Piercing

January 18, 2026
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Ryu Murakimi’s Piercing was originally published in 1994 and became the second of his novels to be translated into English (by Ralph McCarthy) in 2007. A dark thriller of dysfunctional love and damaged individuals, it begins with new father Kawashima Masayuki watching over his baby as she sleeps. This tender scene takes an unexpected turn when he takes an ice pick from his pocket and lifts the baby’s blanket to expose her neck and chest:

“Gripping the ice pick lightly to minimise the trembling, he placed the point of it next to the baby’s cheek.”

Kawashima’s compulsion lies in his past, firstly in an abusive childhood which he has confessed to his wife, Yoko, where his mother regularly beat him:

“What bothered me most, though, was that I was the only one she hit. She never laid a finger on my baby brother.”

What Yoko does not know is that this led to a relationship with an older woman when Kawashima was seventeen. Kawashima lives with the woman, a stripper in her thirties, who often brings men back to the apartment and then complains when he tolerates this – and when he doesn’t:

“What a hateful bitch, Kawashima used to think – how does a person ever get to be this despicable? He was sure he was the only one in the world who could ever care about her.”

One particularly ferocious argument ends with Kawashima deliberately placing his hand in boiling water and then stabbing the woman with an ice pick when she is in the shower. His memory of the incident is vague after that point, though he knows the woman survived. The last thing he remembers is the ice pick falling under the bathtub and he imagines it is still there “and he somehow felt the day would come when he’d go back there to see.” Perhaps this sense that the incident remains ‘unfinished’ leads to his present compulsion which he dismisses as “just a remnant of those times, just an echo from the past.” Despite this he decides:

“There’s only one way to overcome the fear: you’ve got to stab someone else with an ice pick.”

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If the novel was only about Kawashima’s plan to lure a prostitute to a hotel room and kill her it would make for a tense if conventional thriller, but Murakami moves the narrative perspective to that of the prostitute before she arrives. Sanada Chiaki is a young woman with her own problems. She is worried that her sex drive had disappeared (“she couldn’t detect so much as zero point one milligram of sexual desire anywhere in her body”) which scares her as “it had always been the first stage of that awful cycle…

“The cycle of terror that took hold with the sudden realisation that she alone was to blame for all the bad things happening around her.”

The single nipple that she has pierced herself (presumably a more transgressive action in 1990s Japan than now) thrills her as a symbol of being able to “choose your own pain” – now she is worried “it would be choosing her.”

Like Kawashima, Chiaki was abused as a child – in her case, sexually abused by her father. She is similarly haunted by the past:

“When these sleeping memories are awakened, they begin to squirm and then to swim, slowly at first, but gradually faster, up to the surface. And once they get there, your senses shut down.”

Both Chiaki and Kawashima disassociate to survive. Chiaki imagines she is watching herself have sex:

“At first I used to ask her not to look at me like that, but all she would do is snicker, so I stopped. Besides, I was afraid that if I talked to her too much, I might divide into two separate people.”

When Kawashima was being beaten by his mother as a child he also separated into two:

“As a boy, he’d escaped the pain and terror of his mother’s beatings by concentrating on the thought that the one who was being hit wasn’t really him.”

The two are more alike than they realise but also have a very confused relationship with reality. The novel could actually be seen as a twisted romance where the suitability of the couple is more apparent to the reader than to the characters, and they meanwhile seem intent on placing barriers (for example, murder) between them. As the novel progresses, the narrative itself begins to move freely between the characters, outlining a series of misunderstandings.

Piercing certainly has the sex and violence one is led to expect from Ryu Murakami, but beneath its pulpy exterior it reflects on the legacy of abuse. Not only is Kawashima fully developed as character, but so is his ‘victim’, Chiaki. In its crazed and chaotic denouement, there is also something quite touching.

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The Suicides

January 14, 2026
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As translator Esther Allen points out in her afterword, it was fellow novelist Juan Jose Saer who first referred to Antonio di Benedetto’s novels Zama, The Silentiary and The Suicides as a “Trilogy of Expectation.” Now, almost ten years after the first, the third and final novel has appeared in her translation. Unlike the previous novels – Zama is set at the end of the 18th century and The Silentiary shortly after World War Two – The Suicides feels contemporary with its original publication in 1969. Its nameless narrator, a journalist, also feels closer to Benedetto himself, whose father died when he was eleven, possibly by his own hand. The novel begins:

“My father took his life on a Friday afternoon.

He was thirty-three.

I’ll be thirty-three the last Friday of next month.”

And so the story takes on an urgency that goes beyond the journalist’s deadline when the narrator is asked to investigate a photograph of two suicides:

“There’s terror in their eye. But their mouths are grimacing in sombre pleasure.”

