Author: David Hebblethwaite

#InternationalBooker2025: Eurotrash by Christian Kracht (tr. Daniel Bowles)

27th March 2025 / / 0 Comments

The narrator of this novel is, like its author, a middle-aged Swiss writer named Christian Kracht. His mother calls him urgently to Zurich, which is a stifling place for him:

Zurich was claustrophobic; the little flower shop made me claustrophobic, the old city made me claustrophobic, the fifteenth-century buildings, never destroyed in World War II, made me claustrophobic, the ladies with their shopping bags from Kaufhaus Grieder made me claustrophobic and cut me off, the streetcars made me claustrophobic and cut me off, the bankers walking for their banks to accumulate more gold beneath Paradeplatz made me claustrophobic and cut me off.

[Translated from German by Daniel Bowles.]

Still, it could be worse: there are dark aspects to the history of Christian’s German family – including a Nazi grandfather and a fortune amassed from the arms industry – that are about to come to the fore. Christian’s mother has recently been discharged from a psychiatric institution, and now sets out on a road trip with him to give away that fortune, and revisit some old familiar places. 

The first half of Eurotrash intersperses the present day with Christian’s memories of his mother and anecdotes from his family history. In the second half, once the road trip begins, there’s a slight change of emphasis, with more short-and-snappy passages of dialogue, and stories that Christian tells his mother. There is a certain feeling of stepping outside reality, or perhaps of stepping closer to Christian and his mother. It’s fitting, because their relationship is what hangs the novel together, amid the uncertainty of where they’re going to go. 

Published by Serpent’s Tail.

Click here to read my other posts on the 2025 International Booker Prize.

#InternationalBooker2025: The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem (tr. Sinan Antoon)

21st March 2025 / / 1 Comment

The Book of Disappearance is the second novel by Palestinian writer Ibtisam Azem. It was originally published in Arabic in 2014, translated into English by Sinan Antoon in 2019, and gains a place on the International Booker longlist following a UK edition published by And Other Stories last year. 

The book begins with Alaa, a young Palestinian, discovering that his grandmother has died. She had chosen to stay behind in Jaffa following the displacement of 1948, and Alaa wishes he had taken more time to listen and talk to her. He is all too aware that his grandmother had access to an older world which is now lost to him:

Your memory, which is engraved in my mind, has all these holes in it. Am I forgetting parts of what you told me, or were the things you said incomprehensible? I was very young when I started listening to your stories. Later, when I turned to them for help, I discovered these holes. I started to ask you about them. But the more I asked, the more you got mixed up, or maybe I did. How could things not get mixed up? I was certain there was another city on top of the one we lived in, wearing it. I was certain that your city, the one you kept talking about, which has the same name, has nothing to do with my city. It resembles it a great deal.

[Translated from Arabic by Sinan Antoon.]

The loss of Alaa’s grandmother and her memories is one disappearance. In another narrative strand, all Palestinians disappear from their homeland inexplicably one morning. Azem depicts the immediate aftermath of this party through a series of vignettes that illustrate the changing mood of the Jewish community in response. At first, it’s an inconvenience that people haven’t turned up to work. This gives way to paranoia at the thought of what may have caused the disappearance, and eventually taking advantage of what is left behind. 

On a more personal level is the character of Ariel, the liberal Zionist neighbour and friend of Alaa. While trying to find out what happened to him, Ariel comes across Alaa’s notebook, in which he has written about and to his grandmother. Ariel finds an anger on Alaa’s part that he has perhaps known about but not appreciated to the degree it’s expressed in the notebook. Ariel reads on, but it doesn’t stop him taking up Alaa’s space in certain ways. There’s more than one form of disappearance in this book.

Click here to read my other posts on the 2025 International Booker Prize.

