My Sunday Guardian column.
To
begin with, Laurent Binet’s HHhH,
translated from the French by Sam Taylor, about the British secret service plot
to kill Reinhard Heydrich in 1941. (If you’ve seen Operation Daybreak, you already know the story.) HHhH is historical fiction that plays
with the conventions of fiction by putting the author’s own misgivings about
realism and recreation at its heart. Criticized for the occasionally clunky
prose and being too clever by half – with some justification – it’s nevertheless
wholly absorbing and engaging.
Also
from France is Philippe Claudel’s The
Investigation, translated by John Cullen, which tries to out-Kafka Kafka
with the story of an unnamed investigator’s efforts to plumb the workings of an
entity known as the Firm. As the Investigator spirals towards his nemesis,
events become even more nightmarish; an effect balanced by the questions
Claudel raises about facelessness and capitalism, among others.
Then,
there’s Herman Koch’s The Dinner,
translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett, which has surface similarities with
Polanski’s Carnage, but is wickeder
and more startling than the movie. Skillfully paced, it depicts the
manipulations beneath the surface when two couples meet to discuss their sons’ involvement
in an unexpected act of violence, with a denouement that’s as unexpected.
The
novel that lays claim to be the most ambitious and luminous of the lot goes to
Andres Neuman’s Traveller of the Century,
translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia, which begins
with a stranger arriving at a fictional German town in the nineteenth century.
It’s been called an example of a “total novel”, encompassing a love story, a
murder mystery and debates on art, literature, politics and feminism. Sprawling
and bulky but never dull: one of those long novels where the length doesn’t
matter.
Also
in Spanish, and translated by Rosalind Harvey and Anne McLean, is Enrique
Vila-Matas’s Dublinesque. This consciously
literary novel deals with a trip taken by a Barcelona publisher to Dublin to
commemorate his own vision of Bloomsday, and is haunted by the spirit of Joyce
– but also by others such as Beckett and Larkin. I hesitate to use the word
“inimitable”, but that’s what Vila-Matas’s novels always turn out to be.
It’s
long and digressive and stuffed with minor characters, but Grigor von Rezzori’s
An Ermine in Czernopol, first
published in 1958 and now translated from the German by Philip Boehm, is
endlessly fascinating, with prose that alternates between the ironic and the
nostalgic. Set in a small town of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire between the
world wars – a place and era lost to time -- it deals with the tragicomic fate
of a Quixote-like hussar, a humourless man in a place that values humour.
The
Switzerland-based Peter Stamm’s Seven
Years was one of my favourites of last year and he follows it up with a
short story collection, We’re Flying,
translated by Michael Hoffman. In a quiet, sparse, but by no means unaffecting
manner, Stamm records the lives of ordinary folk who oscillate between memories
of happiness and dealing with its loss, leaving them – as the man with the horn
said – kind of blue.
Finally,
from the other side of the globe is Fuminori Nakamura’s The Thief, translated from the Japanese by Satoko Izumo and Stephen
Coates. This tells of a Tokyo pickpocket who takes palpable pleasure in his solitary
craft before being caught up in a web of events he’s unable to control. These cleverly
delineated sequences of action and reaction create an atmosphere of brooding
noir and raise questions that are more existential than criminal.
Most
of the fiction I found noteworthy in 2012 was in translation. Here, there was
all the inventiveness, ideas and engagement one looked for – often
unsuccessfully – in fiction from the English-speaking world. In no particular
order, here’s a selection of this year’s titles: a choice that’s both personal
and random, given the ones I haven’t yet read (Laszlo Karsznahorkai, Robert
Walser) and the ones I haven’t yet been able to get hold of (Bernardo Atxaga,
Daniel Sada).
To
begin with, Laurent Binet’s HHhH,
translated from the French by Sam Taylor, about the British secret service plot
to kill Reinhard Heydrich in 1941. (If you’ve seen Operation Daybreak, you already know the story.) HHhH is historical fiction that plays
with the conventions of fiction by putting the author’s own misgivings about
realism and recreation at its heart. Criticized for the occasionally clunky
prose and being too clever by half – with some justification – it’s nevertheless
wholly absorbing and engaging.
Also
from France is Philippe Claudel’s The
Investigation, translated by John Cullen, which tries to out-Kafka Kafka
with the story of an unnamed investigator’s efforts to plumb the workings of an
entity known as the Firm. As the Investigator spirals towards his nemesis,
events become even more nightmarish; an effect balanced by the questions
Claudel raises about facelessness and capitalism, among others.
Then,
there’s Herman Koch’s The Dinner,
translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett, which has surface similarities with
Polanski’s Carnage, but is wickeder
and more startling than the movie. Skillfully paced, it depicts the
manipulations beneath the surface when two couples meet to discuss their sons’ involvement
in an unexpected act of violence, with a denouement that’s as unexpected.
The
novel that lays claim to be the most ambitious and luminous of the lot goes to
Andres Neuman’s Traveller of the Century,
translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia, which begins
with a stranger arriving at a fictional German town in the nineteenth century.
It’s been called an example of a “total novel”, encompassing a love story, a
murder mystery and debates on art, literature, politics and feminism. Sprawling
and bulky but never dull: one of those long novels where the length doesn’t
matter.
Also
in Spanish, and translated by Rosalind Harvey and Anne McLean, is Enrique
Vila-Matas’s Dublinesque. This consciously
literary novel deals with a trip taken by a Barcelona publisher to Dublin to
commemorate his own vision of Bloomsday, and is haunted by the spirit of Joyce
– but also by others such as Beckett and Larkin. I hesitate to use the word
“inimitable”, but that’s what Vila-Matas’s novels always turn out to be.
It’s
long and digressive and stuffed with minor characters, but Grigor von Rezzori’s
An Ermine in Czernopol, first
published in 1958 and now translated from the German by Philip Boehm, is
endlessly fascinating, with prose that alternates between the ironic and the
nostalgic. Set in a small town of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire between the
world wars – a place and era lost to time -- it deals with the tragicomic fate
of a Quixote-like hussar, a humourless man in a place that values humour. 
The
Switzerland-based Peter Stamm’s Seven
Years was one of my favourites of last year and he follows it up with a
short story collection, We’re Flying,
translated by Michael Hoffman. In a quiet, sparse, but by no means unaffecting
manner, Stamm records the lives of ordinary folk who oscillate between memories
of happiness and dealing with its loss, leaving them – as the man with the horn
said – kind of blue.
Finally,
from the other side of the globe is Fuminori Nakamura’s The Thief, translated from the Japanese by Satoko Izumo and Stephen
Coates. This tells of a Tokyo pickpocket who takes palpable pleasure in his solitary
craft before being caught up in a web of events he’s unable to control. These cleverly
delineated sequences of action and reaction create an atmosphere of brooding
noir and raise questions that are more existential than criminal.
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