Women in Translation

The final part of Eva Baltasar’s triptych after Permafrost and Boulder, Mammoth is a brutal and uncompromising book. Driven by a desire to create, the narrator becomes obsessed with getting pregnant, in experiencing the physical sensations of birth. Chasing this desire, and leaving the confines of the city for the wild Spanish countryside, she enters a life of isolation and drudgery. Our narrator reduces her life to the bare essentials, collecting firewood, nursing lambs, and trying to bake her own bread. But, far from a fairytale idyll, this is a world of brutality and riotous unpredictability. In Eva Baltasars exact and poetic style, this short yet explosive book ultimately asks what it means to create in a world of loneliness and cruelty. 

Appropriately subtitled ‘A Health Resort Horror Story’, the much-anticipated new novel from Nobel-garlanded queen of everything that is good in this literary realm Olga Tokarczuk is a gleefully sadistic tale. Assembled in the clear-aired mountains of Silesia at a dedicated ‘Guesthouse for Gentlemen’ in 1916, a bunch of doofus men with respiratory issues peck and pontificate around the case of the guesthouse owner’s recently-deceased wife. Aided by the potent local liqueur, the men become increasingly haunted, and newcomer Mieczysław battles to retain his physical and mental fortitude.

Fans of Drive Your Plow will feel a familiar unease, but the this time the terror is more pronounced, more directed, more political in its roots. Part mystery, part deconstruction of misogyny, part gung-ho horror, all Olga! 

We’ve noticed a small influx of some brilliantly dark pastoral novels by female authors recently (see: Mammoth) and if this is something of a trend then we’re wholly on board!

Un Amor is certainly one of the best of this type, translated from Spanish, it is a flawlessly crafted tale of desire and obsession. It’s the story of Nat, who flees her city life and rents a house in a small mountain town with a capricious dog that her landlord brings to keep her company. In the shadow of El Glauco and under the pointed gazes of the small community, nothing goes unnoticed, and when Nat is faced with a morally ambiguous prospect, she is forced to question her character and behaviour.

In the female pastoral novel, the values of the countryside almost appear to be flipped upside-down. The sense of freedom and isolation that comes with rural living quite quickly becomes something more sinister with a lone female protagonist, and Mesa convincingly conveys the lurking dangers and the vulnerability that’s present. A perfectly taut thriller that makes you want to slow your reading down to take in every last word.

From the author of Storysmith favourite Cursed Bunny comes another collection of whacky and disturbing short stories. Sentient cars, aliens, mad scientists: Your Utopia is the sci-fi half-sister of Cursed Bunny’s macabre horror. 

Perhaps the absolute peak of the “no plot, just vibes” genre. For some people that’s a turn off, but if you’re the kind of person who likes an all-vibe book then all this here, now is your holy grail. Composed mostly of non-chronological vignettes, each a memory in its most raw sense: tastes, smells, strange details that the mind clings to. Sounds vertigo inducing, but it’s not. More like a painting where you see each one small piece at a time, and when you stand back the whole picture reveals itself into a nuanced portrayal of friendship and grief.

FFO cathartic sadness, poetic novels

As one of the first Kazakh books translated into English, this short story introduces an English readership to Kazakh Literature and cultural geography. Each story weaves together Kazakh traditions, landscapes, auls, and tois, with something more universal, the commonality of the human condition and the strange satire of daily life. Often, the stories are set under the shadow of Soviet control and the hangover of a patriarchal system; each bears witness to a nation slowly reconciling its past with a future of commodity culture and market capitalism. These stories are all poignant and concise snapshots of life, threading together modern with the traditional, the unchanged and the unrecognisable, the melancholic with the hopeful.

Set in an abandoned village in Naples, The Earth is Falling is fleshed out by a cast of ghosts. Each perpetually repeating their daily routines, we are given glimpses into the minds of various eccentrics including a formidable town crier. The houses themselves, and the land they stand on, seem to be alive, murmuring beneath the villagers feet. In this haunting and magical novel, past and present, dead and alive, seem to merge; as time thickens and voices overlap, Pellegrino’s echoic prose seems as alive as the village and its inhabitants.

Set on the Paraná River in Argentina, Not a River follows the fishing trip of Enero, El Negro, and Tilo. After catching and killing a giant ray, they seem to have disturbed something, intruding upon a wider, delicate ecology of which they’re not part. The choric quality of the narration interweaves the intruder’s voices with those of the local inhabitants; in fact, Almada’s prose skillfully interweaves the past with the present, the living with the dead, the human with the animal. Annie McDermott’s translation adds to this poetic quality, creating a soundscape of half-rhymes and echoic murmurs. It’s a novel that seems to ripple, like the river that runs through it, with many undercurrents and tributaries, seamlessly connecting past and present, surface and depths.

Being the sensation-thirsty little book gremlins that we are, obviously we will always be attracted to a title that promises – of all things – a jelly massacre. Set it in a fictional theme park and we’re well and truly sold! We also understand that not everyone is like us, and we’re here to reassure you that this delightful Korean curio is so much more than its sensational title (and striking cover art). True enough, it does begin with a missing child in a theme park and the event that sets off the gelatinous titular incident, but the deceptive genius of the book lies in what comes next. 

Zooming out from the sticky disaster of the novel’s electrifying opening, we see various perspectives on the same incident: what may have caused it, who might be most affected by it, the shadowy forces at work trying to control it. As we cycle through protagonists (including – delightfully – that of a stray cat who has made the now-abandoned theme park their home), themes of social inequality emerge, lopsided family units reach breaking point, all seemingly exhibiting a version of the same desire: to stick together, somehow. Of course, the book’s very literal response to that desire is what tips the book over into deliciously surreal territory, but it is always anchored by those very human concerns. Glibly and addictively translated into nugget-y sentences by Yewon Jung, Cho Yeeun’s hugely entertaining debut novel (there are more in her oeuvre, as-yet untranslated) is precisely as sticky as you need it to be. 

Published in Catalan in 1979, but only just published in English, The Time of Cherries follows several generations from the time of the Spanish Civil War to the final days of Franco dictatorship. Written with a nonlinear narrative, Roig’s plot slowly reveals itself, carefully weaving together different character perspectives. Rebelling against the slippage of time, Roig is able to unpick a country’s muddled and complex past, unthreading its changing relationships to consumerism, desire, religion, and gender.