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.
