Atiq Rahimi, Earth and Ashes, 2000

Set during the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, Earth and Ashes is a first novel from an Afghan film-maker more accustomed to making documentaries. This is worth mentioning as the book reads as a short personal fable and packs its emotional punch by looking at the spiritual cost of a person subjected to loss as opposed to any visually distressing imagery, which this book veils behind the digressive ramblings and nightmares of an elderly man in the shock of sudden grief. Earth and Ashes opens with Dastaguir, an Afghan grandfather and the book’s narrator, taking his grandson Yassin to see the boy’s father Murad, who works in a Russian mine, with the purpose of explaining to him that the rest of the family has been killed after the Russian army, in a fit of obstinate pique, obliterated their entire village.

This book’s tellling in the second person (a rare thing in itself) as opposed to the first or third is a clever device which removes the reader from experiencing directly the shellshock of what Dastaguir himself has experienced: he is clearly in a confused and distressed state yet still feels he must do the right thing and withdraws into frequent internal debates about his proper course of action, one of his reference points being the eleventh century Persian epic The Book of Kings which is interwoven with various well-depicted dreamlike visions. Earth and Ashes is as far removed from the political causes for the execution of a war as any book could probably be, and focuses entirely on how this simple man is now forced to deal with an impossibly complex and traumatic event; Dastaguir, as a result, is given a troubled dignity that seems far beyond the reach of the rest of us. At times it seems like almost every sentence in this book is calculated to extract the reader’s sympathy, but the overall effect is rather positively overwhelming. Highly recommended.   PY

•  Earth and Ashes was shortlisted for the 2004 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

MORE ON ATIQ RAHIMI : WIKIPEDIA

Ma Jian, Stick Out Your Tongue, 1987

Ma Jian is now living in London as a result of these short stories that were immediately banned on publication in China, and serves as a Tibetan counterpart to his award-winning Chinese travelogue Red Dust. This memorable collection is like an examination of Tibet’s spiritual malaise in urgent need of diagnosis, hence the title. As a lone Chinese traveller in Tibet Ma was the outsider, but in these brief fictions he also portrays modern Tibetans as outsiders to their own cultural history: they are harsh, raw and dehumanising vignettes of the consequences of poverty in Tibetan life, yet they are narrated with a degree of unflinching calm that often suggests an autobiographical witness that is hard to argue with or question. Excellent.   PY

•  Stick Out Your Tongue was shortlisted for the 2007 Kiriyama Prize for fiction.

Graham Joyce, Smoking Poppy, 2001

A lonely and bitter Englishman goes to Chiang Mai in search of his daughter who is jailed on drug-smuggling charges, but is led further on a journey into the mysterious, spirit-haunted world of Thailand’s interior. Graham Joyce writes with a kind of contemporary, knowing, middle-aged English freshness; all the characters are sufficiently well-drawn to come alive vividly in the reader’s mind and the narrator never really loses his jaded cynicism throughout, though he finally succumbs to a rather belated coming-of-age as a proper parent to his two estranged twenty-something kids. An excellent book, one I would like to re-read in a few years.   PY

Gabriel García Márquez, No One Writes to the Colonel, 1961

The retired Colombian colonel is a man whose body, house and country are all falling apart, an elderly man with “no occupation other than waiting for the mail every Friday”, and in lieu of his ever-absent war pension the only thing that keeps him going is the windfall that may yet come from his prize rooster’s upcoming cockfight. Essentially it’s a rather cynical shaggy-dog story, and I recently read that the situation of the colonel, if not the character himself, was directly inspired by the experience of Márquez’s own grandfather, and this knowledge gives an extra vitriolic punch to the book’s final scene.   PY

MORE ON GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ :  THE MODERN WORLD  |  NOBEL PRIZE BIOGRAPHY  |  WIKIPEDIA

Eileen Chang, Lust, Caution, 1979

This short novel was begun in the early 1950s but not completed and published until 1979, and Ang Lee’s film won several trophies at Taiwan’s Golden Horse Awards. Set in occupied Shanghai during the Second World War it’s the story of a young student’s role in the entrapment of a Chinese minister who is a sympathiser of the occupying Japanese. The turbulent Chinese politics of the time always formed the backdrop to Chang’s novels and was never usually the story itself, so the political theme makes Lust, Caution an unusual story for her. It’s a convincingly told tale, and one in which the motives of all the characters are morally dubious. Chang was one of the most popular writers in China during her life but is largely out of print now in the English-speaking world, though Penguin are releasing a few titles in their Modern Classics series which, on the strength of this, will certainly be worth reading.   PY

