Haruki Murakami, after the quake, 2000

For some enigmatic reason Murakami wanted this collection’s English title to be devoid of capital letters and all in lower case. The six stories are all set in February 1995, a month after the devastation of the Kobe earthquake (and a month before the Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway that Murakami explored in Underground), and while the characters he writes about were not directly affected by the earthquake it nevertheless created some other far-reaching and more personal seismic shifts. This is Murakami’s focus here, and only the story ‘Super-Frog Saves Tokyo’ has his trademark use of surreal imagery, the rest are very down-to-earth stories and all are told in the third person – again, a departure from previous style. Murakami has a deft way with characterisation and these stories all get their point across with an easy-going precision. ‘Landscape with Flatiron’ cleverly parallels a famous Jack London short story, but for me the best of all is the story ‘Thailand’, about a bitter Japanese woman on holiday there who, with her ex-husband in Kobe, is shown an unusual way to let go of her heart of stone. There are undercurrents of violence present in this collection, much like the seismic dangers that are always present but held at bay in the ground beneath our feet.  PY

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Donald Antrim, The Hundred Brothers, 1997

This bizarre novel has a superb opening sentence that takes up two pages, in which the highly unreliable and self-deceiving narrator Doug introduces his ninety-nine brothers (aged from 30 to 93) and explains what they plan to do over the course of a single night in the collapsing library of their late philandering father’s decrepit mansion. Of course, it doesn’t go exactly according to plan, instead it ends up the way these gatherings always do, in a squall of fights, exhibitions of puerile insecurities and generally asinine behaviour. It’s a black comedy of manners in which little gets resolved, a skillfully crafted and often surreal work that’s set in the present day, although at times it’s given a historical feel largely through the Rabelaisian extravagance of the brothers’ caricatures, done in a way that makes it feel as if one’s viewing an animated Hogarth sketch. But The Hundred Brothers is also as conceptual as it is comedic as the brothers’ childish antics are played out in sections of the library that allude to the loftiest aspirations of Western thought, and it will inevitably appeal to fans of Robertson Davies largely because of the comic intelligence with which it’s written. The cover notes go in for things like “the Marx Brothers - times twenty-five - performing a Harold Pinter play”, but the most succinct is the pull-quote “A mad wrestling match of a book”, because that feels exactly right. We could certainly do with reading a few more erudite comedies like this largely because they set a very high watermark indeed.  PY

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Elise Blackwell, Hunger, 2003

The Soviet Union’s premier botanical institute is the setting for this rather peculiar novel about Leningrad under blockade from German forces in 1941, though the focus is more on the experience and memories of an unnamed protagonist as he, his wife and his colleagues struggle to deal with the ideological extremes of Stalin’s totalitarianism and Trofim Lysenko’s disastrous collectivisation of Soviet agriculture as their nation starves. In spite of the hardships in the worst times of the ‘hunger winter’, the scientists have made a pact: no matter how bad conditions become they will protect their precious cache of seeds that will be their gift to the country’s future. The unnamed narrator is a scientist who has already made various travels to remote places around the world, and the book’s triangular balance is between these memories, his experience of the Seige of Leningrad and assorted sexual reminiscences. He comes across as a particularly unlikeable person with both a bottomless pit of personal vanity and a considerable amount of emotional detachment from the suffering, prefering to recall his appetite for sexual infidelity or at least try to make sense of it in the context of the hunger he witnesses around him.

Despite this being her first novel Elise Blackwell has something of a literary pedigree, but quite why she chose this setting to make some existential points about hunger, appetite and remorse in this particular way was, while reading, largely beyond me, though when seen instead as a long parable about temptation and forbidden fruit it tends to make much more sense. Hunger may have been selected by the L.A. Times as a Notable Book of 2003, but this wasn’t quite the notable book I was expecting: disturbing and curious, I would have preferred a novel lighter on the existentialism and heavier on the real-world subject matter itself.  PY

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Graham Greene, A Sense of Reality, 1963

