Category Fiction in translation

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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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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The International Booker winner explores Bulgarian family life under communism in this moving depiction of a son’s bereavement

The Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov was published quietly in the Anglophone world for years before he won the 2023 International Booker prize with Time Shelter, about an Alzheimer’s clinic that recreates the past so successfully, it beguiles the wider world.

He is perhaps now Bulgaria’s biggest export. Ever playful, never linear, his new novel Death and the Gardener consists of vignettes of a beloved dying and dead father, told by a narrator who, like Gospodinov, is an author. Gospodinov has spoken publicly about losing his own father recently, and the novel feels autobiographical in tone. When we read “My father was a gardener. Now he is a garden,” it is not the beginning of an Archimboldiesque surrealist tale, but rather a more direct exploration of how we express and where we put our love.

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This Catalonian tale of a botched pact with the devil has the demonic excess of a Hieronymus Bosch painting

Margarida is trapped in Mas Clavell, a farmhouse in the Catalonian mountains, with Bernadeta. Bernadeta is dying in an annoying way, with “deep, raspy snores”. Margarida herself has been dead for some time. Rather than ascend to heaven, she has been “dragged downstairs by the ghastly, insufferable women of the house”. Irene Solà’s teeming third novel, I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness, follows these women, both dead and alive, as they prepare for a party. They cook and scrub, tell stories and make fart jokes. The novel begins at dawn and ends at night, but the historical era jumps around without warning. Now the viceroy’s men are arriving on horseback. Now a teenager is calling everyone a “dumbass”. Now local women are fleeing from Nazi soldiers. Characters shape-shift as much as the timeline. A he-goat becomes a bull, then a cat, then “an unusually long, skinny man with the toes of a rooster”. Now the viceroy’s men are demons, dragging Margarida into a “sea of blood”.

I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness references Mrs Dalloway, and shares the modernist interest in formal experimentation and action that unfolds over a single day. Instead of tracking interior sensation, Solà presents a seemingly inexhaustible slew of bodily description, held together by the opaque, vindictive logic of a folk tale. There are wonderful lists: of the different kinds of shit on the mountain, of cheese-making equipment, of body parts fondled by hands in the dark. I read the book twice in quick succession and every time I opened it, I found something to savour. The prose has the demonic excess of a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

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