Lately, as part of my attempt to improve my Spanish, I've been reading books mainly in that language. The first book I got hold of was a set of literary short stories in a dual-language edition. This proved unsatisfactory in several ways. Firstly, and I should have thought of this, literary fiction of most kinds is often more demanding than thrillers and romance. Text in Spanish is demanding enough for me without having to struggle to understand what the writer is getting at. Secondly, a dual-language text is not necessarily a word-for-word translation and it turns out that, for me at least, it works better to translate individual words and figure out the sense for myself. And, thirdly, the selection of stories in that particular book didn't grip me.
Next I picked up a copy, in Spanish, of Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls. But with this one I became distracted by the fact that the English text was so beautifully written and the Spanish translation never seemed quite right. In fact I was so distracted that I ended up reading the whole Country Girls trilogy in English.
Then, browsing in Foyles, I came across a thriller. This seemed like a good idea. Up-to-date dialogue and a page-turning plot to motivate me. Best-selling author. What could go wrong? Not much as it turned out.
The book I chose was Todo Vuelve by Juan Goméz Jurado. This is a violent, action-filled thriller, and it was the first book I read from beginning to end in Spanish. However, this was only possible with the help of Google. If I'd had to sit with a dictionary by my side, pausing every dozen words or so to look something up, I'd never have done it. My process was to try to read a page and get the sense of it, then take a pic and translate the text to clarify everything. The book was about 500 pages long, so a dual-language version could never have worked, but I was amazed by the sophistication of Google Translate. It can even translate idioms into their English equivalent - for example, the Spanish pull your hair rather than pulling your leg and Google knows to translate one with the other.
It was after I finished that book that I began to think about matters of style and judgement. It's very hard to judge the pace of a book when you're reading it a page at a time and stopping frequently to translate. For almost the first time in years I was reading every word. I had the feeling that the pace of the book was a bit slow, that everything seemed to take a long time, but of course it was taking a long time, for me. Maybe it was like the Reacher books, where one of Lee Child's trademarks is his ability to spend a couple of pages describing Reacher opening a door or taking a weapon apart.
And then there was this author's fondness for strange similes and metaphors. Was it because I wasn't Spanish that they didn't really work for me? I couldn't tell. But there was no doubt that the whole process was helping my Spanish, so I went looking for more thrillers and found a writer called Roberto Martínez Guzmán. His thrillers were set in Galicia and it helped that I'd been to that part of Spain and recognised many of the locations. There was enough interest in his books to carry me along, and I could see that the author had used various mechanisms common to many English language crime writers, for example the detective's liking for a type of music that acts as a shorthand for outlining their character. However, as my reading became more fluent I began to notice things that could have been helped by a bit of editing and I also suspected that these books had started out self-published on Amazon. My suspicions increased when I asked after the author in a bookshop in Spain and the proprietor had never heard of him.
Next I discovered the novels of Cristian Perfumo, thrillers set in Patagonia and Barcelona. These were fun, too, but as my ability to read improved (and my Kindle started saying things like 'ten minutes left in chapter' rather than 'three hours left in chapter') I began to notice things I hadn't noticed before. I started asking myself, if this was in English would I have read it? Finally, it occurred to me to search for lists of the top Spanish crime writers on the internet. None of the authors I'd been reading appeared on those lists, and when I looked for Kindle editions of these recommended books they were all much more expensive than the ones I'd been reading. Maybe this was a clue. I bought one of them (the cheapest!) El último barco by Domingo Villar. I noticed immediately that Villar has a distinctive style. The plot proceeds slowly but the detailed descriptions of landscapes and interiors are of a different quality to the other books I've read. All children's authors know that making description interesting is both tricky and essential. Like Guzmán's books, these are set in Galicia, but the landscape comes to life in an entirely different way. There came a moment, about three chapters in, when I finished a paragraph and thought, Wow! that was really great writing.
I've also read a couple of children's books in Spanish. I've written quite a few football-based books, so I couldn't resist Los Futbolísmos when I found the first volume of the series in a bookshop. It's a completely different kind of football story to anything I've come across in the UK - aimed at 8-9-year-olds and above, it's almost 300 pages long! It's also highly illustrated. And the series is incredibly successful in Spain. The best thing about it from the point of view of a learner of Spanish is that it's full of natural, up-to-date (ish) idiomatic dialogue. But, despite the fact that I am considerably more than 9 years old, I still needed help from Google to read this. If I could read, speak and understand Spanish as well as a 9-year-old Spanish child I think I'd be happy.
And, finally, I should mention Don Quixote. I've tried and failed a few times to read this hugely long book, and I have succeeded at last. I found a children's edition in Spanish and it was only 70 pages long. Maybe one day I'll read the original. Maybe.
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