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The World Between Two Covers
Reading the Globe

ANN MORGAN
For Steve, who was there every step of the way
 Reading is a solitary act, but one that
demands connection to the world.
(The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop: A Memoir, A History
BY LEWIS BUZBEE)

You would think differently if this land was

your land and if these people were your people.
(The Corsair
BY ABULAZIZ AL MAHMOUD,
TRANSLATED FROM THE ARABIC
BY AMIRA NOWAIRA)
 Contents

1 Deciding to travel
the impulse to read the world
2 Plotting the route
the global literature landscape
3 Identifying landmarks
cultural identity and the problem of authenticity
4 Following the trade routes
publishing around the world
5 Venturing off the beaten track
writers commercial publishing doesn’t reach
6 Taking alternative modes of transport
oral narratives
7 Encountering roadblocks
censorship, propaganda and exiled writers
8 Broadening the mind
empathy and politics in literature
9 Dealing with culture shock
when books and readers clash
10 Finding myself
representations of the West in books around the world
11 Crossing the language barrier
translation
12 Surveying the road ahead
technology and the internet
The 196 (. . . and Kurdistan)
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements
 1
Deciding to travel
the impulse to read the world

As you drive up the M11 in Cambridgeshire, a junction or two before

the motorway fizzles out into the A14, a view opens up to the right
of the car. Across the flat fields, you see an expanse of rooftops
glistening, and amid them a dark, rectangular tower reaching for the
sky. You might not be able to make it out from the motorway with
the lorries rattling past, but if you take a detour and drive along
Cambridge’s West Road, the building may well start to look strangely
familiar, even if you’ve never seen it before. Looming above you, the
brown-brick giant bears more than a passing resemblance to the red
K2 telephone box that its creator, architect Giles Gilbert Scott, also
designed. To my mind, though, this tower has another
doppelgänger: with its rectangular windows at the top and blind,
enclosed sides, it seems to recall the 1960s police box that stamped
itself on British popular culture as the Tardis in Doctor Who nearly
thirty years after this building welcomed the first visitors through its
doors. The anachronistic parallel with the Time Lord’s vehicle is
oddly fitting, because in many ways that’s what this strange
creation, with its flanking courtyards and cluster of later wings, really
is: a time machine. Step inside and you can travel almost anywhere
in the world and back as far as 3,000 years.
Throughout my time as an undergraduate student in Cambridge,
the University Library dominated not just the skyline but also my
thoughts. Repository of priceless marvels – sketchbooks from
Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle, Newton’s papers, ancient Chinese
oracle bones, the astonishing Hebrew Genizah Collection, illuminated
manuscripts, and some 4,700 fifteenth-century books produced
during the first fifty years of printing – it seemed a magical, almost
mythical place. Glancing through the revolving doors as I wobbled
past on my bicycle, scarfed up against the fenland wind, was like
peering through a portal into another world, a Narnia of reading.
The UL didn’t just contain stories; it produced them too. There
were tales of people camping out on obscure floors of the North
Front overnight, as well as rumours of intrepid third-years having sex
in obscure corners of the South Wing. People said that the library
was so efficient that Oxford professors would forsake the dreaming
spires to come and read there, sometimes in disguise. And then, of
course, there was the omnivisible, seventeen-storey tower – ‘this
magnificent erection’, as Neville Chamberlain is said to have dubbed
it – which, as far as any hormone-riddled undergraduate could see,
just had to be stuffed chock-full of outrageous Victorian porn
deemed too extreme by the building’s soberly dressed guardians to
be made openly available.
Whether or not these stories were true hardly mattered. The place
seemed to demand them. It was as though the books on the shelves
got together after hours and spawned a new generation of tales, as
if the library were so packed with plot that it couldn’t help but spill
over and dribble out of the doors in streams of rumour, speculation
and intrigue.
The stories were only the half of it. A number of the authors of
the volumes contained in the library had been known to put in an
appearance now and then, popping up between the book stacks to
the delight and occasional terror of awestruck undergraduates. You
might bump into Robert Macfarlane in the Map Room or see Helen
Oyeyemi taking a break from her next novel in the Tea Room. Ali
Smith could pass you in the entrance hall on her way to talk to the
creative writing society and Patricia Duncker could appear at any
moment from behind an apocryphal early Bible translation, perhaps
plotting another adventure for her elusive Germanist. I’ll never
forget the day an English student in the year above me arrived in
the college bar to announce, with a tremor in his voice, that he had
spent the afternoon in the UL working at the same table as –
whisper it – Germaine Greer.
For me, however, the single most striking thing about the library
was not its extraordinary contents or the people who frequented it,
but the fact that it was growing before my eyes. As one of six legal
deposit libraries (or copyright libraries, as they used to be known
before the Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003 extended their remit to
include electronic publications and other non-print material), the UL
keeps a copy of each edition published in the UK and Ireland. For
ever. That means that, on an average day, around 500 books and
500 journal issues arrive and have to be found room for. Each year,
nearly two miles of bookshelves are added to the more than 100
miles’ worth already contained in the library in an effort to
accommodate a collection that is growing at a rate of a million
publications every eight to ten years. As a result, the UL has little
choice but to grow too.
To my eighteen-year-old self, the idea of a perpetually growing
library was enthralling, marvellous and faintly monstrous. There was
a touch of the grotesque about it, as though a Roald Dahl book and
a Kafka novel had been left too close to each other on one of the
tables. I loved it, but it also made me afraid. I imagined a day when
the UL sprawled to such an extent that its furthest reaches butted
up against the extremes of the other copyright libraries – the
Bodleian to the west and the British Library to the south. Would we
all live among the bookshelves, I wondered, weaving roads,
hospitals, schools and other amenities in as best we could? I
pictured my street at home in north London overrun with shelves of
books; my mother trying to reverse her car out of the driveway
around a stack of rare Chinese translations. I wasn’t convinced it
could work.
When I unravelled the implications of the UL’s growth for my own
career as a literature student, things didn’t look too promising either.
Given 500 new British and Irish books to contend with every day (I
reckoned I could probably let myself off the journals), my chances of
keeping pace with publication rates looked pretty slim, and that was
without factoring in the roughly eight million books already tucked
snugly within the library’s walls. Even just scanning the titles of all
the new works that appeared every day would be a mammoth task,
let alone having to hunt them down through the facility’s labyrinthine
vaults and passages. And every minute – well, every 2.88 minutes,
to be exact, given the number of texts arriving each day – I was
falling further and further behind: another book was being added to
the stacks behind the forbidding brown façade, another volume
interposed between me and omnilexience. The awful truth hit me: I
was never going to read everything in the UL. It was an impossible
task. Even if I spent every hour of every day of my three years in
Cambridge there – even if I cancelled my future, devoted my whole
life to the project, and became a creature from the far reaches of
the South Front, another legend to add to the UL’s mythology – I
would never manage it. The whole enterprise was doomed before it
had even begun. I might as well give up and go home.
So hopeless did the prospect of trying to get to grips with the
contents of the UL seem that, I’m ashamed to say, for the whole of
my first year in Cambridge I didn’t cross its threshold once. I
preferred to stick to the more manageable environs of my college
and faculty libraries – places in which I felt I might have a chance of
making a dent in at least a wall or two of books, institutions where
tracking down a title didn’t involve walking half a mile and scribbling
catalogue numbers of more than a dozen characters. Giles Gilbert
Scott’s tower loomed at me as I scurried about the city, raised like a
warning finger, reminding me at odd moments that I was on a fool’s
errand, that I would never succeed in knowing it all. But for the
most part, I put it out of my mind. The books on my reading lists
cropped up regularly enough in Heffers and Waterstones and in the
faculty and college collections and when they didn’t – well, what was
a girl to do?
It wasn’t until my second year, when I was looking for some
outlandish critics to pick a fight with over Thomas Hardy, that I
ventured through the doors and up into the great active silence
beyond. That autumn, I discovered Cambridge and reading anew,
huddled cosily at a table on the second floor of the North Wing, in
the rusty glow of shelving lights on timers that every so often would
click off and have to be reset by turning a dial on the end of one of
the bookcases. I sat there, engrossed, as the evenings drew in and
the November wind chased another batch of freshers on bicycles
along the road outside.

