Hikaru Okuizumi, The Stones Cry Out, 1993

Tsuyoshi Manase is a haunted World War Two veteran who received his first lesson in geology from a dying Japanese soldier in a cave in the Philippines. After the war ends he indulges his passion for collecting stones, runs a small bookstore, marries unhappily and fathers two sons, but how he struggles with his memories of the war ends up shaping the present and the tragic destiny of his family. This was Okuizumi’s first novel to be translated into English. It’s delicate and sorrowful with elements of strangeness, particularly in how Manase’s memories, dreams and reality all blur in such a way that he never quite gets a grip on his life as his family falls apart. Okuizumi writes elegantly and he’s clearly meditated on the story he’s telling, although he requires a bit of patience from the reader as he ties up Manase’s inner story with his family life and the world beyond. A quietly powerful book.  PY

•  The Stones Cry Out won Japan’s Akutagawa Prize in 1994.

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Atiq Rahimi, A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear, 2002

Rahimi’s first novel Earth and Ashes was impressive enough to actually alter the course of my reading and look much more at fiction from the point of view of those affected by war. Now with A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear Rahimi revisits the same period – the 1970s Russian invasion of Afghanistan – but the result is far less direct or, for that matter, clear. Farhad, a Kabul student, has been badly beaten by occupying Soviet soldiers, and he is taken in by an unknown Afghan woman and her son, who strangely refers to him as ‘father’. But her act of kindness subjects both of them, and their families, to rules of honour as rigid and unbreakable as the curfew imposed by the communist invaders. For his second outing Rahimi has chosen to write in a prose that is often as deliberately obfuscating as it is endlessly digressive – the narrative jumps back and forth in time, mostly while the narrator spends a great deal of effort trying to understand (or failing that, imagine) the circumstances of those around him, as if his own situation wasn’t bad enough and his appetite for personal disaster has been left unsated. His own survival seems less important than it ought to be for a man in his position, and this is the most unconvincing aspect of the story. The half-awake disorientation that fills the first fifty pages could have been condensed into twenty, there is a most excellently written chapter at a pivotal moment halfway through, but the closing pages feel like the threads of a once-strong rope unravelling. The after-effect is that of a clearly imagined story blurred by too many layers of meaning added after possibly too many rewrites; Rahimi clearly knows what he means to say, but this over-reliance on overcooked prose means his story falls too far short of what may once have been a worthwhile and much better communicated idea.  PY

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Philippe Grimbert, Secret, 2004

An unhealthy and introverted boy in post-war Paris imagines he has a rival elder brother, as strong and statuesque as his health-obsessed parents, but he soon learns about a real brother, no longer alive, that his parents have kept secret from him. This feels like a very private memoir, firstly because it’s filled with such personal and lifelong tragedy for all the characters, and secondly because the protagonist shares not only the surname of the author but also, as an adult, the same profession in psychoanalysis. These are just a couple of the crossover points that give away Secret as an ‘autofiction’, that identifiably French genre, and Grimbert also seems to be asking the reader if the relationship between fact and fiction is more like that of rivals, or long-lost brothers? He seems to be trying to reunite the two, and is deft at manipulating the reader to see the novel this way at the same time as telling a wrenching story, with its autobiographical tone making it insightful, compassionate and also very saddening. Secret was also made into a film in 2007.  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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Italo Calvino, The Path to the Spiders’ Nests, 1947

Throughout his career Calvino had a very ambivalent relationship with this, his first novel, and even when not quite disowning it he was more than happy to point out its various faults and explain just how and why they came about. Written when he was twenty-four after Calvino had lived through some of the kinds of events he describes, and despite clearly trying not to be this is still a very naïve coming-of-age novel. Set in a town on the Ligurian coast at the tail end of the Second World War that is overrun with both the Germans and the Blackshirt fascist paramilitary, a young cobbler’s apprentice hangs out with adults in the local bar, playing their dangerous adult games and, after stealing a German soldier’s pistol, later plays at being a partisan revolutionary. It really doesn’t go any further than this (apart from the awkwardly polemical ninth chapter that really does stick out like a sore thumb) having been specifically plotted and themed to tick all the boxes of the recently formed Italian ‘neo-realist’ school, its aim seemed to be more to preach to the converted (it sold very well on first publication) and nail Calvino’s communist-leaning politics to the mast, rather than tell a good story. Disappointing, but clearly the best place to start when understanding the transformations of Calvino’s later career.  PY

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Joseph Roth, The Spider’s Web, 1923

