A bestseller and multiple prize winner in the author’s native Sweden, Annika Norlin’s Colony (£12.99, Scribe UK, in a lively translation by Alice E Olsson) looks at the possibilities and pitfalls of communal living in a world dominated by societal pressure and environmental challenges.
Freelance journalist Emelie is suffering from burnout. One day she simply cannot get out of bed. Four days later, on recharging her mobile phone, she finds “a hundred new text messages, 40 emails and 20 DMs waiting for me”. Her neighbour rescues her from this anxious torpor with food, a diagnosis of “the tiny work death” and a nature cure.
Emelie protests at first: “I love the city”, nature is “boring” – but soon prioritises time spent alone in the forest on the city’s outskirts, becoming ever more intrigued by a local commune of seven mismatched people she observes and hesitantly interacts with.
Norlin richly details each individual backstory, including Sagne, an entomologist studying the local ant colony (a rather obvious analogy); Augny, once in prison for manslaughter; Sara, an animal liberationist; and questioning teenager Lake who has never known any other existence. Emelie is a disruption, an outsider from a noisy intrusive world, in an impressive study of community, secrets and trust.
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Fiction in translation: Swedish bestseller Colony an impressive study of community, secrets and trust
A first outing for a new independent publisher of literature in translation, and a strong one, too, one of three the press will bring out in 2025. Voracious (Linden Editions, £12), a debut by Polish writer Malgorzata Lebda, comes with a deft, lucid translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones and an endorsement from Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk. It’s not hard to see why Tokarczuk has championed it – this controlled, spare and often exquisite novel is concerned with the seasons, the countryside, and humans coexisting with the darker aspects of themselves and of nature.
Grandma Róza is dying: ministering to her over the course of a year in the village of May are her granddaughter (the book’s narrator) and her friend Ann, while the grandfather, Róza’s elderly husband, in denial, renovates part of the house. As the year progresses the familiar is wrought into the fabular and spiritual, from a flock of starlings “shining as if their wings are coated in petrol, shimmering violet, blue, red and yellow” to the misery of animals slaughtered at the local abattoir: “guttural, protracted sounds”.
“Waking the birds is a sin,” remarks Grandma, who wishes to protect all living things, of this daily occurrence. All of death and life is in Lebda’s short work, bloody, beautiful and intermingling. A quiet joy of a book.
[ Fiction in translation: Olga Tokarczuk and Michel HouellebecqOpens in new window ]
The first UK and Ireland publication of a novel originally published in Norway in 1947, Nothing Grows by Moonlight (Penguin Classics, £12.99), by Torborg Nedreaas (1906-1987) in a luminous translation by Bibbi Lee from 1988, is as enigmatic as its title. Across a station platform in the blue twilight of a spring evening, a man is drawn to the sight of a woman, a stranger. The scene is at once electric and dramatic. “Mother-of-pearl dusk was seeping through the glass roof above us while a yellow light from a lamp fell across her shoulders and her hair.”
The man has his own preoccupations; at first, he takes the woman to be a young girl he can pick up, but when she accompanies him home she takes the lead. A story within a story unfolds as the woman before him, who is, he now clearly sees, in her late 30s, asks to be plied with drink and cigarettes. Significantly she leafs through a copy of Bocaccio’s Decameron. Throughout the course of the long night, her own desperate tale of devastating love and its tortuous consequences is revealed.
It is compelling, the manner in which the woman plays Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner to the hapless narrator’s trapped Wedding Guest. However, it’s more in the flashes of movement that the book comes alive, “the passionate drags on her cigarette”, than the endless soliloquising, which is, ultimately, heavy going and soporific.
“At the still point of the turning world”: TS Eliot’s famous line from Four Quartets could easily be applied to the work of Austrian writer Robert Seethaler whose A Whole Life (2014), about one man’s remote mountain life, untouched by world events, was an international bestseller. Seethaler’s latest book, The Café With No Name (Canongate, £16.99), descends from the peaks to a poor district of Vienna in the mid-1960s.
In a vivid translation by Katy Derbyshire, Seethaler once again focuses an individual placed amid the landscape of a changing Austria. Seethaler is not an overtly political writer, and his work can sometimes teeter on the edge of whimsicality, but it is laced with a kind of addictive, melancholic subtlety. The book opens in “the late summer of 1966”. Robert Simon is 31 years old, lodging with a war widow, his solitary breakfast, one feels, the same every day: “two boiled eggs, bread and butter, and black coffee”. He is about to take over the lease on a rundown cafe in a part of Vienna not famed for its salubriousness.
Echoes of the recent past are an ominous reminder of the city’s part in the disappearance of many of its former inhabitants: “the wallpaper was faded and bulging in places; it looked as if the walls had faces”. In this part of the city the cafe‘s dusty windows face on to new construction, new developments, and its customers tell their stories and grumble about progress. Seethaler’s works are a similar form of quiet protest against the ruthless march of time.
Korean literature in translation seems set to continue on its unstoppable and welcome trajectory. The latest bestseller to be translated into English is Cheon Seon-ran’s A Thousand Blues (Doubleday, £16.99), translated by Chi-Young Kim. It’s one of these novels that can be filed under “deceptively lighthearted” and while the narrative voice is punchy and young, the story it relays has profound implications.
It is 2035. Two school-age sisters work in a canteen near a racecourse, helping their mother make and serve ramen. One of the sisters is laid off due to her job being automated. Yet technology can also be harnessed (no pun intended) to advantage, in the shape of humanoid robot Coli (also known as C-27) who has been faultily manufactured with emotions.
The racecourse uses the robots as jockeys, and when the sister’s favourite racehorse, the elderly yet optimistically named Today, faces the knacker’s yard, they hatch a plan with Coli for her to compete once more on the track – but to run the slowest race of her life. Idiosyncratic and rather too loaded with cliche (“we all need to practice slowing down”), A Thousand Blues nevertheless overflows with spontaneity and charm.
In her translator’s note to Alba de Céspedes’ There’s No Turning Back (Pushkin, £20), Ann Goldstein describes how the book, first published in 1938, was censored and banned by the fascist powers. While not explicitly disavowing the government under Mussolini, de Céspedes quietly subverts a culture and political hierarchy which preached that a woman’s place was in the home.
Her story, beautifully rendered, is of eight young women studying in Rome in the mid-1930s who live communally in a frugal and strictly run convent boarding house, the Grimaldi. They are mostly just out of girlhood, from country villages. These young women are pragmatic, hopeful and determined, with different, tangible reasons for wanting to be there: “what we’ve left we don’t look back at. What awaits us is still enveloped in fog.”
Yet they are not intimate, their proximity is temporary and they accept it. It is this frank lack of sentiment that has caused de Céspedes to be routinely compared to the equally clear-eyed Elena Ferrante, and while the comparisons are wearing, it is certainly Ferrante’s success that has meant a new lease of life for “forgotten” Italian women writers.
