This was an interesting take on the idea of language, alienation, cultural identity, and the unspoken connections between people. It was thoughtful rather than gripping, but nevertheless rewarding.

This is a fresh and fascinating book, with a unique narrator's voice and some thought-provoking ideas about language, identity and belonging.

The book's unusual style, subject matter and setting offer some strange material for a story about a couple who find out they may be pregnant and what that means for them, their lives and their future.

The whole scenario of a living museum trying to be authentic is entertaining, and has so many threads of different characters, there is a wealth of information in there that plays with the setting and the people beautifully.

Altogether an enjoyable read, it could have been even better with further character development and understanding of their motivations, especially Kirsten's Brazilian boyfriend who we never really get to see outside of her exasperation with him,

I’m afraid this book just didn’t work for me. I do think this could be partly due to the format which may differ on paper. But I had no idea what was happening for most of this book. I found the excerpts about language particularly interesting and there were moments that really shone for me. Sadly, a lot also fell flat with information peppered in throughout that confused me or made no sense at all.

I came away from this not thinking it was a bad book, but that it’s something I’d expect to study at university. It isn’t a book you curl up with on the sofa - you need a physical copy, some form of caffeine, a bunch of high litres and tabs and your academic hat on. I would reread it with this in mind and a lecturer who knows more about the book and could guide me. I have no doubts universities will devour this.

As a language geek, I was so excited to read this upcoming debut dealing with the issues of incommunicability and identity.
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The book features a young couple - Kristin and Ciaran, and is told from the perspective of Kristin. We meet them in their rented flat in Edinburgh, after being in a relationship for 4 years. There's a rift growing between them, somewhat explained by the potential baby growing inside 24-year-old Kristin, which begs for a difficult decision to be made. ⁠
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Kristin is a Swedish immigrant. She works at an immersive historical exhibition at a fictional Museum of Immigration in Edinburgh Castle, where different groups play the roles of their original peoples. Kristin is in the Scandinavian group that plays Vikings. ⁠They are forced to speak their original language in all their interactions during the day, with even a dedicated time and space (so-called Translation Rooms) before their shifts start to prepare for it.

Ciaran was born into a Brazilian orphanage and adopted in Scotland as a child. He is a nurse taking care of the elderly, a human rights activist with a hobby of preserving animals. He suddenly decides to learn Swedish and throws himself into it fully (watching Swedish TV and films, reading newspapers) insisting Kristin speaks exclusively in Swedish at home, which creates tension in the relationship, as Kristin is eager to speak English after a full day of work. However, this situation causes Kristin to reflect on the quirks of English and rethink her native Swedish too. The text often features Swedish and English side by side and shows Kristin's response to them.

I highly admire the conceptuality of the novel and the writing style is equally original. What I found lacking was the characters themselves, especially Ciaran who felt entirely undeveloped. The relationship between Ciaran and Kristin felt inexplicable most of the time.

I loved discovering this author, and despite the lack of depth in her debut, I'm expecting truly remarkable things from her in the future.

Thanks to Scribe UK and NetGalley for my advanced copy.

I was sent an uncorrected proof copy of How We Are Translated by Jessica Gaitán Johannesson to read and review by NetGalley. I found this to be quite a difficult book. At first I really didn’t understand it or what was going on! Gradually I came to fathom out the setting and the backdrop to the relationships of the players, which made things slightly easier, but I really didn’t find this to be a cohesive piece of writing. There was a good deal of interesting insight and studies of human nature and I felt some of them resonate with me, especially when it came to protagonists Kristin and Ciaran’s difficulty in understanding each other, not in a literal sense but through the ‘language barrier’ that can occur by growing up in a different location in a family that has a different way of saying/seeing things. My partner and I were both born in England but the 300 miles that separated our upbringings is testament to that! I enjoyed the sensitive prose and I’m glad that I have read it but couldn’t get to grips enough with my overall feeling of frustration to give this novel a higher rating.

Thank you, NetGalley for this ARC.

I gave up 15% through the book. I found it mind-numbingly boring and felt like I wanted to run away. I literally made an abandoned books bookshelf on Goodreads just because of this book. Pretty cover though.

A quirky, very original novel about different cultures and languages (and all its nuances).
The story takes place in Edinburgh and is mainly narrated by Kristin, of Swedish origin, who works in a living history museum as a Norse character called Solveig. The museum considers the different races from all over the world that have come and settled in Scotland and creates an interactive experience by getting the museum workers to submerge themselves into a particular character/culture and getting them to only speak in that language, pretending not to understand English. We follow Kirstin’s musings and her interactions with her colleagues at the museum and her boyfriend from Brazil. Kristin is pregnant and her boyfriend aware of the different languages and cultures in their relationship is trying to learn Swedish by watching Swedish films.
The book has humour which is subtle and dry such as the playful lost in translation passages with Swedish and English language.

The language and Kirstin’s thoughts/observations make this a special book although it will not appeal to all but if you read a sample, you may find this quirky, original book works for you.

This was a really interesting book. Kristen and Ciaran, both immigrants to Scotland, live in Edinburgh, where she works at a fictional Museum of Immigration.

Her work is an escape from thinking too hard about the fact she has just discovered she is pregnant, whereas her Brazilian/ adopted Scottish partner Ciaran is dealing with it by trying to learn Swedish. Much of the book involves disjointed pieces of Swedish/ English translation that are interesting to read, but interrupt the flow of the book a bit.

At the museum, international tensions are played out as the different cultures (all European) that have their own exhibits are set against each other, while more recent immigrant groups like Pakistan are ignored. The strange, ineffectual manager insists that each employee speaks only their native language, which means that most of them cannot communicate with each other. This of course leads to strange and farcical situations, like the Latvians discovering the Viking house is going to have a fake pregnancy storyline, so they all appear the next day wearing fake bellies.

It was a strange mixture of realistic and weird, and I found it hard to work out exactly what was going on. It fairly accurately represented the feeling of being in a foreign country and culture, and not being quite sure of what everyone was trying to say! A very unusual book, and one I will remember.

I thought the synopsis of this book sounded interesting, but unfortunately I found the execution somewhat disjointed and as a result didn't connect with the characters as much as I would have liked. Quirky and original, it's worth a read even if it is a little laborious.

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.

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.