*
Eleven years later, when I first started thinking about reading the
world, that same old UL paralysis returned to haunt me. I was
roughly halfway through a project that involved me spending 2011
reading books by women when a blogger from a website called
‘Commonwealth Cartographies’ stopped by my website to add his
two penn’orth – or two cents, to be more precise, he being
American. He had a book to recommend by an Australian writer: Tim
Winton’s Cloudstreet.
Restraining my inner pedant from pointing out that my blog’s
name was ‘A Year of Reading Women’ – which, in the great, grand
Ronseal tradition of names, meant that I was spending a year
reading only women writers and that there was no point
recommending books by men, sheep, goats or any other sentient
beings, as I wouldn’t be able to read them for at least another six
months – by which stage I’d more than likely be up to my eyeballs in
a backlog of recommendations from friends, regular visitors and
people who actually bothered to read the name of my blog – I wrote
an enthusiastic response saying that I would add the title to my list
for the following year.
I expected that would be that. Commonwealth Cartographies, I
thought, would go jogging off into the virtual sunset, leaving me to
tend my reviews of Murdoch, Moran and Delafield in peace.
Not so. Within a few days he was back. Was I going to do another
blog next year? He asked because he was anxious to be privy to my
love of Cloudstreet as, at the risk of sounding presumptuous, he
couldn’t imagine anyone not liking it.
I was somewhat taken aback. Who was this person trampling all
over my delicately cultivated comments section with his great, male
doorstoppers? And what was this book that he seemed to like so
much anyway? If it was so good, how come I had never heard of it
before?
I kept my reply friendly but non-committal. No, I hadn’t thought
as far as next year, I wrote, but if I were going to continue, the new
blog would have to have some kind of angle. Not for me the chance
choices of the casual book blogger. I needed a goal.
The next day, the unusually persistent commenter, or Jason
Cooper as I later came to know him, returned with a concept
designed around the idea of my reading Cloudstreet. What about
tackling books from different countries? he suggested. Around the
world in 365 days?
There were actually 366 days in the upcoming year, it being of the
leap variety, but I didn’t bother to point this out, so amused was I by
the suggestion. What sort of a philistine did Cooper take me for? Did
he seriously think that I didn’t already read lots of books from
around the world?
Why, my year of reading women had already featured a whole
load of them. There were books by writers from the US, and South
Africa, and India . . . and the US . . . Huh.
I glanced up at my bookshelves, the proud record of more than
twenty years of reading, and found a host of British and North
American greats staring down at me: the Hardys and the Austens,
the Orwells and the Greenes, the Steinbecks, Highsmiths, Hellers,
Christies, Tremains, McEwans, Fieldings (both of them), Smiths
(hundreds of them) and Shields. They were great friends, all of
them, and I loved them dearly, but now that I came to think about it
weren’t they all a little, well, Western?
Worse, apart from a dog-eared copy of Madame Bovary and a
jumbled assortment of Freuds picked up during a student book-
buying binge and barely touched since, there seemed to be nothing
at all in translation. And not because I had been reading books in
their original languages, I hasten to add.
No. I had barely touched a work by a foreign-language author in
years. My literary diet consisted largely of highly processed British
and American staples, most of which had to have been sampled by
at least two major media outlets and seasoned with an online
discount or packaged up in a flashy deal to tempt me to pick them
up. I was comparable to one of those people who order chips in
Chinese restaurants. Or pack teabags for a weekend away on the
Isle of Wight. I was the person who preferred to take a mini-break in
Milton Keynes to making the trip across the Channel for fear of squat
toilets and menus I didn’t understand. The awful truth dawned: I
was a literary xenophobe.
Something had to be done. As far as I could see, there was only
one course of action. I would have to prescribe myself an intensive
course of world literature and spend 2012 trying to read a book from
every country in the world. I would set out to devour a book-length
prose narrative – written or translated into English – from each state
during those twelve months, aiming largely for contemporary novels,
story collections or memoirs, but leaving the door open for
extraordinary blasts from the past here and there. Part-penance,
part-prophylactic, this undertaking would, I hoped, atone for my
years of literary insularity and inoculate me against the narrowness
of mind that such a restricted diet of reading matter must have
predisposed me towards. It would be the corrective treatment that
my stunted and anaemic reading needed. (When I declared this to
my now-husband Steve, he looked far from convinced that it was the
treatment our relationship needed, but, having witnessed me getting
embroiled in various bonkers projects over the years, he knew better
than to object; instead he threw himself into coming up with ideas
for photographs to illustrate the progress of the project on the blog.
He was helped, perhaps, by my Christmas gift to him of a
PlayStation as a sort of advance apology for the fact that I was likely
to be incommunicado for much of the coming year.)
The die was cast, but there was a problem: I didn’t know where to
start. The world has an awful lot of books in it – 500,000 English-
language volumes were published in 2009 alone, according to
bibliographic monitor Nielsen Book – and I had no way of knowing
what to choose. The sea of titles I could access in English, the
language in which more than a quarter of the world’s books are
currently published, was as good as limitless. And, unlike the
Cambridge UL, I didn’t have the creaky old Newton computer
catalogue to help me narrow down books to subject areas and
genres that might appeal. I really was on my own.
As the full implications of what the quest entailed hit me, it
seemed for a while that my teenage nightmare vision had come true
after all. Without my realising it, I had been living in a global library
all along, hemmed in by walls of unknowable books. It was as
though someone had flicked a switch to reveal miles and miles of
dusty shelves stretching off in all directions where I had blithely
assumed walls to be. It was exciting and tempting, but it was
daunting too. Having spent my adult life reading books by authors
who wrote almost exclusively in my mother tongue, I was painfully
aware that I was ill equipped to navigate this newly revealed terrain.
I had no way of knowing what I should read or where to find it and
there were more international books on offer than I could hope to
consume in a lifetime of lifetimes. Amid such a bewildering welter of
riches, mediocrity and no doubt downright stinkers, it seemed
impossible – absurd, even – to pick out and make a start on one
volume. How could I do it when, with every page I turned, I would
be shutting the door on reading another possibly more marvellous
work?
Such anxiety is a common theme among those contemplating
taking on the world’s stories. Since Goethe first introduced the term
Weltliteratur into circulation in the late 1820s (he didn’t in fact coin it
– August Ludwig von Schlözer and Christoph Martin Wieland got
there first, but Goethe gets the credit for bringing it to general
attention), numerous would-be world readers have quailed in the
face of the enormity and even ludicrousness of the task. ‘What can
one make of such an idea?’ exclaimed the critic Claudio Guillén in
1993. ‘The sum total of all national literatures? A wild idea,
unattainable in practice, worthy not of an actual reader but of a
deluded keeper of archives who is also a multimillionaire. The most
harebrained editor has never aspired to such a thing.’ Or, as Harvard
comparative literature professor David Damrosch put it ten years
later, ‘How can we have it all?’
Guillén and Damrosch were by no means the first to express such
anxieties: back in 1964, the French polyglot René Étiemble, who
specialised in Arab and Chinese culture, was thrown into a cold
sweat by the notion of trying to tackle all stories written everywhere
ever. ‘I am immediately seized by a kind of panic terror, which
reminds me of the proverb “grasp all, lose all”,’ he confessed in a
speech to the Fourth World Congress of the International
Comparative Literature Association. ‘What would such theoretical
openness of spirit to all literatures, whether present or past, bring us
given that any mind, however capacious we may imagine it, is
limited by the average length of our lives?’ The idea clearly niggled
Étiemble, for he gave it some detailed thought:

