Gabrielle Wittkop … sly humour in The Necrophiliac. Photograph: Pierre Franck Colombier/EPA
One of the most pleasant surprises of the year has been the way people seem to be abandoning their distrust of foreign fiction in translation. When I raved about Diego Marani's New Finnish Grammar in May I didn't expect it to sit in the Guardian's bestseller list for weeks – let alone reappear recently. I gather it made the publishers, the defiantly independent imprint Dedalus, very happy. But there was some other great stuff: Nobel laureate Imre Kertész's Fiasco (Melville House) is actually an even better book (and funnier, too), so I hope that gets another look-in.
Peirene Press, an imprint that makes Dedalus look almost mainstream, continued their enthusiastic mission to bring intriguing short European fiction to these islands with Alois Hotschnig's incredibly weird and unclassifiable Maybe This Time. Various pressures prevented me from praising Matthias Politycki's Next World Novella, a heartbreaking tale of loss which then goes on to deliver a horse-strength kick in the face. I will say no more but to exhort you to investigate Peirene and buy the book.
Then there was Gabrielle Wittkop's disgusting The Necrophiliac (ECW Press), which does what it says on the cover, but with a very sly humour. One suspects the book is an extended skit on Nabokov: good luck getting hold of a copy. Juan Pablo Villalobos's Down the Rabbit Hole brought us the inner life of the son of a Mexican drug lord; and Dalkey Archive, whose commitment to European works in the modernist tradition (which are also, to use the vulgar parlance, great reads) continued to delight by bringing us The Truth about Marie by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, who deserves to be better known over here. Surely you would like to know what happens when you take a highly strung thoroughbred racehorse on a plane in appalling weather? Well, Toussaint has somehow done the research.
Anglophone fiction in paperback brought us Ian McEwan's Solar, which is not quite the comic departure for its author some said it was, but is still droll and clever. Everyone's going to buy Jonathan Franzen's elegantly constructed Freedom, but you know what? They're going to forget what happened in it within a few months, just as they did with The Corrections. Philip Roth's Nemesis showed the old boy still has it in him, though. And I liked Martin Amis's The Pregnant Widow, too, so there.
I didn't do much poetry this year, to my shame, but I like to think I made up for this by raving about Carcanet's New Poetries V, edited by Michael Schmidt and Eleanor Crawforth, which contains a melancholy and reflective poem about a headbutt by new Scottish genius William Letford. (He also puts clothes-eating moths in their place, and it's about time someone did.) My non-fiction book of the year, though, was a reprint of Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain (part of a series of reprints by Canongate), which will make you go almost mystical about the Cairngorms even if you've never thought of them before.
Full piece at The Guardian.
Peirene Press, an imprint that makes Dedalus look almost mainstream, continued their enthusiastic mission to bring intriguing short European fiction to these islands with Alois Hotschnig's incredibly weird and unclassifiable Maybe This Time. Various pressures prevented me from praising Matthias Politycki's Next World Novella, a heartbreaking tale of loss which then goes on to deliver a horse-strength kick in the face. I will say no more but to exhort you to investigate Peirene and buy the book.
Then there was Gabrielle Wittkop's disgusting The Necrophiliac (ECW Press), which does what it says on the cover, but with a very sly humour. One suspects the book is an extended skit on Nabokov: good luck getting hold of a copy. Juan Pablo Villalobos's Down the Rabbit Hole brought us the inner life of the son of a Mexican drug lord; and Dalkey Archive, whose commitment to European works in the modernist tradition (which are also, to use the vulgar parlance, great reads) continued to delight by bringing us The Truth about Marie by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, who deserves to be better known over here. Surely you would like to know what happens when you take a highly strung thoroughbred racehorse on a plane in appalling weather? Well, Toussaint has somehow done the research.
Anglophone fiction in paperback brought us Ian McEwan's Solar, which is not quite the comic departure for its author some said it was, but is still droll and clever. Everyone's going to buy Jonathan Franzen's elegantly constructed Freedom, but you know what? They're going to forget what happened in it within a few months, just as they did with The Corrections. Philip Roth's Nemesis showed the old boy still has it in him, though. And I liked Martin Amis's The Pregnant Widow, too, so there.
I didn't do much poetry this year, to my shame, but I like to think I made up for this by raving about Carcanet's New Poetries V, edited by Michael Schmidt and Eleanor Crawforth, which contains a melancholy and reflective poem about a headbutt by new Scottish genius William Letford. (He also puts clothes-eating moths in their place, and it's about time someone did.) My non-fiction book of the year, though, was a reprint of Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain (part of a series of reprints by Canongate), which will make you go almost mystical about the Cairngorms even if you've never thought of them before.
Full piece at The Guardian.