Funny Novels in Translation

Natsume Sōseki's I Am a Cat is narrated by a nameless house cat who has never caught a mouse and has plenty of opinions about the humans who feed him. His owner is a dyspeptic schoolteacher, and the visitors who drift through the house are a parade of pompous scholars and idle talkers in Meiji-era Japan, all of them skewered with feline disdain. It was written in installments over 1904 to 1906, so it reads best in sittings rather than at a gallop. The Tuttle edition translated by Aiko Ito and Graeme Wilson gathers all three volumes and keeps the cat's lofty, rambling voice, which is where most of the jokes live.

The Good Soldier Švejk is the great comic novel of the First World War, told from the bottom of the Austro-Hungarian army. Švejk obeys every order with such cheerful, rambling literalness that the whole military machine seizes up around him, and nobody can tell whether he is an idiot or a genius at sabotage. It is the most translated Czech novel. Hašek planned six parts but died in 1923 while writing the fourth, so the book simply stops. Cecil Parrott's unabridged translation, with Josef Lada's famous drawings, is the one most English readers know, though some find it stiff; the newer one led by Zenny Sadlon is the alternative. Švejk's anecdotes are the point, not the plot. The cover shown is a 1920s Czech edition of part four.

Anyone who has sworn off a bad habit on a meaningful date and lapsed by lunchtime will recognize Zeno Cosini. Svevo's narrator writes his memoir for his psychoanalyst, and his famous resolutions to smoke one last cigarette, each one followed by another, set the tone for a life of self-serving excuses he narrates with a perfectly straight face. The comedy is quiet and sly rather than slapstick: the joke is how thoroughly Zeno rearranges the truth to flatter himself. William Weaver's translation was the first new English version in more than seventy years, and it reads freshly. Look for it rather than the older Confessions of Zeno.

The Twelve Chairs, from 1928, is a treasure hunt through the early Soviet Union: a set of dining chairs has been scattered across the country, and one of them hides a fortune in jewels. The hunt is led by Ostap Bender, the smooth-talking "great schemer," who became one of Russian literature's most beloved con men. Ilf and Petrov wrote it as a satire of the new bureaucracy, and a little background on communal apartments and state offices makes the jokes sharper. Anne O. Fisher's 2011 translation is the one to get: it won the Northern California Book Award for fiction in translation and comes with useful notes. Her version of the sequel, The Little Golden Calf, follows Bender further.

Ferdydurke is for readers who like their comedy unhinged. A thirty-year-old writer wakes up to find himself turned back into a schoolboy and marched off to class, and from there Gombrowicz runs wild with the ways adults, teachers and polite society squeeze people into roles they never chose. It is absurd, aggressive and sometimes baffling, closer to Monty Python than to a gentle satire. Read Danuta Borchardt's 2000 translation for Yale: earlier versions came at the book through other translations, while hers was the first taken directly from the Polish, and it won the National Translation Award.

Zazie in the Metro is the shortest route on this list to laughing out loud. Impish, foul-mouthed Zazie arrives in Paris from the country to stay with her uncle Gabriel, and all she wants is to ride the metro, which is shut by a strike. What follows is a single breathless weekend of chases, misunderstandings and adults out of their depth. Queneau wrote much of it in spelled-out street French, so translation matters enormously. Barbara Wright, who also translated his Exercises in Style, found English equivalents for the phonetic games rather than explaining them, and her version is the standard one. Louis Malle's 1960 film is a fine chaser once the book is done.

The devil comes to 1930s Moscow in The Master and Margarita, bringing a retinue that includes a huge, gun-toting, wisecracking black cat, and the city's literary bureaucrats, theater managers and housing officials never stand a chance. The satire is savage, the set pieces are wildly funny, and underneath it runs a love story and a retelling of Pontius Pilate. Bulgakov wrote it in secret and it was published only in the late 1960s, long after his death. Translations vary a lot. Burgin and O'Connor's is the most often praised for keeping the humor and irony readable, Pevear and Volokhonsky's for fidelity and notes; avoid Mirra Ginsburg's, which was made from a censored text.

Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands is the warmest and sexiest book here. Flor, who runs a cooking school in Bahia, loses her first husband, the gambling charmer Vadinho, who collapses in the middle of Carnival. She marries Teodoro, a respectable, orderly pharmacist. Then Vadinho comes back as a ghost, having lost none of his old ways. Jorge Amado's comedy is generous rather than cutting, full of food, music and Salvador street life, and recipes turn up in the text. Harriet de Onís's 1969 translation keeps the sly, gossipy narrator who makes the whole thing feel like a story told over a long dinner.

Private Ivan Chonkin is a short, clumsy, good-natured Red Army soldier sent to guard a plane that has made a forced landing near a remote village on the eve of the German invasion of 1941. Then everyone forgets about him. He settles in with a local woman, and by the time the authorities remember, rumor and paranoia have turned him into a dangerous enemy of the state. If Švejk is your thing, this is its Soviet cousin, and the comedy of a system chasing its own tail is just as sharp. The Russian original could not be published at home and first appeared in Paris in 1975. Richard Lourie's 1977 translation remains the English version, and his translation of the sequel, Pretender to the Throne, continues the story.

Ditie is a pint-sized hotel waiter with big dreams, and he narrates his rise through ever grander Czech hotels in long, giddy, run-on sentences that feel like a story spun at a bar. The early chapters are pure tall-tale comedy, full of eccentric guests, outrageous banquets and a headwaiter whose claim to fame is having served the King of England. Twentieth-century history keeps marching in, though, and the laughter darkens as Ditie's ambitions collide with occupation and communism. Hrabal finished it in 1971 but it circulated in typescript for years before proper publication. Paul Wilson's translation catches the breathless, chatty rhythm that makes the book so easy to keep reading.

The Year of the Hare begins when a young hare is hit on a country road and Kaarlo Vatanen, a journalist fed up with his magazine and his marriage, goes into the woods after it and simply gives it all up. The hare becomes his only true companion through a year of odd jobs in remote places, including Lapland, while the charges against him quietly pile up. Arto Paasilinna's 1975 novel is deadpan Finnish comedy at its best, a fable about dropping out that never turns preachy. Herbert Lomas's translation is appropriately comic, if idiosyncratic in places. Anyone who enjoyed the Nordic escapade of The Hundred-Year-Old Man should try this one next.

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter alternates two strands, and the comedy comes from how they bleed into each other. In one, young Marito, working at a Lima radio station, falls for Julia, a relation by marriage who is older and divorced. In the other, the station hires Pedro Camacho, a celebrated Bolivian scriptwriter, to liven up its soap operas, and his serials grow ever more lurid as he starts mixing up his characters. Vargas Llosa drew on his own youth, so the love story has real warmth beneath the farce. Helen Lane's 1982 translation handles the shifts between the tender narrator and Camacho's overheated melodrama, and the radio chapters are among the funniest pages in Latin American fiction.

No Word from Gurb begins when two aliens land in Barcelona during the building frenzy before the 1992 Olympics. One of them, Gurb, takes human form and promptly vanishes, so the other sets out to find him, changing his own appearance at random and reporting his baffled observations of earthly life in clipped, deadpan log entries. The book is tiny and very, very funny, one to finish in an evening. Eduardo Mendoza first published it as a newspaper serial in El País, which explains its quick, snack-sized rhythm. Nick Caistor's translation keeps the dry, straight-faced tone that makes the alien's misreadings of bars, buses and bureaucracy land so well.

