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The Guardian
08-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Mind-expanding books': International Booker prize shortlist announced
Hiromi Kawakami and Solvej Balle have made this year's International Booker prize shortlist, which for the first time is comprised entirely of books published by independent presses. British translator Sophie Hughes has been shortlisted for her translation of Perfection, originally written in Italian by Vincenzo Latronico. This marks the fifth time Hughes has been shortlisted for the prize, making her the award's record holder for the most times shortlisted and longlisted. On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J Haveland (Faber) Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix, translated by Helen Stevenson (Small Axes) Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Asa Yoneda (Granta) Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated by Sophie Hughes (Fitzcarraldo) Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi (And Other Stories) A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre, translated by Mark Hutchinson (Lolli) Six author-translator teams are now in contention for the £50,000 prize, the winner of which will be announced on 20 May, with the prize money divided equally between author and translator. Japanese writer Kawakami, best known for her novel Strange Weather in Tokyo, has been shortlisted for her novel-in-stories Under the Eye of the Big Bird, translated by Asa Yoneda. Danish writer Balle and Scottish translator Barbara J Haveland have been chosen for On the Calculation of Volume I, the first of a planned septology in which the protagonist Tara is stuck in a time loop. 'These mind-expanding books ask what might be in store for us, or how we might mourn, worship or survive', said author and judging chair Max Porter. 'They offer knotty, sometimes pessimistic, sometimes radically hopeful answers to these questions. Taken together they build a miraculous lens through which to view human experience, both the truly disturbing and the achingly beautiful.' The shortlisted titles are slim, with four coming in at under 200 pages, including Latronico's Perfection. The novel, about a millennial expat couple living in Berlin, 'transcends its satire of 2010s hipsterdom through the depth of Latronico's sociological observations', writes Thomas McMullan in the Guardian. 'This chronicle of contemporary Berlin is strongest in its articulation of how a certain kind of globalisation dislocates us from our surroundings.' Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix, translated from French by Helen Stevenson, was also selected. The book was written in three weeks, and is based on recordings from a real event in November 2021, when a dinghy carrying migrants from France to the UK capsized in the Channel, causing the death of 27 people on board. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion A book translated from Kannada – a language spoken by tens of millions of people, primarily in the state of Karnataka in southwest India – features on the shortlist for the first time in the prize's history this year: Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi. It contains 12 stories originally published between 1990 and 2023, which capture the daily lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. Completing the shortlist is A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre, translated from French by Mark Hutchinson. Serre wrote the book, about a woman with severe psychological disorders, in six months after the suicide of her sister. 'I wanted to create a memorial to her', said Serre. The other titles longlisted for this year's prize were The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem, translated by Sinan Antoon; There's a Monster Behind the Door by Gaëlle Bélem, translated by Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Loubert; Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu, translated by Sean Cotter; Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia de la Cerda, translated by Julia Sanches and Heather Cleary; Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa, translated by Polly Barton; Eurotrash by Christian Kracht, translated by Daniel Bowles; and On a Woman's Madness by Astrid Roemer, translated by Lucy Scott. Alongside Porter on this year's judging panel are the poet Caleb Femi, writer and Guardian critic Sana Goyal, author and translator Anton Hur, and musician Beth Orton. Authors who have previously won the award include Han Kang, Olga Tokarczuk and Lucas Rijneveld. Last year, Jenny Erpenbeck and translator Michael Hofmann won the prize for Kairos. To explore all of the books on the shortlist for the International Booker prize 2025 visit Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
29-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘A different philosophy of things': how Solvej Balle got ahead of Groundhog Day's time
If you've heard about Solvej Balle's On the Calculation of Volume I, longlisted for this year's International Booker prize, you may have experienced a sensation that is central to the Danish writer's brand of philosophical speculative fiction: deja vu. In Balle's five-book opus (of a planned septology), the first three of which won the prestigious Nordic Council literature prize in 2022, someone wakes up to find they are reliving the same day over and over. Their partner, family, neighbours: they all experience this day for the first time in their life. Only the protagonist has been there before. That person is a woman called Tara rather than a man called Phil, and the day is 18 November rather than 2 February, but the plot resemblance to Groundhog Day is striking. The only thing is: Balle got there first. When Bill Murray, Andie MacDowell and the groundhog Punxsutawney Phil hit the big screen in 1993, the kernel of Balle's story had already been stewing in her brain for six years. An obsession in her 20s with James Joyce's Ulysses – set entirely on 16 June 1904 – had led her to wonder how much a single day could contain: 'The thing that fascinated me most was the question: how can one day be so voluminous?' She decided on the title in 1989, though she didn't start writing for another 10 years and the first volume wasn't published in Danish for another 20. Watching someone turn her idea into a box-office hit in the meantime was a relief rather than a blow: 'I thought, 'Oh, that's nice, somebody's helped me to do some research and gone in a direction I wasn't going to go anyway.'' Because even when Bill Murray tries to kill himself in increasingly gruesome ways, he keeps on waking the next day. 