Do the sum yourself: give yourself fifty years of life without one
day of illness or rest, or altogether 18,262 days. Rigorously take
into account periods of sleep, meals, the obligations and
pleasures of life, and of your profession, estimate the time left
to you for reading masterpieces with the sole purpose of finding
out what precisely is literature. As I’m extremely generous, I will
grant you the privilege of reading every day – good ones as well
as bad ones – one very beautiful book of all that are accessible
to you in your own language and in the foreign languages you
have mastered, in the original, or in translation. You know that
it will take you more than one day to read The Magic Mountain
or the Arabian Nights; but I also take into account that with a
little bit of luck and zeal you might read in one day the Hojoki,
the Romance gitano, the Menexenos and The Spirit of Conquest
of Benjamin Constant. This will give you the couple of days
extra that you will need to read And Quiet Flows the Don, which
for the longest time was thought to have been written by
Sholokhov, but which is not any less good for actually being
mostly the work of Krioukov. In any case better than Cleared
Land by the same Sholokhov. Now, when measured against the
total number of very beautiful books that exist in the world,
what are 18,262 titles? Sheer misery.

One wonders what Étiemble would have made of today’s rate of

publication, which, leaving aside the hundreds of thousands of books
published every year, sees around 51 million websites added to the
internet annually and 100,000 new tweets going live every minute.
The truth is that the volume of printed words in the world has
always been unreadable by a single individual, almost from the word
go. By 1500, a mere fifty years after Johann Gensfleisch zur Laden
zum Gutenberg’s first printing press first rattled into life in Mainz,
some 27,000 titles had been churned out across Europe –
considerably more than even Étiemble’s tyrannical proposed regime
could allow for getting through in a single lifetime. Devouring it all,
or trying to have, as Marx and Engels put it with typically daunting
earnestness, ‘intercourse in every direction’, has always been an
impossible fantasy. Whichever way you look at it, if you’re trying to
read the world, you’re pretty much screwed.
With covering all bases definitively off the menu, some element of
choice has to come into the equation and therein lies another rub.
Because if no individual can have read all the books in the world
how can anyone be in a position to say that one text is more
deserving of attention than another?
Staring down at me now from the bookshelf across the room is a
fat volume titled 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. Edited
by one Dr Peter Boxall, it contains details of a mere eighteenth of
the number of titles you might be able to get through if you read
your head off until you expire. Inside, the selection certainly looks
intriguing – while dominated by US and European writers, it includes
a good handful of Asian and South American authors and an African
work or three. There’s no doubt that Boxall and his extensive team
of contributors have done a lot of work to compile their
recommendations, and if you google the book you’ll find comments
from armies of ambitious readers champing at the bit to take the list
on. Strangely though, for a man putting the finishing touches to so
mammoth an enterprise, Boxall takes a rather apologetic tone in his
introductory words and seems at times to be fumbling for a
disclaimer to distance himself from the bold assertion of the title.
‘The contributors to this book are not interested in producing an
exclusive list, a list that can achieve transnational and transcultural
consensus about which books we should read before we die,’ he
writes in the Preface, going on to reinforce his point in the
Introduction with the assertion that his list ‘does not seek to be a
new canon . . . Rather, it is a list that lives in the midst of the
contradiction between the comprehensive and the partial.’ Far from
feeling satisfaction as he comes to the end of the gargantuan task of
marshalling this ambitious must-read list, Boxall seems rather
uneasy, as though, for all their diligence, he and his team will
inevitably fall short.
It’s a sentiment familiar to many academics working in this field.
As the study of world literature as a separate discipline has come
into focus in lecture and seminar rooms – most of them in the
United States – over the last four decades or so, numerous experts
have expressed concerns about what writer Gerard Holden has
called ‘the problem of what to include and what to leave out’ and
about their inability to preside over so vast and varied a field of
human endeavour. ‘How many of us are linguistically qualified to
teach such courses?’ asked one-time International Comparative
Literature Association president Werner P. Friederich in 1960, when
mooting the prospect of expanding academic teaching to include
Asian literatures. ‘In spite of our desperate need to know far more
about Asia than we actually do, we are in a particularly deplorable
predicament right now.’ In recent times, some universities, such as
Yale, have attempted to solve the problem by introducing team-
taught world-literature courses, bringing in experts on the literature
of specific regions to lead on certain texts, and relying on a
generalist lecturer to provide continuity and an overview. But with
teaching time in short supply, the challenge of selecting texts
remains as fraught as ever.
Even at the highest level, mistakes are sometimes unavoidable.
Since 1901, the eighteen members of the Swedish Academy have
striven to award the Nobel Prize for Literature to writers who, in the
words of Alfred Nobel’s will, have ‘conferred the greatest benefit to
mankind’, creating a sort of elite world-literature canon along the
way. The 111 writers to have been honoured to date – among them
Günter Grass, Gabriel García Márquez, Jean-Paul Sartre, Samuel
Beckett and Toni Morrison – make for formidable reading. All the
same, there are some key omissions and odd inclusions. Virginia
Woolf and James Joyce, for example, do not get a look in because
the proposers in their home countries never nominated them, and
yet, as Academy member and former permanent secretary Horace
Engdahl freely admits, ‘not even every second author on the list can
be said to have reached something like a canonical status’.
Even with their minds focused on recognising writing that most
benefits the human race, the Academy members’ decisions are
swayed by the fashions and prejudices of their times. Feeling duty-
bound to recognise only God-fearing writers, the early Nobel
Committee passed over Thomas Hardy because of his immoral
heroines and rebellious stance towards religion. It rejected Ibsen as
‘negative and bewildering’ and threw out Zola for being ‘cynical’. And
when it came to the year in which the prize went to Eugene O’Neill
instead of Sigmund Freud, the Committee’s report explaining its
reasoning was as unapologetic as it was doomed to crumple under
the test of time: ‘Freud appears, more than any of his patients, to be
