All the things we've lost in translation - Books
One moment you’re sitting on a couch somewhere in Jakarta, listening to the soft hum of the air conditioner. The next, you’re in Saigon, making your way through a street in war- torn 1960s Vietnam . Or perhaps, watching the sun rise and fall through a small window from a prison somewhere in the French-colonized Algeria. Stories have the ability to take us to places that we have never been, to see sights that we have never seen; an access to the foreign and strange and familiar, however brief and fleeting. Ultimately, literature tells us about how people lived. It tells us about what people have cried about, what they have lost. How people wake up in the morning and make their coffee, and how the moon looks before they fall asleep. It tells us about how things fall apart, and how people fall in love. It may even remind us of emotions that we too have felt; whether it be something that we vaguely remember feeling at some time and some place, or something that comes to us with such an i...