Challenge #44 - a book that was originally written in another language

[Jessa]

Post the title, description, and your opinion of the book you read. Which language was it originally written in? What language did you read it in?

[Christina]

I think I'm going to put The Room here. While some articles call this his debut novel, his Goodreads page lists many other books under his name and those are written in Swedish. Since many of the names in The Room still have umlauts and superdots within names, its not much of a stretch to say it was first published in Swedish. However, I read it in English.

Bjorn, compulsive and hairline OCD, begins working for the government. From time to time, he seeks relief in The Room, a purified office on his floor where no one seems to work and he believes he achieves the highest level of work. However, his coworkers begin to call his behavior odd and distracting to their work environment and seek to have him removed from the office.

Just when you think this book will playout like The Adjustment Bureau, it takes a hard left followed by a zig-zag and a loopty-loop. It's short (186 pages, but some pages are merely a paragraph), witty(either utterly brilliant over I'm over thinking it, having just finished this morning) and contains readers questions in the back.

[Jamie]

For this category I have already read a few, but my favorite was The Sorrow of Angels, by Jon Kalman Stefansson. It was originally written in Icelandic. In this story an orphan boy and an intrepid postal worker take off to deliver the mail along a hazardous coastal route with no roads and where winter has not yet given way to spring.
I enjoyed the adventure aspect of this story, and also the brooding philosophizing that seems so common in Icelandic and Scandinavian literature.
The Sorrow of Angels

[Katherine]

I read The Room by Jonas Karlsson (translated by Neil Smith) as well. It was very odd but I really enjoyed its oddness. Part satire, part psychological drama, the story is about Bjorn, a new employee at an unspecified company who does unspecified work. One day he discovers “the room”. In the room, he can work with focus and clarity and without interruption. When he tries to tell his co-workers about the room, they do not believe him. While his work improves, his manager and co-workers believe him to be mentally unstable. As the story progresses, the reader also begins to wonder if Bjorn is an unreliable narrator. I would highly recommend it if you are sick of reading the same old same old.