possessed of a sick and twisted imagination, which speaks volumes,
since he has an abundance of unusually strange patients.’
With the great and the good of the literary establishment
committing such pratfalls on occasion, what hope is there for
everyone else? How are we to proceed when no one is in a position
to explain the comparative merits of each offering to us with
objective certainty? Faced with the unknowability of what’s out
there, it often seems simpler and safer to stick with what we know –
the stream of recommendations and endorsements that publishers
and retailers have developed to ensure we are never more than a
few clicks away from a book that is like a book we like.
From endorsement quotes by comparable writers on the jacket, to
taster chapters for similar works at the back, we are constantly
encouraged to read things similar to the stories we have already
read. If we buy a book on Amazon, we are told what other people
who bought that title also went for – and then we get emails about
it too. In bookshops, even before we inch close enough to make out
the title, we can usually tell from a novel’s colour scheme and cover
design whether the contents tend more towards the Marian Keyes or
Ruth Rendell end of the spectrum: stilettos on a candyfloss-pink
background and you’ve got the story of a touchingly dizzy city girl
trying to have it all; drops of blood on a snowy landscape and you
know you’re in for a rough ride. And without realising it, we can find
ourselves co-opted into the like-with-like marketing drive through
invitations to tweet that we’ve finished ebooks, and book-club notes
nestling in the closing pages of print editions. And that’s even before
we’ve liked the author page on Facebook so that all our friends can
be in no doubt of our literary preferences.
All this can be useful and often leads to reliably enjoyable reading
experiences, but it has a drawback. Ensconced as we are in our
individual hall of mirrors, our literary preferences reflected endlessly
back at us in slightly altered form, it can be tricky to see a way out.
If your default frame of reference for selecting a book is that it looks
like, sounds like or is like something you’ve read before, or that
someone you like likes it, how do you begin to navigate your way
through literary terrain that has few familiar landmarks, where book
jackets don’t give off the signals you’re used to and where hardly
any of your contemporaries may ever have ventured? It’s little help
knowing that Yan Lianke’s Dream of Ding Village has been likened to
Albert Camus’ The Plague if you’ve never read either and have no
foundation on which to construct the comparison.
With familiarity providing the rationale for much of what we buy
and read, it’s small wonder that the few foreign-language writers to
top the UK sales charts in recent years have been those that slot
into preordained categories. The Scandi-crime giants fit comfortably
into popular conceptions of what a gritty crime novel should be, and
have the added advantage that publishers can use them to sell one
another through a sort of domino effect: Jo Nesbø, stripped of his
slashed ‘o’ for squeamish British eyes, was marketed as the next
Stieg Larsson; then Camilla Läckberg took to the UK shelves without
her umlaut, her works bearing stickers that read ‘If you like Jo
Nesbo you will love this.’ Small wonder too that, with our
preferences so carefully catered for and pandered to, few of us feel
tempted to change our reading habits – with the result that,
according to a 2013 survey by Literature Across Frontiers, only 4.37
per cent of literary works published in the UK and Ireland in 2008
were translations (a figure not a million miles away from the
controversial 3 per cent statistic thought to have originated from a
report on the US publishing industry by bibliographic-data provider
Bowker in 2005). With so much well-pitched material on hand, the
prospect of seeking out stories from further afield feels a bit like
being asked to abandon the bright supermarket aisles where
everything is arranged just as we like it to forage for literary
sustenance in the local park. It seems more than a touch eccentric,
rather a lot of effort and as though it may well yield dubious results.
Luckily, however, readers elsewhere don’t share our reluctance. As
I found when I launched ayearofreadingtheworld.com with a short
appeal for book lovers the world over to suggest titles for me to try,
bibliophiles around the planet (including those intrepid anglophone
readers who have struck out from the familiar shallows of the US
and UK markets) are usually only too pleased to share their views,
time and expertise. Sitting in my living room on the dreary evening
in October 2011 on which that first post went live, I had prepared
myself for the possibility that I might be on my own with my
capricious quest. In practice, nothing could have been further from
the truth: within hours of sharing the link with friends and
colleagues and on Facebook and Twitter, I was getting messages
from people I had never met suggesting titles and promising to ask
the advice of contacts in far-flung destinations. A Portuguese woman
in another department at the newspaper where I was freelancing
generously donated a volume of translated short stories by Eça de
Queiróz, which she had just bought (I promised to return it, but I’m
afraid it’s still sitting on my shelf), someone who grew up in Saudi
Arabia shared her ideas, and a German-language translator pitched
in with recommendations for Austria. Before long, strangers had
written far more about my plans than I had and the list of comments
below my little 300-word appeal extended far down the page. And
then, about four days after my post went live, I found a comment
from someone called Rafidah waiting in my inbox. Based in Kuala
Lumpur, she liked the sound of my project and was offering to go to
her local English-language bookshop, choose a book for me from
Malaysia and post it to London. I accepted with alacrity, and a few
weeks later a package arrived containing two volumes – one
Malaysian and a possible choice for Singapore, both selected after
lengthy deliberation with the bookseller – along with a card wishing
me luck.
As I discovered later, that package also contained the key to my
project. Symbolic of the generosity, enthusiasm and creativity of the
many book lovers I encountered on my quest – both during my
preliminary explorations in the last months of 2011, when I tried to
gather a stock of titles so that I’d be able to hit the ground running
on 1 January, and then during the year itself, when reading,
blogging and researching often took up as much as eight hours a
day, fitted around full-time work – it revealed the thing that would
keep me going through the months ahead and would ultimately
enable me to achieve my goal. The answer to my dilemma about
how to select texts from the mass of reading matter out there was
not in chilly canons or definitive must-read lists, but in discovery and
openness. It was in accepting the impossibility of the project and yet
doing it all the same. And it was in a readiness to trust the words of
an unknown person on the other side of the world.

