Tag: book review

#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.

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.

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.

Stories from Taiwan: ká-sióng, Part 1

25th November 2024 / / 1 Comment

Strangers Press is a publishing project based at the University of East Anglia, specialising in sets of strikingly designed chapbooks, with stories in translation. Their latest project is ká-sióng, a collection of five tales from Taiwan. They kindly sent me a set for review, and in this post I’m looking at the first three.

‘Not Your Child’ by Lâu Tsí-û
Translated by Jenna Wang

Parliamentary assistant Yu-Jie is on the train, going to visit her niece, when her leave is interrupted. A speech given by her MP following an assault on a young girl – a speech that Yu-Jie wrote – has been taken out of context and gone viral, the MP now seeming callous and out of touch. People ask what right she has to comment when she’s not a mother herself. 

I have a soft spot for strong thematic parallels in stories, and there’s one here. Yu-Jie is taking that journey because she’s concerned about the welfare of her niece. She feels that she may even be more concerned than the girl’s own mother, and questions whether that’s right when this is not her child.

So, you have that personal quandary playing out with and against the professional scandal unfolding in wider society. Yu-Jie can’t really do anything about either situation while she’s on the train, so the ultimate sense for me is of the protagonist in her own bubble of reality, heading into an unknown future. 

‘Cage’ by Qiu Miaojin
Translated by Shengchi Hsu

This tale begins with a character in a room with an open exit. What, it asks, is keeping this person from leaving? We then cut to the voice of Li Wen, who meets Ping when they are both about to jump off the same building. They talk each other out of it, and Li Wen goes on to become a successful journalist. Ping reappears in his life intermittently, happy to be alive while he’s alive also. She is an almost idealised hanger-on, someone Li Wen cares for deeply without allowing it to become love. 

At the same time, Wen is haunted by “him”, a bedraggled and boorish figure who takes up space and brings out the worst in him: “Our co-dependence was toxic: we were each other’s plaything, like live targets in a dart match, the darts poisoned with repulsion.”

The question arises for the reader of whether this other figure is real: probably not, is my guess – I imagine him to be an embodiment of Li Wen’s worst attributes. This also raises the question of whether Ping is real: probably, although Li Web may be projecting his desires on to her. 

One of the most powerful scenes in ‘Cage’ for me comes when all three characters – Li Wen, Ping and “him” – apparently occupy the same space, and one has to interpret what’s actually happening. The uncertainty over how much we’ve really seen of Li Wen electrifies the reading. 

‘Mountain Rat’ by Lulyang Nomin
Translated by Yu Teng-Wei

Our protagonist is chopping at a tree knot when a mountain rat bites his ankle. He retreats to a bamboo hut reserved for members of his tribe to quarantine in times of plague. Instead of healing, though, he finds himself transmogrified into a hybrid rat-human creature. He also finds his consciousness being pushed out by a malevolent spirit. 

This is a splendidly disturbing story. The sense of horror escalates as the protagonist tries to shake off the spirit’s hold, but it’s coupled with a nagging sense of allure. The protagonist recalls a tale his grandfather told him, about a young man who turned into a monkey and decided he preferred to live that way. Perhaps, for this protagonist, there is something to be said for life as a rat. That tension underpins ‘Mountain Rat’ right up to the final page. 

The Black Orb by Ewhan Kim (tr. Sean Lin Halbert): Strange Horizons review

28th October 2024 / / 0 Comments

I am back at Strange Horizons with a review of The Black Orb by Ewhan Kim, translated from Korean by Sean Lin Halbert. This is the tale of an unusual apocalypse, as mysterious dark orbs proliferate across the world, absorbing everyone who gets in their way. Our protagonist is Jeong-su, who may not seem to be cut out for surviving an apocalypse, but does so anyway. It turns out that the real danger in this novel lies on the inside.

To find out more of what I thought, read my review in full here.

The Black Orb is published by Serpent’s Tail.

#1970Club: 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

17th October 2024 / / 10 Comments

Twice a year, Kaggsy and Simon host themed ‘club’ weeks dedicated to books from a particular year. Joining in has long been on my to-do list, and this week finally I’ve managed it, with the 1970 Club. 

84, Charing Cross Road was the address of a London second-hand bookshop, Marks and Company. The book of the same name is a collection of correspondence between the shop and Helene Hanff, a writer who lived in New York. The letters begin prosaically enough in 1949, with a note from Hanff accompanying an order, and a formal reply from the manager, Frank Doel. But, over the years, this blossoms into far more. 

Hanff’s voice in her letters is often spiky and forthright, and I can imagine the British bookshop staff finding it disconcerting. For example, here Hanff writes in 1950, wondering where her books are:

you leave me sitting here writing long margin notes in library books that don’t belong to me, some day they’ll find out i did it and take my library card away. 

I have made arrangements with the Easter bunny to bring you an Egg, he will get over there and find you have died of Inertia. 

As that second sentence suggests, though, Hanff was also often generous, sending the shop parcels of food and other supplies at a time when rationing was still on in Britain. Hanff’s evident warmth gains a response in kind: Frank’s letters become less formal, and Helene also hears from other shop staff, and even Frank’s family. 

Hanff’s correspondence with Marks and Co. lasts for twenty years, until Frank Doel’s sudden death. Reading the book now feels to me like a glimpse into an older way of selling and relating to books that, for better or worse, has now gone. There was one line of Hanff’s from 1950, though, which struck me as an unexpected echo of the future:

Why should I run all the way down to 17th St. to buy dirty, badly made books when I can buy clean, beautiful ones from you without leaving the typewriter?

I don’t know if Helene Hanff could have imagined how we’d be buying books fifty or more years in the future, but there’s a familiar impulse behind that comment all the same.

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