Gaëlle Bélem 

The inspirations behind There’s a Monster Behind the Door 

How can you read and write in a family of crazy people where books are hated? How can you become a great writer when everyone around you is hooked on TV and horror films and is dead set against it? How can you be a good storyteller when the only stories your parents tell you are about monsters, each more bizarre than the previous? 

My novel answers these questions by telling the story of an amazing little girl, from her conception to the age of 20. This ‘little monster’ comes from the island of Reunion. For more than 15 years I dreamt of writing this novel to let people know more about my native island, as it is still not well known in many parts of the world. However, it is one of the most beautiful islands on the planet and has an extremely exciting history. At the age of 34, I set aside my hesitations, closed the door, lit a lamp (as I write mostly at night) and set to work. 

My inspirations are many and varied. I wrote this book in the same way you would make a refreshing cocktail: from several ingredients. Firstly, a pinch of music. To me, my book is the literary equivalent of a rap song from 1996 – Nirvana by Doc Gynéco. It’s a cynical song about prison, total demotivation and suicide. That’s where the dark part of the text comes from. Then there’s a spoonful of cinema. The stylised violence of Tarantino (Django Unchained and Kill Bill) and of Park Chan-wook (Lady Vengeance, Old Boy) and the denunciation of social injustices of Bong Joon-ho (Snowpiercer) made a big impression on me. After rewatching those films, I wanted to combine all that and write about misery in a very stylised and sophisticated way. 

Finally, the icing on the cake was inspiration from 19^th-century French writers Émile Zola (The Assommoir) and J.K. Huysmans (Against Nature) and their very 19th-century, slightly outdated style.  

How I wrote the book  

Writing this novel took me two years and a whole lifetime. Two years of basically writing at night, and a lifetime’s observation of my surroundings. I slipped into the skin sometimes of a journalist, sometimes of a sociologist who wants to tell a story and who therefore has to observe, inquire and ask questions – entering into working-class districts where the island’s beating heart can be found. 

Writing means failing a lot. Sometimes spending half a day on one paragraph. This little monster is my first novel. The main challenge for me was to fill it with credible characters and to finish it (before it finished me off). I felt like Dr Frankenstein asking himself if he would succeed in creating life and whether his creature would be monstrous. 

I spent two years doubting myself. Doubt is not necessarily paralysing. I had to get past it. I wanted to write something very special, a book that was a scream, a punch, a shot of strong alcohol that surprises you and that you don’t recover from straightaway. I like literature that delivers a punch, even if my text is very poetic at the same time. 

The book that made me fall in love with reading  

One book?! That’s like asking me to choose between my right and left eye. It’s impossible to mention just one. A whole library or nothing! That library would have to include Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand. I fell in love with Cyrano de Bergerac. He is a man who compensates for the ugliness of his nose through the overdevelopment of his intellectual character. Cyrano de Bergerac, c’est moi! I love this book because, in very few pages, it tells a story of love and friendship while touching on all human tribulations – disillusionment, failure, estrangement, mockery, war, solitude, death. Books have this power to scan souls. And I love this book because it makes a complete audit of the human soul. I also love this book because it speaks of fragility. The fragility of a man, the fragility of love, and I think that Cyrano helps me to bear my own life better. 

The book that made me want to become a writer   

It was more an author: Victor Hugo. Before each book of mine is published, I return to the house where he lived from 1832 to 1848. Like with Dante, Goethe or Shakespeare, Hugo’s house in Paris has been turned into a museum. It’s like a pilgrimage for me, because my gratitude to this author is infinite. Hugo wrote everything – poems, plays, novels, pamphlets, short stories. He is the incarnation of the national writer, and I have made him my spiritual father. A girl doesn’t normally try to do better than her father. She just wants to walk hand in hand with him and be nourished by his experience. A short story like ‘Claude Gueux’, which is a magnificent condemnation of the death penalty, moved me profoundly. The same goes for The Last Day of a Condemned Man. I often reread Contemplations and The Legend of The Ages, which contain respectively ‘Tomorrow at Dawn’ and ‘The Conscience’, two of my favourite poems. Without Les Misérables I would not have written my first novel. There is something of Gavroche in my little Dessaintes. 

