Commenting on the 11 short stories that make up his stunning collection Hunter (Granta Magazine Editions, £12.99, in a vivid translation by Jeremy Tiang), Chinese author Shuang Xuetao has said: “I tried to write about things historical as well as contemporary, realistic as well as not quite realistic”.
In Shuang’s work, ostensibly about the harsh, often callously wrought facts of life, there is a bold contention with the strange workings of myth and history. In Premonition, science-fiction writer Xiaobing, happily married with a young son, makes an unusual request to his wife that they sleep separately; what he does not tell her is that he has been subject since childhood to dark, shadowy premonitions that ultimately come true.
To slake his insomnia, he drives to his favourite night fishing spot, where he meets a screwdriver-wielding nemesis from outer space, a man somewhat prosaically named Andrew, who accuses Xiaobing and his ancestors of “stealing a sentence”: an encounter replete with wit and pathos.
An ambulance rushes through the night in Heart, one of the collection’s most powerful stories, and its opener: an old man in a family with a history of hereditary heart problems is rushed to a hospital in Beijing, accompanied by his adult son and a young female doctor. As the surreal journey unfolds, the son relays his father’s history to the doctor, but the occupants of the ambulance, including the driver, intermittently fall asleep, while the patient blooms once more into a vivid, pre-death life.
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Fiction in translation: The strange workings of myth and history, a work of limpid beauty set in the Bosnian countryside, and more
At the centre of the story is the woodworker ancestor “who could make anything from a coffin to a comb”. On his unexpected death he is found to have “a heart full of tiny wood-shavings, enough to build a foot-high pagoda”.
“The first day in the jungle, the day he fled, he still didn’t know how to see. Now he does. It’s nearly impossible in this world of plants. But he sees it. A tender vine-shoot veers around itself until it meets another, intertwining myriad.” Although set in the 17th century, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s rich, baroque We Are Green and Trembling (Harvill Secker, £18.99, sumptuously translated by Robin Myers) is strikingly relevant to the present day.
Cabezón Cámara uses history to illuminate and interrogate current threats to trans representation and, in parallel, to interrogate the enduring, dehumanising effects of colonisation. Her epic in miniature is that of Antonio de Erauso, born a woman, Catalina, in Spain around 1592. Wikipedia lists him as “Basque nun and explorer”, a mere indication of de Erauso’s extraordinary life. Escaping, aged 15, from the convent in which he was virtually jailed by his aunt, its prioress (to whom, in the novel, Antonio addresses letters) Catalina adopted men’s attire as disguise, eventually journeying to the New World, first as a cabin boy, then as secretary to a particularly unpleasant conquistador, becoming part pf the violent, buccaneering conquest of Peru, Chile and Bolivia by Spain. But as told here, he also protected and championed two young indigenous girls, rescuing them from enslavement. De Erauso’s shape-shifting is a mercurial tale for all time. The image of death hangs over all in the shape of a buzzard: an unforgettable image of perpetuated abominations.
Summer is the perfect time for discovery, drama and unexpectedness. Heuijung Hur’s deliciously unsettling Failed Summer Vacation (Scratch Books, £10.99, nimbly translated by Paige Aniyah Morris) crosses genres in a collection riddled with unsentimental yearning and emptiness. “I’ve long been obsessed with the idea that I was pretending to be someone else,” confides the title story’s anonymous narrator. In a small room at a beach resort, the speaker addresses a “you” who may or may not be present. “The cramped room. My alibi. Our freshly made beds”.
What is actually going on? Has a crime been committed, or is it all in the mind? The prose is chilling and sensuous, the denouement ominous. This theme of entrapment haunts the collection. “Paper Cut” begins simply: “A wanted to run away.”
A is stuck in his room, with an omnipresent feeling of guilt for a crime he cannot remember committing – or is he about to carry one out? He is awaiting his regular visit from a person he describes simply as “that man. The visit had been prearranged.”
The man, who is made entirely from paper, each time demands “a statement” from A. What ensues is a wildly funny, Kafkaesque battle of wills – either bureaucracy gone mad, or perhaps just A’s own frantic imagination. Each one of these breezily disturbing short fictions is a small marvel of originality.
Compared by its publisher to Elena Ferrante, but more in debt to the simplicity of Georges Simenon (alluded to in the author’s afterword), Charia Valerio’s The Little I knew (Foundry Editions, £13.99, with a cool, confident translation by Ailsa Wood complementing Valerio’s style) is no crime procedural, though it revolves around the hushed-up death of a woman at home inher bath.
A bestseller in Italy, it was shortlisted for the Strega Prize. The setting is Scauri, an out-of-the-way seaside town between Rome and Naples. Vittoria, who had mysteriously arrived there some 30 years before, and whom everyone knows but yet does not know, has an “accident” in her bath at the home she shares with her partner Mara.
A veil of silence falls over the townspeople as Lea, the local lawyer, fed up with dealing with the petty crimes and disputes that are the routine of her work, decides to investigate the woman she had always been fascinated by, the first woman to have her own boat space at a club dominated by men.
“The hatred I’d always felt for Scauri as a girl was back. The feeling of airlessness.” What follows is a thrilling examination of the black hole of society and the secrets people keep from each other and themselves.
In Late Summer, by Croatian writer Magdalena Blaźević (Linden Editions, £12, translated with verve and sensitivity by Andelka Raguž), is a work of limpid beauty drenched in sorrow. A massacre takes place in a quiet village in the Bosnian countryside one hot August day; the events leading up to that and after are narrated by a chatty, confiding young girl, Ivana, aged 14.
“Old, hanging faces are already lined up on the road, their hands behind their heads.” Yet Ivana is also dead, shot in front of her mother and brother outside their house. Ivana should be hanging out with her cousin Dunja, picking blackberries for jam, helping her mother. But she is “hit by one spark ... my camomile hair spread out on the road, its light extinguished ... the sky is the last thing I see, poisoned by smoke and unknown voices”.
The figure of Death (in Ivana’s capitals) stalks the book, and yet it is also a work of grace and joy, a testament to the lives of generations of Bosnians until the horrific genocide of the early 1990s. Above all it stands as a memorial to, as Blaźević’s dedication states, “the citizens of Kiseljak, in memory of 16 August 1993”.
War dominates The World We Saw Burning, an uncompromising novel from Peruvian journalist and writer Renato Cisneros (Charco Press, £11.99, in a fine translation by Fionn Petch). Cisneros pulls together differing, stirring strands, effortlessly switching between the past and present day, yet never loses sight of his goal or his grip on the story.
“Certain tragedies devour the memories of their victims, imposing a point zero from which everything has to begin again. The mistake ... is to look back.” Matías Roeder, son of an Italian father and German mother, immigrates at the age of 19 from Peru to New York. It is 1939. Eventually he will join the US Air Force, his whole raison d’être called into question when he finds himself involved in the bombing of Hamburg, his grandfather’s city. Cisneros skilfully intersperses his narrative with that of two Peruvians living in contemporary Madrid, in a rousing story of migration and identity.