Their expression echoes the contradictions of the narrator. As he explores death, his mind frequently strays to sex – “Here, along the sidewalk, comes a blouse with a lot going on inside,” he thinks as he leaves the office. A girlfriend, Julia, does not prevent him looking for other sexual encounters, or even relationships, symbolic of a more general sense of dissatisfaction with his life. (His relationship with Julia is perhaps best summed up when he says, “she accedes to my desires, as docile as ever”). He is paired with a photographer, Marcela, whom he freely admits to disliking, yet determinedly attempts to discover if she is single. There is also a dichotomy between his ability to look clearly at the darker side of life and his need for escape, which often takes the form of a science fiction film at the cinema.

The initial photograph leads to a wider investigation into suicide for a series of articles which are apparently never written. A key component of the novel is the interpolation of facts on the subject provided by Bibi, the agency translator. The narrator and Marcela visit the scene of a double suicide, two boys, and speak to the father, though the suggestion of a relationship (“Why’d they do it? Things weren’t working out between them?”) is ignored by the police officer. The idea of a suicide pact will provide the novel with its conclusion.

Though the article the narrator is writing has a nominal deadline, the novel moves inward rather than forward as his research widens, and the urgency seems to come from his fear that he, too, is a suicide. He remembers walking with his grandfather:

“Then he would proclaim in his Italian dialect that I understood perfectly, ‘Twelve – twelve suicides there have been among us.”

Julia, too, is sucked into his obsession with death when she asks her class to write on the topic – an assignment which the principal and parents regard with distaste. The incident both demonstrates the narrator’s egotism (he has little thought for the problems he has caused her – “I tell myself that in the end, it’s all so much theatre”) and society’s reluctance to face the inevitable. As the novel progresses the proposed series of articles on suicide increasingly resembles the narrator’s life, When the editor laments the lack of publication possibilities (“It won’t be any use, there are no buyers…”):

“I ask whether the series is cancelled. He says not yet.”

The novel is full of striking incident – a woman who claims to hear voices, a body exhumed with a missing hand – but it is the narrator’s own journey which holds the reader’s real attention, told in a tone that seeks the cynicism of the hardboiled detective but is secretly too earnest for that role. Whether it is a true trilogy or not, the publication of all three novels in English is to be celebrated.

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Vanishing World

January 7, 2026
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Sayaka Murata’s breakthrough novel in English, Convenience Store Woman, was actually her tenth book in Japanese, and now we have the novel she released before it, translated as Vanishing World by Ginny Tapley Takemori, who has translated all of her work so far. As we now know from Earthlings and the short story collection Life Ceremony, Convenience Store Woman is a tamer exploration of the themes which reoccur in Murata’s work. Vanishing World once again concerns an outsider, Amane, but one who exists in a very different society, a version of the future where attitudes towards marriage, family and sexual desire have undertaken a dramatic transformation. In a brief prelude, which will reappear chronologically later, we are introduced to the twenty-year-old Amane as “the last human left having sex,” a comment that will only be fully explained once we come to terms with the world Murata is presenting to us, one where sexual relief is divorced from love, and marriage is steadfastly asexual with everyone fitted with a contraceptive device when they become sexually mature.

When Amane is a young child and her mother tells her, “you too will marry the man you love and have his baby,” she does not realise that this represents an eccentric, even perverted, view of marriage in contemporary society:

“I was in a sex education class in the fourth year of school when I discovered that I had been conceived by an abnormal method.”

No longer are married couples expected to be sexually attracted to each other, and conception is conducted artificially. Individuals still fall in love, but generally with imaginary characters:

“When you and a friend were both in love with the same character, it brought you closer together.”

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Murata is, of course, describing a common experience of adolescence, where crushes develop on characters who are, or may as well be, imaginary. In Amane’s world, however, it is not expected that you will grow out of this, and even if later you take a real person as a ‘lover’, it would be unusual to actually make love to them. What marks Amane as an outsider is her sexual desire, which she experiences with her first imaginary love, Lapis:

“I shook my stiffened legs and had the sensation that all the blood in my body was fizzing and popping, then all the strength drained out of me.”

Murata revels in such unusual descriptions as it is quite common for her characters not to know what they are experiencing. She is also adept at world building, though this often involves an element of repetition. Amane finds a boy, Mizuuchi, who is also in love with Lapis and convinces him to have sex with her:

“By trial and error, after numerous attempts, Mizuuchi finally managed to get his part into my body.”

This will not be the only time in the novel she has to persuade a man to have sex with her, which they will only do to please her, generally finding the act distasteful. Most people share the view of her friend, Juri:

“These days you don’t have to fall in love with someone to breed… so all sorts of anime characters have been created for our sexual gratification. They’re just consumables to help us process our desire. It won’t be long before nobody bothers to have sex anymore.”

