Queer Books in Translation

I’ve written in another newsletter about how Miaojin was Taiwan’s first openly lesbian writer who was active in the late ’80s/early 90s. And Notes of a Crocodile seems autobiographical. In it, the alienation college student Lazi feels because of her attraction to women leads to severe depression. The novel is structured as eight notebooks, which detail Lazi’s romantic struggles, as well as the lives of her complicated friends. This is a queer coming-of-age novel that is more character than plot based and really captures the essence of feeling alienated from others. Miaojin wasn’t able to see her novel achieve cult classic status, sadly, as she passed away in ’95.

This won the 2019 Lambda award for bisexual fiction and is both a family saga and story of Iranian history. Kimiâ Sadr serves as narrator and is the youngest daughter in a family of intellectuals who speak out against the government. She jumps back and forth through time, telling a story that juxtaposes her current experience with her family’s past, effectively telling Iran’s past in the process. While waiting in a fertility clinic in France, where she and her family fled to when she was ten, she recounts her childhood as a person descended from a harem. The story’s many characters, changing timelines, and historical events are tragic at times, but can also be funny, with Sadr occasionally breaking the fourth wall.

San is a young woman in South Korea in 1970s who first faces rejection from her parents, and the stigma of her father having left, and later rejection from the one person who made her feel less alone. Now 22 and working in a florist’s shop, San continues to struggle with relationships, partially because how things ended with her childhood friend still haunts her.