COVER TO COVER

1956: A WORLD WRITTEN AT ONCE—PART II

MARTIN AVELAR

November 12, 2026

In Part I of this two-part essay, Martin Avelar brought together some books published in 1956. But few readers could have encountered all of them that year. Someone who read James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room” when it appeared had to wait until 1990 to read Naguib Mahfouz’s “Palace Walk” in English, and until 2016 for Antonio Di Benedetto’s “Zama.” Seventy years on, Avelar considers how these books reached us, what we have learned to notice in them, and what their reputations sometimes obscure.

A book can be seventy years old and still arriving. When Antonio Di Benedetto’s Zama came out in English in 2016, an Argentine reader could quite reasonably have wondered what the fuss was about. Di Benedetto’s official had been waiting for his transfer since 1956. English-language reviewers were just getting to the head of the queue.

Consider certain unequal routes into English. Yukio Mishima’s The Temple of the Golden Pavilion appeared in Ivan Morris’s translation in 1959. João Guimarães Rosa’s Grande Sertão: Veredas (The Devil to Pay in the Backlands) followed in 1963, translated by James L. Taylor and Harriet de Onís, but that edition eventually became difficult to obtain. John Reed’s translation of Ferdinand Oyono’s Houseboy appeared in 1966. Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk waited until 1990 for its English publication, and Zama waited longer still. None of these dates describes the books’ standing among their original readers. They describe access within a particular language. Our image of what happened in 1956 changes substantially depending on where we live and which languages we read.

Three dates tell the story of Palace Walk. Mahfouz published it in Arabic in 1956. The English translation, seen here, appeared in 1990. The date the publisher chose for the jacket was 1988, the year of Mahfouz's Nobel Prize.

Rosa presents a particular difficulty for anyone drawing up a list of discoveries. The 1963 English translation went out of print. A reader in Brazil could go on buying the novel while an English-speaking friend who had been urged to read it had to look for a secondhand copy. Alison Entrekin’s translation, Vastlands: The Crossing, is scheduled for January 2027. Even the title will have changed since the friend last looked.

Take Ferdinand Oyono. A reader in Paris could have picked up his Cameroonian novel Une vie de boy in French in 1956. In London the same year, a reader who knew French could have done the same. A Londoner who needed the English Houseboy had another ten years to wait.

James Baldwin’s readers in New York have had seventy years with his second novel. That kind of familiarity brings a difficulty of its own. It is possible to know that Giovanni’s Room is a landmark of gay literature, to admire Baldwin for writing it, and to have forgotten what an appalling night the book asks us to spend with David. Hella has gone home to America. Giovanni is to die on the guillotine in the morning. David has the house in the south of France to himself and all the time left to tell his side. Baldwin even allows him considerable insight into his own conduct. Giovanni might have preferred a little of it sooner.

James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room appeared in New York in 1956. Two years later, Claude Messanges’s French translation introduced him as Giovanni, mon ami. “My friend” is just how one imagines David introducing Giovanni, with Giovanni standing beside him.

In Rosa’s Grande Sertão: Veredas, the old gunman Riobaldo is telling a visitor about Diadorim, a companion from his fighting days. David in Giovanni’s Room can name what he feels and still do Giovanni considerable harm. Riobaldo can remember a look from Diadorim long before he can say what passed between them. Near the end, a discovery sends the reader back over scenes Riobaldo has already told. A reader who comes equipped with a better vocabulary for desire still has to reckon with the order in which Rosa lets the facts out.

Yukio Mishima’s The Temple of the Golden Pavilion gives a reader an unusual advantage over its narrator. A real-life young monk burned down Kyoto’s Golden Pavilion in 1950. Six years later, many of the novel’s first readers would have known what the character Mizoguchi was going to do. Mishima could devote his book to the harder question of how a boy who had grown up hearing from his father that the temple was the most beautiful thing in the world came to want it gone.

A few brushstrokes might be enough to suggest a fire. The Japanese cover of Mishima’s Kinkakuji leaves the matter open. On the English jacket, a golden bird has acquired an expression of its own. Ivan Morris’s translation appeared in 1959, three years after the original.

