The Living and the Rest by José Eduardo Agualusa, translated by Daniel Hahn (MacLehose, £12.99)
“That is how it all begins: the night splitting open in a huge flash, and the island separating from the world.” Such is the fate of a group of writers at a literary festival on the Island of Mozambique, who find themselves stranded with limited resources and, worst of all, no internet; there’s Ofélia, more famous for her interview outbursts than her poetry; there’s Julio, who keeps rewriting the same novel; there’s Cornelia, whose first book was so successful she can’t write another; and Jude, who didn’t review Cornelia’s novel favourably enough. “I gave it four stars out of five.” “Precisely. You did not give it five.” The writers tell one another stories, Decameron-style, as they wonder: has the world ended? Are they all dead? Agualusa’s funny and lively tale turns increasingly ominous ahead of an explosive conclusion. I give it four stars – and a half.
Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg, translated by Wendy H Gabrielsen (Weatherglass, £11.99)
This tense novel of loneliness and dissatisfaction made me laugh a lot – to begin with. A double award-winner in Norway, it tells the story of 53-year-old Karin and her daughter, Helene. Helene’s husband is having an affair with a woman whose “body is smooth and hard like technology”. “Maybe they’re just good friends. What did the messages actually say?” asks Karin. “That he’d like to come inside her,” replies Helene. Karin has been looking for happiness in the same place, with men. Her dates are always comically mismatched, and then not so comically – one man yanks her earrings out of her ears. Stoltenberg’s elegant prose makes each scene – a trip to London, a memory of a past boyfriend – so engaging that it gives plot a bad name. By the end, the atmosphere has shifted with such subtlety that the sentence “the rooms are exactly how she left them” can seem almost too sad to bear.
Vengeance Is Mine by Marie NDiaye, translated by Jordan Stump (MacLehose, £12)
There are numerous mysteries in this gripping novel. The first is why a Bordeaux woman, Marlyne Principaux, has killed her three young children. The second is why her husband seems to “feel no anger at his villainous wife … seemed almost prepared to accuse the children in his wife’s defence”. The next is why he has instructed a low-ranking lawyer, Maître Susane, to defend her. All these questions uncover a complex knot of feelings in Maître Susane, the narrative voice of the novel. She starts to believe she knows Principaux from her childhood, becomes estranged from her parents, and obsesses over the welfare of her cleaner, an undocumented immigrant. Using a series of short, breathless paragraphs to drive the story on, NDiaye balances external and internal revelations to create a powerful story of mothers and daughters, and of what happens when a parent’s unconditional love breaks down.
The Siren’s Lament: Essential Stories by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, translated by Bryan Karetnyk (Pushkin, £12)
Tanizaki is a monument of 20th-century Japanese literature, but these two stories (never before translated) and novella (out of print in English for a century) are undiscovered jewels. As we might expect from Tanizaki, emotions are intense. We encounter a woman determined to seduce the Chinese sage Confucius; and a playboy bored by his seven concubines who finds that a mermaid “fills him with the passion for which he had longed”. The novella Killing O-Tsuya is the star: a story of love against the odds which turns into a revenge killing spree by a hero who makes Macbeth look insufficiently committed to his work. “Once you’ve developed a taste for it, it isn’t easy to stop!” Yes: more of this sort of thing, please.
