict over it come out as well as the ideas of cultural identity and rivalry. 

So as I hope the introduction shows this is a book that brings a myriad of admirable opinions and influences to bear on its writing.  And I hope also how my review gives some ideas on how these map to this unusual book and how the novel explores issues such as language, communication and cultural identity.  

Conceptually then the book is excellent - but I felt the execution was lacking.  I simply did not enjoy reading the book anywhere near as much as reviewing it (as an aside that also went for half the Booker shortlist this year).   

The issue for me here is that the ideas simply did not coalesce into what I found a convincing or coherent form – I felt like the novel was always slipping away from me.  Further Cairan feels an undeveloped character (particularly his heritage) while the interactive exhibit which comes to dominate the book felt to often somewhere between far-fetched and farcical. 

Nevertheless a fascinating if flawed debut novel from what I think will turn out to be a very interesting author.

You know how sometimes, you just don't "get" a book? Well, for me this was one of those. I enjoyed it, I loved the bits of Swedish, I delighted in the translation quirks, but it remained altogether separate.... I didn't feel a connection or emotional involvement. I'm not saying don't read it, but it's not one I would tell you to rush out and buy.

Thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for the advance copy.

Technical hitch detected, the review wouldn't post directly to Goodreads, so I've copy/pasted.

I love reading books about other languages, or with parts written in other languages, even though it makes me feel like I should try to pick up my Spanish again, or that I should remember any French vocab at all. Only speaking one language is really very boring. Ha.

How We Are Translated is about a couple living in Edinburgh; 24-year-old Kristin, who immigrated from Sweden five years ago, and her boyfriend Ciaran, who grew up in Scotland after being adopted from Brazil as a toddler. A potential pregnancy means that their relationship is shifting into something neither of them feels quite adult enough for, and they both deal with it in different ways. Kristin throws herself into her job, as a living history exhibition at the Castle, allowed to speak only in Swedish during working hours, playing the character of Solveig, the Viking’s wife. Ciaran decides that he will learn Swedish to better understand Kristin, immersing himself in a språkbad language bath, covering their small flat with post-its and reading newspapers he doesn’t yet understand. 

I loved Kristin’s interactions at her job and how her job bled into her life outside of it, the way that it made her native language — a language she doesn’t share with anyone immediately around her — feel like a job in itself. The book is written mostly in the second person, as Kristin addresses her thoughts throughout the day towards Ciaran. It’s full of small observations which make both Kristin and whoever she’s talking about feel more fully realised, and the little bilingual segments add another layer to the relationships between characters. 

I really enjoyed this — and can we just have a moment to bask in that BEAUTIFUL cover? 

Out in February, thanks @scribe_uk & #netgalley for the early copy!

As a French national living in Scotland, I thought I'd be able to relate a lot but was rather disappointed. Although the reflections on language are astute, as mentioned by other readers, the novel as a whole is relatively confusing. I also found the scenes and characters pertaining to Kirsten's job in particular rather over the top. It's a shame because I still enjoyed some of the humour as well as the style, but I found the whole too inconsistent.

I couldn't really get into this book - which is a shame as it sounds like it should be right up my street. Maybe I'll give it another go sometime and see if I can make more headway. For the moment I will leave it part read and try something else before going back to it.

It took me a long time to get into the swing of this book and I almost abandoned it, but about a quarter of the way through (certainly when we see Kristin/Solveig at work in The Castle) it began to come alive for me.  I enjoyed her interaction with her colleagues and the whole concept of ‘living history’ using exclusively native languages kept me turning the pages - her relationship with her Brazilian/Scottish partner not so much.  I kept hoping there would be some more meaningful insights into the immigrant experience but was disappointed there.  A confusing read, particularly in the dialogue, and if nothing else I’ve taken away some interesting ideas about the Swedish language and how it does and doesn’t always easily translate into English.

This is one of those books that is hard to review and rate because there is nothing else quite like it to compare it too. One of the most bizarrely quirky books I’ve read in a long time. I think it’s a bit like marmite, you’re either going to hate it or find you just can’t put it down. It definitely drew me in. 

