BA Book Prize reading list: Ross Perlin’s picks
Posted by Ross Perlin
To celebrate this year’s British Academy Book Prize, we’ve asked all of the shortlisted authors to tell us about the books they’ve been reading. Our penultimate selection is from Ross Perlin, whose shortlisted book Language City tells the story of some of the world’s most endangered languages via six inhabitants of the most linguistically diverse city in history: contemporary New York.
Esther Kinsky’s River, translated by Iain Galbraith: Follow the unsung and bedraggled River Lea from its northern reaches down to its junction with the Thames, encountering along the way Hasidic housewives, Kurdish drivers, a Romanian mover, a Croat storekeeper. And it’s all through the eyes of the mysterious narrator, who juxtaposes lyrical scenes of end-times nature, industrial ruins, and deep-cut forgotten histories with other rivers of her past: the Rhine, the Tisza, the Hoogly, the St. Lawrence.
Morten H. Christiansen and Nick Chater’s The Language Game: How Improvisation Created Language and Changed the World: Two cognitive scientists, unpacking their experiments and collaborations over the last three decades, have written a must-read for linguists and language lovers, arguing that language has evolved accidentally, gradually, and culturally through improvised games of charades which become routinized and deeply inflected for local and individual conditions. Their approach doesn’t solve all the mysteries, but presents a view of language in which diversity is primary, humans are central to the story (but animals are not excluded), and children are some of the best charades players of all.
Perumal Muruguan’s Pyre, translated by Aniruddhan Vasudevan: Translated from (an apparently rural and idiomatic) Tamil, this powerful social realistic novel feels close to lived experience, as newlyweds Kumaresan and Saroja move from the town where they meet to the former’s village to start a new life. Because they don’t give a clear account of the girl’s caste, they face immediate and implacable hostility, starting with Kumaresan’s own family – and it builds from there with devastating clarity.
Find out more about Language City, and the rest of this year’s British Academy Prize shortlist, here.