Roth’s debut novel paints a disturbing picture of post-World War 1 Germany, and shows how the seeds of its unfinished war with itself fractured the country still further with the conspiracies of the radical right undermining the Weimar Republic. The writing is often urgent and relentlessly assertive, but with it you get the inside track on what drives Roth’s cunning, duplicitous and feral characters to survive in a dangerous time of national schism. Also worth remembering is that it was written long before the rise of Hitler and National Socialism, which makes the conclusion all the more prophetic and chilling. Excellent.  PY

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Stefan Zweig, Journey into the Past, 1976

Zweig and his wife both committed suicide in Brazil in 1942, probably in despair at what was happening in Europe as Zweig was a lifelong pacifist. Being his long-lost final novella this was first published in Germany in 1976; he certainly took his time writing it, beginning in 1924 and probably finishing sometime in the 1930s. It concerns the reunion of two lovers whose early illicit relationship was interrupted by the First World War, their exploration of whether memories of their relationship actually match the reality, and their questioning of if they can pick up where they left off. The reader will, inevitably, notice a specific and fundamental detail that is missing, but this absence actually gives an indication of how Zweig was a cut above the rest and a re-read for more subtext is worthwhile. This is a microcosmic story of one man’s heart; on one level it could be easily dismissed as a minor love story but there’s far more going on here than is visible on the surface. This is something brief, but masterly.  PY

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Elina Hirvonen, When I Forgot, 2005

This debut quickly became the most internationally successful Finnish novel, to date. Anna, a Helsinki journalist, sits in a café piecing together the lives of her own family, shattered in a moment of domestic violence, and that of her American partner Ian, torn apart by his estranged father’s experience of the Vietnam War. Through these two central and well-drawn figures tensions radiate outwards in all directions with each character carrying their own burden of family history, particularly Anna’s own psychotic brother for whom mental suffering has become a fact of life, and Ian who lost his father to post-traumatic stress disorder and feels helpless in the face of his country revisiting its enormous mistakes upon another generation. Written in a taut style that jumps back and forth from the late 1960s to 9/11 to the Iraq War protests, this is a subtle and layered novel about the far-reaching effects of both small- and large-scale kinds of violence that never leave anyone untouched. Like entering someone else’s head for a day, it even has a happy ending of sorts and will be well worth a re-read. Rather unique.  PY

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Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl, 1989

The two linked stories included in The Shawl were not combined into a unitary edition until 1989, having both first appeared in The New Yorker earlier in the 1980s. The first story is ‘The Shawl’ which, in a mere two thousand highly succinct words, is calculated to deliver a short, sharp shock of the first order, describing the plight of Rosa Lublin, a Polish teenage mother and concentration camp inmate who witnesses the murder of her daughter Magda by a Nazi camp guard.

It might have been a self-contained if very bleak tale, had not Cynthia Ozick, a recognised American ‘lady of letters’, capped it with a more sympathetic but no less saddening portrait in the second story, ‘Rosa’. Now living in Miami, Florida, it is immediately clear Rosa lost more than her child that day fifty years before, there are aspects of herself that she has sadly also not been able to recover. With an internal life that is far richer than the actual life she lives out, Rosa writes letters to her late daughter, convincing herself that Magda has grown into a wise and worldly woman, while herself hiding this secret life from others by simply stating, more realistically, that thieves took her life. Like the shawl that once held Magda, memories of Magda herself seem to have become the shawl that Rosa uses to protect her permanently damaged psyche from the reality of a daughter and life stolen from her. There are tormented psychological depths here sketched out but to my mind not fully explored, instead going for a more distilled portrait of personal pain and inner despair, making it a book probably best approached with some trepidation.  PY

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Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World, 1986

In post-war Japan, the successful artist Masuji Ono was a man who once played a small part in the rise of Japanese militarism, but years later, with a more contrite political climate and a daughter looking for an approving husband, he believes that what the Japanese are referring to as ‘the past’ is now casting a shadow over the present. The pivotal events on which this book turns are small, but in those microcosms the receding background of the damaged psyche of an entire nation becomes apparent. Plotwise there is little more to this story, but each page reads like an incremental tightening of the noose as Ono, a rather vain but upright man, believes he must head off the consequences of his past actions as his daughter’s marriage prospects become paramount. With some marvellous and sensitive conversational sequences, this is a masterfully delicate and closely observed book. Recommended.   PY

•  An Artist of the Floating World was shortlisted for the 1986 Booker Prize, and won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award for the same year.