This slim volume of four short stories predates the twenty-five year period in which Greene kept a comprehensive dream diary, although dreams are clearly one of this collection’s thematic strands. His usual realism takes a back seat in favour of a more imaginative approach to his writing although, on this evidence, it doesn’t actually feel like something he was particularly comfortable with or even adept at: I puzzled at the glowing cover quotes and wonder if they were actually describing the same book I was reading. The most imaginative story, ‘A Discovery in the Woods’, a post-nuclear war piece, feels uncomfortably stilted throughout yet the idea is a decent enough one (it was also reprinted in the pages of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1967 and later anthologised in a science fictional context three times); I didn’t much care for the rather forced nature of the dream-inspired ‘Under the Garden’ and ‘A Dream of a Strange Land’, but the most successful story, ‘A Visit to Morin’, is a much more familiar kind of Greene, a sharp tale dealing with Catholicism and the loss of religious belief – now that’s a story to remember.  PY

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Jan Blensdorf, My Name is Sei Shonagon, 2004

The rights to this novel were reportedly sold to eight countries before publication, an enviable record for a debut novelist. Aiming at being a modern rendering of Sei Shonagon’s 11th century Pillow Book, it’s the story of a Japanese-American woman who inherits a Tokyo incense shop and finds herself acting as counsel to the insecure inner lives of her customers. It’s a ‘spiegel im spiegel’ of interiors, constantly looking further into the life of ‘Sei’ and how she engages with the lives of other people, lives far more interesting than her own which seems to have had most of the joy written out of it. This book is also good for providing a discreet look inside the private behaviours of present-day Japanese who come across as a nation mostly fearful of offending each other, largely reflecting what generations of Japanese would still see as the truth despite the excesses of post-war Western influence. As a whole it has the feel of a book that’s been assembled from disparate parts and rewritten maybe too much, all pieced together with the joins and spikes of interest smoothed over. It is observant and artfully prismatic, though not quite as engaging as I’d hoped for.  PY

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Mikhail Bulgakov, The Heart of a Dog, 1925

The Heart of a Dog has ingredients that make it a satirical classic, yet it would surely have been funnier still to its intended Russian audience. Bulgakov had constant problems with censors and he never saw publication of The Heart of a Dog in the Soviet Union in his lifetime: he died in 1940 and it was suppressed there until as late as 1987, appearing only a few years before the fall of Soviet Communism. Philip Philipovich, a rich and respected Moscow doctor who specialises in rejuvenation, decides to experiment with some transplant surgery on a stray mongrel known as Sharik with a few body parts from a recently deceased prole, and unwittingly transforms the dog into a poor resemblance of a cultured man. What gives this book its spark is the downtrodden dog’s character, which kicks off and then punctuates the rest of the story very nicely indeed. Bulgakov displayed a splendid sense of fun in this satire on the Russian Revolution, in which the uneducated and common proletariat expected to simply be handed a share of the wealth, and when encapsulated in the character of Sharik they’re also satirised as aspiring – and of course failing – to take on the airs and graces of the bourgeois elite. The doctor’s frequent counter-revolutionary rants are what help this novel endure as a modern and edgy one: right or wrong, Bulgakov gave the reader room to still wish the world was a fairer and more evenly divided place, despite the entrenched imbalance between rich and poor that became the source of his best jokes. A book that can’t be missed by those with a taste for sharp satire.  PY

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Soazig Aaron, Refusal, 2002

Sometimes it seems that any new fiction centred on Auschwitz is required to offer up new horrors previously untouched upon and Soazig Aaron has certainly attempted to go down that route too, somewhat in the tracks of William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice. In this case I’m not sure it was necessary, but as the point of Refusal is to focus on some of the after-effects of the horror, perhaps you can’t really do that without the inclusion of a few graphic scenes as flashbacks. In Refusal much of the evil of Auschwitz happened to Klara Schwarz-Roth, a German-born Parisian Jew, separated from her daughter and sent there where she was forced to learn many of the darker aspects of survival, which also prevent her from properly rejoining the world upon her release. Klara is a fascinating and eloquent character, if also deeply scarred and deeply scary. Even though the story is told through the eyes of her pre-war friend Angélika, Klara takes centre stage throughout. This is one of those books that won’t let go and is, even with Klara’s self-imposed and self-limiting options for her future, defiantly difficult to argue with.  PY

