Review: The Best Recent Translated Fiction
This roundup highlights four compelling new works in translation, each offering a unique perspective on contemporary life, from Tokyo's underworld to Lapland's flooded villages.
Sisters in Yellow by Mieko Kawakami
Translated by Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio (Picador, £16.99). Kawakami's latest opens with a bang, as narrator Hana learns that her old friend Kimiko has been charged with abduction. This MacGuffin takes us to their friendship in late-1990s Tokyo, when teen Hana and the older woman open a bar called Lemon: "Yellow attracts money." But it's a turbulent ride and soon Hana is in a world of organized crime. "The world is crazy. I feel like I'm living in a manga." She's not the only one, and you need an appetite for Kawakami's style, which prefers to explore rather than explain – people come and go, buildings burn down, cancer is diagnosed, almost at random – but the relentless rush means there's no time to get bored. At its best – as in a scene where Hana's unreliable mother wants to borrow 2 million yen for investment in lingerie that helps "your spine and organs move back to where they're supposed to be" – this is a story both absurd and horrifying.
All Flesh by Ananda Devi
Translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman (Pushkin, £12.99). "Forgive me for starting this story with bodily, unpalatable origins." You may as well – it's all like that. In an unnamed European country, a schoolgirl "born with no urge but to consume" is getting bigger and bigger. "My gut, my ass, my thighs – they were all set on reaching the farthest corners of the world." She blames her gluttony on the need to silence the voice of her dead twin sister, who was "absorbed into my tissues" in the womb. She hates school, where other kids mock her, as though her own self-disgust weren't enough. After a blackly comic scene where she gets stuck in her bedroom doorframe like "an uncooperative cork", she falls in love with the lonely carpenter who arrives to widen the door – but there are more twists to come. This powerful story is deeply physical, but driven by a compelling voice describing the torment of a girl who is "the psychical mirror of our time … immoderation made manifest."
The White Desert by Luis López Carrasco
Translated by Rosalind Harvey (Granta, £14.99). This unpredictable book, comprising five linked stories about a Spanish couple, opens with the end of the world and gets weirder from there. A balloon debate about a post-apocalyptic scenario turns nasty when one participant pulls a knife, or thinks he does. A plane crash-lands on an island. "Can [we] go and get our luggage … Lots of people have, you know, soiled themselves." What links the scenes is a sense of disconnection in our connected world, but the book subverts expectations: when a group of people celebrating New Year's Eve go missing, it turns out to be a game of hide and seek. Footnotes peppered throughout suggest we're viewing all this from the future ("Emirates was a well-known passenger airline …"), and discovering what the white desert is turns everything on its head. For readers who like to do their own joining up, and who want a playful, original take on our precarious lives, this is a thought-provoking treat.
The Home of the Drowned by Elin Anna Labba
Translated by Elizabeth Clark Wessel (Harvill, £16.99). "You could have waited, you bastards." In 1942 Lapland, a village occupied by the semi-nomadic Sámi people is flooded by a new hydroelectric plant's dam. One family watches as their goahti (peat-covered hut) disappears under the water. "It wasn't the nicest goahti," says Ánne. "No, but it was mine," says her sister Rávdná. When Rávdná wants to build a house to replace it, the authorities refuse permission: the Sámi way of life has been rejected but alternatives are not permitted. A local newspaper half-heartedly offers to publicize their case, but "we receive a lot of angry letters if we use any foreign words." When the government tells local people the new dam "will lift us out of poverty and injustice," the words reek with irony. This intimate story of infuriating discrimination is, Labba says, based on real events in Sweden.