Julie Otsuka, When the Emperor was Divine, 2002

Many present day Japanese American families still feel stigmatised and dishonoured by Japan’s attack on their adopted country, and while it may not be Julie Otsuka’s intention to attempt to heal those wounds her clear target instead is the less-than-memorable experience of Japanese immigrants during World War 2, interned in desert camps by a process which included separation of families, with their family names deliberately, and shamefully, being replaced by numbers.

When the Emperor was Divine is fiction but based on Otsuka’s own family history. The focus of the book is the forced displacement from their California home of a Japanese mother, daughter and son, and their dislocated, developing triangular relationship. The story is sparingly told from all their points of view but the family’s own focus is clearly their absent father, previously arrested on no charge and interned elsewhere. Years of isolation roll by with life outside the camp mostly a mystery; telling moments accumulate and are recorded, and with the war over the family is finally reunited in bitterness against those who imprisoned them.

What this book benefits from most is an understated style which fits well with the theme of looking back on two different situations both in their own way far from ideal: this was a time before America could admit its treatment of their innocent Japanese population was excessively harsh, just as it was also a time before Japanese treatment of their PoWs came to light and Emperor Hirohito was forced to admit that he was, after all, a mere mortal. Otsuka’s lack of sentimentality about these unfortunate pasts gives this book much character in its evident restraint, and is a clear window into an unjustifiably forgotten episode in America’s wartime history and the immigrant Japanese experience of it.   PY

Rachel Seiffert, The Dark Room, 2001

Comprised of three novella-length tales that focus on individual German experiences of the Second World War, there is little in any of these stories that could be considered uplifting, though one emerges from the other end feeling considerable sympathy towards the modern German mindset as it still comes to terms with the evils of the Final Solution that were hidden from many ordinary Germans living under the Third Reich.

The first tale is of Helmut, born physically disabled before the war but who uses his talent for photography to express and record his enthusiasm for German expansion, though while Berlin empties itself of people and falls under Allied bombing he never turns his keen eye inwards to see what has befallen the German people from within. The second tale is of Lore, a young German girl who, at the end of hostilities and the occupation of Germany by the British, American and Russian forces, is forced to guide her starving brothers and sisters on foot across a bleak and devastated Germany while their Nazi parents are seized by the Allies.

While these first two tales avoid the kind of truth only provided by hindsight and are told much as they would have been experienced, the third is of a different mettle, about the present-day search of Micha, a German teacher, obsessed with learning the truth about his much-loved grandfather’s activities while serving with the Waffen SS in Belorussia. While he himself experiences the onset of fatherhood with his Turkish girlfriend and learns what it is to uncover uncomfortable family truths that may best be left forgotten, this is the kind of tale which must have much resonance with the kind of experiences of today’s young Germans researching their family histories. It is an excellent tale, and makes this entire 2001 Booker Prize-shortlisted novel something of a dark and educational pleasure in itself.   PY

Gil Courtemanche, A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali, 2000

UN representative Ahmedou Ould Abdullah once famously remarked about Burundi, “What this country really needs is a psychiatrist.” This comment could equally have applied to Rwanda, the only difference between the related mass-killings being the tribal origins of each country's population majority. After reading A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali it’s readily apparent that psychiatry is as nothing compared to what Rwanda actually needed – intervention – and was summarily ignored by the international community in those horrific years of the mid-1990s. One naturally approaches a book like this with some trepidation, though the path is smoothed by the fact that as the tension inevitably builds so does another thread, that of a highly unusual love story, without which the book would read as little more than another example of Western voyeurism of other people’s catastrophes. This is as much a tale of love and sex as it is of death.

Courtemanche, a French-Canadian journalist, thinly masquerades himself as the character Bernard Valcourt, a journalist who is in Rwanda to set up a TV station. He lives in Kigali's Hôtel des Milles-Collines, a grand affair which similarly attracts both Rwandan high- and low-life, and whose pool serves as a talking shop for the Hutu atrocities which everyone knows are just around the corner but no one has any idea how to prevent. Pivotal to the tale is the story of Gentille, a Hutu hotel worker who appears Tutsi in every way, but despite the ‘proof’ of her identity card she is marked for death because of her elegant Tutsi appearance. It is Valcourt’s fate to fall in love with her. This is where the historical roots of the violence are revealed as the cause for the genocide itself, with Hutu animosity to the ruling Tutsi minority validated by outdated but still prevalent colonial attitudes which defined the country’s social strata along racist lines, the lighter skinned and more ‘refined’ Tutsis being considered by Belgian colonists to be superior to the darker Hutus.