Today, like yesterday, I have no problem with the incredible difference separating me from Victor Hugo. I simply believe that the fact of idolising such a genius has motivated me and placed the bar very high. 

The book that changed the way I think about the world  

Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse, The Year of the Hare by Arto Paasilinna, Moral Letters to Lucilius by Seneca and, more recently, Ain’t I a Woman by bell hooks. These are all books that have helped me to sketch the world in which I want to live. A feminist, or I’d like to say a humanist, world at a remove from consumerism where simplicity, respect for nature and moral values are held in high esteem.  

A book original written in French that I’d recommend to English-language readers   

I come from an island where nearly 20% of the population suffers from illiteracy. More generally, screens are winning out over books for people of all ages. So I increasingly find myself recommending short books to be sure that people will read them. There is an association between literature and great tomes as if a short text is incapable of talking about the world. But in this type of text, the characters are described right down to the last detail. 

So I recommend a short story collection by Maupassant like Tales of the Goose or a short novel like Little Louise Roque. Otherwise, I gained a lot from Perfume by Patrick Süskind, The Cloven Viscount by Italo Calvino and The Scortas’ Sun by Laurent Gaudé. 

In recent years I’ve really enjoyed Humus by Gaspard Koenig and And Their Children After Them by Nicolas Mathieu, two very intelligent novels that tell stories of the vices and virtues of two very different types of young people against a backdrop of social and ecological crisis. There are the young people that succeed and want to change the world (Koenig) versus those left behind (Mathieu). As a teacher and associate judge in a juvenile court, I am very receptive to books that talk about young people. Mathieu’s quasi-sociological inquiry and Koenig’s advanced scientific references are very impressive. 

The Booker-nominated book everyone should read  

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, The Lord of the Flies by William Golding, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood are books that I always recommend. 

Saving the best for last, I strongly recommend At Night all Blood is Black by David Diop, who was the first French author to win the International Booker Prize. 

Il faut lire, au moins une fois dans sa vie, le texte d’un ancien lauréat.  

Karen Fleetwood 

The inspiration and process behind the translation There’s a Monster Behind the Door 

The effects of colonialism and racism continue to be experienced by many people worldwide. Gaëlle’s novel exposes the multigenerational impact and legacy this can have, an important warning in the current era. Yet this lesson is imparted with such vibrancy and humour that its effect is all the more powerful. 

It took us [Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Loubert] about a year to translate the novel, which we did alongside our day-to-day work. I read it through once before embarking on the translation. Laëtitia and I worked by each translating alternate sections, which the other would then read through, comment on and revise. We then discussed any particular challenges in each section, bouncing around ideas. Gaëlle was kind enough to answer any questions that we had along the way, usually with respect to cultural specificities or individual words. Finally, we reread the entire text again a couple of times to improve its flow and consistency.   

One particular challenge in translating the text was the use of Reunionese Creole in the original French. We were determined to preserve this bilingual element in the English translation, without using an excessive number of footnotes or explanations that would disrupt the flow of the narrative. This required a degree of creativity on many occasions.   

The book that made me fall in love with reading     

At the age of about eight, I was given the first book in the Chalet School series by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer. This series is about a girls’ school located first in Austria, then in Britain and finally in Switzerland. The girls are expected to learn to speak German, French and English fluently, and the books are scattered with phrases in both German and French. This series was my obsession well into my teenage years. It is the reason I developed a passion for languages and so has shaped my entire life.    

The book that made me want to become a translator      

I wouldn’t say there was one individual book that inspired me. My inspiration came from the dozens of amazing works I have read in translation over the years, many of which I would never have been able to read had they not been translated into English.   

The translator whose work I always look out for    

I love the Neapolitan Quartet by Elena Ferrante, and by extension Ann Goldstein’s translations. I also recently read her translation of Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Céspedes and was deeply moved by the constraints of the heroine’s life and by her desire to express her innermost feelings but her fear of her family’s reaction. As one of the first translators to become a well-known name in her own right, I also think Ann Goldstein has really raised the profile of literary translation.   