Not knowing things often feels rather threatening. It carries with it

the connotations of failed homework assignments and being singled
out in front of the class. In many areas of anglophone culture, to be
ignorant is somehow shameful, and many of us go to great lengths
to avoid being exposed as poorly informed. We smile and nod when
someone mentions a film or celebrity we’ve never heard of, we come
up with elaborate stealth strategies to get people to reveal their
names when we’ve forgotten them. But most of all, given the choice,
we try to avoid situations where we’re likely to find ourselves out of
our depth.
All of this makes venturing into a story from a part of the world
we may never have heard of before more than a little daunting. It
seems inevitable that such books will contain references to things,
places and practices we know nothing about. Faced with the
prospect of reading something from a culture quite different to our
own, we can feel clumsy and ill-equipped, liable to take things the
wrong way or miss the point. In the worst-case scenario, there’s the
risk that we end up sitting like an unpopular child at the margins of
the text while in-jokes buzz about over our heads, full of secret
codes we have no means of understanding.
The question of how we go about bridging these gaps so as to be
able to read culturally alien texts is a thorny one. ‘What is a non-
specialist reader to do?’ asks David Damrosch in the Introduction to
his confidently titled How to Read World Literature. ‘If we don’t want
to confine our reading within the narrow compass of one or two of
the world’s literatures, we need to develop ways to make the most
of works from a range of distinct times and places.’ Spending the
rest of the book addressing this question, Damrosch takes the
reader through a series of great works from around the planet,
drawing up a list of mental approaches, ideas and preparations that
we might want to consider in order to get the most from forays into
foreign texts. These include accepting the importance of reading
translations ‘in critical awareness of the translators’ choices and
biases, even if we have no direct knowledge of a text’s original
language’; being open ‘to read[ing] different works with different
expectations’; learning enough about each new literary tradition ‘to
achieve an overall understanding of its patterns of reference and its
assumptions about the world, the text and the reader’; and
endeavouring to engage with works’ ‘original social, political and
biographical contexts’ while maintaining a balance so that we are
neither guilty of ‘submerging ourselves in antiquarian details nor
absorbing the works so fully into our own world that we mistake The
Odyssey for a modern novel or look to it for the same pleasures we
expect from movies and television’. Oh, and if we can – although he
realises this is pushing it somewhat – it would be very helpful if we
could have command of two foreign languages, ‘one from [our]
home region and one from a very different part of the world’.
The problem with Damrosch’s prescriptions is that they sound like
a lot of work. If anyone tried to follow them fully, they would be
looking at months, if not years, of preparation simply to be in a
position to read a single foreign text. Taken to extremes, they might
even be seen as advocating a kind of method reading for which we
would each be required to immerse ourselves in the cultural
practices of the milieu of a work for a period of time before taking it
on – spending a month keeping kosher in order to be worthy of
reading Primo Levi, say, or fasting through Ramadan to prepare for
tackling The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Even people who are
emigrating don’t put in that much groundwork, so it seems over-
egging the pudding to suggest that prospective readers go to such
great lengths.
Another issue Damrosch overlooks somewhat is that, for many
people, one of the major incentives for reading books from other
cultures is discovery itself. Rightly or wrongly, we tend to regard
literary works as windows on other worlds. Learning about a
different way of life and a different way of looking at things is part of
the point of the exercise. If we have to mug up on all that in
advance, it defeats the object of reading the book at all. By the time
we’ve made our way through the thicket of well-meaning,
schoolmasterly tomes Damrosch seems intent on hedging each
literary work in with, that initial spark of curiosity that got us
interested in the novel or memoir will have been well and truly
stubbed out and we will probably just feel like flopping on the sofa
with a comforting P.G. Wodehouse instead.
All this earnestness takes the fun out of the idea of reading such
works. While many of us might welcome an element of roughage in
our literary diets, it’s fair to say that most of us who read purely in
our spare time look for at least some enjoyment from books. Kafka
might have advocated tackling ‘only books that bite or sting us’ (or
‘wound and stab us’, depending on which translation you favour), as
he wrote in a letter to his friend Oskar Pollak in 1904, but he didn’t
have to commute through the rush hour, holding on to a swinging
strap with only the words in front of his eyes to take his mind off the
armpit of the person standing two inches away. We ‘common
readers’, as Samuel Johnson and Virginia Woolf charmingly dubbed
us, aren’t, by and large, cowards. We’re not afraid of being stretched
and shocked and made to work for our payoffs, but we probably all
have moments when we feel the truth of Dylan Thomas’s statement
to writer Joan Wyndham: ‘Poetry is not the most important thing in
life . . . I’d much rather lie in a hot bath sucking boiled sweets and
reading Agatha Christie.’
Dr Johnson might have appreciated the point. Despite being the
leading man of letters of his age – or any age, some would argue –
he knew that reading can be an effort and that enjoyment has an
important part to play in engaging people with books. ‘I am always
for getting a boy forward in his learning; for that is a sure good,’ he
wrote. ‘I would let him at first read any English book which happens
to engage his attention; because you have done a great deal when
you have brought him to have entertainment from a book. He’ll get
better books afterwards.’ Enjoyment might not have been the end of
reading for Britain’s most celebrated literary critic, but it was not a
dirty word. Nor should it be regarded as such for people trying to
expand their horizons by reading beyond their own national and
linguistic boundaries. After all, the joy of reading is often what
makes books travel in the first place. The crowds that hurried to the
New York docks to ask sailors on the incoming ships ‘Is Little Nell
dead?’ in 1841 weren’t there for the sake of their intellectual
improvement, they were there because they were gripped by
Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop and wanted to know what happened
next.
Still, it can be hard to hold on to that in the face of the rather
snooty pronouncements that the discussion of world literature has
prompted from time to time. ‘It must not be forgotten that
everywhere also the great majority is lethargic, ignorant and of poor
judgement,’ wrote the Danish literary critic Georg Brandes on the
question of sifting world literature in 1899. ‘The best is inaccessible
to the mob and the finest incomprehensible. The mob chases after
the bellowing soap-boxers and the inscrutable crackpots, they follow
fashion and worship success. That a writer at one point has pleased
everyone is by no means enough that we may include him in world
literature forever.’
 In the face of such statements, it’s tempting to feel that world
literature is best left to those in the know while you and I stick to
our Jordan memoirs and gossip magazines. The French scholar
Albert Guérard saw the problem when in 1940 he wrote: ‘There is
some danger, however, in claiming Goethe as our master. It might
foster the notion that World Literature is a formidable subject, fit
only for such a titan of culture as he, or, at second-hand, for his
learned disciples . . . World Literature . . . is not reserved for a
supercilious elite, doctors of philosophy or cosmopolitan
sophisticates.’
Yet, despite Guérard’s protestations, there’s no question that even
today the idea of being cultured and widely read brings out a kind of
smug, competitive streak in some people. I’ve certainly encountered
it a few times since I embarked on my world-reading quest. Usually
it emerges in the company of people who have amassed a little heap
of knowledge that they are anxious to show off. This they brood over
jealously, comparing it aggressively with the efforts of those around
them. On several occasions I’ve found myself cornered by flushed
and slightly wild-eyed figures, determined to have their say about
what should be on my list. They differ from people who genuinely
want to help in one key respect: if they name their particular
recommendations and I confess that I haven’t heard of them, a look
of triumph scuds across their faces. To me it’s no surprise that
among the millions of writers past and present spinning tales around
the globe, there should be plenty that I’ve never come across – my
global literary adventure opened my eyes to just how much richness
the planet has to offer and how little I have managed to sample –
but to them my ignorance of their favourites is significant. It means
that they are somehow vindicated as better, more cultured, more
knowledgeable than me. They have scored.
The irony is that such literary smugness rarely manifests itself
among the people who have most cause to gloat over their expertise
– the polyglots and regional-literature aficionados who can recall
dates and titles and forge links and parallels as easily as most of us
draw breath. In my experience, they are hardly ever anything but
helpful, enthusiastic and generous to a fault with their time and
talents.
Once you break through such jockeying for position and see it for
what it is, it poses no threat. But to those hovering on the fringes of
the world-literature scene, such posturing can seem fearsome. It
alone has no doubt been enough to head off scores of would-be
world readers, cutting them off from many wonders.

