This year’s Booker International longlist gives rise to some puzzlement and controversy. Why, for example, was the careless, cantankerous writing of Michel Houellebecq chosen over the depth and intricacy of László Krasznahorkai?
Then there's Red Dog by Willem Anker, translated by Michiel Heyns (Pushkin Press, £16.99), a novel which owes far too much to the biblical cadences of Cormac McCarthy.
In its original Afrikaans, several lines from McCarthy’s Blood Meridian were incorporated into the novel without attribution. The translated version includes some reparation in the form of an acknowledgement which, with a shrug of the shoulders, blames the central character of the novel, Coenraad de Buys – a real-life tyrant of the Cape Colony in the 18th century – who “plunders mission stations and cattle kraals, so he plunders the texts of others far and wide in order to tell his own tale”.
However, Anker’s writing remains overwrought, repetitious and knotted with exposition in its depiction of a violent man who hurls the full force of his temperament against a world which, with all of its tribal allegiances and fierce antagonism, cannot accommodate him.
The Adventures of China Iron by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, translated by Fiona Mackintosh and Iona Macintyre (Charco Press, £9.99), is a far more successful reconfiguring of historical existence. A woman who is mentioned in passing in the epic Argentinian poem Martín Fierro by José Hernández – which extols the macho life of the gaucho – becomes the narrator of a story in which incidences in the poem are subverted in the queerest possible way.
We watch a girl initially named China, who at 14 is already the mother of two sons, moves from a life of casual brutality to one in which she is given the name Josefina by a Scottish woman who – full of colonialist assumptions of superiority – is seeking the land she imagines she owns.
The transformation both women undergo, and the relationship that develops between them, is told in a sensuous language also used for the many descriptions of plants and animals seen from the vantage point of their wagon as they move across the pampas and towards an idealised, paradisiacal existence.
There are no glimpses of paradise in Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann, translated by Ross Benjamin (Riverrun, £18.99). Yet, as people watch Tyll, the central character in this novel of many perspectives, they innately "understood what life could be like for someone who really did whatever he wanted, who believed in nothing and obeyed no one".
These are peasants, living in a German village just before the Thirty Years War, enjoying a performance by the multi-talented acrobat who takes a sly joy in ridiculing his audience and will continue to do so as a sanctioned fool when employed by royalty. He is the son of a miller whose absorption in philosophical questions and belief in the power of incantations leads him into jeopardy at a time when only sanctioned superstitions are allowed.
The early chapter which tells of Tyll’s upbringing is by far the best in a novel which offers a great deal of substance about the effect of the war on people at all levels of society. Tyll, a man of many guises, repeatedly materialises in unexpected settings, always bringing a crackle of daring to a novel full of verve and invention.
Faces on the Tip of My Tongue by Emmanuelle Pagano, translated by Jennifer Higgins and Sophie Lewis (Peirene, £12) is more a collection of short stories than a novel, but there are many links between them. A father describes the early years of his daughter in The Jigsaw Puzzle; later we meet her in a park with her son and, in another story, we learn of a distressing incident in which she had to kill a trapped fox. A hitchhiker expounds on his bizarre method for getting drivers to give him lifts in one story and is described by one such driver later on. A woman who feels she must end her life is seen from several perspectives, the most affecting of which is her own reasoning as to why her life must end. It is the friction between expectations and unpredictability that gives the collection its many sparks.
"We the dead are the sorrowful side of life, while the living are the joyful side of death," says the narrator of The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree by Shokoofeh Azar, translated by Anonymous (Europa Editions, £13.99), a novel in which both states of being mingle effortlessly. Set at the time of the Iranian revolution, the novel convincingly manages to combine horrific accounts of repression with tales about the interventions of jinns and the persistence of ancient folk beliefs. It takes a special writer – and Azar is one such – to avoid faltering when the harshest experiences are interlaced with scenes of fantastical interventions in the routine experiences of the characters.
The lives created within this novel, and the conditions to which they must adapt, lead to extraordinary scenes. One in which Ayatollah Khomeini fails to find his way out of a palace is both gruesome and glorious as is the revenge taken on a boy who killed a pregnant lion. Even more harrowing is an encounter between a woman who has transitioned into a mermaid and a group of men who find her asexuality unacceptable. Along with the raw rage and enchantment that mix so easily in this novel, it is also a homage to the importance of books and the freedom of the imagination (a freedom still denied within Iran, which is why the translator is unknown).
The centrality of books in locating a meaning for our lives is also crucial in Mac and His Problem by Enrique Vila-Matas, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Sophie Hughes (Harvill Secker, £14.99). Mac, failed lawyer and unreliable narrator, decides to keep a diary which, despite his protestations that he is not writing a novel, begins to develop into one when his writings encompass far more than the daily happenings of a man adrift.
To gain some purpose he decides he will rewrite the first book of stories by a successful novelist called Ander Sánchez who lives nearby and who he occasionally meets. At this point, the book becomes a treat for anyone who revels in intertextuality with references to numerous writers (including Samanta Schweblin, fellow longlisted writer) and novels (adding to the books-to-be-read list of any keen reader) along with playful musings about the forms fiction can take.
All of this is undercut by increasing uncertainty about what exactly is happening in the narrator’s “real” life and that of his wife, a woman so disgruntled with her existence that she has signed up for a one-way journey with the Mars One Foundation. What is especially satisfying about the process we are presented with in this “diary” is the way it demonstrates the wisdom of Nathalie Sarraute’s observation, referenced by Mac a couple of times, that we could “find out what we would write if we wrote”. This writerly novel – along with Tyll and The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree – deserves a place on the shortlist, which will be announced next Thursday.