#InternationalBooker2025: Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico (tr. Sophie Hughes)

11th March 2025 / / 1 Comment

This novel is Italian, but its focus is international: a search across borders for the perfect life. Anna and Tom didn’t intend to become freelance graphic designer-web developers, but came to it naturally through their youthful obsession with the internet. They moved to Berlin for the promise of a freer life, and were captivated by its unfamiliar sensations:

They would go for walks on endless summer evenings and freezing winter mornings when the blinding sunlight would reflect off the fresh snow. They would gaze up in awe at the vast and changeable northern sky, so different from the one under which they had grown…They were fascinated by the contrast between the recently renovated buildings and those still bearing the shabbiness of the former East – the crumbling or graffitied stucco, the boarded-up windows.

[Translated from Italian by Sophie Hughes]

These are surface impressions, though: Anna and Tom don’t really know much about the history of the city. Their life in Berlin runs along similar lines: a carousel of friendships with ex-pats in similar professions, often structured around artistic events even though Anna and Tom aren’t necessarily that interested in art. It’s busy, but missing something. 

As the years pass, people come and go, technology changes, housing is precarious. Through it all, Anna and Tom try different ways to reach a life that feels full and authentic, a life that can live up to the glossy pictures in the apartment ads. 

What really makes Perfection work for me is the way it embodies what it depicts. It skates over the surface of its characters’ lives, not even allowing Anna and Tom individual viewpoints, and rarely pausing to flesh out their experiences. It ends in a way that both ties the work up in a neat little bundle, and reminds one that there’s no real ending after all. The perfect life is always just around the corner. 

Published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.

Click here to read my other posts on the 2025 International Booker Prize.

#InternationalBooker2025: A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre (tr. Mark Hutchinson)

4th March 2025 / / 1 Comment

The Narrator of this novel remembers his late friend Fanny. She struggled with her mental health, and could often appear distant, holding herself still within her own body. But there was a lighter side to her, too. The Narrator recalls that Fanny once stole a leopard-skin hat, and wearing this made her act differently:

She also had in her, popping up from time to time, and always when you least expected it, the jovial young woman in the leopard-skin hat she would have been had certain hatches not got battened down one day, by accident, abruptly, as if by a gust of wind. Whenever this woman turned up in a word or a look, the Narrator was astounded. So Fanny wasn’t just this old friend battling against great odds? She was also this perfect stranger, this person no one had ever heard of whose lineaments had yet to be set down.
[Translated from French by Mark Hutchinson]

A Leopard-Skin Hat is an account of the Narrator’s friendship with Fanny, but all told at a distance like this. The Narrator can see his friend is struggling profoundly, but also knows that ultimately he can’t see the world through her eyes. There’s a push-and-pull to the writing, as we see the Narrator by turns get closer to and further away from his friend. 

There is a further distancing, in that even the character called “the Narrator” isn’t speaking to us directly. It’s especially poignant to learn that this book was written following the death of Anne Serre’s sister, and the distancing at work is Serre’s way of approaching that. If the leopard-skin hat in the novel can be seen as a symbol of those times when the Narrator can reach Fanny, then perhaps the novel itself is something similar for its author. 

Published by Lolli Editions.

Click here to read my other posts on the 2025 International Booker Prize.

#InternationalBooker2025: the longlist

26th February 2025 / / 3 Comments

It’s that time of year again, as the longlist for this year’s International Booker Prize was announced this week:

  • The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem, translated from Arabic by Sinan Antoon (And Other Stories)
  • On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle, translated from Danish by Barbara J. Haveland (Faber)
  • There’s a Monster Behind the Door by Gaëlle Bélem, translated from French by Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Loubert (Bullaun Press)
  • Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu, translated from Romanian by Sean Cotter (Pushkin Press)
  • Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia de la Cerda, translated from Spanish by Julia Sanches and Heather Cleary (Scribe UK)
  • Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix, translated from French by Helen Stevenson (Small Axes)
  • Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa, translated from Japanese by Polly Barton (Viking)
  • Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from Japanese by Asa Yoneda (Granta Books)
  • Eurotrash by Christian Kracht, translated from German by Daniel Bowles (Serpent’s Tail)
  • Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated from Italian by Sophie Hughes (Fitzcarraldo Editions)
  • Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi (And Other Stories)
  • On a Woman’s Madness by Astrid Roemer, translated from Dutch by Lucy Scott (Tilted Axis Press)
  • A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre, translated from French by Mark Hutchinson (Lolli Editions)

I haven’t read any of those as yet, so it’s time to make a start. As always, I will be taking part in the Shadow Panel, and this year we have our own joint Substack. So any reviews I do of the longlist will be posted on there as well as here, linked in the above list as I go along.