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Bohumil Hrabal, Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age, 1964

An unnamed narrator holds forth to a group of ladies he obviously wants to impress on matters such as marital strife, dream symbolism, personal hygeine, crooks, barmaids, balalaikas, unlikely personal dalliances and anything else that comes to mind, all in one rambling, tumbling, obscenely long and unfinished sentence that’s clearly meant to be taken with a massive pinch of salt. As with other books by Hrabal (for instance the bizarrely worthwhile Too Loud a Solitude and Closely Observed Trains), Hrabal’s linear momentum becomes rather effortless once you get into his awkward rhythm: the oddness of what he’s describing is somehow shaken off and the reader can indulge this vainglorious character all the way. As book-length, comic self-portraits go this is excellent, and Hrabal’s self-imposed task of writing an entire book in a single sentence was clearly a constraint he could also turn into something of a liberation.  PY

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Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, 1963

Thirteen year-old Noboru spies on his widowed mother Fusako with her new lover Ryuji, a rugged sailor on shore leave in Yokohama. Without a father he’s become dispassionate and dysfunctional, part of a sinister group of schoolboys who can’t find meaning in anything and who eventually draw up their own plans for Ryuji, based on the sadistic treatment they’d previously dished out to a harmless kitten. It’s Noboru’s misanthropic world view in one so young that makes this a definitively perverse book, one that exhibits an almost tangible disrespect for those who show no strength, as when Ryuji finally exchanges his rigorous life at sea for a soft life on land and therefore must suffer the consequences. This broadly echoes Mishima’s own tough and exacting expectations of other people, and his ambivalent sexuality finds a quiet voice here too though it doesn’t detract from what is otherwise a well-plotted, lightly atmospheric and economically told story.  PY

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Imre Kertész, Liquidation, 2003

— Ten years have passed since the fall of Communism. B., a writer of great repute – whose birth and survival in Auschwitz defied all probability – has taken his own life. His friend Kingbitter discovers among his papers a play entitled Liquidation, in which he reads an eerie foretelling of the personal and political crises that he and B.’s other friends now face. Having survived the Holocaust and the years of Communist rule, having experienced the surge of hope that rose up from the rubble of the Wall, they are left with little other than a sense of chaos and an utter loss of identity.

Communism has fallen in 1990s Hungary, the publishing house of the literary editor Kingbitter is about to fold, and his friend, B., the only author he admired, has just comitted suicide. B. was an extraordinarily perceptive writer, having written a play, Liquidation, which predicted precisely how his coterie of friends and lovers would react after his death: Kingbitter reads about himself doing exactly what he has recently done. This clever beginning to the novel hints at layers of metaphysical introspection, a clever interweaving of meanings and motives, but this ‘Matryoshka doll’ technique of hiding stories within stories only goes so deep here. Further in, and always central to Kertész’s concerns, is the nature of evil and its coexistence with good, the impossibility of truly escaping the mental confines of Auschwitz even after that too has come and gone, and the question of how does one continue to live on after or whether there’s greater dignity in ending it all before the survival instinct disappears forever. A book that’s full of things coming to an end with no new beginnings, short novels don’t come much weightier than this.  PY

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Imre Kertész, Detective Story, 1977

— Antonio Martens was a torturer for the secret police of a recently defunct dictatorship. Now in prison, he requests and is given writing materials in his cell, and what he has to recount is his involvement in the surveillance, torture, and assassination of Federigo and Enrique Salinas, a prominent father and son whose principled but passive opposition to the regime left them vulnerable to the secret police. Preying upon young Enrique’s aimless life, the secret police began to position him as a subversive and then targeted his father. Once this plan was set into motion, any means were justified to reach the regime’s chosen end—the destruction of an entire liberal class. Inside Martens’s mind, we inhabit the rationalising world of evil and see first-hand the inherent danger of inertia during times of crisis.

