“Do you like scary stories?” asks a character in Handkerchief, one of a series of interlocking tales from The Midnight Timetable (Dialogue, £14.99), a new collection of short fiction, or “novel in ghost stories” from expert in unsettling horror Bora Chung, translated with exquisite panache by Chung’s regular collaborator Anton Hur. In the book’s explanatory (at least according to the laws of the supernatural) opener, You Can’t Come in Here, employees roam the labyrinthine structure of a mysterious institute by day and night. An unnamed “sunbae” – senior colleague – warns her proteges not to carry mobile phones, not to enter certain rooms, to ignore odd footsteps, to never look back. Naturally these rules are all forgotten about or disobeyed. The Institute is a research centre for “haunted objects ... with corridors that either existed or didn’t exist according to some midnight timetable” and a strange man, ID badge unreadable, who obstructs access to the basement parking lot. This “nondescript figure in a nondescript suit” appears at various points in the book; a symbol of a society which is rigid in its anonymity, its conformity, its prejudices, and above all its loneliness. Chung is mordantly eerie and funny: two stories featuring possessed sheep recall her 2017 debut Cursed Bunny. In Why Does the Cat, a man who murders his lover to prevent her leaving is then subject to her haunting him. Taking a 21st century tool – the internet – he unearths centuries-old occult remedies which, when put to use, extract a terrible curse both ancient and terribly modern.
The question of what makes a good story and the lengths a writer will go to achieve their intent is blatantly explored in Aoko Matsuda’s provocative and timely The Woman Dies (Europa Editions UK, £14.99), in an acutely poised translation by Polly Barton. In 52 stories – some composed of just a few sentences – the prevalent sexist culture of contemporary Japan is skewered, riffed on and finally lanced with perfect timing and ingenuity, from inanimate objects such as a sweater that goes on holiday to Hawaii, to a cheeky one-line critique (“That loaf of bread is so long”) of Balthus’s controversial 1933 painting The Street, in which a sexual assault takes place, largely unnoticed, to one side of the canvas. In CV, a woman on the receiving end of constant harassment at work leaves countless jobs “for personal reasons”. This relentless drip of misogyny is never more starkly rendered than in the title story. “The woman dies. She dies to provide a plot twist. She dies to develop the narrative. She dies for cathartic effect. She dies because no one could think of what else to do with her.”
Frode Grytten, in a nice touch at the end of The Ferryman & His Wife (Serpent’s Tail, £12.99), translated by Alison McCullough, states that his novel was “written in dialogue with ...” then lists a number of writers both living and dead, from BS Johnson to Colm Tóibín, Kirsty Gunn to José Saramago. It’s a fitting acknowledgment for a short, unexpectedly uplifting book about the end of an outwardly ordinary life. “At a quarter past five in the morning, Nils Vik opened his eyes and the last day of his life began.” It’s November 18th and the book begins with widowed elderly ferryman Nils embarking on what will be his last day travelling in his boat across the fjord. Of all the companions he has journeyed with as he sets out to sea, and whose voices and presence accompany him now, the one that he most longs for does not appear – his late, Marta, the complexities of their marriage and family laid bare in a beautifully wrought, unsentimental novel of time and memory.
A vanished world is meticulously reconstructed in Mikołaj Łoziński’s small-scale epic My Name Is Stramer (Pushkin Press, £14.99) in a lively, lovingly balanced translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones – that of Jewish Poland in the years leading up to and during the second World War. Home for the sprawling Stramer family is the city of Tarnów, in southeastern Poland, where Nathan and wife Rywka and their six children squeeze into a two-room apartment in one of the poorer areas. Nathan had previously emigrated to the US along with his older brother Ben but returned to Poland, without, unlike Ben, making the fortune he had gone there to achieve: “it was for Rywka that he had come back from America ... his story was that he’d thought about her every day for four years ... he never told how he’d come back without a cent, and had even had to borrow the money for the ticket from his older brother.”
Michael Harding: From November on I surrender... We are both entangled in this winter
Ben Elton: I was the godfather of political correctness. People said I killed Benny Hill
What does it mean to be a fallen woman?
Fiction in translation: The Midnight Timetable; The Woman Dies; The Ferryman & His Wife; My Name Is Stramer; Wolf Moon’ and The Loft
Similar to Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, Nathan’s outlandish schemes to raise capital come to nothing; meanwhile his children grow up and move away, some embrace communism (one, Salek, fights in the Spanish civil war), others go to university. This is a rich generational saga and Łoziński’s (who was born in 1980) ear for Yiddish idiom is transporting. The Stramers inevitably become caught up in the rush of history and horror; particularly poignant is the moment a long-awaited letter from the US proves devastating for their chances of survival.
“As evening falls, the wood grouse is singing in the nearby beech woods. The cold cierzo wind suddenly stops, wraps itself around the trees’ sore branches and tears off the last few autumn leaves. Then the black rain, which has been lashing the mountains violently for several days, finally stops.” Episodic and almost unbearably dramatic despite its short length, Wolf Moon by Julio Llamazares (Pushkin Press, £10.99, vividly translated by Kathryn Phillips-Miles and Simon Deefholts, with a new introduction by Benjamin Myers) plunges the reader into the heart of the Spanish civil war.
It is 1937 and four republican soldiers hide out in a shepherd’s hut in the vast Cantabrian mountain range, hungry and in hiding from the victorious fascists in pursuit. The four-part novel covers almost a decade to 1946; in the end, only one of the men survives; like a lone wolf, at the mercy of locals and officials alike, he plots an escape to France. First published in 1985, in an afterword the author explains that he based the story on Casimiro Fernández Arias (who later died exiled in France in 2004), “the last survivor of four resistance fighters from the central mountain of Léon after the Civil War. He never returned to live in Spain.”
“I do not like surprises.” The Austrian writer Marlen Haushofer (1920-1970) is best known for her 1963 dystopian novel The Wall; now The Loft, first published in Germany in 1969 and in English in 2011 has been reissued (Vintage Classics,£16.99) in an impeccably taut translation by Amanda Prantera. The Loft’s narrator, a middle-aged housewife concealing an unspoken loss, lives with her lawyer husband Hubert (their marriage she deems as “beyond helping”) and 15-year-old daughter Ilse. Their son has left home. Each day passes in assiduously practised routine tasks; on a self- appointed day each week she retreats alone to the loft of the family home; as a former graphic artist who gave up her job due to what we assume was a psychosomatic illness, she now attempts to draw for herself, for pleasure. One day a package arrives from an unknown sender containing extracts from the narrator’s old diary. Haushofer’s writing is subtle, multifaceted and utterly gripping: the struggles and denial of her protagonist can be interpreted as a metaphor of a nation struggling to come to terms with its horrific recent past.