*
Fear of not recognising texts that everyone else knows backwards is
just the start. For some, the idea that there is a right and a wrong
way of reading may be enough to put them off attempting unfamiliar
works altogether. ‘“Weltliteratur” is not for us,’ wrote Werner P.
Friederich in 1959, because we can perceive ‘only a few facets and
never the totality of God’s creation’, as though God were watching
and shaking his head at our ham-fisted attempts to get to grips with
The Epic of Gilgamesh. In recent decades, this has been
compounded by the general move away from viewing texts as
standalone ‘verbal icons’ open to interpretation by the reader, as
suggested by the critic William Wimsatt in the 1940s and ’50s, and
towards placing greater emphasis on putting works in their social
and political contexts, as David Damrosch encourages us to do. It is
as though, unless we are guided carefully and are made aware of all
the potential connotations and references that might be relevant to a
work, we’re at risk of making some terrible faux pas for which God –
or some equally formidable, all-knowing alien jury that administrates
the cabinet of Platonic ideal readings of all texts written everywhere
ever – will never forgive us.
When it comes to translated literature, this sense is often
heightened by the awareness of the presence of a third party in the
text, crashing the cosy little author–reader tête-à-tête that can make
the reading experience so delicious. Usually, to read is to enter into a
dialogue with a writer who is no longer there. It is covert,
anonymous and, if we want it to be, potentially illicit. Even before
the strangulation and burning at the stake in 1536 of William
Tyndale – the man who first translated the Bible into English,
thereby enabling people to access the scriptures for themselves
without a priest or liturgical scholar to manage and guide their
interpretations – private reading carried connotations of decadence
and danger. So risky did it seem to the instigators of the Spanish
Inquisition that they introduced a rigorous censorship programme
from 1478 onwards, which lasted for nearly 400 years. Even
nowadays, there is something deeply seductive and even subversive
about the idea of embarking on a secret, imaginary journey that no
one else can control or scrutinise. It’s surely no coincidence that one
of the most frequently commented upon attributes of e-readers is
that they afford book lovers an extra level of privacy, with not even
the title of the work on public view.
In the case of literature from other cultures and texts originally
written in languages the reader doesn’t speak, the story is rather
different. That cosy dialogue between reader and writer is simply not
possible, at least not in the way we’re used to with texts from our
own milieu. We can skimp on Damrosch’s prescriptions all we like
and take the risk of diving straight into a foreign text without doing
any preliminary reading, but we will frequently find that we are not
left to our own devices. In order to access these tales, we need
professional help, usually in the form of translators who can convert
the indecipherable original into something we can comprehend. Even
for works that were written in English, if they are from other parts of
the world, we might need the help of footnotes or a glossary to
explain terms, ideas and practices we may not have come across
before. In addition, editors may judge that numerous forewords,
notes on the text and translator’s introductions are necessary to help
us get the fullest possible sense from the work.
These attendant bits of material can make texts feel rather
crowded and can sometimes get in the way. If you’re forever having
to flick to page 439 to check out the footnotes for fear of getting the
wrong end of the stick, you’re likely to become a little frustrated. It
hardly makes for a relaxing, immersive read and we may feel self-
conscious about trying to make sure we ingest every scrap of
extraneous material in order to be capable of doing justice to the
words before our eyes.
It’s odd because, at least when we’re reading for pleasure, we
Brits rarely look at getting to grips with our own texts in the same
light. I’ll warrant that many an English-speaking newcomer to
Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure will not know what ‘the
characteristic part of a barrow-pig, which the countrymen used for
greasing their boots, as it was useless for any other purpose’ is, but
when Arabella flings one at the ill-starred protagonist, the meaning
quickly becomes plain. The context helps us to understand it and the
fact that most readers of the novel these days will never have set
foot on a pig farm, let alone have any knowledge of the butchering
process, is neither here nor there.
That’s not to say that there’s no value in reading around books
from different times and places. There is a great deal, and cultural
knowledge will almost always provide fresh insights and unlock new
meanings in a text. It’s just that in their eagerness to explain
everything to us, these texts sometimes risk working our
consciousness of the importance of contextual awareness up to such
a pitch that it paralyses us and prevents us from reading unfamiliar
things for fear of getting it wrong. In the face of a thousand
footnotes, it can be difficult to maintain enough confidence in our
ability to read a story and get something out of it without someone
telling us what to think every second word, even if this means that
some of it goes over our heads. And it’s important to hold on to this.
Otherwise why read at all?
Indeed, there may be times when a foreign perspective – being
unfamiliar with the host culture of a text – proves to be an
advantage. The Czech writer Milan Kundera thinks so. In fact, he has
gone so far as to suggest that readers from other countries have an
advantage over readers from the nation where a book originated
because ‘geographic distance sets the observer back from the local
context and allows him to embrace the large context of world
literature, the only approach that can bring out a novel’s aesthetic
value’. ‘Do I mean by this that to judge a novel one can do without a
knowledge of its original language? I do mean exactly that!’ he
pronounced in an essay in 2005 with the confidence that perhaps
only someone who has written a work as extraordinary as The
Unbearable Lightness of Being can muster.
I’m not a believer that everyone has won and all must have prizes.
I don’t mean to imply that one reading is necessarily as valid as the
next. For a start, we’re not all Milan Kundera. Nevertheless, I would
suggest that most – if not all – readings have some value and that
this is a place to start when we think about reading the world.
Perhaps we could all do with taking a leaf out of the book of the
Chinese academic Zhang Longxi, who in 1992 called for a ‘spirit of
interpretive pluralism’ to infuse the way we approach global
literature. He pointed out that a sense of the possibility of reading
texts in different ways has long been a theme in Chinese literary
criticism, citing the sixteenth-century scholar Xie Zhen, who
declared: ‘Of poems some can be understood, some cannot, and
some need not be. They are like the moon in water or flowers in a
mirror; so don’t trace every line too doggedly.’ Zhen’s point, says
Longxi (or at least his reading of it), is ‘not only the realization that
nothing should be excluded from understanding and interpretation,
that the reader should be free to choose whatever is available to him
or her, but more radically that the reader should also be free not to
choose but to declare his enjoyment without thorough
understanding’.
The truth is, we as individuals will never be wise enough or
cultured enough or fast enough or long-lived enough to read the
world as deeply and thoroughly as it deserves – and we never have
been. We can only fail. So we have a choice: we can stick with what
we know, or we can embrace the impossibility of reading world
literature properly and jump right in – ‘feel the fear and do it
anyway’, as Susan Jeffers’ self-help classic has it. ‘The shelves of
books we haven’t written, like those of books we haven’t read,
stretch out into the darkness of the universal library’s farthest space.
We are always at the beginning of the beginning of the letter A,’
writes the Argentinian author, translator and editor Alberto Manguel
in the conclusion to his A History of Reading. As I found all those
years ago, huddled over piles of books in a dingy corner of the UL as
the shelving lights flickered on and off, and later when readers
around the world began to share their literary loves with me, that is
part of the fun.
 2
Plotting the route
the global literature landscape

