Eastbound by Maylis de Kerangal, translated by Jessica Moore (Les Fugitives, £10.99)
In this timely novella about a Russian military conscript defecting from the army, 20-year-old Aliocha is on the Trans-Siberian railway from Moscow to Vladivostok, spanning almost a quarter of the Earth’s circumference. When he gets there he plans to “hide, remake himself and earn enough to get back to the west”. But no literary train journey would be complete without encountering a stranger – in this case Hélène, a Frenchwoman who has her own secrets. Through a combination of clothes swapping, psychological gameplay and simply hiding in a toilet, the two play cat and mouse with the senior Russian officer moving inexorably along the train. The result is a balance of internal thought and external action propelled by a narrative that races on in long sentences, keeping things flowing beautifully in between moments of drama.
Ti Amo by Hanne Ørstavik, translated by Martin Aitken (And Other Stories, £11.99)
We’re not often aware of when we’re doing something for the last time; an exception is when a loved one is dying. “It was our last 30th December,” writes the narrator of Ti Amo, addressing her terminally ill husband, “and it would be our last New Year’s Eve too.” The book is a short, sharp account of how they cope with the knowledge of his impending death. He abandons his work as a painter, deciding to “give up looking into yourself”, but the narrator is a novelist: how else can a writer process life than by writing about it? She also feels “an unmitigated YES” for a new colleague, whose health and vigour mean “just sitting there beside him is so electric”. This novella, sometimes hard to read for its bleakness but impossible to look away from, shows that even when we know the destination, the journey is still worthwhile.
Pyre by Perumal Murugan, translated by Aniruddhan Vasudevan (Pushkin, £9.99)
As unanswerable questions go, “How did you bewitch him?” is hard to beat, but it’s one of many that young Saroja faces when she moves with her new husband, Kumaresan, to his village in southern India. His mother is hostile in the traditional manner of fictional mothers – “He has thrown fire on me” – but the main concern locally about Kumaresan’s bride is that she seems to be from a different caste, despite his denials. “Can’t we tell just by looking at her?” Perumal Murugan is one of India’s best-known literary novelists, and Pyre is beautifully done, with flashbacks to the lovers’ meeting in a soda shop, second thoughts as Saroja finds herself thinking fondly of the confinement of her old home and a further elopement to evade what prejudice threatens to bring down on them. The title promises a dramatic conclusion, and the book delivers.
Awake by Harald Voetmann, translated by Johanne Sorgenfri Ottosen (Lolli Editions, £12.99)
“Living only means to be awake,” wrote Pliny the Elder, the Roman naturalist who died in the eruption of Vesuvius in AD79, in his Natural History. Danish author Harald Voetmann’s funny, eccentric novel takes snippets from that book (“The soul is nothing but the childish lies of dumb mortals who greedily desire never to die”) and gives us the man behind them in all his human foibles. If your novel doesn’t have much plot, then you’d better have a lot of character, and Awake certainly does. Pliny is vain and prone to nosebleeds, and shows us that even the greatest mind is prey to base urges – especially lust. Meanwhile, his nephew Pliny the Younger offers scathing commentary on his uncle’s writing. After a paragraph on the stars, he mocks: “He is confusing stars with fireflies or something.” Awake is the first in a trilogy about humanity’s drive to conquer nature. The mind boggles at what is yet to come.