Viktor is an aspiring writer in post-Soviet Kyiv whose only company is Misha, a melancholy king penguin adopted when the zoo could no longer feed its animals. He takes a job writing obituaries of the living for a newspaper, and then the people he writes about start dying on cue. Death and the Penguin works as a comedy thriller and a satire of 1990s Ukraine at the same time, and the deadpan absurdity lands even when the plot turns sinister. Andrey Kurkov wrote it in Russian; George Bird's 2001 translation is wonderfully readable. Misha, silently shuffling around the apartment, is one of the great comic animals in fiction.

Fear and Trembling is the funniest workplace novel here. A young Belgian woman spends a year at Yumimoto, a giant Japanese corporation, and is demoted step by humiliating step, finding a niche serving tea and changing calendars until even that is taken away, by a hierarchy she never quite learns to read. Amélie Nothomb writes with a wicked straight face, and much of the comedy comes from her narrator's chirpy acceptance of each new indignity. It is short and sharp, an ideal one-sitting read. Adriana Hunter's 2001 translation keeps the brisk, ironic voice, and the opening line, a chain of who is senior to whom ending with the narrator at the bottom, sets the tone perfectly.

Measuring the World puts two giants of German science side by side: the explorer Alexander von Humboldt, hauling instruments up volcanoes in South America, and the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, who barely wants to leave home. Chapters alternate between them, and Daniel Kehlmann pokes sly fun at both, Gauss a cartoonish grumbler, Humboldt a bumbling, fastidious adventurer. It was a number one bestseller in Germany, and it is the rare historical novel that is genuinely funny without being silly. No science is needed to enjoy it. Carol Brown Janeway's translation is easy to read, though Kehlmann's trick of avoiding direct speech sits a little stiffly in English.

On his 100th birthday, Allan Karlsson skips the party his retirement home has planned, climbs out of his window in his slippers and wanders off, and within hours he has stolen a suitcase full of criminal money. The present-day chase is intercut with his past, in which Allan, who cares nothing for politics, keeps stumbling into the great events of the twentieth century. Jonas Jonasson's comedy is broad, gentle and episodic, the literary equivalent of a feel-good road movie, and it was a huge international bestseller. Rod Bradbury's translation keeps the mild, matter-of-fact tone that makes the outrageous coincidences so funny. Readers who like their satire sharp may find it too cozy.

Look Who's Back is the riskiest comedy on this list. In 2011, Adolf Hitler wakes up on a vacant lot in Berlin, alive and entirely unchanged, and modern Germany takes him for a comedian or a method actor who never breaks character. His rants become a YouTube hit and land him on television, and he never once drops the act, because it is not one. Timur Vermes narrates in Hitler's own pompous voice, and the laughs come with a chill: the target is the media and audiences who make him a celebrity. Jamie Bulloch's translation is lively and idiomatic, and a little knowledge of German politics helps the topical jokes land. The cover shown is the German original.

A Man Called Ove centers on a curmudgeon, the kind of man who points at people he dislikes as if they were burglars caught outside his bedroom window, and who patrols his Swedish housing development enforcing rules nobody else cares about. Then a boisterous young family moves in next door and keeps interrupting his very private plans. It is the most sentimental book here, and it will make some readers cry as often as laugh. The comedy comes from Ove's furious, rule-bound logic colliding with neighbors who refuse to be put off. Fredrik Backman's short, punchy chapters translate easily, and Henning Koch's English version keeps Ove's grumbling voice intact.

Keiko Furukura has worked in the same Tokyo convenience store for eighteen years, and she is perfectly happy there: the store's manual tells her exactly how to behave, which ordinary life never did. Her family and friends, however, are increasingly desperate for her to get a proper job or a husband. Convenience Store Woman is deadpan comedy with a bite, and its targets are the polite social pressures that most people never question. Sayaka Murata's short novel won Japan's Akutagawa Prize, and Ginny Tapley Takemori's translation catches Keiko's flat, precise narration, which is where the humor comes from. Readers who enjoyed Fear and Trembling will find a similar eye for Japanese workplace ritual from the inside.