Sadeq Hedayat, The Blind Owl, 1937

Hedayat’s writing has been banned in Iran since November 2006 so The Blind Owl, his most famous book, is the obvious first port of call. It begins with a mysterious woman’s murder by a rather deranged man in the ancient Persian city of Rey, then follows his own dreamlike self-portrait as a man who has lost his grip on life. The book is either a veiled, opium-drenched, mysogynist rant with similarly high levels of angst and self-loathing or, as is widely believed, a Kafkaesque masterpiece. I expect the truth falls somewhere in between but I won’t default towards the latter opinion, as it’s still a very hard book to figure out without learning a little more about Hedayat, who commited suicide not long after writing The Blind Owl. A deliberately uncomfortable read that also defies proper categorisation, it’s out there on the margins of European-influenced literature but only of any real value to existentialism: if I would read more Kafka (which I’m not really inclined to do) I’d get much more out of it.  PY

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper, 1892

A psychological horror story that owes much in style to Edgar Allan Poe. The narrator, whose name may or may not be Jane, keeps a journal while she herself is kept in a room with disturbing yellow wallpaper, all as a way of curing her post-natal depression. During her descent into madness her husband only sees the situation without seeing the struggle of the woman inside; this aspect of the story I still find unnatural as, being a doctor himself, he would surely notice something unsettling going on with his wife. Gilman’s own experiences and the disastrous ‘resting cure’ she was proscribed by the renowned doctor S. Weir Mitchell for her own depression are the origins of the book; Mitchell, named in person in the story, took Gilman’s criticism seriously and to his credit abandoned this form of treatment for depression. The medical and Victorian family traditions that inform the story are the real mental confinements of the tale with the wallpaper a clever if slightly vague metaphor. Not a story I’ve ever actually enjoyed, but there are elements here that can apply as much to men as women when it comes to medical treatment that somehow ignores the needs of the patient.  PY

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Roberto Bolaño, By Night in Chile, 2000

My first encounter with Bolaño was a few years ago with his heroic cameo appearance in Javier Cercas’s marvellous Soldiers of Salamis, something which brought him fame in his adopted Spain, and since his passing there’s been a bit of a worldwide Bolaño-fest culminating in the posthumously released doorstopper 2666. A year ago Jonathan Lethem said “Reading Roberto Bolaño is like hearing the secret story”, and that’s exactly right. By Night in Chile is basically a dying rant from a mad Chilean priest and poetry critic, endlessly digressive and enormous intellectual fun, and as a first encounter with Bolaño’s actual books it matched the word-of-mouth and was a good place to start. I was taken not only with what Bolaño amusingly alludes to, that an obsession with poetry probably indicates a wasted life, but also with Bolaño’s style: I grew to like his long, rambling sentences that allow him to fill the page with all kinds of loosely connected thoughts into what is essentially one book-length paragraph. This must have been hard stuff to translate and yet also keep Bolaño’s nervous energy going throughout, but it’s an admirable accomplishment. Bolaño has been a very satisfying discovery, and at his best is someone who has can open one’s eyes to what literature can be in a way that few authors can do.  PY

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Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, 1963

Thirteen year-old Noboru spies on his widowed mother Fusako with her new lover Ryuji, a rugged sailor on shore leave in Yokohama. Without a father he’s become dispassionate and dysfunctional, part of a sinister group of schoolboys who can’t find meaning in anything and who eventually draw up their own plans for Ryuji, based on the sadistic treatment they’d previously dished out to a harmless kitten. It’s Noboru’s misanthropic world view in one so young that makes this a definitively perverse book, one that exhibits an almost tangible disrespect for those who show no strength, as when Ryuji finally exchanges his rigorous life at sea for a soft life on land and therefore must suffer the consequences. This broadly echoes Mishima’s own tough and exacting expectations of other people, and his ambivalent sexuality finds a quiet voice here too though it doesn’t detract from what is otherwise a well-plotted, lightly atmospheric and economically told story.  PY

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Carlos María Domínguez, The Paper House, 2004

Anyone who lives their life at least partially under the spell of books will almost certainly find the premise of The Paper House captivating: a copy of Joseph Conrad’s The Shadow Line is sent by a Cambridge lady professor to a Uruguayan academic. Not long after, the professor is dead and the book suddenly arrives back in England, caked in the dust of concrete. The small mystery to be solved is not the reason for her death – that is explained away in a very brief literary indulgence – but the nature of what has been done to her book while in Uruguay, and the answer somehow lies in the power of books themselves. There is a distinctly Latin American quality to this novella’s fanaticism for literature, but most of us who possess a substantial number of books will identify at least a little with such veneration and also be uncomfortably reminded of the sometimes unreasonable degrees of power our books have over us. It’s a self-conscious read and possibly too self-indulgent aswell, but I can’t deny it is also unerringly engaging with many passages I want to go through again, so it’s probably up for a re-read soon.  PY

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Kressmann Taylor, Address Unknown, 1938