As an Auschwitz survivor the study of evil has always been Kertész’s focus and yet this novella, in the form of a prison memoir written by one of the police officers after a civilian government has been restored, focuses more on its banality than its excesses though is no less gripping. The officer shows nothing in the way of remorse and instead tries to show how he was just doing his job, following orders, and the surveillance techniques he uses are straight out of East Germany’s Stasi. This works as an excellent and very accessible piece of writing that serves to illustrate how an untrammeled police force will often be inclined to pursue the wrong leads, and it that respect it helps to cast light on the kind of mindset that results in the death of innocents at the hands of the police. Recommended.  PY

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Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, 1921

Welcome to OneState, a soulless totalitarian regime based on mathematical principles, reason, logic and the efficiency models of the 19th century management theorist Frederick Winslow Taylor. The designer of the spacecraft known as the Integral, the mathematician known only as D-503, has love and pity for the life found elsewhere in the solar system, considering them as yet uncivilized by the missionary nature of the Integral’s forthcoming journey. D-503’s diary entries depict a cold and unemotional civilization: OneState is obsessed with its own mathematical perfection, a dictatorship run through with expansionist dogma and rhetoric that it will impose on whatever aliens are encountered out there in the universe. But then there are his misadventures with the rebel movement Mephi and his infatuation with the woman I-330, both of which take his eye off the ball and force OneState to intervene. We was the first work banned by the Soviet censorship bureau and wasn’t published in Russia until 1988, despite having already inspired Ayn Rand’s Anthem and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. It’s easy to see why this short dystopian masterpiece is considered to be among the greatest of its kind; described by its most recent translator Clarence Brown as a “clunky old postmodern monster” it feels very much of its time yet retains a great deal of charm, not least because D-503 knows he is not writing for posterity or his contemporaries but for his wild and remote ancestors, us.  PY

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Graham Greene, Brighton Rock, 1938

Sometimes your most honest appraisal of a story can be found in the first words you say to yourself when you finish it: in this case mine were “That was, again, a fantastic book.” Greene doesn’t put a foot wrong in his story of the downfall of Pinkie, a teenage gangster on the streets of 1930s Brighton, after he commits one murder too many. Greene’s getting under the skin of Pinkie is a truly class act in characterisation, equally so his nemesis, the formidably convincing Ida Arnold, who gets to the root of things with the small help of a ouija board and plenty of female intuition. There’s something quintessentially British about it all, with everyone trapped in their own circumstantial worlds and their lives intersecting in ways that can’t help but point back to their own individual loneliness. How Greene does this I’m not so sure, and in fact to analyse that some more would take away much of the pleasure: Greene can dazzle you with his writing here, if you let him. Brighton Rock is also a very catholic novel about life, with Pinkie being a defiant exception to whatever rules life may have, his come-uppance conveyed in his refusal to countenance that ‘there’s always room between the stirrup and the ground’, even when time is at its most short. A benchmark of a novel in British literature, and one that can still make a particularly hard-hitting impression.  PY

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Ian McEwan, The Cement Garden, 1978

Over a hot English summer, a family of four recently orphaned children avoid being taken into care by not telling anyone of their bereavement, instead choosing to fend for themselves. Narrated by the morose teenager Jack, The Cement Garden is soaked in an authentic atmosphere of a boring 1970s British adolescence, but their unguided excursions into premature adulthood would probably be treated as farcical and troubling comedy if they were from a less finely-tuned author. The setting seems as familiar and mundane as McEwan could possibly make it (notwithstanding the sibling sexual tension and the problem of how they dispose of certain incriminating evidence), and for a first novel it’s as dry as dust in its cold and disturbing perfection.  PY

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Guy Goffette, Forever Nude: A Fiction, 1998

