The best recent translated fiction

The Guardian

5 days ago

The Propagandist by Cécile Desprairies, translated by Natasha Lehrer (Swift, £14.99)
This clever and vivid book by a historian of Vichy France falls somewhere between autobiographical novel and fictionalised memoir. It opens as a colourful story based on the author's family: her grandmother's morphine addiction, her aunt Zizi's vanity (she 'boasted that all she kept in her refrigerator were beauty products'), and her mother's reluctance to talk about the past. But what were grandmother and Zizi doing in the pages of Nazi propaganda magazine Signal? The narrator learns her family were 'Nazi sympathisers', though the phrase hardly captures the zeal of her mother Lucie's support. The details are shocking: to Lucie and her lover, 'mice, rats and Jews were basically the same', and she has no regrets after the war. 'If all the French had been on the right side, Germany would have won.' Their blinkered support has lessons for today, too. 'What does it matter if something is true or false,' asks one character, 'if you believe it to be true?'
Lovers of Franz K by Burhan Sönmez, translated by Sami Hêzil (Open Borders, £12.99)
Nazi-supporting parents feature in this novel too, set in West Berlin in 1968, the year of revolutionary protests around the world. A young man of Turkish descent faces off against a police commissioner. Ferdy Kaplan is under investigation for killing a student – but his intended target was Max Brod, the executor of Franz Kafka's estate who published Kafka's work against his wishes. Police suspect Ferdy had an antisemitic motive against the Jewish Brod, 'influenced by [his parents'] ideas'. There's a Kafkaesque quality to the interrogation – 'It is our job to assume the opposite of what you tell us,' the police say – but Kurdish author Sönmez is really interested in the question of who owns literature. Was Brod right to publish? Would Kafka be unknown if he hadn't? The dialogue-led approach makes the book punchy and fast-moving, and brings some surprising twists before the end.
Back in the Day by Oliver Lovrenski, translated by Nichola Smalley (Hamish Hamilton, £14.99)
Sixteen-year-old Ivor is a typical schoolboy in Norway: 'every day sitting in the same classroom, getting smart, creating chaos' and torn between 'the side of me that wanted to do good things, and the other side saying, chill man, no stress'. That other side tends to win, as he and his friends Marco, Jonas and Arjan get up to antics that may need further translation for middle-aged readers: 'bunn a zoot', 'we blazed some lemon haze', 'we rocked up like we was about to harvest some bamboo'. But amid the intensity of young male friendship, there's love, family loyalty and vulnerability. 'Sometimes you hang the biggest towel you can find over the mirror [cos] you wanna smash the face of the brother staring back at you.' The energy and richness of this novel would be impressive, even if Lovrenski hadn't been only 19 years old when he wrote it.
Waist Deep by Linea Maja Ernst, translated by Sherilyn Hellberg (Jonathan Cape, £14.99)
Five friends, one week, a summerhouse: sounds like a dream – which could become a nightmare. 'It'll be like our own clever talk show, fabulous and never-ending,' says one character. Danish debut novelist Ernst delineates her characters snappily, from Esben, an experimental poet who went commercial with a novel about his mother, to Gry, who 'hasn't eaten any carbohydrates in three weeks'. But what brings the friends together and drives them apart is sex. Central to this is 'confused' Sylvia, who enjoys being dominated by her 'dreamboat' girlfriend Charlie: 'She has been a jug full of dark, heavy liquid, and now the jug is broken', is her description of being brought to orgasm. But Sylvia also gets angry at the 'vanilla hetero-banality' of the other happily settled couples. The novel is operatic in its emotional intensity and its surprise pairings, but ultimately a lament for lost youth. 'Weren't they true radicals just a second ago?' wonders Sylvia. Weren't we all?