Austral by Carlos Fonseca, translated by Megan McDowell (MacLehose, £20)
If a book-within-a-book isn’t ambitious enough for you, Costa Rican writer Carlos Fonseca has just the thing: two books within a book. US university lecturer Julio remembers British Aliza (“who swore she had kissed Sid Vicious”), whom he knew decades earlier. A letter tells him that Aliza, the author of four novels, is dead, and wanted him to edit her final manuscript, a “novel or memoir (that will be for you to determine)”. The manuscript, A Private Language – a story of the failed “New Germany” in Paraguay co-founded by Nietzsche’s sister – is accompanied by Aliza’s notebook, Dictionary of Loss, featuring collage images representing expression that words cannot achieve. (A photo of Wittgenstein shows “the tired eyes of a person who has spent his life chasing an idea to its logical conclusion”.) Aliza’s work was intended for only one person, but Fonseca’s novel – chewy but not clotted, expansive and thought-provoking – should have wider appeal.
Whites Can Dance Too by Kalaf Epalanga, translated by Daniel Hahn (Faber, £16.99)
When the then Portugal-based Angolan musician Kalaf Epalanga was touring northern Europe in 2008, he lost his passport and was detained at the Sweden-Norway border. The incident inspired Epalanga’s satisfying debut novel, in which the narrative about the power of music and dance fizzes with energy, even if you don’t know your baile funk from your electroclash from your Angolan kuduro. Epalanga’s wry account of immigrant life in Portugal (“Frying chicken teriyaki for four euro an hour gave me a very real perspective on Europe”) is tempered with memories of the civil war and colonialism that brought him there. But what expands the novel beyond memoir are the second and third parts, from the viewpoints of Sofia – Epalanga’s wife back in Portugal – and Eyvind, a member of the Norwegian immigration police, whose story (“Why is arresting famous people always so complicated?”) is at once chilling and enthralling.
The Incredible Events in Women’s Cell Number 3 by Kira Yarmysh, translated by Arch Tait (Serpent’s Tail, £16.99)
This debut novel by Kira Yarmysh – Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s press secretary – comes with praise from her boss on the cover. The title refers to the detention centre where heroine Anya is held for 10 days on trumped-up charges after attending an anti-corruption rally. There she meets other women: combative Katya, seemingly innocent Ira, and Maya who sells sex and supports the leadership. “‘Well, I admire Putin,’ Maya said dreamily, twisting a lock of hair round her finger.” As this suggests, the book is not always subtle: characters are big and points are made clearly, with Catch-22 exchanges on the impossibility of fairness for women in Russian society. But some complexity comes with Anya’s troubled history, her experience of strange visions, and her belief that her cellmates may not be all they seem. At times the book feels as long as Anya’s detention, but the dialogue-heavy narrative keeps the pages turning.
You, Bleeding Childhood by Michele Mari, translated by Brian Robert Moore (And Other Stories, £11.99)
There’s a Calvino-esque blend of the playful and the rigorous to this collection of stories by the Italian author about his childhood. It opens with a father putting his precious comics out of reach of his soon-to-appear baby son (“a slobbering critter who will scribble on them with obscene crayons”), and moves through a child’s difficult transition from comics to books, an obsessive report on drinking-fountain hygiene that reads like a juvenile Nicholson Baker, and the poetry of his mother’s jigsaw-solving technique. “Scrupulously comb, flip, isolate; subdivide certain categories of pieces by hue or by grain … ” But best of all in this uniquely refreshing book is the final exchange of childhood memories by two old men: idiosyncratic, amusing and moving. “There wasn’t much else, in life.” “No, it’s almost all down there.”
The Love of Singular Men by Victor Heringer, translated by James Young
(Peirene, £12.99)
Also obsessed with memory is Camilo, the disabled narrator of the first book by the Brazilian novelist Victor Heringer to be translated into English. He remembers “my Cosme, my first and only”, the orphan his father brings to their home in the town of Queím, and whose appearance coincides with Camilo’s discovery of his sexuality. (When he sees men’s calves, “my penis awoke in little jerks”.) Three decades after Cosme’s murder, their two weeks together remain the centre of what is left of Camilo’s life. “I’ll soon be thickening up the soup of the dead.” The brief, precise scenes – incorporating photos, lists and handwritten passages – enable Heringer to cover a great deal in a short space and make a potentially gloomy story into a multilayered celebration of life. That the author died in 2018, aged 29, is a loss to international literature.
