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We Do Not Part
Han Kang, translated by e yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris (Hamish Hamilton)
The Korean 2024 Nobel laureate combines the strangeness of The Vegetarian and the political history in Human Acts to extraordinary effect in her latest novel. Kyungha, a writer experiencing a health crisis (“I can sense a migraine coming on like ice cracking in the distance”), agrees to look after a hospitalised friend’s pet bird. The friend, Inseon, makes films that expose historical massacres in Korea. At the centre of the book is a mesmerising sequence “between dream and reality” where Kyungha stumbles toward Inseon’s rural home, blinded by snow, then finds herself in ghostly company. As the pace slows, and physical and psychic pain meet, the story only becomes more involving. This might be Han’s best novel yet.
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On the Calculation of Volume I and II
Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J Haveland (Faber)
“It is the eighteenth of November. I have got used to that thought.” Book dealer Tara Selter is stuck in time, each day a repeat of yesterday. Groundhog Day it ain’t; this is more philosophical than comic – why, she doesn’t even bet on the horses – but it’s equally arresting. Tara slowly begins to understand how she occupies space in the world, and the ways in which we allow our lives to drift. At first she tries to live normally, recreating the sense of seasons passing by travelling to warm and cold cities. By the end of volume two, with five more books to come, we get hints of cracks appearing in the hermetic world – is Balle breaking her own rules? – but it just makes us want to read on further.
The Director
Daniel Kehlmann, translated by Ross Benjamin, (Riverrun)
In Hollywood in the 1930s, film-maker GW Pabst is surrounded by yes-men studio execs and egotists such as Fritz Lang (“Metropolis is the best film ever made.” “I know”). He returns to Europe to see his sick mother; when war breaks out, he’s stuck in Austria, where he still wants to make films, but can only do so with the Nazis’ say-so. Kehlmann turns Pabst’s real-life dilemma into a full-blooded, entertaining epic. “Times are always strange,” he’s told. “Art is always out of place.” It’s the secondary characters who steal the show, from his son Jakob, who takes up the fascist cause, to Leni Riefenstahl with her “skull-like smile”, or the surprise narrator of one chapter: prisoner of war PG Wodehouse.
Money to Burn/ The Devil Book
Asta Olivia Nordenhof, translated by Caroline Waight (Jonathan Cape)
You wait ages for a Scandinavian septology-in-progress, then two come along at once. But where Balle’s is cool and reflective, Nordenhof’s is hot and eccentric. The books are loosely structured around a fire – and possible insurance scam – on a passenger ferry in 1990 that killed 159 people. They harness rage from this (“capitalism is a massacre”) to spin out into stories of love, rape, mental illness, art and more. Like a normal novel with all the boring bits taken out, these books are more energising and thrilling the more furious they get – even if the very loose links between the stories mean the reader must work to fill in the connections. “I mean really /,” writes Nordenhof, “I can’t / do the whole thing / by myself.”
Sololand
Hassan Blasim, translated by Jonathan Wright (Comma)
Laughter is the best response to horror, say these three novellas of life in – and in exile from – postwar Iraq. The blend of darkness and humour is encapsulated in the first story, where a pharmacist closes her shop because she’s fed up with Islamic State fighters asking for Viagra: a comic-sounding detail, until we realise what they might want it for. In another, a youth tasked with managing a militia leader’s email account falls in love with one of his female admirers. Elsewhere, library books are soaked in blood dripping from the IS killing floor above: a blunt illustration that literature is under threat from fundamentalism. All the more reason to read Blasim’s essential stories.
