Category Fiction in translation

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‘I took literary revenge against the people who stole my youth’: Romanian author Mircea Cărtărescu

As the first part of his acclaimed Blinding trilogy is released in the UK, the novelist talks about communism, Vladimir Nabokov – and those Nobel rumours

In 2014, when he was travelling around the US on a book tour, Mircea Cărtărescu was able to fulfil the dream of a lifetime: a tour of Vladimir Nabokov’s butterfly collection. Cărtărescu is a great admirer of the Russian-American author, and shares with him a literary career that bridges the western and eastern cultural spheres – as well as a history of being mooted as the next Nobel literature laureate but never having won it.

Above all, the Romanian poet and novelist shares Nabokov’s fascination with butterflies. As a child, he harboured dreams of becoming a lepidopterist. On a visit to Harvard, Cărtărescu was allowed access to Nabokov’s former office and marvelled at specimens the St Petersburg-born author had collected. “His most important scientific work was about butterflies’ sexual organs, and I saw these very tiny vials with them in,” he whispers in awe. “It’s like an image from a poem or a story. It was absolutely fantastic.”

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The School of Night by Karl Ove Knausgård review – can this sprawling epic deliver on its promise?

In the fourth volume of the occult Morning Star cycle, a Faustian pact haunts a misanthropic artist who finds miraculous success

Karl Ove Knausgård’s Morning Star cycle may turn out to be even larger in scope than his six-volume autofictional bestseller, My Struggle. Four books deep, this gargantuan work of supernatural existentialism is an unsettling account of the occult phenomena that attend the appearance in the sky of a bright new star. Mysteries from the first three volumes include: who killed the musicians in the forest? What’s going on with the local wildlife? Why does no one seem to be dying any more? By the end of The School of Night, the most burning question may sound comparatively mundane: who is Kristian Hadeland?

Scattered references appeared in the saga’s first 2,000 pages. Kristian Hadeland was the 67-year-old man buried without mourners by doubting priest Kathrine Reinhardsen in The Morning Star (2021). In The Third Realm (2024), he was the sinister chap hitching a lift with Kathrine’s husband after the unloved man she buried is supposed to have died.

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Ican Klíma obituary

Czech novelist and playwright whose work was banned under communism

Ivan Klíma, who has died aged 94, carried into the third decade of the 21st century his memories of four years in a Nazi concentration camp. That childhood, from 10 to 14, was spent in the “model” camp at Terezín, where Jews died from malnutrition rather than extermination.

It left an indelible stamp on the Czech writer’s mind and work as it taught him that “life can be snapped like a piece of string”. As did his four decades of struggle with the repressive communist regime that blighted Czech culture until the Velvet Revolution of 1989, led by his friend and fellow-dissident Vaclav Havel.

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The Devil Book by Asta Olivia Nordenhof review – a Danish series that burns with purpose

This incandescent novel takes in lockdown, the devil, bad investments, erotic thrills and the deadly fire on the Scandinavian Star ferry

At about 2am on the night of 7 April 1990, a fire broke out on board the MS Scandinavian Star, a car and passenger ferry operating between Oslo and Frederikshavn. Inadequate staff training coupled with jammed fire doors aiding the spread of the fire and the subsequent release of deadly hydrogen cyanide gas from burning laminates resulted in the deaths of 159 people. The disaster was initially blamed on one of the passengers – a lorry driver and convicted arsonist. The fact that this suspect was also one of the fire’s casualties and thus unable to refute the charges against him was almost certainly part of the reason why the truth about the tragedy took so long to come to light. In 2020, a six-hour documentary revealed that the fire had most likely been started deliberately as part of an insurance fraud.

In the first volume of Asta Olivia Nordenhof’s Scandinavian Star sequence, Money to Burn, an unnamed narrator is travelling on a bus through Copenhagen when she finds her attention drawn to an elderly man on the street outside. As the bus moves away, she has the “eerie sense” that she is carrying a part of him with her. Compelled to travel the same route again in search of him, the narrator finds herself in a landscape that is at once alien and deeply familiar. She introduces us to Maggie and Kurt, a couple whose feelings for each other are struggling to survive the pressures of their conflicted pasts. In that book’s final pages, we learn that the root of Kurt’s disaffection might possibly be found in the shattering effects of a bad investment made on his behalf by a man known as T.

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Vilhelm’s Room by Tove Ditlevsen review – a portrait of catastrophic mental illness

Originally published a year before her death, the Danish author’s final novel is an autofictional suicide note

Tove Ditlevsen’s last novel, Vilhelm’s Room, was originally published in Denmark in 1975. As it begins, the protagonist, Lise Mundus, has just been abandoned by Vilhelm, her husband of 20 years. He’s a celebrity newspaper editor; she’s an acclaimed writer with a history of addiction. From a bed in a psychiatric ward, Lise publishes a lonely hearts ad: “Recently escaped a long, unhappy marriage – aged 51, but youthful in spirit – wonderful son, aged 15 – household literary name – summerhouse – large flat in the city centre – temporarily incapacitated by a nervous breakdown – prefers a motorist.”

The ad is seized upon by Lise’s malicious upstairs neighbour, Mrs Thomsen, who shows it to her young lodger/lover, Kurt, hoping he can financially exploit Lise. Kurt is duly installed in Lise’s home, but finds himself treated there with total indifference. Lise is wholly consumed with memories of Vilhelm and with plans to end her own life. We know she will carry these out; in the opening pages, she is already dead.

