February’s best new translated fiction

When Reiko exits the lift on the 20th floor of a tower block and enters room 203, she can barely contain her disbelief. Pulling back the curtain of a window overlooking the nearby railway station, she sees the station’s west side, instead of the east side encountered when she was last in that room. Her reaction is immediate: “Reiko started shrieking hysterically. She’d come to the wrong world and she knew it.”

This is a world where buildings are switched, time zones flip endlessly, highways fill with writhing snakes and an abusive husband is magicked into a strip of dried meat. The speculative short stories of Izumi Suzuki hover between deadpan normality and a mischievous, anarchic play with earthling complacency.

In Hit Parade of Tears (Verso, 336pp, £11.99), translated by David Boyd, Sam Bett, Daniel Joseph and Helen O’Horan, Suzuki’s heroines feel routinely displaced: hapless refugees from distant planets, unsure of who or what to believe, they experience time not as a calm progression than as a sinister manipulation. Suzuki, an actor who frequently courted controversy before embracing a career as a writer, has produced stories that delight in weaving the uncanny into everyday experiences.

The stories are edgy and comic, taking a sharp, sardonic scalpel to male privilege in Japanese society in Trial Witch, for example, and gently ribbing the self-preoccupied seriousness of younger characters entranced by the minutiae of pop culture in Hey, It’s a Love Psychedelic! Suzuki’s heroines are particularly wary of forms of conformity that are traded in for false promises of contentment. The narrator in Full of Malice seeks out her lost brother in a hospital, but she never leaves. Her “vitriol” is removed and she says : “I never even think about leaving this place any more. Now that all my malice is gone.” Suzuki, who took her own life in 1986 at the age of 37, is a singular voice in Japanese literature and these translations are a timely reminder of the power of this disturbing shape-shifter.

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A personal housing plan: Move to Newry, buy for €150,000 less, commute to Dublin

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Equally disturbing, if in a different register, is Tezer Özlü's Cold Nights of Childhood (Serpent’s Tail, 93pp, £9.99), translated by Maureen Freely. This account of a life lived between Ankara, Istanbul, Berlin and Paris, is among many other things, a remarkable account of mental breakdown and the long, dark road to recovery. Özlü's narrative offers compelling insight into her experiences in Istanbul, from the Muslim neighbourhood and Catholic schools of her childhood to the bohemian wine bars and shoddy real estate speculation of her adult years.

‘I want to write. But I keep getting pulled into the world outside.’

—  Tezer Özlü

Trapped by the dour pieties of Faith and Fatherland, the young Özlü yearns for the freedom to think and live as she sees fit, beyond the eternal perimeter fence of duty. When she reaches Berlin, she notes, “I want to write. But I keep getting pulled into the world outside.” Throughout Özlü's text, there is a sense of urgency, the need to take in life, not let it slip through her fingers. After the horrors of her treatment for bipolar disorder in her twenties – which run the gamut from electroshock therapy to sexual abuse by medical staff – she flees the terrors of psychiatric incarceration for the embrace of freedom and light in her chosen cities.

Özlü writes with great tenderness about moments of physical intimacy and the deep pleasure of fleeting joys in the mayhem of the streets. Towards the end of her account, she confesses: “Life’s beauties are not somewhere else. They are here, all around us. In Taksim Square. In the black swarming crowds of shoeshine men and vendors selling pickles, sesame rolls, flowers, postcards.” Maureen Freely, as translator, is particularly deft in capturing the beauties of Özlü's own writing. She provides a moving and enlightening translator’s note on the world of the Turkish writer who died the same year as Suzuki, at the age of 44.

A world that remains distinctively and compellingly his own is that of Alejandro Zambra in The Private Lives of Trees (Fitzcarraldo, 86pp, £10.99), translated by Megan McDowell. One of the most inventive writers in the Spanish-speaking world, the Chilean author has developed a unique style that combines a puckish wit with a clear-eyed, if indulgent view, of the fears and hopes of his struggling writers.

Julián is trying to put his stepdaughter, Daniela, to sleep with stories he makes up about trees while waiting for Daniela’s mother, Verónica, to come home. As the hours lengthen and there is still no sign of Verónica, Julián’s thoughts gradually turn to his parents, to growing up, to past loves, and to meeting Daniela’s mother. We learn of Julián’s current life, working in different universities, he teaches literature modules including classes on Italian poetry, even though he doesn’t know Italian.