'That's a very clear body-soul split; his soul just continues all the way through.' In On the Calculation of Volume, the balance of mind and matter is a more cryptic affair: Tara Selter, a rare-book seller in her late 20s living in rural France, may be caught in a time loop, but she's still tied to the material world. Her hair grows, her body ages, a burn on her skin slowly heals. Food she eats is missing from the fridge the next day. There's a rare Roman coin that vanishes and then reappears, a coffee grinder that has to be bought several times before it stays. The parallel universe that Tara has fallen into has 'a different philosophy of things', and the hypnotic appeal of Balle's fiction lies in the fact that her protagonist is not merely a hero seeking to escape a predicament, but an inquiring scientific mind earnestly trying to unravel its fixed laws. Balle herself has moved through life in non-linear ways. Born in 1962 in South Jutland, she has 'done all the things you shouldn't do if you wanted a career'. During her high-school years, she zigzagged between Denmark and Paris, where she first worked as an au pair and then caught the writing bug, hanging out at legendary bookshop Shakespeare and Company. She studied literature for a while and then took a degree in philosophy but didn't finish it until she was 56. Her debut novel Lyrefugl (Lyrebird) was published when she was 22, but it was her 1993 book According to the Law: Four Accounts of Mankind that truly made a mark. A quartet of interlinked philosophical parables that was translated into multiple languages, it turned the heads of literary Copenhagen. 'I remember thinking, this is world literature,' recalls Jes Stein Pedersen, literary editor of Danish broadsheet Politiken. 'It was a truly original voice.' But, in May 2005, Balle swapped the Danish capital for Ærø, a small island with a population of just under 6,000 people in what Danes call the 'rotten banana', the peripheral belt of marshland and islands in the southern part of Denmark. 'I was kind of unhappy with the Danish publishing world, which became more and more commercial, more and more about bestsellers and all that shit.' But she laughs at the idea that she became a recluse and stopped writing, as some critics have claimed. 'Denmark's cultural scene is as centralised as England's: if you move out of Copenhagen, it's almost like dying,' she laughs. 'This idea that I am about to make my comeback is nonsense – I was there all the time.' After publishing a book of art criticism and a political memoir, Balle set up her own publishing house, Pelagraf, in 2011, bringing out two books of short minimalist fiction, If and Then, and the first five parts of her septology. She is dismissive of the suggestion that life on a small island may feel much like the repetitive time loops that her character experiences. 'Here, at least, there's the summer where you're doing certain things and then there's a winter – in the city people do the same things all the time,' she says. 'Nowadays, cities are so much more conventional than the countryside, whereas it used to be the opposite.' She did find it easier to focus on the ever-expanding universe of Tara's 18 November away from the city, she concedes. 'I had to have more space in order to be able to keep all the bits in my head at the same time,' she says. She used to sing in the local choir but had to stop because she couldn't hear so many voices concurrently. 'I can sometimes go for days without seeing anyone.' Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion At the beginning of the first volume, Tara is romantically and professionally intertwined with her husband, Thomas, who is also a rare-book dealer, with her scoping out new acquisitions and him managing the sales from home. Tara tells her partner about her predicament, and even amid their confusion they are happy: she likens their relationship to a 'quiet weather system with no natural disasters'. Is On the Calculation of Volume a love story? 'When I started out, I had the feeling that I was writing a love story,' Balle says. 'But was it only a love story? I don't think so.' If her books are an investigation into what is truly essential to the human condition once our routines are hollowed out by repetition, then book one concludes that love isn't it. By the end, Tara has left Thomas behind in the countryside. What Tara truly cannot do without, it turns out, is not the weather system of her matrimonial love, but the actual weather. In book two she travels to southern and northern Europe to recreate the seasonal change that the time loop has taken from her. She becomes increasingly concerned about her consumption of resources and her inability to regrow them. What set out as a love story turns into a parable about humanity's abusive relationship with the natural world. Can the time loop be broken; can Tara escape her fate? In part three, which Faber will publish in English in November, translated as the others have been by Barbara J Haveland, Balle's protagonist encounters other loopers, and there are some shoots of hope. But, by the sound of it, the author herself hasn't found all the answers to the mysteries of the world that have grown inside her head for nigh on four decades. She's currently plugging away at volume six, and wrestling with quantum physics and Epicurus. 'I like the idea that you're allowed to keep your brain while going into a book,' she says. 'I don't know why we've got brains if they can't be part of literature.' On the Calculation of Volume I and II by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J Haveland, is published by Faber. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