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‘Literature can be a form of resistance’: Lea Ypi talks to Elif Shafak about writing in the age of demagogues

The Albanian author of Free and Turkish novelist discuss the rise of populism, censorship – and how today’s conflicts all come from the unresolved trauma of the past

Lea Ypi’s prize-winning memoir, Free, detailed the experience of growing up in Albania both before and after communist rule. Her new book, Indignity, reconstructs the life of her grandmother, who arrived in Tirana from Salonica as a young woman and became closely involved with the country’s political life. She currently holds the Ralph Miliband chair in politics and philosophy at the London School of Economics. The Turkish writer Elif Shafak is author of more than 20 books, both nonfiction and fiction, including the Booker-shortlisted novel 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World and, most recently, There Are Rivers in the Sky. When the pair talked over videocall, Ypi travelling in India and Shafak at home in London, their conversation ranged over the threats of censorship and the rise of populism, the challenges of being writers with multiple identities and the importance of representing complex historical events in their work.

Elif Shafak It’s the age of angst. There’s so much anxiety, east and west, young and old, so many people are anxious right now, it’s quite palpable. And I think in many ways, it’s the golden era for demagoguery, for the populist demagogue to enter the stage and say: “Just leave it with me. I’m going to make things simple for you.”

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Good and Evil and Other Stories by Samanta Schweblin review – grasping the essence of horror

The Argentinian writer maps a journey through fear, healing and the terrifying permeability of our boundaries

Horror, in essence, is about porousness. Our terrors take varied forms but horror probes their single, existential source: the terrifying permeability of our boundaries. If spirits can swim back from the world of the dead, if the living body can degrade to the point where it becomes malleable or parasitically possessed, what hope can there be for our fantasy of security and selfhood?

Argentinian writer Samanta Schweblin’s most recent collection of stories, her third in English, may not be categorisable as “horror” in the traditional sense, but it shares with the genre its spiritual core. In Schweblin’s vision, the barriers that separate one thing from another – the wanted from the unwanted, the environmental from the bodily, the unthreatening from the violent and chaotic – are so porous as to be nonexistent. True horror, she reminds us, is neither otherworldly or supernatural, it is simply the acknowledgment of life’s fundamental conditions.

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Watching Over Her by Jean-Baptiste Andrea review – a love song to Italy

A sculptor and his unlikely soulmate navigate the political turmoil of the 20th century in a prize-winning blockbuster

In a remote monastery perched perilously on top of a crag in Piedmont, Italy, an old man lies dying. Thirty-two monks stand vigil at the deathbed; “Mimo” Vitaliani has lived among them for 40 years, yet few of them know exactly why. Nor did Vitaliani come alone, but with a mysterious statue that is kept under lock and key in the depths of the Sacra di San Michele, a pietà depicting the Virgin Mary mourning over the body of Christ, whose faces must not be seen. And all the while, the abbot tiptoes around the dying man, waiting for a word. These and others are the mysteries French writer Jean-Baptiste Andrea’s prize-winning fourth novel sets out to solve, mapped on to the course of an extraordinary century in the history of a resilient, self-sabotaging and remarkable nation.

Born in France to Italian parents in 1904, at the dawn of a new world order, Mimo is destined never quite to fit (nor, incidentally, ever to grow taller than 4ft 6in). His father was a stone carver who had hubris enough to christen the boy Michelangelo before getting himself conscripted and blown to bits; Mimo refuses the name, and yet finds himself taking up the art all the same.

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‘It’s another form of imperialism’: how anglophone literature lost its universal appeal

There’s a growing appetite for stories from around the globe – if only we can avoid the cliches and exoticism of recent years, writes the International Booker nominee

When I heard that a major international broadcaster would be producing a TV series based on Claudia Durastanti’s Strangers I Know, as a millennial Italian writer I was enthusiastic. Durastanti’s book – a fictionalised memoir about growing up between rural southern Italy and Brooklyn, and between identities, as the hearing daughter of two deaf parents – was the first literary novel of an Italian writer from my generation to reach a global public. Published in English by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2022, in a translation by Elizabeth Harris, its success was widely seen as a good omen, the sign that international publishers were starting to show interest in a new crop of Italian literature.

A further reason for my enthusiasm was that a big part of Strangers I Know takes place in Basilicata, where my father is from. It is one of the country’s poorest regions, right at the arch of Italy’s boot, a place so derelict and forgotten that the one nationally renowned book about it, Carlo Levi’s wartime memoir Christ Stopped at Eboli, owes its title to the idea that the saviour, crossing Italy from the north, stopped at a village before the region’s border: Basilicata was never saved.

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Fair by Jen Calleja review – on the magic of translation

A highly original book from the author of Goblinhood explores the art and work of translating fiction

Jen Calleja is used to making things happen for herself, by herself, despite the fact that collaboration is vital to all her endeavours: her work as a literary translator, rendering German prose and poetry into English; her life as a publisher, and co-founder with her friend Kat Storace of Praspar Press, which aims to bring Maltese literature to a wider audience; her own writing, which includes the novel Vehicle and the essay collection Goblinhood; and her other incarnation, as a member of the post-punk band Sauna Youth.

All of this takes a significant amount of energy and determination, but one of Fair’s central contentions is that it is all made far harder than it ought to be by, in effect, the covert acceptance of inequality and exclusion in the arts and literature. She recalls, for example, finally feeling that she has made it as a translator when she is invited to speak at the London Book Fair; years later, she returns to tell the audience that she has plenty of work, but only £30 in her bank account because so many of the organisations in the room are behind on paying her. “Out of the frying pan of grifting,” as she acidly notes, “into the fire of contempt”.

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