This is the first of Goffette’s récits to be translated into English – short fictions in which he reimagines the lives of historical figures. This follows the life of the French artist Pierre Bonnard and his lifelong relationship with a woman he first met as a teenage farm girl, someone who’d reinvented herself as an Italian aristocrat and who under that guise became his model, muse, lifelong friend and wife over forty-nine years. The Belgian poet Goffette certainly leans towards the poetic and romantic in his writing and he’s therefore suitably aligned with Bonnard’s own style, and he provides a good reflection upon the artist’s life particularly with respect to his relationships with other artists, notably Pablo Picasso, and the onward lives of his paintings after his death. I’ve never taken to Bonnard’s style and probably never will, but this was such a useful and well-observed ‘insider’s guide’ that I’d be interested in seeing more of Goffette’s translations.  PY

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Salman Rushdie, East, West, 1994

Nine stories, three of Indians in India, three that exhibit aspects of Rushdie’s own peculiar way with Western fictional forms, and three of Indians living in England. Those middle three are notable for their imaginative diversity but they don’t sit well with the rest: we have a bizarre (and somewhat unreadable) abstraction on Hamlet, a scenario where fictional characters are infiltrating the real world at an auction of Dorothy’s slippers from The Wizard of Oz, and a courtship with Queen Isabella in the fevered mind of Christopher Columbus (a story which, somehow, has Bruce Chatwin written all over it). The remaining six more straightforward stories show how Rushdie makes the act of spinning very engaging tales of ordinary Indians and their families look easy, including the very original ‘Chekov and Zulu’, something which could qualify as a piece of very Indian and very erudite Star Trek fan fiction.  PY

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William Styron, The Long March, 1952

A book that teaches a hard lesson in leadership but only if readers can discern it for themselves. A company of US reserve Marines is taken on a cruel and impossibly long march of thirty-six miles by a posturing Colonel, and as expected it all goes badly wrong. Simple enough on the surface, but it exposes the different motives that can operate at different levels of leadership. Styron makes it very believable, first deliberately misdirecting then reversing the reader’s sympathies. A very neat, useful and yet hard-hitting little book.  PY

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Bruce Chatwin, The Viceroy of Ouidah, 1980

Chatwin originally intended to write a biography of the 19th Century slave trader Francisco Felix da Souza, but instead turned his research into a work of fiction about a similar Brazilian adventurer, one who sought to control the slave trade that ran through Dahomey’s port city. Chatwin instead was able to produce something that is richly imagined, leaving out very little in terms of atmospheric detail that is somehow able to seep off the page, while at the same time the written tone remains both terse and compelling. The story itself does take time to get going and I found it necessary to re-read the anachronistic first chapter to completely understand the context and perspective of the whole book, which is otherwise completely memorable.  PY

Dai Sijie, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, 2000

A good story set in 1970s China in the grip of Cultural Revolution, when Western books were banned because of their ‘decadence’. Two friends sent into the country for re-education by peasants come across a stash of translated French literature, and this informs their relationship with a young seamstress who becomes enchanted by the words of Balzac. Good fun and spirited, with the kind of slightly cynical tone you would expect the telling of such a tale to have, and the film version which Dai also directed supplies some excellent visual richness. Recommended.  PY

Shena MacKay, Music Upstairs, 1965

Shena MacKay’s first novel, which is set in London’s Earls Court before the ’60s had really got into their swing. Sidonie O’Neill, young, impressionable and far too passive, becomes the lover of both Pam and Lenny, her neighbours, and finds herself veering between the two while ignorant of Lenny’s increasingly obsessive behaviour towards her. Written when she was just 19, MacKay’s writing could perhaps have done with some tightening as well as some development of the scant few descriptive passages. But the narrative technique is similar to that of reality TV today, following Sidonie around while documenting the details of London life and building towards a random and unpredictable ending (while the sex remains strictly off the page). Its connection with the present is becoming ever more tenuous because it was intended to be contemporary and written very much for bohemian Londoners of the time, although the reader can still get a good sense of atmosphere and location; if memories can fill in the missing details of a grubby London bedsit life then Music Upstairs can still feel like a rather authentic journey back in time.   PY