Chemmeen gives its fishing village a belief with consequences for every marriage on shore. A husband’s safety at sea depends on his wife’s fidelity. A boat that fails to come home can turn an entire village into judges of what a woman did while it was out. In Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk, Amina leaves the house without her husband’s permission to visit a shrine. A broken collarbone gives her away. Her husband can send her home to her mother for an outing even her children encouraged. One wonders where either woman could take an appeal.

Two English-language jackets for Pillai’s Malayalam novel Chemmeen. The same wave breaks across both. The black jacket offers an introduction by Santha Rama Rau. The pink one offers a little help with the geography: “A novel about India.”

Erich Fromm’s account of love in The Art of Loving reads oddly beside Baldwin’s account of David and Hella. Fromm treats the union of male and female as an answer to human loneliness. He calls homosexuality a “failure to attain this polarized union,” then adds that a heterosexual person incapable of love suffers the same loneliness. Consider what those terms would allow David to say about himself. He could leave Giovanni, marry Hella, and count the marriage as evidence of his capacity to love. Baldwin gives Hella enough of a voice for us to hear what it would cost her to serve as that evidence. Albert Camus’s The Fall gives David a fellow advocate in Jean-Baptiste Clamence. David has a whole night to tell his side. Clamence has a stranger in an Amsterdam bar to whom he can confess his worst faults, secure in the knowledge that he gets to choose which fault comes next. Try interrupting him. The next objection you have in mind is very likely one he was about to raise.

What would go on a shelf marked 2026? Two novels that appeared in English this year have a claim on the space, though a bookseller in Tokyo would file one of them under 2023. The first offers a small satisfaction to a reader of Camus. For all the time one spends in that Amsterdam bar, one never gets to hear the other man’s voice. George Saunders allows for interruptions.

In Saunders’s Vigil, the oil executive K. J. Boone is on his deathbed. Jill “Doll” Blaine, who has been dead for fifty years, has come to comfort him. Other visitors have things to say about what his company did in the years he ran it. Boone can still give his account of his working life, but he has rather less say than Clamence about who gets a hearing. It is an awkward occasion for an argument about the oil business. There is also some doubt about the availability of a later appointment.

Two English-language editions keep watch over the deathbed in George Saunders’s Vigil. One stays outside the house, where a single light is on. On the other, somebody appears to have left by a less conventional exit.

Mieko Kawakami’s Sisters in Yellow is the book the Tokyo bookseller would move. Japanese readers first met Hana in 2023. Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio’s translation brings her into English in 2026, just as the English publication of Zama brought a book of 1956 onto the new-fiction table in 2016. Hana would have something to say to Amina about being sent home. In Tokyo in the 1990s she helps make a household that has no husband at its head. She and an older woman, Kimiko, open a bar called Lemon. For a time its takings help keep a household of women together. Amina knows exactly who has the authority to turn her out. In Hana’s house, it takes a shortage of money to bring into the open the question of who gives the orders.

Mieko Kawakami’s Kiiroi ie means “yellow house.” In Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio’s English translation, the women who live there move into the title. The house disappears from the jacket, too, though the lemon in the glass is precisely the right color.

Which of this year’s books will somebody put beside Zama in 2096? The example of Di Benedetto suggests a difficulty for anyone compiling a list in New York. One of the likelier candidates may already have a publisher, admirers, and detractors, all conducting their business in a language the compiler cannot read.

In 1963, the English title of Grande Sertão: Veredas put the devil on the cover. Alison Entrekin’s new translation, due in January 2027, gives the space back to the landscape. On the jacket of Vastlands: The Crossing, a solitary rider still has most of it ahead of him.

The first part of this essay opened with Riobaldo talking to a visitor in the Brazilian backlands. In January, if the publication remains on schedule, an English-language reader will be able to open Entrekin’s translation and hear how she has rendered his first word. For that reader, the conversation is about to begin.

Since the first part of this essay appeared, Martin Avelar has heard back from Paris. The publisher expressed considerable sympathy for the predicament of “Words Detained in Transit” and asked whether an English translation might be available for the reader assigned to its case. The Portuguese original remains in custody.