Republic of Consciousness Prize 2025: the longlist

4th February 2025 / / 0 Comments

I am a long-time fan of the Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses, which is now in its ninth year. The 2025 longlist was announced recently:

The publisher names above link to the individual publisher pages on each book.

I’m not intending to read the whole longlist, but it is an intriguing selection, and I will be having a look at some. In the meantime, congratulations to all!

The Bridge Between Worlds: A Brief History of Connection by Gavin Francis

30th January 2025 / / 0 Comments

In his preface to this book, Gavin Francis writes that his interest in bridges began in childhood, from the Forth Rail Bridge just a few miles from his house, to a Ladybird book about bridges (which I’m pretty sure I must have read as a child too), to the tale of the Billy Goats Gruff. That is to say, it’s not just the spectacle or the technical aspects of bridges which captured Francis’ interest, but also how bridges can be used imaginatively – what they may represent. 

All these aspects come together in The Bridge Between Worlds, which is not a history of bridges as such, but a tour of bridges that Francis has visited or lived near, bringing in elements of memoir, history, geography, technology, culture and metaphor. The way I phrase that, it sounds a lot, and I honestly wasn’t sure at first whether it would all fit together – but it does. 

The first chapter, about the Union Chain Bridge across the River Tweed at the Scotland-England border, is typical of Francis’ approach. He sets the scene with a link to his own life (in this case, crossing the bridge on childhood holidays), then goes into the history of the bridge and its construction, a wider look at the border and the changing position (so to speak) of Berwick, and a mention of bridges as a metaphor in Paradise Lost, before touching on the politics of that point in his life (shortly before he was born in 1975, Britain had voted to stay in the European Community).

Francis ends the chapter reflecting that the announcement of a new bridge may bring hope:

Perhaps during periods of retrenchment behind borders, when literal and metaphorical drawbridges are everywhere being pulled up, people are comforted to think that the closure of bridges won’t prove permanent. We want to hear that new connections will one day be laid across the boundaries we draw around ourselves.

In mixing the different topics together as he does, Francis makes his book feel both wide-ranging and intensely personal, which is fascinating to read. Francis’ other destinations in the book include London as a 17-year-old, where he has a sense of life’s possibilities opening up at a student science forum; Türkiye, and the world’s oldest bridge still in use; and Scandinavia, whose bridges suggest to him a picture of international cooperation, post-Brexit. It’s a world tour of bridges, their roles and meanings – one that I found rewarding. 

The Bridge Between Worlds is published by Canongate.

Touring the Land of the Dead by Maki Kashimada (tr. Haydn Trowell)

3rd January 2025 / / 0 Comments

2025 has begun, and we are starting the year in Japan. This is the first book by Maki Kashimada to appear in English translation, and it collects together two novellas. I would say the main theme connecting them is family, with contrasting relationships in each.

In the novella ‘Touring the Land of the Dead’, we meet Natsuko, whose family once lived the high life, but now her mother and brother are content to scrounge off her. She is caught between them and her husband Tachi, who is unable to do much for himself due to the effects of a neurological disease. 

Natsuko books a break for herself and Tachi at a health retreat which used to be a luxury hotel that her family would visit. Those old times are captured on 8 mm film that feels like a distant world to our protagonist:

Her mother’s brother, watching the dance from a leather sofa, was brazenly holding a champagne glass. And her mother herself, wanting to take a sip, was trying to snatch it away. There was something impenetrably startling about their actions, but in the middle of that monochrome world they flowed silently, matter-of-factly.

Translation from Japanese by Haydn Trowell

Being at the retreat, moving through the same spaces as her relatives once did, sparks off visions of the past in Natsuko. Their effect is disconcerting:

Her young mother, thinking that she was special. Thinking that she was one of the chosen few. Natsuko is overcome with vertigo, her heart filled with disgust. Just as it was all beginning to become too unbearable, a round rubber ring cut across her vision. 