Society is changing even during Amane’s lifetime. Just as the novel seems caught in a loop of Amane’s need for physical connection setting her at odds with the world she is living in “I do really love you, Amane,” her latest lover tells her, “but I just can’t handle sex.”), she decides to move with her husband to an experimental city where all children are parented by all adults:

“In this city everyone was expected to live alone. The concepts of couples and families were considered disruptive…”

One reason they move there is that it allows her husband to also have the opportunity to give birth using an artificial womb, but Amane is determined that the sperm and egg used will be theirs and reacts angrily when he says “and all these children are mine”:

“What are you talking about? Our child hasn’t been born yet, has it?”

She continues as an outsider in a society that wishes to eliminate the individual and prizes conformity above all. Vanishing World, like many dystopias, becomes more plausible the longer you spend there. It is a world where human emotion is written out and replaced by rational design, where science is utilised to create homogeneity. Murata, as always, is on the side of difference, continuing to provoke and shock us out of complacency.

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The Best of Elizabeth Taylor

January 3, 2026

At the beginning of 2024, having spent a pleasant three years reading the novels of Muriel Spark in chronological order (you can read my Best of Muriel Spark here), I decided to do the same with (much loved but never quite as respected as she should be) English writer Elizabeth Taylor. Taylor was first published earlier than Spark, in 1945 with At Mrs Lippincote’s, and her final novel, Blaming, appeared posthumously in 1976. She wrote only twelve novels (compared to Spark’s twenty-two) but here are five of my favourites.

Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont

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Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont remains Taylor’s most famous, and for many her finest, novel so rather than create artificial suspense through order of publication (this was her final novel to appear while she was alive), let its inclusion be immediately revealed. Set in a hotel (the Claremont) which has become a refuge for those find themselves old and alone in steadily reducing circumstances, it performs a wonderful balancing act. Its characters are privileged but constantly worry about money; there is a longing for Britain’s lost past but also an attachment to youth in the form of the penniless writer, Ludo; there is a clinging on to life as death approaches; and, above all, a constant wavering between comedy and tragedy. It is this that makes the novel a masterpiece as elements of farce brush shoulders with moments of real poignancy and the sometimes caricaturish characters suddenly live and breath in three dimensions. If you are only going to read one of Taylor’s novels, read this one.

A View of the Harbour

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A View of the Harbour, published in 1947, is a novel of loneliness and lost dreams. Most characters live in isolation like Mrs Bracey, unable to leave her house and left to gaze out of the window (at the harbour), existing on the crumbs of conversation her daughter, Iris, deigns to give her. Iris, meanwhile, dreams of a better life but leaves that possibility to chance. The single long-lasting friendship between Tory and Beth is rather undermined by the fact that Tory is sleeping with Beth’s husband, a response to her own loneliness. The widowed Lily Wilson also makes compromises to avoid feeling alone. Ony Beth offers a sense of purpose, if not happiness, as she types out her latest novel, though her writing is as much a burden as a joy. The general air of desperation is leavened by Taylor’s wit, but this is a novel which looks at humanity with a rather jaundiced eye. Its final lines, where a sailor looks from the harbour to the town thinking “nothing has changed” reveals that Taylor is well aware the most important changes happen on the inside.

Angel

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Angel, published in 1957, is probably Taylor’s funniest novel. Unlike Taylor’s other novels, its central character, the eponymous novelist Angel Deverall (her surname’s likeness to ‘devil’ clearly the first joke) is not so much flawed as grotesque. Angel is a storyteller rather than a reader as child, and is appalled to discover that, for some, her storytelling is simply lying. Her determination to become a novelist originates from a desire to avoid the future her mother has planned out for her as a servant. Her natural arrogance is evident when she refuses to make any changes to her first novel which, unforeseen by anyone but her, becomes a remarkable success. Soon she is writing one novel a year and has the wealth she dreamed of, buying the house where she was once earmarked to be a maid (if she was lucky). As is generally the case with Taylor, behind the comic frontage lies the tragedy of a woman where the very qualities which lead to her success are also the cause of her downfall.

In a Summer Season

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In a Summer Season, originally published in 1961, is the most lovestruck of Taylor’s novels. At its centre is Kate Heron and her young (second) husband, Dermot, who is rather like an overgrown child, unable to make a success of anything and loving nothing more than a drink in the pub. Kate is not unaware of Dermot’s faults, but her love is charged with sexual passion – though the title suggests that this may not be enough in the long run. Kate’s grown-up children also experience love in the novel, in both cases without much reply. Louisa develops crush on the young curate, Father Blizzard, and Tom falls for the daughter of one of Kate’s friends with the equally unlikely name Araminta. It would be easy to make any of these lovestruck characters laughable, but Taylor is more generous than this, and even seems to have sympathy for Dermot’s general fecklessness. making In a Summer Season one of her sunniest books.

