The Penguin Book of French Short Stories (volumes 1 and 2), edited by Patrick McGuinness (Penguin Classics, £30 each)
It’s hard to imagine a better introduction to French literature than this glorious two-volume bran tub of short fiction, featuring 84 authors over almost 900 pages, running from the 15th century (Philippe de Laon, Marguerite de Navarre) to the day before yesterday (Marie NDiaye, Virginie Despentes). There are plenty of old favourites – Vivant Denon’s corrupt love story No Tomorrow, Flaubert’s A Simple Heart, Maupassant’s terrifying The Horla – outstanding masterpieces all. Highlights among the modern stories include Charles Dantzig’s Ballardian story of a dying man taking to the road (“The motorway is right. It will help me become more perfect”). There’s a welcome playfulness throughout, as in Georges Perec’s exquisite The Winter Journey, or in Émile Zola’s cynical Death by Advertising, where a man who believes everything he reads, including book reviews, decides to buy “only those books described as ‘outstanding masterpieces’, thereby reducing his purchases to some twenty books a week”.
Idol, Burning by Rin Usami, translated by Asa Yoneda (Canongate, £14.99)
This novella about toxic fandom won Japan’s prestigious Akutagawa Prize for up-and-coming writers in 2020. (Its then 21-year-old author took home 1m yen – £6,000 – and a pocket watch.) It’s narrated by Akari, a superfan of boyband singer Masaki Ueno – her oshi, or idol. She blogs about him and struggles to be noticed in his live-stream chat: the hopelessly one-sided relationship is “more than a core – it was my backbone”, taking on the weight of other problems. But more tantalising is the portrait of her hero, seen only in glimpses: a star since childhood, he’s in the news for punching a follower, struggling with the weight of millions of hopes being projected on to him. Usami so successfully depicts the consequences of pure obsession that when Ueno declares his desire to return to being a private citizen and Akari says “I knew it was the end,” we’re torn between sadness and relief.
Mr Ma and Son by Lao She, translated by William Dolby (Penguin Modern Classics, £9.99)
“They’re a terrible lot, the English, but at the same time, so admirable!” That’s the conclusion of Ma Wei, who comes to London in the 1920s with his father to run an antiques shop near St Paul’s Cathedral. In this funny and charming tragicomedy, the prejudices of Londoners against the “tricky foreign devils” are handled with a satirical lightness. Their reluctant landlady, Mrs Wedderburn, reads De Quincey’s Confessions of English Opium Eater so that “she’d have a suitable topic of conversation ready”, and embroiders a Chinese character on her daughter’s hat which she thinks means “beautiful” but actually reads “big bastard”. The novel, first published in 1929, froths with activity, from a punch-up with a vicar’s son at a Chinese restaurant to an unexpected rapprochement between east and west (“She glanced at Mr Ma … and kissed him smack on the lips”) under the influence of Christmas spirit.
A Silence Shared by Lalla Romano, translated by Brian Robert Moore (Pushkin, £10.99)
When a book is praised by three of Italy’s greatest 20th-century writers – Giorgio Bassani, Italo Calvino and Natalia Ginzburg – you pay attention. Lalla Romano’s novel, first published in 1957 and never before translated into English, is about two couples sharing a rural house during the second world war. One, Paolo, is a partisan in hiding, and suffers from a mysterious illness. “My talent is not specifically a narrative one,” writes Romano in an afterword, and it’s true that there is not much action – Paolo ventures outdoors, a cow is calved, winter falls and the silence of the snow intensifies. But outside the house, the war – “that happening like no other” – carries on in the background, and through short scenes and spare dialogue, Romano successfully creates a mood of stasis, anticipation and guilt. The characters know they are not doing enough to help, but cannot tear themselves away from their sanctuary.
