Julia Leigh, The Hunter, 1999

This debut was a very different animal to her later Disquiet. An unnamed man has been sent by a biotech firm to retrieve the DNA of the last Tasmanian tiger, a carnivorous marsupial now believed extinct in the twentieth century. This man is only one link in a chain and we don’t see any distance beyond the job he’s doing, so what’s noticeable are the areas that Leigh doesn’t explore such as the purpose to which this DNA might be put, or the immorality of hunting down the last of a species. Instead we get a straight-ahead story of survival as the man lays traps in the forest by day and sleeping rough at night, while also suffering the awkward negotiations of the bereaved family with whom he stays at weekends. Leigh was picked by the Observer as one of the twenty-one writers to watch in the new millennium and this was certainly a confident debut, though not as directly allegorical as I was expecting, or hoping for. However it does resonate with unanswered questions that invite further thought on her technique, ie. of what she chose to leave out and why. This was not an “extremely disturbing” read as one blurb quote puts it – far from it, unless I’m missing something glaringly obvious – but it was at least rather unsettling.  PY

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Dambudzo Marechera, Black Sunlight, 1980

Marechera was the kind of off-beat Zimbabwean writer that did himself no favours, one who ended his life sleeping on Harare’s park benches refusing to talk to his family. He was either mad or blessed with, as some believed, a taint of genius, and his small output of work continues to attract attention with the reissue of his second novel in Penguin’s newly launched African Writers Series. A photojournalist whose name may or may not be Christian becomes connected to a violent rebel organisation that may or may not be called Black Sunlight, in a country that may or may not be Zimbabwe. What Marechera is doing in this odd and, yes, awkward book is explore anarchism as an intellectual position. Written when he was in his mid-twenties, the story bounces between Christian’s marriage to his blind wife Marie, to liaisons with several women (all of whom are necessarily spectacular in bed), to his work covering student riots and the shadowy world of Black Sunlight. There’s an interesting passage in which he meets a doppelgänger of himself and discusses violence, plus there are several sections in the latter parts of the book that indulge in philosophy-fuelled rants of the sixth-form variety (Marechera also studied at Oxford, before being kicked out). One surprise was that he name-checked John Wyndham and Clark Ashton Smith, although not in a particularly complimentary way. I didn’t particularly like this book at all; it’s vain, inconsistent and weakly plotted (if there is much of a plot at all), and gives the strong impression of a talented young writer who didn’t yet know how to say what he needed to say.  PY

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Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One, 1948

This was described by Anna Haycraft (better known as Alice Thomas Ellis) as ”One of the funniest and most significant books of the century”. The friction that drives it is the awkwardness of British cultural attitudes in post-war Los Angeles, set mostly in the Whispering Glades Memorial Park – a kind of Disneyland for the dead – and involving a young British poet who falls for a young American corpse beautician while he himself works secretly as a mortician at a pet cemetery. Waugh is funniest when he lets his characters’ veneer of civility slip to reveal something far more feral underneath, and I can almost sense how he filled in some laugh-free zones with just that kind of unexpected viciousness to keep the humour levels up. Some mocking characterisation and a few very memorable turns of phrase make this a wickedly funny book.  PY

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Soazig Aaron, Refusal, 2002

Sometimes it seems that any new fiction centred on Auschwitz is required to offer up new horrors previously untouched upon and Soazig Aaron has certainly attempted to go down that route too, somewhat in the tracks of William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice. In this case I’m not sure it was necessary, but as the point of Refusal is to focus on some of the after-effects of the horror, perhaps you can’t really do that without the inclusion of a few graphic scenes as flashbacks. In Refusal much of the evil of Auschwitz happened to Klara Schwarz-Roth, a German-born Parisian Jew, separated from her daughter and sent there where she was forced to learn many of the darker aspects of survival, which also prevent her from properly rejoining the world upon her release. Klara is a fascinating and eloquent character, if also deeply scarred and deeply scary. Even though the story is told through the eyes of her pre-war friend Angélika, Klara takes centre stage throughout. This is one of those books that won’t let go and is, even with Klara’s self-imposed and self-limiting options for her future, defiantly difficult to argue with.  PY

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Italo Calvino, The Path to the Spiders’ Nests, 1947

Throughout his career Calvino had a very ambivalent relationship with this, his first novel, and even when not quite disowning it he was more than happy to point out its various faults and explain just how and why they came about. Written when he was twenty-four after Calvino had lived through some of the kinds of events he describes, and despite clearly trying not to be this is still a very naïve coming-of-age novel. Set in a town on the Ligurian coast at the tail end of the Second World War that is overrun with both the Germans and the Blackshirt fascist paramilitary, a young cobbler’s apprentice hangs out with adults in the local bar, playing their dangerous adult games and, after stealing a German soldier’s pistol, later plays at being a partisan revolutionary. It really doesn’t go any further than this (apart from the awkwardly polemical ninth chapter that really does stick out like a sore thumb) having been specifically plotted and themed to tick all the boxes of the recently formed Italian ‘neo-realist’ school, it’s aim seemed to be more to preach to the converted (it sold very well on first publication) and nail Calvino’s communist-leaning politics to the mast, rather than tell a good story. Disappointing, but clearly the best place to start when understanding the transformations of Calvino’s later career.  PY

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Julia Leigh, Disquiet, 2008

Fleeing a violent marriage in Australia, Olivia returns to her mother and childhood château in France with her two young children and a broken arm. By coincidence her brother arrives with his wife and newborn child, along with a tragic secret that will turn them into a family in extremis. Just two books into her career and Simon Schama is already calling Julia Leigh “one of the greatest living writers”. Before beginning Disquiet I was sceptical about this accolade, but I had to admit just fifty pages in that I admired enormously her distilled method that cuts out an enormous amount of in-between and focuses on tight prose that makes the family tension palpable, bleeding out in a long string of tense and, yes, exquisitely described interpersonal moments. There is much left unspoken in this rather gothic, present-day novella and Leigh doesn’t waste words, so as an example of how less is more this comes highly recommended.  PY

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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 magnum opus 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 (Steinbeck’s excellent The Moon Is Down, written as anti-Nazi propaganda four years later, underwent a similar propagation), inevitably ending up on Germany’s list of banned books. 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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