By Tim Parks, New York Review of Books Blog, June 11, 2012

Shortly before his death in 1980, the great anthropologist Gregory Bateson suggested that social engineering was like trying to reverse a truck with five or six trailers attached to it through a complex maze; you might get somewhere, but where and with what collateral damage would never be clear. So it’s hardly a surprise that the decision in many countries around Europe to insist on English as a second language—to facilitate trade of course and to promote a global scientific community—has had some unexpected effects, not least on literature [....]

Inevitably, as the number of people speaking English increases, so do the sales of novels in English. But not enormously. The surprise is that increased knowledge of English has also brought a much more marked increase in sales of literature written in English but read in translation in the local language. When you learn a language you don’t just pick up a means of communication, you buy into a culture, you get interested [....]

At Università IULM in Milan, where I teach, we have a group research project on the effects of globalization on literature [....] When I asked people to list titles they had recently read, they seemed surprised themselves how prevalently English and American, rather than simply foreign, these novels were [....]