Rwanda was already an Aids-ravaged country before this other kind of self-inflicted hell-on-earth descended upon it; Rwandans are depicted as living with such rich intensity that impulsive gratification was always going to win out over long-term social planning. Rwandans are as susceptible to the powerful distractions of sex, status and political vengeance as everyone else, but sex is often the strongest driving force behind people’s actions throughout the book: it provides the reasons, the excuses and the salvation for many of the book’s real-life characters. This includes one totally bizarre death-bed scene which, like almost every other event related, Courtemanche claims to have actually happened, a claim it is often hard to doubt.

There is also plenty of j’accuse here, with much of it directed right back at the author; most of the book’s heroes and villains real identities are kept, names are named and mostly shamed and Courtemanche, in the guise of Valcourt, examines closely his own failings, his own culturally-ingrained journalistic detachment, his inability to react to the horrors until it is too late. In retrospect Courtemanche is clearly uncomfortable about it, because what does emerge is the truth of how meaningless a racial identity becomes in the hands of those eager to take it away from you in the bloodiest way possible, and he often questions how friends could still be alive if he had acted with more courage. Courtemanche/Valcourt’s story involves the reader morally, though the moral stance a Western reader is invited to take is also cleanly stripped down and exposed as the complacency it really is. Instead, Courtemanche wants you feel as if you have lived through these events yourself, making this book the necessary catharsis it obviously was for him, and one which will also negate any uncomfortable feeling of voyeurism. Even his cynicism is often an intelligent cut above the rest. Highly recommended.   PY

•  A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali was a finalist for the 2003 Governor General’s Literary Award.

Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, 1959

Had Borowski not commited suicide at the age of twenty-nine it is thought he would have gone on to become one of Poland’s truly great writers. The defining two years of his life were spent in Auschwitz-Birkenau between 1943 and 1945, a period which undoubtedly coloured his perception of humanity for his remaining six years and which found an outlet in the short amount of Holocaust fiction which he produced, gathered here in this short, valuable collection. These are tales based on true happenings in Auschwitz but told with a storytelling licence that makes no bid for literary greatness or emotive overkill, yet it is just this act of ‘telling it like it is’ that gives This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen its impact.

The distinguishing thing about concentration camp life, as Borowski tells it, is that there is no clearly defined line between victims and perpetrators. Camp inmates act with frequent self-interested cruelty to each other, something that Borowski resigned himself to accepting is a trait of anyone whose back is against the wall and whose life is under threat; the Nazis, however, do reserve both the more gratuitous and ‘professional’ acts of inhumanity for themselves and appear to relish in them, there being little that is identifiably human about them, as we encounter them here. This short book seems to offer a microcosm of one extreme of human experience that does benefit from some occasional optimistic colouring and black humour, though amongst the almost everyday telling there are some particularly memorable and shocking sequences, delivered deadpan and with surprisingly little anger or cynicism. This collection deserves its ‘classic’ status.   PY

Shan Sa, The Girl Who Played Go, 2001

Set in 1930s Manchuria in a town that lies in the path of the advancing Japanese army, a young girl who is unusually adept at the game of Go finds herself falling into the circle of some young Chinese revolutionaries determined to repel their country’s Japanese invaders. Told as both her own first-person story and that of one of the invading Japanese soldiers, the two opposing viewpoints eventually meet over a long and protracted game of Go after he is asked to disguise himself as Chinese and look for signs of insurrection in the town. Both characters are less wise than they think they are, she in her naïvety about love and he in his belief in the correctness of the Japanese invasion when comparing his rigid culture to that of the more easy-going Chinese. Go is a boardgame about defending and claiming territory from your opponent, so while their game mirrors the invasion that is defining both their lives this rather obvious metaphor fortunately never becomes too overbearing.

Chinese author Shan Sa has already won several French and Japanese literary awards for her two previous novels, and she is certainly able to build a convincing backdrop for her story’s theme and subtext. It has other important subtleties, and is also insightful into both Chinese and Japanese opinions of each other in that particular era. This novel ultimately takes on the dimensions of a love story between the two protagonists – albeit a rather curious and tragic one – and while it draws you along very nicely, nevertheless the odd and ultimately illogical (though probably inevitable) ending will very likely have some more literary types raising an eyebrow or two.   PY

•  The Girl Who Played Go won the 2001 Prix Goncourt des Lycéens and the 2004 Kiriyama Prize for fiction.