Hester Lilly

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Finally, rather than a fifth novel, a novella, Hester Lilly, from the collection of the same name published in 1954. The premise is straightforward: orphaned teenager Hester goes to stay with her cousin, Robert (a Headmaster) and his wife Muriel. Muriel seems to have misgivings about this even before she arrives, but is relived to see her dressed in a way that emphasises her youth and poverty rather than her beauty. Slowly, however, her jealousy grows, and it is, in fact, she who suggests to Hester that she must be in love with Richard which leads the girl to assume that is what she is feeling. Muriel realises, however, that any attempt to remove Hester from the household will make her look bad. While Taylor allows the reader insight into Muriel and Hester’s thoughts, she deliberately leaves Richard’s feelings opaque, placing us in the same position as the two women. Without the need for the larger cast of a novel, this showcases Taylor’s skills on a smaller stage.

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Books of the Year 2025 Part 2

December 27, 2025

Badenheim 1939 by Aharon Appelfeld

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Most of my favourite translated reads are new to English, but Aharon Appelfeld’s Badenheim 1939 first appeared in 1978 and was translated by David R Godine in 1980. Badenhiem is a fictional town in Austria with a largely Jewish population; over the course of the novel, its inhabitants are prepared for transportation to Eastern Europe by the ‘Sanitation Department’ in an allegory of Nazism. Appelfeld assembles an extensive cast who react in different ways to their impending doom, some remaining optimistic and unbelieving while others despair. Many have forgotten their Jewish heritage, or regard it of little significance. The novel works because we know how it will end – almost entirely as a result of the date in the title as Appelfeld deliberately eschews historical details. It goes without saying that the novel’s conclusion is almost unbearably sad.

On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle

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Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume, steadily being translated into English by Barbara J Haveland, seems likely to divide readers in the same way as Karl Knausgard’s My Struggle, though for different reasons. First of all, it requires us to accept the premise that its narrator, Tara, is stuck in a single day, and then to relive it with her over and over, the very reverse of what a narrative is supposed to do. It draws the reader in by starting on the 121st reiteration of that day allowing her to look both backwards and ahead. As a thought experiment it tells us about our relationship with time and also with others, Tara’s husband Thomas’ inability to experience what she is acting as an emphasis of the individuality we all struggle to escape. Whether to will be worth all seven volumes remains to be seen, but it certainly worth the commitment of one book.

Perspectives by Laurence Binet

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Laurent Binet’s fourth novel, Perspectives, is just as erudite and entertaining as the previous three. The novel is a murder mystery set at the intersection of art and politics in 16th century Florence told via a series of letters from a variety of correspondents (or perspectives). The victim is a painter, there are possible clues in the mural he is painting, and the motivation may lie in the appearance of Maria de’ Medici’s face on a nude Venus. Michelangelo and Vasari, among others, not only swap theories but get involved in the investigation. Binet balances the demands of the narrative and the epistolary style with skill navigating numerous twists and turns while still delivering a satisfying conclusion. Unlike Umberto Eco, you suspect Binet prioritises entertainment over philosophy, but this does not prevent his work from being the current standard for intellectual page-turners.

The Other Girl by Annie Ernaux

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The Other Girl was the book which followed The Years but has only now been translated into English by Alison L Strayer. Among Ernaux’s many short books, it is shorter, and also seems to lie outside her project of recording her own life being, as the title suggest, about someone else. The ‘other girl’ is her sister, Ginette, who died of diphtheria at the age of six before Annie was born and remains unmentioned by her parents. Only an overheard remark when Annie is ten reveals Ginette’s existence: “She died like a little saint…” her mother says, “she was nicer than the other one.” The ‘other one’ is, of course, Annie suggesting that the title has a double meaning, Ernaux’s difficult otherness a comparison with her sister’s frozen innocence. Much of the book is addressed to her sister, even as she questions her motivation for writing. Like much of Ernaux’s work, it is moving without ever being sentimental.

The Director by Daniel Kehlmann

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Daniel Kehlmann’s latest novel, The Director (translated by Ross Benjamin) must surely be in the running for the International Booker Prize in 2026. Set during the Second World War, it tells the story of real-life film director Georg Pabst who finds himself accidentally stranded in Nazi Austria as war is declared. ‘Red’ Pabst has little sympathy for the Nazi regime and must decide whether to take up their offer to make ‘non-political’ films in a novel that wrestles with the relationship between art and politics. While probing these deeper issues, Kehlmann gives us an eye-opening insight into how films were made at the time, introducing a number of drawn from life characters into the story. If it sometimes feels like there can be little new to say about Nazi Germany, Kehlmann disproves this with a novel that will entertain and horrify.