The book I’m reading at the moment   

I have just finished reading Mina’s Matchbox by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder. I love Japanese literature generally, but this gentle coming-of-age novel had a magical atmosphere all of its own. It is also the only book I have ever read with a pygmy hippopotamus as one of the main characters. As escapism, it was perfect.   

A work of fiction originally written in French that you would recommend to English-language readers    

I think everyone should read The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry at least once. There are many lessons for adults in this children’s story, and of course the illustrations are beautiful.   

The International Booker-nominated book everyone should read     

There are so many wonderful books that it is hard to choose, but A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler, translated by Charlotte Collins, is outstanding. It shows the beauty and value of every individual life, however simple and humble it may appear.   

Why do you think translated fiction is so appealing to a new generation of English-language readers?     

Technology and the internet have their drawbacks, but they have also made the world and other cultures more accessible. Perhaps it is this that has caused younger people to be more open to reading literature in translation. One example might be South Korean literature, which is now well represented in UK bookshops, presumably boosted by the popularity of K-pop and K-drama. 

Laëtitia Saint-Loubert 

The book that made me fall in love with reading    

I grew up in a modest household where there weren’t many books around. I remember studying passages from Les Misérables at school one day and loving it so much that I came back home with the book I had borrowed from the school library. I was fascinated by the character of Gavroche and the barricade scene which ends with this beautiful sentence: ‘Cette petite grande âme venait de s’envoler’.    

I also realised years later, as a young adult, how much the stories that my dad and his dad had told my sister and I when we were growing up had fashioned my love for reading and storytelling. They would always tell us colourful stories that would be filled with snippets of the Gascon language, which is one of the reasons why I became so passionate about linguistic variation and interested in Patois and Creoles.  

The book that made me want to become a translator     

Michelle Cliff’s Abeng. I first read the novel around the time I started a Master’s degree in literary translation many years ago, and fell in love with Cliff’s unique voice and the Jamaican soundscape. I translated most of the book into French during my degree but have revised the translation since, as I felt the oral dimension of the original could be improved and am hoping this translation will find its way to Caribbean readers living in the region and the diaspora.     

The translator whose work I always look out for    

There are too many English translators whose work I admire to mention them all here. I’ll just mention two French translators who work from Brazilian Portuguese and English, respectively: Paula Anacaona and Sika Fakambi. I love how Fakambi’s retranslation of Their Eyes Were Watching God gave a new, more authentic voice to Zora Neale Hurston that was more in keeping with her African-American experience for French readers. I am also always on the lookout for new books published, translated or written by Paula Anacaona. One of my favourites to this day remains 1492, Anacaona. L’insurgée des Caraïbes.   

The book I’m reading at the moment    

I recently finished reading Anna Burns’s Milkman, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I loved the first-person narrator’s distinctive voice, her use of dark humour and the way she distorts the English language, making it sound very rough around the edges at times to convey the main character’s sense of oppression in a country never named, but highly evocative of Northern Ireland during the Troubles.    

I enjoyed the novel so much that I decided to have my students work on a French translation of a passage from the book. Although the students were a bit apprehensive and unsettled at first by the ‘strangeness’ of the text, once they’d overcome their initial fear, they proved very creative in their translation choices and did not hesitate to play with the French language and push it to its extremes. I believe texts like Milkman can work wonders with new generations of readers and can serve as a breeding ground for emerging translators.    

A work of fiction originally written in French that I’d recommend to English-language readers   

I would say L’Étranger by Albert Camus. I chose this text because there are various English translations of it, each colouring the original in a different way, reminding us that a translation is always an interpretation of a text, which ultimately calls for other translations.   

The International Booker-nominated book everyone should read    

More than ever, I think everyone should read Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Achebe wasn’t nominated specifically for that book, but was awarded the Man Booker International Prize for his literary career in 2007.   

Why do you think translated fiction is so appealing to a new generation of English-language readers?     

I think that small, indie presses have a lot to do with this trend in the UK. They are willing to take risks and publish new voices from other parts of the world that stand out from the crowd and tend to appeal to younger generations.