Dennis Bock, The Ash Garden, 2001

The Ash Garden is impressive though, it’s fair to say, challenging and certainly not straightforward. It explores a question often posited and explored: what happens when a Hiroshima survivor comes face to face with one of the ‘perpetrators’ of the Bomb? In that respect The Ash Garden is rooted very much in reality, and takes some necessary liberties with actual events, such as the meetings on US television that first explored this idea, and which are revisited in a slightly fictionalised version for this book (John Hersey’s Hiroshima provides the factual version).

There is a twist ahead, however, and one that is so fundamental and unexpected that it might not please every reader – it almost shook the story apart for me, but what held it together was the subsequent and important changes the author makes to the relationships between the three main characters. If that makes the characters sound contrived, that’s because they possibly are, though Bock never loses sight of the inescapable history that drives the people he’s writing about, or their fundamental essence. By the end of the story they feel real enough, though I still can’t decide if the twist to their relationship is entirely justified or necessary. The reader just has to hang on and see where it ends up, though it’s certainly a journey worth taking.   PY

•  The Ash Garden was shortlisted for both the 2001 Kiriyama Prize for fiction and the 2003 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

Jens Christian Grøndahl, Virginia, 2000

In occupied Denmark in 1942 a downed English RAF pilot is hiding from the Germans on a remote beach, and Virginia, a teenage girl, is secretly looking after him. But the narrator, at the time a smitten and slightly jealous teenage boy, betrays the pilot in a moment that will haunt him and the girl for the rest of their lives, right up to the present day. This excellent story is about the often dangerous intricacies of negotiated relationships, either long-standing or fleeting. The writing is full of lucidity and clarity, great characterisation and a superb ending: whether capturing early innocence or the weary maturity of advanced years, It’s hardly surprising that Grøndahl, one of Europe’s most widely-read authors, somehow nails it perfectly.   PY

Martin Malone, The Broken Cedar, 2003

Khalil is not a bloodthirsty extremist, he’s a dying old man from South Lebanon with a guilty conscience, in his younger days having taken part in the hanging of an Irish UN peacekeeper. Now many years later, the Irishman’s son arrives to bring the body home, and calls on Khalil to help find the grave. One of those books you have to stick with as it takes plenty of time to get going, but Malone takes you ultimately to where you didn’t expect the heart of the matter to be. A very good character portrait of the dying Khalil, and also very believable in its portrayal of how the Lebanese are forced daily to deal with the legacy of their own civil war. A knowing and quietly impressive book.   PY

Peter Dimock, A Short Rhetoric for Leaving the Family, 1998

A man writes a long letter to two boys, both relatives, outlining to them the rules of effective rhetorical speech. He has a purpose: to expose his father’s shame as an architect of America’s role in the Vietnam War, and to arm them in similarly turning against the American policy of ‘continual reprisal’ in its foreign affairs – hence A Short Rhetoric will be better understood by those who already see American foreign policy as being one of the great evils of today’s world. The language is deliberately obtuse and idiosyncratic, and I would defy anyone other than the most hardened practitioners of political spin to tease out its intricacies – it’s only the very useful cover blurb that can help put this entirely singular novel into understandable context for the rest of us. It gets under your skin eventually and it will remain there, but A Short Rhetoric is a real slow burner that demands both patience and thought, its real purpose being to challenge and educate rather than entertain. A short, sharp shock, and an unforgettable experience.   PY

Andreï Makine, A Life’s Music, 2001

Of the twenty cover quotes used to promote this book possibly the most apt is “as assured as a self-contained Chopin nocturne”, and a particularly sad one at that: Makine is Russian but writes in French, something that somehow heightens the sense of detachment for this tale of a promising life sent completely off-track. In a snowbound railway station in the present-day, far Siberian east, a stranded passenger comes across an old man playing the piano. He is Alexeï Berg, and we learn that he was once a young concert pianist who had grown up in pre-war Stalinist Moscow at a time when the Russian intelligentsia were being ‘disappeared’. He gets secret word that he is next in line for the re-education camps, and before his first solo concert he is forced to disappear himself, away from his pursuers and instead into the arms of the Russian military as it repels the German invasion before returning to the old totalitarianism which Berg, once again, falls foul of.

Infusing the book from start to finish is Makine’s adopted concept of homo sovieticus, encapsulating the kind of stoic and peculiarly Russian patience that is required to deal with life’s endless difficulties. A Life’s Music pushes the reader in different and unexpected directions that may seem too sudden when told in such a short space as a hundred pages, but it is the right length because too much sentimentality would, otherwise, dilute its stunningly good ending.   PY