Money to Burn by Asta Olivia Nordenhof

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Asta Olivia Nordenhof’s Money to Burn (translated by Caroline Waight) is in some ways the antidote to On the Calculation of Volume despite being another projected seven volume series from Denmark. Whereas Balle focuses in – one narrator, one day – Nordenhof is widescreen. Yes, this is the story of dysfunctional couple Kurt and Maggie, but it also their lives beforehand, and, thanks to Kurt’s random investment, related to the fire of the Scandinavian Star which gives the series its title. It is also nakedly political (“Capitalism is a massacre”) and with a tendency to break the fourth wall (even more so in the second volume which begins with a long digression about how difficult it was to write). Money to Burn is more successful as a standalone novel and also seems to have quite different intentions as a series, but the excitement over the next volume is just as intense.

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Books of the Year 2025 Part 1

December 22, 2025

TonyInterrupter by Nicola Barker

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Nicolas Barker’s fourteenth novel (but her first since 2019) continues to give the impression that she writes exactly what she likes with little care for literary fashion – and, appropriately enough, it is a celebration of non-conformity which begins with the interruption of a jazz concert: “Is this honest? Are we all being honest here?” The interruption is filmed, as is the angry response of band member Sasha who labels the offender as a “small-town TonyInterrupter”, a sobriquet which soon becomes a viral hashtag. Art about authenticity has never been less serious since Wilde as the initial incident ricochets around various band and audience members in a prose style which is deliberately divergent to the point that even the author feels compelled to comment, “This is a dreadful waste of time. It’s silly.” Silly or not, Barker manages to make us care about her characters as we laugh at them.

The Lowlife by Alexander Baron

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Alexander Baron’s The Lowlife, originally published in 1963, would have claim to be the rediscovery of the year if not for the fact that it has been rediscovered (more than once) before.  No matter – it well deserves its latest round of enthusiastic readers. Grounded by its incredible sense of place – London, towards the end of the fifties – its irregular protagonist, Harryboy, is the kind of character who might carry any novel, a chancer intent on not taking his chances, averse to settling down or standing still, whose natural instinct to avoid entanglement is unwillingly undermined by a child, the son of new neighbours in the building where he stays. The parents could not be more ordinary, a lonely father and unaffectionate mother.  Apparently proud to be a lowlife, Harry regards himself as such not for his carefree lifestyle but because of a wartime regret he cannot forget. A novel which refuses to die because it feels so alive.

The Fate of Mary Rose by Caroline Blackwood

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Another rediscovered novel, though from the more recent 1981 (still over forty years ago!) is Caroline Blackwood’s The Fate of Mary Rose. Blackwood takes the trappings of a crime novel and twists it into something that is both difficult to look at yet impossible to take your eyes off. As is usually the case with this author, everyone is awful, from the narrator, Rowan, a historian with a predilection for using women, to his maniacally protective wife, Cressida, who, following a local murder, refuses to let her daughter (Mary Rose) out of her sight. Rather than her daughter’s safety, her obsession is with the murder itself as she insists Mary Rose memorises all the details and attends the funeral. Rowan meanwhile is aware of his wife’s deteriorating mental state but blind to any responsibility he might bear for it despite spending most of his time in London with his mistress. Most impressively, Blackwood manages a tour de force ending which will leave you gasping.

Dreaming of Dead People by Rosalind Belben

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Anything Blackwood can do, Rosalind Belben can do darker. Where we might think we hear the former cackling wickedly in the background, Belben’s laughter is a more uncomfortable experience. Dreaming of Dead People was published two years earlier than The Fate of Mary Rose, the last of four novels she published in the 1970s. Written in six sections (“I visualized the arrangement of these chapters to echo the compartments of a biography”) the  novel reflects on a life at the midway point touching on Belben’s childlessness and her relationship with animals through a character called Lavinia. Belben is what one might refer to as an acquired taste, a moving section relating her relationship with a particular dog sitting alongside an extended essay on masturbation with an electric toothbrush. If that is not variety enough, one chapter is interspersed with middle-English songs. Behind all this, however, is a desire for unflinching truth from a writer who does genuinely seem fearless.

The Story of the Stone by James Kelman

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James Kelman has the unusual distinction of being both a strong candidate for the UK’s greatest living writer and without a publisher in his own country. Luckily the small American publisher, PM Press, have stepped in, releasing a new novel, collections of essays and short stories, and a book of interviews in the last few years. This year saw the publication of The Story of the Stone which collects Kelman’s shortest stories, a genre he excels at. It contains 96 pieces ranging from four pages to less than a page (including perhaps his most famous short short story, ‘Acid’, which features as a footnote in Alasdair Gray’s Lanark). They demonstrate Kelman’s range of both style and subject matter for those who continue to think of him as a one-note writer. Anyone who appreciates the craft of writing should not be without this book, or, indeed, all of Kelman’s work.