Michael Ondaatje, Coming Through Slaughter, 1976

Set in 1900 in the Storyville red light district of New Orleans, this is a loosely fictionalised but also lucidly detailed telling of the life of Buddy Bolden, the cornetist whose music and descent into madness were both factors in the birth of jazz at the turn of the 20th century. Bolden himself remains an elusive and slippery character as if Ondaatje knows he can only give a refracted portrait, with so much detail of his life being lost to history, and more than just exploring the relationships between the characters Ondaatje is also further exploring the relationship between creativity and destruction. The prose of Coming Through Slaughter is as liberating as the music, free-spirited though often deliberately disjointed and disorientating, told in rushes of solo improvisations and phrases stripped down to rhythms of speech, with words often given the precise function of musical notes. Ondaatje has allowed the story itself to completely inform his method of storytelling, giving this novel a memorable and truly poetic heart.   PY

Andrey Kurkov, A Matter of Death and Life, 1996

At just thirty, Tolya is sick of life in Kiev and his failed marriage and sets himself up to be the next job for an acquaintance of an acquaintance: a hitman. But what can he do when, before the appointed hour on his last day, small opportunities come his way and he changes his mind, choosing to carry on instead? Kurkov sets up a bleakly comic situation but doesn’t play it for laughs, instead relying on some untidy situational complexities and possibilities to keep the reader engaged. Nevertheless it’s a realistically told and sometimes cynical domestic drama, and the sting in the tail is one you’ll never see coming.   PY

José Eduardo Agualusa, The Book of Chameleons, 2004

In the Angolan capital Luanda, Félix Ventura is a man who creates your past – if you don’t like yours, he can come up with a new one. The book’s narrator is a gecko, also with a past life as a human, but who necessarily adopts a lizard-on-the-wall style of narration. The storytelling allows you to see the small ensemble of shifty characters from just about every angle, in a way that suggests the transience of identities and the influence of memories, real or created: everyone in this book changes who they are to various degrees. The Latin American influence on The Book of Chameleons is self-evident given that it was written in Portuguese, but ah, if only more African writing was as imaginative as this. Excellent.   PY

•  The Book of Chameleons is the first Angolan novel to be translated into English, and also won the 2007 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

Warwick Collins, Gents, 1997

Warwick Collins is one of those cross-genre writers who defies categorisation, something that has given him a great reputation for diversity across Europe while remaining almost unheard of here, his previous UK publishers finding him impossible to ‘market’. Ezekiel, Jason and Reynolds are three West Indian attendants at a London lavatory with a problematic reputation for cottaging and casual sex, and the council requires them to do something about it. They each have their own approach to dealing with the matter, each of them moral in their own way, whether combative or pragmatic. You need to put aside any preconceptions about a book such as this: there is some superb dialogue as the focus is on the interaction between the three men as seen through the eyes of Ezekiel. Gents started as a screenplay and ended up as a novel, but would still look great filmed for TV. Very literate and acutely observed, and deservedly seen as something of a underground classic.   PY

Junot Díaz, Drown, 1997

With the release of his first novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao there’s a buzz about Junot Díaz, and Drown is an impressive themed collection of shorts on growing up in the Dominican Republic followed by life as a New York immigrant, and the high expectations I had of this collection were largely met; most of the stories are narrated by Yunior and focus on individuals in his family at the expense of himself, and I suspect there’s a heavy autobiographical thread running through them. The writing is for the most part crystal clear and sophisticated, observant and considerably streetwise; to Díaz language is everything and he consciously uses it to illuminate character and impart detail and a sense of place with brilliant effect. Highly recommended.   PY

Nada Awar Jarrar, Somewhere, Home, 2003

The rarely mentioned centrepiece to Somewhere, Home is the long and bloody civil war that tore Beirut apart from 1975 to 1990, because this novel lies outside the peripheries of the violence and looks at the displacement and continuity of the lives of several ordinary Lebanese women and their families as they are forced to relocate away from Beirut. This was a time when there were probably more Lebanese outside the country than in, so Nada Awar Jarrar obviously has plenty of source material for these invented histories that will probably resonate fairly accurately with the real lives of many exiled Lebanese.

The three stories here, set at different times around Beirut’s civil war, are about three individual women. The first is Maysa who, while expecting a child, relocates herself away from her husband to a large rambling house on the slopes of Mount Lebanon, before he eventually joins her. Then there is Aida who has long since left the country, choosing instead to live in the cultured capitals of Europe, and yet is haunted by the spirit of a murdered Palestinian refugee who finally draws her home after the war ends. Finally we have Salwa, elderly and bed-ridden in an Australian hospital, taken from her homeland when she was a young wife and mother, recalling her old life far from home as her descendants in the wider world move on with their lives with little connection to their ‘home’ country.

Somewhere, Home is often unashamedly sentimental and mostly family-oriented, but the stories are all sufficiently picaresque to beguile the reader into wishing to know more about the characters, context and setting than we are told. A sequel novel to these lives, whether about these particular people or others entirely, would probably also be worth reading, though the tone would probably be equally melancholy.   PY

•  Somewhere, Home won the Best First Book Award for Southeast Asia and the South Pacific in 2004.