Zambra’s comment on Julián’s chutzpah is typical: “In any case teaching classes on Italian poetry without knowing Italian is not terribly unusual in Chile, as Santiago is full of English teachers who don’t know English, dentists who can’t pull a tooth, overweight personal trainers, and yoga teachers who wouldn’t be able to face their classes without a generous dose of antidepressants.”

Julián defines himself as a teacher from Monday to Saturday but as a writer on Sundays. He has no clear idea of the kind of writer he wants to be and – in a playful nod to Zambra’s earlier novel, Bonsai, published in English last year – we find him hard at work, at one stage, on a novel about a diminutive, ornamental tree. Like many of Zambra’s bookish heroes, he is earnest but inept. Verónica does not come home and while Daniela eventually loses her interest in the private lives of trees, his stepdaughter grows up to be a radio presenter with a rare capacity to listen (“Most of her colleagues bathe their egos shamelessly in their listeners’ patience”), inheriting Julián’s compassion for confused frailty. Zambra captures this frailty again and again in his richly revealing prose.

[ January’s best new translated fiction ]

It is strength not frailty that is marshalled in Constance Debré's harrowing autofiction Love Me Tender (Tuskar Rock Press, 168pp, €16.99), translated by Holly James. Her account of losing custody of her young son after coming out and separating from the child’s father is particularly distressing. Passages chosen from books in her library, which are authored by well-established writers such as Georges Bataille and Hervé Guibert, are presented at the custody proceedings as evidence of her unfitness to be a mother.

What follows is the long, protracted process of appeal and Debré's attempts to re-establish contact with her son as months and years are lost to the glacial obstructionism of the legal system. The French writer’s prose is forensic in detailing the disturbing persistence of prejudice and the implacable resistance of sections of the professional middle class to any threat to the established gender order. Though Debré is occasionally given to moments of self-aggrandisement (“First there was Socrates, then Jesus, then Oscar Wilde, and now me. We’re a select few”), her ferocious emotional honesty keeps any easy pathos at bay.

Moving from her materially comfortable circumstances as a legal professional in Paris to the dire straits of a hand-to-mouth existence – squatting in girlfriend’s homes and stealing food from supermarkets – Debré's commitment to radical emotional and material independence is uncompromising. Love Me Tender is a bracing read and a timely reminder that attitudes are often far slower to change than legislation.

Algeria is often known in this part of the world through the voice of its French-language authors – Albert Camus, Hélène Cixous, Boualem Sansal, Assia Djebar – so a translation into English from an Algerian author writing in Arabic, the majority language of the population, is an event to be welcomed. The Disappearance of Mr Nobody (Hoopoe, 121pp, £9.99), translated by Jonathan Wright, is the first of Ahmed Taibaoui’s novels to be translated into English. Taibaoui is a recent recipient of the highly regarded Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature.

A nameless narrator (later referred to as “Mr Nobody”) is left in charge of Suleiman Bennaoui, a dying man who is a veteran of the Algerian War of Independence. The narrator, who is deeply scarred by early childhood abandonment and a near-death experience in the Algerian Civil War of the 1990s, is consumed by self-loathing and an overwhelming desire for anonymity. When his charge eventually dies, Mr Nobody disappears and the police open an investigation suspecting foul play. The investigation is led by Rafik Nassiri, who is on the verge of leaving the force, weary of the futility of fighting corruption in the society.

As the investigation proceeds, the narrative focus shifts to the lives of those on the periphery of Mr Nobody’s marginal existence: Kada, the Islamic militant turned police informer; Ousmane la Gauche, an embittered former leftist; Djelal, a venal cemetery attendant; and Mubarak Tahraoui, a melancholy and frustrated cafe owner who sees the birth of a son as the sure path to deliverance. Taiboui’s Algeria is a country still struggling with the toxic legacies of colonial and postcolonial violence. However, like Suzuki, Özlü, Zambra and Debré, he shows in his powerful account, why stories still matter and why not everybody is made comfortable by them.