 The book takes place inside the mind of a Swedish woman living in Edinburgh. It is hard to tell how much of a reliable narrator she is as there are quite a lot of contradictions. She has a job in which she must translate but also pretend to not understand English, her partner decides to put in himself on a personal intensive Swedish learning week shut inside his own home and collects animals in jars and she may or may not be pregnant. While there is not much of a plot- there is quite a lot of intrigue and I enjoyed some of the use of language and the idea that there are things that are cultural specific and just don’t translate or might translate as something else. 

This is really a book of themes. Themes of belonging, connectedness, language and the things that unite or divide us, making the reader question how arbitrary these are? Can they be overcome or not? Are we separated entirely by being completely in our own heads and individual consciousness? Can we ever truly understand each other and what is it really that prevents barriers to this? 

Not sure how much I liked this book but I did thoroughly enjoy the experience of reading it and found myself repeatedly drawn to pick it up and read on. Very interested to hear peoples reactions to this one and any further work by the author. 

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for giving me an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

How We Are Translated is an intriguing title - especially to those interested in languages - and it makes you consider the narrator's actions in a certain way throughout the book. A well-chosen title that says something about how the main character perceives her boyfriend’s obsession with learning Swedish, but also about how she feels stuck in - but can’t escape - her work life.

Kristin feels like a different person depending on the language she speaks and the language that is spoken to her. When she is Solveig, the character she impersonates at work, the visitors of the living history exhibit take her words and actions in a certain way and translate her in a way she is not. The same thing happens at home with her boyfriend, though in this case, it is obvious that they mistranslate each other. 

When a question comes up in either her work life or private life, the situation is mirrored in the other. Both Kristin and her boyfriend are stuck between worlds, trying to find out who they are alone and together, but also who they should be in the future. The perfect translation is still a long way off.

What I appreciate about How We Are Translated is how their struggles are subtly shown in the way Kristin describes her days. It is in the soft and loving thoughts she has about her boyfriend, but also in the small gestures that they both make. Jessica Gaitán Johannesson wrote a multi-dimensional character that is struggling with her identity. Who is she? Who will she be in the future?

Unfortunately, I have to continue this review by saying that I didn’t enjoy reading the book. This is mostly because of the way the story is told. The unpredictable narrative is refreshing at first, but gets tiresome after a while when you’re looking for something ‘whole’. When you can finally pinpoint what a certain paragraph is about, it switches to the next topic before you know the outcome or the next steps of the previous topic.

The narrative felt too shattered to me. Kristin addresses her boyfriend and not me, the reader. Perhaps if her boyfriend had read this book, they would have understood each other better. For me, there is no point in following her thoughts. A shorter glimpse would have been enough.

I feel neutral about the frequent use of Swedish words and sentences (all with English translations) in the book. I learned some Swedish, which is fun, but because of its frequency, I expected a stronger impact on the story. After a while I started to share Kristin’s sentiments about Swedish: “I do adore Swedish sometimes (as long as it stays where it is).” I do hope this was not the intended impact.

I finished the book with my thoughts as shattered as Kristin’s, and a strong hope for her to find a way to say hello to the future, especially if it happens today.

This book really confused me and I just couldn’t get into it - I could tell that it was trying to do something but honestly I just couldn’t feel what exactly that ‘something’ was. It was charming and innocent in many ways that at times made it a pleasant read, and honestly maybe it’s just me, but while I could tell it was trying to say something about the distance in language, I could never connect the dots and find the writing style to be a little confusing.

This is a quirky book that took me a little while to get it's rythym.   Kristin, a Swedish woman, lives with Ciaran in Edinburgh.  By day she is Solveig, part of Edinburgh Castles living history exhibit.
Ciaran is one of those people who throws himself into his projects.  He decides he wants to learn Swedish and will only speak Swedish at home.  For some reason this irritates Kristen, who then avoids helping him wherever possible.  She also finds out she is pregnant.
The whole book is written from her viewpoint and we come across the strange and eclectic characters  who are part of her life.  Joanne Tarbuck, her boss, Ingrid and Algot who are her co-workers in the exhibit.  The Lithuanians, the Irish and the odd bods around her home.
A strange book, but it drew me in and I enjoyed it.