THE BLUE AND THE WHITE

The London imprint Fitzcarraldo Editions makes challenging literature chic.

- REBECCA MEAD

For nearly a year after Jennifer Croft, a translator, sent a submission to Jacques Testard, a publisher in London, in the summer of 2015, the manuscript languished unread. Testard had launched Fitzcarraldo Editions the previous year, with the goal of creating a distinctive list of literary fiction and essays, many in translation. He was only thirty, and fiercely ambitious, but his publishing house was barely more than a one-man operation, and he fell behind on his reading. It wasn’t until after the Brexit referendum of June, 2016, when U.K. citizens voted narrowly to leave the European Union, that Testard reviewed the text that Croft had sent him: a two-hundred-page extract from “Flights,” an expansive novel first published in Polish, in 2007, by Olga Tokarczuk.

Testard, a French citizen who had moved with his family to the U.K. in childhood, hadn’t been eligible to vote in the referendum. But, like many people in his social circle, he’d assumed that Britain would choose to remain part of Europe. Testard was shocked by the result, and horrified by its effective legitimization of hostile attitudes toward European-born residents of the U.K. Testard didn’t feel personally vulnerable: he is effortlessly bilingual, and speaks English with the accent of London’s educated, affluent, cosmopolitan class. But less privileged immigrants were made to feel insecure: “Go Home” graffiti appeared on British streets, and mothers observed speaking to their children in a foreign language were chided. Immigrants from Poland—who, after that country had joined the E.U., in 2004, had become the U.K.’s largest foreign-born cohort—were derided in the right-wing press as “Polish plumbers,” job-stealers from Warsaw or Lodz who’d thrived by maintaining the homes of hapless Londoners.