A sense of the ridiculous and the serious … Pirkko Saisio. Photograph: Pirjo Honkasalo
The best recent translated fiction – review roundup
The Red Book of Farewells by Pirkko Saisio; Short Circuit by Wolf Haas; Cosmos by Lucia Odoom; The Fallen Trees Are Also the Forest by Alejandra Kamiya
The Red Book of Farewells (The Helsinki Trilogy, 3)
The Red Book of Farewells by Pirkko Saisio, translated by Mia Spangenberg, Penguin Classics (£14.99) Following Lowest Common Denominator and Backlight, this book completes Finnish author Saisio’s autofictional trilogy. It covers her young adulthood in the 1970s, where she comes out as lesbian (“The electricity doesn’t go out. The Richter scale remains still”) and falls in love. One of her lovers, Havva, is a communist who’s engaged to a man; she relies on his rich parents for funding, but pees in their private pool as a protest. Later, Saisio is voted vice-president of a political drama company, as “she has the skills to bring about the revolution, specifically via theatre” – despite half-baked productions such as the “napalm opera” Vietnam-a-Go-Go. As that suggests, this is a story with a sense of both the ridiculous and the serious. Told in clear prose, it playfully shifts between third and first person as Saisio recounts her memories then analyses them. This enchanting series deserves to become a modern classic.
Short Circuit by Wolf Haas, translated by Jamie Bulloch
Short Circuit by Wolf Haas, translated by Jamie Bulloch (HarperVia, £20)
“We think [time] goes in one direction. But really you need to think of it as a loop”. This, well, loopy novel opens with jigsaw aficionado and “merciless hair-splitter” Franz Escher getting an electrician in to fix his power – then accidentally killing him. As Franz waits for the ambulance, he reads a novel about Elio, a man who helped put his own mafia family behind bars. Elio, who’s now on witness protection, kills time by reading a novel about … Franz Escher. The two stories pursue one another, accelerating until they collide, incorporating courtship by car alarm, rival funeral orators and multiple identities for many characters. Oh, and what if the electrician Franz killed turns out to be Elio? Short Circuit_,_ recallingthe slipstream fiction of Christopher Priest and the light-touch experimentations of David Mitchell, is an entertaining literary hall-of-mirrors.
Cosmos by Lucia Odoom, translated by Hunter Simpson (Daunt
Cosmos by Lucia Odoom, translated by Hunter Simpson (Daunt, £10.99)
“Lately my leap feels more and more like a fall,” writes Cosmos, a young Ghanaian man who has migrated to Copenhagen, where he contends with Denmark’s “worrying lack of smells” and collects recyclable bottles to earn money. Later he gets a job modelling, and lets the agency believe he’s an asylum seeker so they’ll feel sorry for him. He falls in love with Elizabeth: when she describes something as a guilty pleasure, “I asked her what a guilty pleasure was”. The past presses in: when Elizabeth takes him to the seaside, he recalls the vomit-streaked boat journey to Europe. All this is told in WhatsApp messages to Cosmos’s family back home – even the sex scenes. It’s a story of the challenges and hopes of a migrant’s life, made charming by the funny narrative voice and Cosmos’s optimism: he can see a plane and imagine being a crow, “flying high above the world, high above everything that no one owns”.
The Fallen Trees Are Also the Forest by Alejandra Kamiya, translated by Daniel Hahn (Pushkin,
The Fallen Trees Are Also the Fores t by Alejandra Kamiya, translated by Daniel Hahn (Pushkin, £12.99) In this collection of stories from a Japanese-Argentinian writer, people rarely say what they mean. The dark secret beneath a woman’s meticulous breakfast preparations is hinted at through imagery: a flower, “open like a yelling mouth”. A story where a family attempts to cope when their son leaves by not talking about him (“I learned to differentiate between many different types of silence”) reads like an epic in miniature. There is black comedy – a woman asks her maid to help her read the letters on an optician’s chart – as well as intense psychological drama, in the tale of a soldier who is told to “dig here until further orders” and keeps going, and going, and going. Kamiya’s collection is remarkable in its variety but united by its laconic, sometimes elliptical style. These are teasing, satisfying stories to be savoured slowly.