From Scenes Like These by Gordon Williams

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From Scenes Like These is another novel to have been rediscovered more than once and bears the distinction of having been shortlisted for the first Booker Prize in 1969. Unfortunately, its author Gordon Williams refused to stick to literary fiction, cowriting the Hazell books with Terry Venables when both football and crime fiction were much less fashionable. This, however, is a wonderful novel, exposing the harshness of both urban and rural life in 1950s Scotland. It also touches on contemporary concerns, however, as its central character, school-leaver fifteen-year-old Dunky Logan, wrestles with what it means to be a man. Its portrayal of misogynistic attitudes among the farm workers still has the power to shock, more so as we may fear they are not so outdated as we hope. Though not without the occasional moment of hope, it is a bleak work with little the way of redemption, A Catcher in the Rye for those who cannot afford therapy.

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Napalm in the Heart

December 14, 2025
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Napalm in the Heart is Catalan writer Pol Gausch’s debut, originally published in 2021 and now translated into English by Mara Faye Letham. The novel is set in a dystopian landscape where the narrator lives with his mother in a militarised zone, occupied by an army with a different language. It is a novel filled with death; within a few pages the narrator reports:

“I found him dead among the tomato plants and cold, as cold as the winter frost… Grandpa dead, his heart destroyed. From so much wating… For nine hundred nights he’d held out.”

Later the narrator will tell us how he discovered his father, dead by his own hand, and in the novel’s second half he will travel with the body of his mother. There are echoes of Chernobyl in the novel’s setting, a town centred on ‘the Factory’. The narrator, whose limited understanding of events may be excused by his age, the deliberate ignorance in which the population is kept, or his focus on the man he longs for, Boris, can only tell us:

“I began to understand the Factory. Understand that when night suddenly becomes day it is because of a mistake.”

The Factory, we learn, was “the first building they sealed off” and “it is now skeletal and in ruins…the Factory enters the ground and sinks beneath the world.” The nine hundred days of waiting referred to above began on the day of the accident, and Gausch includes pages of tally marks which count up from that nine hundred, though in the narrator’s case he is also wating for his lover. The short chapters of the novel, some headed with single word titles, are interrupted by the narrator’s letters to Boris:

“Sometimes I’m scared we’ll never see each other again, scared I risk never being happy with you again…”

Though the words are tender, the lovemaking he remembers is as violent as the land, Boris “almost choking me with his kisses…”

“He grabs me by the hair really hard and when he grips me, I think about how animals fuck…”

While the narrator writes frequently, in person they hardly speak. Do they meet rarely and in secret because the relationship is disapproved of? This is unclear, as there is a wider sense of the narrator’s existence being marginalised when even his language is degraded. His hatred of the occupation finds its focus in a soldier who visits his mother:

“The man with the shaved head is at our house again… I thought I saw mother beside him, small, as though his arrival had shrunk her.”

At first he is unfriendly, but later (encouraged by Boris – or so it seems, we never see Boris’ replies) decides to kill him, luring him into the woods where he wounds him, ties him up and leaves him. When he returns:

“His lips were pale, his clothes soaked, and he was barely moving. He didn’t say anything to me: he just looked at me.”

The cruelty of his death is in keeping with general sense of violence, but he will later discover that his impression of the man’s relationship with his mother is, once again, based on a limited understanding. In the novel’s second part, as the narrator travels with Boris, his letters are replaced by a letter his mother has written to him. As they travel, they encounter military checkpoints, servitude and companionship in a landscape which verges on the desolation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

Some readers may find this novel frustrating, populated as it is not only with blank spaces on the page, but with absences in the story. It rests on the relationship between the narrator’s emotional journey and the apocalyptic landscape (and similarly between intensity and abstraction) – and I suspect that not every reader will agree on which is an echo of the other. It is, however, a novel that will leave an impression with its ferocity and its passion.

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Last Date in El Zapotal

December 9, 2025
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“I came to El Zapotal to die once and for all,” begins Mateo Garcia Elizondo’s Last Date in El Zapotal, now translated into English by Robin Myers, echoing the opening of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo (“I came to Comala…). Elizondo’s novel is also set in a remote Mexican village, the kind of place that there are few reasons to visit. He comes with only “three thousand pesos, twenty grams of opium and a quarter ounce of heroin, which had better be enough to kill me,” leaving the city behind because “when I die I don’t want anyone to wake me up again.” He chooses El Zapotal for no other reason than he wants to reach “the end of the line, the ends of the earth.” The town (as the novel’s title suggests) is as important as any character to the novel:

“The streets were deserted. There were more dogs than people, and some of them barked until they realised I was one of them, gaunt and homeless.”