Javier Cercas, Soldiers of Salamis, 2001

A most unusually constructed novel, one of those in which every detail purports to be fact – something that did not prevent Soldiers of Salamis from winning the 2004 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Soldiers of Salamis is centred around the story of what happened one fateful day near the end of the Spanish Civil War, a day in which fascist writer and poet Rafael Sánchez Mazas cheated death twice in one day, the first time by escaping from a firing squad, the second by a soldier who hunts him down, looks him in the eye, and then inexplicably just walks away. In researching the life of Sánchez Mazas, Cercas uncovers a man whose disproportionate influence on twentieth century Spanish history far outstretched his literary abilities or political ambition, revealing him to be little more than a persuasive protofascist and coward. But who was the unknown man on which this story hinges, the executioner who didn’t pull the trigger? And might he still be alive?

Javier Cercas embeds Sánchez Mazas’s story in between two episodes of his own life, first as he decides this is a story worth writing and later as he realises the story is incomplete without looking further into the identity of the unknown soldier. While the book moves along at a steady enough pace for the first two parts, the third part – in which Cercas believes, sixty years after the event, that he has actually tracked down the mysterious man – simply soars, and the story widens out (with the help of a memorable appearance by Roberto Bolaño) to illustrate how much of history has often turned on the actions of forgotten, but extraordinary, people. Soldiers of Salamis only avoids being historical revisionism by virtue of the fact that Sánchez Mazas’s reputation has previously relied on little more than myth and received opinion, and Cercas convinces you that even if this story probably may not be true down to the very last detail, he thoroughly deserves the artistic licence in the telling of an extraordinary history. Highly recommended.   PY

•  Soldiers of Salamis won the 2004 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

Edeet Ravel, Ten Thousand Lovers, 2003

A book that draws you in, conceivably because of the central story of a curiously unusual relationship between a pacifist Israeli student and an Israeli army interrogator of Palestinian detainees, therefore the divide to be crossed here is not racial but one defined by tolerance for political violence. Despite its 1970s setting this is contemporary left-wing Israeli fiction, anti-occupation of the Territories, and clearly informed by Edeet Ravel’s own experiences: this could conceivably be autobiography, so naturally does the dialogue flow and the situations resonate with their surroundings. Ten Thousand Lovers is less politically defined than I expected, but none the worse for that; the political dimensions take a long time to come to the fore and are felt mostly as an undercurrent beneath the surface layers, playing a necessary second fiddle to the developing relationship of Lily and Ami. The final explanation of the book’s title and also its political resonance is a shining moment, finally defining the enigmatic character of the interrogator Ami and giving the book some subtle pacifist credentials. Altogether a good read, though necessarily sentimental in parts.   PY

Jennifer Clement, A True Story Based on Lies, 2001

This book is not as difficult to pin down as its title suggests, so simple is its structure of dual narratives and yet so beguiling and engrossing is the nature of the poetic language Clement uses. A True Story Based on Lies explores the consequences of a brief sexual relationship between Leonora, a fifteen year-old native servant in a wealthy modern household in Mexico City, and Mr. O’Conner, her master. But when a child is born from this union she is raised as an adopted daughter of the house, while Leonora is expected to abandon any hope of true motherhood and merely remain the servant to the manipulations of Mrs. O’Conner, all pointing to one, possibly inevitable and tragic, conclusion.

Leonora is an innocent victim of adult games several times over, but this is not a mysogynist piece of fiction, indeed all the women of the house maintain this deception not only for the sake of their masters’ saving face, but because the alternative is Leonora returning to poverty and her child begging on the streets. The narratives contain plenty of native Indian ‘knowledge’ and other quirky strangeness, plus the right amount of pathos that imbues the Mexican servants of the house with as much dignity as innocence. Further, it describes a situation that must be common the whole world over, not just to Latin America. Certainly one of the best – and in the story’s very clever and economical telling, most original – books I’ve read this year.   PY

Chingiz Aïtmatov, Jamilia, 1957

The French poet Louis Aragon described Jamilia as the world’s most beautiful love story. Small and perfectly formed it most certainly is, a sensitively told drama played out on the steppes of Kyrgyzstan and related by the teenage friend of the spirited Jamilia, whose soldier husband is hospitalised while fighting on the front. But when another crippled, silent and shell-shocked soldier returns to their village, Jamilia finds her affections are being slowly and unexpectedly pulled in a different direction. There’s an attractive, can-do decisiveness to Jamilia, and while the narrative places her firmly at the centre of her story it’s the emotional development of the narrator that has a more interesting aspect. Recommended.   PY

•  Aïtmatov won the 1963 Lenin Prize.