That rubber ring is the tyre of Tachi’s wheelchair, a reminder of practical concerns in the present. This trip and the memories stirred allow Natsuko to confront how she views her birth family, and to move beyond this. They also allow her to appreciate where Tachi is coming from. She has always wondered why he doesn’t complain about what happens to him, but now she can see that he’s choosing to get on with life. The closing sense is that Natsuko now has the means to do the same.

If the protagonist of Kashimada’s first novella is pulling away from her family, the narrator of the second, ‘Ninety-Nine Kisses’, remains close to hers – sometimes uncomfortably so. Nanako illustrates her feelings towards her three sisters:

I’m just completely taken by my sisters, my sisters who don’t let themselves get overwhelmed by such things, who are able to go on fighting fearlessly among themselves over the same man. They’re my whole standard of reference. My personality only serves to add something to theirs. It might not even add anything. I’m just an echo of them. But it’s an erotic experience, this way of being.

The sisters’ closeness is challenged by the arrival of a man in their lives – as is Nanako’s sense of herself and her place. An acute confrontation with emotions is common to both of the novellas in Kashimada’s volume, and the aftermath lingers in the mind.

Touring the Land of the Dead is published by Europa Editions UK.

This review is for January in Japan, which Tony is hosting at Tony’s Reading List.

A selection of 2024 favourites

30th December 2024 / / 0 Comments

2024 was another year when, for whatever reason, I just didn’t click with reading in general as much as I would have liked. There’s no point dwelling on it, I just hope this will turn around next year. In the meantime, I have picked out the following four highlights from the reading year:

Leonard Cohen: a Novel (2024), by Jeffrey Lewis

An aspiring songwriter named Leonard Cohen writes to his more famous namesake, and we learn of an intense relationship that ended in ambiguous circumstances. This is a novel of a life haunted by possibility: what if Leonard could step out of the celebrity’s shadow? What else could have happened in that relationship? Other realities, just out of reach. 

Weasels in the Attic (2012-4) by Hiroko Oyamada
Translated from Japanese by David Boyd (2022)

This is the shortest book I read in 2024 – a collection of three stories – but it certainly carried its weight. Each story centres on a meal which acts as the focus for broader currents at play. For example, a tale told over dinner about weasels in the house points to deeper problems in a couple’s relationship. I found these stories to open out more the further I went in. 

84, Charing Cross Road (1970) by Helene Hanff

Collected correspondence between American writer Hanff and the staff of a London bookshop. It suggests that Hanff could be spiky but also generous, and there’s an obvious warmth in her relationship with the shop. This book felt like a fascinating glimpse into an older world, with an unexpected echo of the future in a comment about buying books without leaving the typewriter. 

Mary and the Rabbit Dream (2024) by Noémi Kiss-Deáki

If I were to choose a favourite book of 2024, I think this would be it. Mary Toft was a real-life 18th century figure who (for a time) was believed to have given birth to rabbits. In the novel, this is a scheme devised by Mary’s mother-in-law that gets beyond her control. What I like most is how the prose itself embodies the forces holding the characters in place, and enables Mary eventually to find a voice. 

***

So, there was 2024. You can find my highlights of previous years here:

2023, 2022. 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, and 2009.

You can also find me on social media at Instagram, Facebook, Bluesky, and X/Twitter. I wish you well for 2025!

Gliff by Ali Smith: Strange Horizons review

20th December 2024 / / 0 Comments

Over at Strange Horizons, I’ve reviewed the latest novel by Ali Smith. Gliff is the tale of two young siblings living in a future of banal oppression, and the ways they find to resist. I found its abstract dimensions strongest, the way it articulates that resistance must take place partly at a conceptual level. But the concrete aspects of its future are a bit too sketchy to have real heft. There will be a companion novel, Glyph, next year, which will apparently tell a story hidden in the first volume. I will be curious to see how that turns out.

Read my review of Gliff in full here. The book is published by Hamish Hamilton.

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