Yet, the setting itself is confused by the narrator’s dreams and hallucinations. After a night of drinking, the narrator’s memories come back to him disordered and unconnected: “I’m finding it harder and harder to distinguish experience from dreams.” The town comes to represent his addiction, a place of uncertain reality:

“That’s where I live now. That’s what this whole town is: limbo. That’s what heroin is too. You’re halfway between the world of the living and the dead, and neither wants to deal with you.”

Somehow, Elizonda manages to both capture the existence (or otherwise) of the addict while at the same producing a sympathetic, almost companionable, narrator. Partly this is the narrator’s own acceptance of his flaws, but it is also in the voice itself which remains searching even as it claims to have given up.  Indeed, Elizonda has said that it is a novel about life rather than death, and, as it progresses, it seems the narrator thinks more about his own life than his (as he claims, imminent) death:

“At long last, I pulled it off: I’m completely alone. Now I really do have time to think about my life. That’s the true hell, especially if you spent it like I did.”

In particular, he remembers Valerie, a woman he falls in love with who tries to cure him of his addiction (“I think life tried to save me through Valerie”) but who herself becomes an addict and later dies of an overdose. As he reflects on these regrets, it becomes gradually clear that there is more to the novel than a junkie’s final days. There are hints early in the narrative, for example when he is warned not to “stir up trouble” shortly after arriving: on claiming he is passing through, he is told:

“No one just passes through this place. They always stay in the end.”

Later, when the narrator is searching for his ‘lady’ an ambiguity develops: this might refer to heroin, Valerie, or death herself. One character (“They say you’re the devil himself”) tells him:

“I can make you an appointment with the Lady… There’s really nothing better, let me tell you. Puts an end to all your troubles. You find peace in her arms.”

The description might equally apply to death or drugs.

The novel is also engaging in its use of imagery. Take, for example, this description of the narrator’s drug-induced dreaming coming to an end:

“I feel a string pulled tight in me, then snap, and a brilliant light floods my eyes as if someone had yanked out the final frame of a film roll. The celluloid starts to fog and bubble until it evaporates, leaving me floating in milky neon liquid that swamps everything around me…”

Such moments use language to raise the reader above the ordinary, in much the same way that the narrator uses drugs. This, in turn, echoes the novel’s transcendence, rising above the wreckage of the narrator’s life to find, in death, a reason for living.

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Posted in Mateo Garcia Elizondo | 4 Comments »

Childish Literature

December 4, 2025
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Alejandro Zambra touched on fatherhood (or at least step-fatherhood) in his last novel, Chilean Poet, but in his latest, Childish Literature (also translated by Megan McDowell), relationships between fathers and sons are at the very centre of the book. It begins with the birth of his own son:

“With you in my arms, I see the shadow we cast together on the wall for the first time.”

The opening section reflects on the early days of fatherhood, perhaps originating in the hundred poems Zambra says he writes on his phone. Addressed to his son, he reflects that literature lacks ‘letters to my son’:

“To imagine that our children will read our own work is, likewise, as exhilarating as it is overwhelming. To narrate the world that a child will forget – to become our children’s correspondents – is an enormous challenge.”

Zambra’s diary of the first year of his son’s life leads into a short piece in which he speculates on his life should he have been born female (Jennifer was the name his parents had chosen for a girl) and then a memory of a drug he took for migraines which has hallucinogenic effects but brings us back to his son in the end when he states, “I could carry him on my arms his whole life.” Zambra has always been an entertaining and thoughtful narrator of his own life, but it is the slightly patchwork nature of Childish Literature that prevents it becoming over-sentimental. Sections can be read separately, such as ‘French for Beginners’ about reading his son a particular book, or ‘Screen Time’ where the parents try to avoid their child watching TV:

“His whole life he has believed that the TV in our bedroom is broken.”

These chapters, however, only form the first part of the book. The second part opens with something quite different, almost a negative of what has gone before, ‘The Kid with No Dad’:

“More than a nickname it was a condition they acknowledged in a low voice, in the tone of someone talking about a shameful or deadly illness that was maybe also contagious…”

It tells the story of two boys, Dario and Sebastian, who become friends one of whom lives alone with his mother. The friendship ends in unfortunate circumstances but is renewed later. This piece of fiction (it is the only section not narrated by the author) allows Zambra to transition into memories of his relationship with his own father. It starts with a letter:

“I wrote, maybe, as if I were the adult and I had to explain that leaving home was the only way to keep from hating him and from hating myself.”

