Tomás Nevinson
Javier Marías, translated by Margaret Jull Costa (Hamish Hamilton)
“I was brought up in the old-fashioned way, and could never have dreamed that one day I would be ordered to kill a woman.” Ah, how we will miss the late Javier Marías and his unique genre of slow-motion page-turners, blending thrillery plots with long, equivocating sentences. His final work, a “companion novel” to its predecessor, Berta Isla, tells the story of a washed-up spy chasing down a terrorist, and is full of the complexities, comedy and most of all contradictions that define his work. Fittingly, its closing words are “Possibly. You never know.”
Kairos
Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Michael Hofmann (Granta)
Erpenbeck’s novel about a destructive affair between a young woman and an older man in 1980s East Berlin is less formally experimental than her early work, but just as carefully structured and more emotionally resonant. It’s a story of tension between pairings: men and women, sex and love, east and west; and the “landscape of ruins” that remained when the Berlin Wall came down. As ever with Erpenbeck, history makes mincemeat of those swept along in its wake: which is to say, all of us. Kairos furthers the conviction that Erpenbeck is a dead cert for a future Nobel prize.
The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild
Mathias Enard, translated by Frank Wynne (Fitzcarraldo)
How to capture the garrulous glory of this chaotic epic? David, a bien-pensant student writing a study of provincial life in western France, patronises the locals when he’s not prattling in his diary (“I wonder what Walter Benjamin would have thought of cybersex?”) or playing Tetris. But the countryside is busier than he knows, and correspondences abound: a priest is reincarnated as a wild boar, a killer becomes a worm, all through the action of “the Wheel of Life”. Stories are told, past and future collide, the gravediggers raise a toast – “Long live Death, that big-hearted strumpet!” – and the reader bows in admiration and awe.
Vengeance Is Mine
Marie NDiaye, translated by Jordan Stump (MacLehose)
Marie NDiaye’s skill at taking internal convulsions and rendering them into breathless activity on the page is at its height in what might be her best novel to appear in English. The narrator, a low-ranking French lawyer, feels herself to be the centre of a web of connections: to her client, a woman who killed her children; to the woman’s husband, whom she thinks she knew years ago; to her domestic cleaner, Sharon; and to her own parents. The result is a complex knot of guilt, fear and obsession, which compresses a great deal into 240 pages without ever seeming clotted.
Whale
Cheon Myeong-Kwan, translated by Chi-Young Kim (Europa Editions)
A novel published in January still lingers in the mind at the other end of the year. And how could it not? This South Korean picaresque is a colourful, eccentric, sometimes cartoonish romp that cheerfully insults its own characters and takes pleasure in upending the reader’s expectations. At its heart are mother and daughter Geumbok and Chunhui, and a plan to build a whale-shaped cinema; and beneath the riotous surface, a study in ambition and patriarchy. “Dear reader,” we’re told near the end, “please keep the drowsiness at bay a little longer.” No need to worry about that.
To browse all translated fiction included in the Guardian and Observer’s best books of 2023 visit guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