In most of the classrooms of Chalgrove Primary School in Finchley

during the last decades of the twentieth century, there was a map of
the world on the wall. Tricked out in colours reminiscent of the
Queen Mother’s wardrobe – cerulean blues, salmon pinks and pastel
greens – it watched over me throughout the first seven years of my
academic career and, apart from the odd reference to it by a teacher
eager to make a new pupil from a far-flung destination feel
welcome, went largely unnoticed.
It also went unchanged. The web of lines marking the country
boundaries stayed fixed in their chaotic pattern, with only the border
between the US and Canada straighter than anything I could rule
under the titles in my exercise book. Throughout the late eighties
and early nineties – as the USSR collapsed, Yugoslavia shattered and
numerous former colonies declared their independence – the map
stood firm and resolute. It had its story and it was sticking to it. It
would not be moved.
A memory of that map came back to me when I began to prepare
to read a book from every country, twenty years on. Fixed and
definite, it had seemed to suggest that the world was an easily
measurable and quantifiable place – a belief many of those I
encountered during my research seemed to share, as the question
‘how many countries are there in the world, then?’ was almost
always the first thing anyone said when the project came up. It was
as if we all believe that there is some globally agreed standard that
governs the categorisation of places around the planet, and that
calculating the answer must therefore be a simple matter of
arithmetic.
In many ways, it’s no wonder so many of us hold this view. Far
from being unique to my primary school, such maps have dominated
our way of looking at the planet on paper for generations. It’s only
natural, therefore, that most of us should have formed the habit of
picturing the world as a stable, changeless thing. Ever since the
Flanders-born cartographer Gerardus Mercator published his Nova et
aucta orbis terrae descriptio ad usum navigantium emendate
accommodata (‘New and more complete representation of the
terrestrial globe properly adapted for use in navigation’, or ‘World
Map’, for short) in 1569, this chart – or recognisable versions of it –
has adorned walls in many parts of the planet. For more than four
centuries, it has been the basis for portraying the globe in two
dimensions.
This is not as straightforward as it sounds. As Mercator was all too
aware, having spent years trying ‘to represent the positions and
dimensions of the lands, as well as the distances of places, as much
as in conformity with very truth as it is possible so to do’, it is
mathematically impossible to represent a round thing on a flat thing
without serious distortion. Something has got to give. In Mercator’s
case, the compromise was to treat the globe rather like a balloon
inflated inside a cylinder, pressing the sides flat and straightening the
meridian lines to present a roughly accurate picture of the central,
most populous section of the planet. This is all well and good for
those in the middle of things, but it begins to get rather awkward at
the extremities. Making the meridian lines parallel means that things
become larger and larger the further you move from the equator,
and, as much of the land in the northern hemisphere sits closer to
the pole, the distortion has the effect of making Europe and North
America appear disproportionately big. So it is that, on a common or
garden Mercator projection map, Greenland will often appear to
have the same land mass as Africa (when it is in fact fourteen times
smaller), Europe looks as if it covers twice the area of South America
(which is actually nearly double Europe’s size), and Australia seems
like a pebble compared to Russia (instead of nearly half as big).
 For some, these discrepancies reveal more than mathematical
compromise. In 1973, when he launched his rival world map based
on what was to become known as the Gall–Peters projection,
German filmmaker and historian Arno Peters pulled no punches in
attacking the motives behind the prevailing world view. The Mercator
projection, he said, ‘presents a fully false picture particularly
regarding the non-white-peopled lands’, and ‘over-values the white
man and distorts the picture of the world to the advantage of the
colonial master of the time’. He claimed that his map, by contrast,
offered a full and fair picture of the relative sizes of countries – even
if it did so by stretching out all the land masses so that, as reviewer
Arthur Robinson put it, they ‘are somewhat reminiscent of wet,
ragged, long winter underwear hung out to dry on the Arctic Circle’.
Seen through Peters’ eyes, Mercator was less a trail-blazing technical
genius than a blinkered Eurocentric, drawing the things that were
important to him big and in the middle of the page – much like
those children staring up at the fruits of Mercator’s labours four
centuries later.
But as Jerry Brotton demonstrates in his A History of the World in
Twelve Maps, Mercator’s creation was arguably no more biased than
any other representation of the world because ‘throughout most of
recorded history, the overwhelming majority of maps put the culture
that produced them at their centre’. Nevertheless, in the early 1970s,
when the ink was still drying on the constitutions of many newly
minted ex-colonial nations, Peters’ arguments struck a chord. His
map was ‘the most honest projection of the world yet devised’,
according to the Guardian, and it was taken up and championed by
UNESCO and UNICEF, which issued around 60 million copies with the
tagline ‘New Dimensions, Fair Conditions’. This, despite several
academics pointing out errors in Peters’ calculations – Nigeria and
Chad appeared twice as long as they really are, for example, while
Indonesia was squeezed to half its actual breadth.
Flawed though Peters’ map may have been, its launch did reveal a
truth, even if it was not quite the one its creator intended: it showed
that representations of the world and its regions influence the status
and development of the places depicted. For there is no doubt that
the widespread pictorial presentation of Europe as the central and
dominant land mass over the last four centuries, whether
intentionally or not, has insinuated itself into the thinking of many
people around the planet. The evidence crops up time and again in
studies such as Jeremy Crampton’s survey of twentieth-century
atlases, which revealed that Africa was typically only represented by
three maps in each book, despite covering around a fifth of the
planet’s land area, to Professor Thomas Saarinen’s 1999 National
Geographic-sponsored research project, for which he collected more
than 3,800 sketch maps of the world by children from forty-nine
countries, most of which inflated Europe and placed it at the centre
– regardless of where the child’s home was. And, as Palestinian-
American critic Edward Said showed in his landmark essay collection
on Culture and Imperialism, this way of looking at the world has
woven itself into the plots of some of our best-loved novels, with
suspicious, two-dimensional characters such as Dickens’ Magwitch,
who returns from Australia, and the natives of Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness and Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief, left to loiter in the
margins of their narratives every bit as much as the places they
come from do on the world map. When Jules Verne’s Phileas Fogg
sets out from Western Europe to undertake his bet that he can
circumnavigate the globe in Around the World in Eighty Days, he
does not merely leave his home, but the centre of the planet, if not
the universe.
Taken to extremes, this sort of thinking can have terrible results. It
can enshrine entitlement and subjection as the self-image of groups
of people, so that, in the words of Guinea-Bissauan political activist
Amílcar Cabral, ‘as soon as African children enter elementary
schools, they develop an inferiority complex. They learn to fear the
white man and to feel ashamed of being Africans [and] African
geography, history and culture are either ignored or distorted.’ At its
most damaging, such a skewed perspective can be used in an
attempt to justify the control or repression of one group at the
hands of another simply by virtue of the fact that they don’t seem to
matter as much. It may, for example, make it seem entirely
reasonable for an administration to send someone who has never
visited a region before to carve it up into separate states, as
happened in 1947, when the British government commissioned Sir
Cyril Radcliffe to produce a report partitioning India along religious
lines. After Radcliffe, working from outdated census reports, took
just over three months to draw the 6,000-kilometre boundary line
demarcating Pakistan, the resulting bloodbath – in which an
estimated million people died – was a powerful demonstration of the
dangers of mapmaking in the wrong hands. ‘As soon as men begin
to talk about anything that really matters, someone has to go and
get the Atlas,’ Rudyard Kipling told the Royal Geographical Society in
1927; after all, there can be few things more calculated to make you
feel entitled to meddle in things that really matter than a large and
beautiful book illustrating your international influence on every page.
In many ways, however, it wouldn’t matter whether Kipling and his
cronies were looking at the most meticulous representation of the
world or a child’s scribble. Because the biggest myth that maps
peddle is not the privileging of one portion of the planet over
another, but the mistaken belief that it is possible for one person to
stand outside the world and survey the planet and its contents
objectively. The mere fact of creating what seems like a god’s or
alien-eye view of the world perpetuates the idea that it is possible
for one person to look at the planet as an impartial observer might
and that the world will stand still, peacefully and changelessly, while
we do it. In Brotton’s words, a map ‘offers its viewers the chance to
look down on the world from above, and a god-like perspective on
earthly creation’. Essentially, it allows us to dodge the truth that, as
Chinese émigré novelist Gao Xingjian puts it, ‘man’s cognition of the
external world and other people can never be divorced from a
subjective viewpoint. The world and human events inherently lack
meaning: meaning is conferred by human cognition.’
This may be one of the reasons why the idea that it’s possible to
observe the world objectively persists. Bolstered by the famous
Apollo 17 ‘Blue Marble’ photograph (itself inverted to fit the view
people would expect to see), which gave us earthlings our first
glimpse of home from space in 1972, our confidence in our ability to
take a global view remains largely unshaken. To feel that we can
look at things in this way is appealing. If all of reality can be
contained and delineated in so orderly a manner, then the world
must truly be a manageable place, an entity that we can preside
over, get our heads round and master. The act of looking at a map
has the power to both play to our vanity and banish our fear of
confusion. It makes us feel that we have control.