His father, however, tells him he hasn’t read it: “I’ll read it next time I feel like crying… Except I never feel like crying.” The story is echoed later when his father gives him a novel to read (Norman McLean’s A River Runs Through It) which he dismisses, then loses, and only reads years later having first tracked down a new copy. (His father knows this having taken the original book back from him unannounced and asking him to read out the handwritten dedication when he claims to still have it). Fishing is one sport which united father and son at times; football is another, and, being Scottish, I can certainly identify with the title of the chapter ‘An Introduction to Football Sadness’, particularly when he describes the Chilean national team as “the one that was destined to fail but still, every once and a while, allowed us to flirt with glory from a decorous distance.” The story continues towards his own son’s enrolment in a football class.

The book concludes with Zambra once again addressing his son, and returning to the subject of unread texts like the letter he sent his father and the book his father leant him:

“I don’t even know if I want you to read this book. It’s unnecessary of course. It exists thanks to you, and you are its main recipient, but I wrote it, above all, to accompany, with my friends, the mysteries of happiness. It’s okay of you don’t read it.”

In the end, it is the act of writing not reading which matters most, just as loving your child matters more than receiving their love. Childish Literature is a heart-warming book which would make a wonderful gift for any new father (should they have time to read it).

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Posted in Alejandro Zambra | 7 Comments »

And Never Said a Word

November 29, 2025
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And Never Said a Word is an early novel by Heinrich Böll published in 1953. It was translated quickly into English in 1955 (as Acquainted with the Night), but the translation quoted here is by Leila Vennewitz from 1978. Böll’s focus is post-war poverty, seen through the lens of a married couple, Fred and Käte Bogner, who narrate their story in alternate chapters.  Its title comes from a folk song (Never Said a Mumbling Word) which Käte listens to at one point, about Jesus’ stoicism on the cross (“His blood came trickling down, / And He never said a mumbling word”) used to highlight her own patient and uncomplaining nature given the difficulties she faces in her life. She lives in a single room with her two children in fear on her landlady and neighbours:

“The children playing in the corridor: they are so used to being quiet that now they don’t even make a noise when it is permitted.”

On the other hand, her neighbours, the Hopfs, make love loudly through the wall, and her landlady, Mrs Franke, smothers them with the vinegary smell of her preserving. Mrs Franke is what might be described as a ‘pillar of the community’, on numerous committees and boards (including the Housing Commission), and receiving Holy Communion every morning:

“I shrink from partaking the Body of Christ, the consumption of which seems to make Mrs Franke more alarming every day.”

Here Böll introduces one of the key concerns of the novel, the contrast between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’, which often has a religious dimension. When Käte finally goes to confession she tells the priest:

“…about my hatred for the priests who live in big houses and have faces like advertisements for face cream.”

He tells her he cannot absolve her – “how can you harbour so much hatred” – yet later, realising her poverty, changes his mind.

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As the novel opens, Käte and Fred are living separately, Fred no longer being able to bear staying in the one room and having left after an incident where he struck their children. Their poverty is highlighted in the way Böll opens both the first (Fred) and second (Käte) chapters by immediately referring to money: Fred going to the bank to cash his paycheck; Käte counting the money Fred has sent her. Fred has a job at a telephone exchange, but also tutors for extra money. Despite this, he spends the first chapter looking to borrow money so that he and Käte can spend the night together in a hotel. In the evenings he drinks and plays pinball. Fred is a weak man who still loves his wife but is unable to live with her. Käte, meanwhile, faces the burden of raising their children alone (and fears she might be pregnant again). The constant challenge of poverty is portrayed in her fight to keep her environment clean:

“Then I start my battle, my battle against dirt. Where I derive the hope of ever subduing it, I don’t know.”

The novel takes place over a single day (and night) yet such is Böll’s deftness with the double narrative that we feel we have come to know the characters thoroughly. Their marriage has reached a crisis point where Fred must either come home or separate from his wife.

The novel is also notable for its use of motifs or repeated moments, for example the café which they visit separately and which, on both occasions, suggests kindness remains in the world. This might be contrasted with their visits to churches which are less welcoming. There is also a convention of pharmacists (or druggists as they are called in this translation) in town and the novel is scattered with slogans such as “You can trust your druggist!” providing a modern alternative to the processions of priests and bishops. Most successfully, Böll has Fred see the other members of his family at points as a spectator:

“And in these children of mine, slowly marching along and solemnly carrying their candles across my minute field of vision – in them I saw what I thought I knew but only knew now: that we are poor.”

Towards the novel’s end he sees his wife in the same way, “my wife, who I had embraced innumerable times without recognising her.” It is this sighting that influences his final decision.

And Never Said a Word is probably among Böll’s lesser novels, but it is still a striking portrait of poverty which presents its characters with empathy and compassion.

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Posted in Heinrich Boll | 7 Comments »

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