A very brief and neat exposure of the realities of Nazism, written by an acutely aware observer in the distant US before the Second World War had even begun. Two German-American friends and art dealers, one a Jew, conduct some friendly correspondence after the other returns to Munich in 1933, where he then falls under the enchanting spell of Adolf Hitler. A small but tragic event follows in Munich which, suffice to say, ensures a brilliant response. There's not much else that can be said about Address Unknown without giving the game away. America was largely uninterested in what was going on in Germany at this time but over in Europe word spread about this short serialised work, ensuring it was copied and translated, inevitably ending up on Germany’s list of banned books (Steinbeck’s excellent The Moon Is Down, written as anti-Nazi propaganda four years later, underwent a similar propagation). The simplicity and potency of Taylor’s idea ensured her a large and immediate readership, then after the war was over it was largely forgotten until its reissue in 1995 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps. Another interesting aspect is the vehement rejection of liberalism which broadly echoes some of the same criticism you hear from the American far right today. Certainly one of the better 30-minute reads I have had this year.  PY

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Yuri Buida, The Zero Train, 1993

The bête noire of post-Soviet writing from Russia would seem to be the question of what Stalinism did to individual lives, and The Zero Train is at heart a straightforward allegory on this theme with a straightforward answer: it sidelined them. Therefore we have a community of disparate people living in the sidings of Station Number 9, ensuring the Zero Train runs without a hitch as it passes through every day, a fast juggernaut with both an unknown cargo and an unknown destination. How the mysterious Zero Train defines the lives of these people is Buida’s meat and gravy and he spreads the allegory pretty thick, also with different meanings attached to individual lives: character X is a metaphor for this, character Y is a metaphor for that. It’s a lively and lyrical read though I made the mistake of expecting proper characterisation, which is clearly not Buida’s point at all. A second reading would probably explain more, but thankfully the translator’s afterword answered many of the questions I was inevitably left asking. Complex and slightly mad, and certainly entertaining.  PY

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Jane Vejjajiva, The Happiness of Kati, 2003

Kati is a nine year-old Thai girl from Ayutthaya whose hospital-bound mother is dying of Motor Neurone Disease, and the story charts her upbringing by her grandparents and how she connects to the world immediately around her and beyond, including how she chooses to deal with the possibility of reconnecting with her estranged father. The setting is unashamedly, comfortably middle class and presents an idealistic, almost perfect environment for Kati that cushions her separation from both her parents, and this blunts the story somewhat although it’s still undoubtedly realistic. The author Vejjajiva is clearly sticking to the strata with which she’s most familiar: herself cerebral palsied and wheelchair-bound, and apart from running a Thai publishing agency and translation bureau her writing also won her Thailand’s 2006 SEAWrite Award (two years before her brother became the country’s current Prime Minister). The Happiness of Kati has also been translated into six languages with a Thai film adaptation released early in 2009. This gentle story also illustrates how Thai extended families can function in more close-knit ways than they do in the West. Recommended.  PY

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Jacques Chessex, The Vampire of Ropraz, 2007

Chessex was the only non-French author to have received the Prix Goncourt by 1973 (he won another, for poetry, in 2004), and despite a large body of work there’s still little by him that’s available in English. This is a fictionalised account of a ghoulish but unsolved true mystery regarding necrophilia and the desecration of young women’s graves in Switzerland’s Jura mountains at the turn of the twentieth century. It starts out lucidly and almost frighteningly atmospheric, with the mountainous landscape harbouring isolated villages rife with superstition and Calvinist doctrine, and when a possible suspect is found the rule of law comes a poor second to the prejudices of the local people and the courts. Chessex’s writing grabs the reader from page one: it’s unflinchingly spare and direct and gets straight to the point, but although much of this story is based on real events he perhaps added a little too much gratuitous detail, even though this just adds to the sense of how much remains unknown. The twist at the end seems almost too extraordinary to be true and would be incredible if it were, but even so it’s still a very good allegory for buried secrets. A brief but memorable novella.  PY

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Nathan Englander, The Ministry of Special Cases, 2007

It must have been heartbreaking all over again for the Argentine mothers of the Disappeared to end their protests back in 2006. There are inevitably several non-fiction works available on this dark period of Argentina’s history but little in the form of fiction other than The Ministry of Special Cases. It must be among the best there is, in English at least, as the focus is on one family as it is torn apart by the casual cruelties of a paranoid government. Kaddish Poznan is a family man in 1976 Buenos Aires, an aimless outsider by day but, with the political climate as uncertain as it is, by night he has created for himself the unusual job of erasing the family names of his hijo de puta clients from their headstones in the city’s forgotten Jewish cemetery. There’s a military coup on the horizon and worse in the shape of the Dirty War, and when Poznan’s teenage son enters that catalogue of the Disappeared he can only appeal to the strange labyrinthine bureaucracy that is the Ministry of Special Cases for any semblance of justice.

This debut novel has a masterfully burlesque yet confident beginning, necessary to establish Poznan’s colourful family history and the range of experiences that brought Buenos Aires its arm of the Jewish diaspora, but this quickly settles down as Poznan’s small family is revealed to be a typically ordinary one. Unexpectedly, and despite the seriousness of the subject, Englander finds plenty of opportunity for black humour (mostly revolving around plastic surgery), but he also explores many serious themes via a cast of shadowy characters, the impenetrable web of government lies and the absolute need for hope in a hopeless situation. This is obviously a broader subject than just being purely a Jewish experience therefore in some way it’s fortunate that Englander doesn’t consider himself to be a ‘Jewish’ writer, but it’s all too easy to see how this novel was his labour of love, eight years in the writing, and it deserves to be considered a triumph. He pulls you around by the heartstrings with a drama that reads easily but is always engaging, and his main problem must have been how to end the story of an unending nightmare. He handles it rather well if perhaps, inevitably, a little inconclusively, but this still comes highly recommended.  PY

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