This idea of a single, objective world is not the preserve of maps

alone. Just google anything to do with ‘number of countries in the
world’, as I spent many hours doing before the start of 2012, and
you’ll quickly discover source after source packed with confident
assertions about exactly how many states make up the global
community. Most of them will tell you, as Wikipedia did until recently,
that the world consists of either 195 or 196 countries, usually
hinging on whether or not Taiwan is counted. So ubiquitous and
persuasive are these claims that, in my eagerness to get started
when I prepared for my project, I took them as some sort of
objective, universal standard and used the 196 (counting Taiwan) as
the basis for my ‘world’. It was a decision I would later come to
question, but back then, bolstered by a childhood played out
alongside Mercator’s rendering of the globe, I found the concept of a
definitive world order entirely natural. The occasional voice
protesting that the number of countries depends what world you
come from could not shake my cartographically conjured confidence.
It’s a shame, because such dissenters are absolutely right. With at
least 270 national flags hoisted around the planet and 280 country-
code, top-level domain names registered with the Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, there’s plenty of
wiggle room – or, more often than not, skirmish room – in answering
the question of how many independent countries exist in the world.
Historically, attempts to clarify what constitutes a sovereign state as
a means of defining who is in the club, and who isn’t, have done
little more than articulate the difficulty of pinning the terms down.
Even the most widely cited definitions, such as the one set out in the
1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, are
far from watertight. According to the terms of that treaty, sovereign
statehood essentially boils down to having a permanent population,
defined borders, a government, and the ability to have dealings with
other states. You’re a state if you say you are and if the people in
and around you agree. But with so much uncertainty over what
precisely defines an independent country and so many news
bulletins containing something to do with wrangles over sovereignty
– from Britain and Spain’s spats over Gibraltar to Israel’s stand-off
with Palestine – this is usually not as straightforward as it sounds.
Even apparently politically neutral categorisations of sovereignty,
such as the United Nations’ list of recognised states, can only take
you so far. For all its rhetoric of inclusivity and impartiality, the UN is
not without bias, as the existence of the five permanent members –
originally known as the Great Powers – on its Security Council
demonstrates. With right of veto on all non-procedural matters to
come before the council, the US, UK, France, Russia and China have
the power to derail UN Security Council resolutions even in the face
of unanimous agreement from the other (non-permanent) members.
This, despite the fact that the major allies of the Second World War
– plus China – can hardly be said to represent the realities of global
power today. (In fact the notion that the UK could be thought of as a
Great Power in the twenty-first century verges on the laughable, as
evidenced by Vladimir Putin’s spokesman’s description of Britain as
‘just a small island no one pays any attention to’ in September
2013.)
Only a handful of decades after the UN’s formation, the world had
outgrown it. There was no impartial observer to step in and
redistribute roles fairly. Consequently, just as Greenland dwarfs
China on Mercator’s map and Arno Peters’ Chad and Nigeria are
stretched out of shape, the UN presents a distorted picture of global
dynamics, a fudge between what is accurate and what is practicable.
It leaves some things out, it makes others appear more important
than they really are and – in some matters – it favours the interests
of those who had control of creating it. Still, if the history of
mapmaking is anything to go by, this may well be the only world we
can grasp.

*
Just like the world itself, the international literary landscape has long
been a contested and rather unequally represented domain. Since
Goethe focused the attention of the European literati on the concept
of reading across national boundaries nearly 200 years ago, various
subjective concepts of what this might entail have been batted
around between academics, publishers and readers. Helpfully,
although he mentioned Weltliteratur twenty-one times in his work
between 1827 and 1831, Goethe did not provide a precise definition
of what he meant by it. Perhaps he didn’t need to give it much
thought – over the course of a career spanning more than seventy-
three years, the polyglot translated work from eighteen languages.
In fact, the most powerful impression that anyone encountering
Goethe’s comments on reading internationally is likely to take away
is his impatience with national divisions and distinctions altogether.
Far from developing a concept of reading the world that might
involve sampling literature from every country, he was anxious to
encourage his contemporaries to work towards ‘a common world
literature transcending national limits’. This, he thought, could be
achieved by and could in turn promote exchanges between ‘the
living, striving men of letters’ of the age (it was mostly men in those
days), such that they ‘should learn to know each other, and through
their own inclination and similarity of tastes, find the motive for
corporate action’.
It was a conviction that stayed with him throughout his career. ‘I
am more and more convinced that poetry is the universal possession
of mankind, revealing itself everywhere and at all times in hundreds
and hundreds of men,’ he said in the final years of his life. ‘I
therefore like to look about me in foreign nations, and advise
everyone to do the same. National literature is now a rather
unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and
everyone must strive to hasten its approach.’
 To Goethe, world literature seems to have been a body of work at
least partly curated by people with the insight, knowledge and taste
to form judgements about what it should and should not comprise, a
dialogue conducted ‘so that we can correct one another’. ‘I am
convinced that a world literature is in process of formation, that the
nations are in favour of it and for this reason make friendly
overtures,’ he wrote to Adolf Friedrich Carl Streckfuss in 1827. ‘The
German can and should be most active in this respect; he has a fine
part to play in this great mutual approach.’
Goethe was right in some ways. Germans and other Western
Europeans were to play a pivotal role in shaping the concept known
as world literature over the next century and a half – so much so in
fact that, just as many of their compatriots were doing physically in
far-flung nations, they colonised the literary landscape. Adopting the
mapmakers’ practice of putting themselves at the centre of things,
they downplayed and even in some instances entirely disregarded
everything that didn’t seem directly relevant to their lives and
concerns, to the point where, in 1930, making an appeal for his
contemporaries to look further, German scholar Fritz Strich observed,
‘If one talks about the world, one usually thinks primarily only of
Europe, and world literature stands for European literature.’
Despite the fact that, up until the middle of the eighteenth
century, more books are thought to have been published in Chinese
than in all other languages put together, the prevailing view of world
literature had nothing to do with works penned in Mandarin or
Cantonese. Many of the early anthologies barely contained a single
sample. Alden’s Cyclopedia of Universal Literature (1882–91), for
example, purported to be ‘a complete survey of the literature of all
ages and of all peoples’, but left out the work of non-Western writers
almost entirely. Even some sixty years later, the first two volumes of
Frank Magill’s Masterpieces of World Literature in Digest Form,
featuring summaries of 1,010 works between them, contained
details of only three non-Western works: The Thousand and One
Nights, The Tale of Genji and Shakuntala by K lid sa.
It wasn’t just editors of anthologies with impossibly lofty ambitions
who struggled with a universal representation of literature from
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