Fiction in translation: from a masterpiece of postwar guilt to femicide in Brazil

The extravagantly named Alexander Lernet-Holenia (1897-1976), Viennese poet, playwright and novelist, has of late enjoyed a revival with the near cult status of his novella Baron Bagge (first published in 1936) in which a military officer embarks on a solo journey by horseback through the Carpathian Mountains after – apparently – his entire squadron has been ambushed and wiped out.

Its structure, which emphasises the elliptical and the supernatural, ensures that while being absolutely a work of its time it somehow belongs to all time. The same goes for the weirdly prescient, newly reissued Count Luna (Penguin Classics, £9.99), elegantly translated by Jane B Greene. Originally brought out in 1955, the book features another eponymous hero – and yet this one we never actually meet.

The narrator of the story, which is a masterpiece of postwar guilt combined with Kafkaesque nightmare, is Alexander Jessiersky, the spoiled, wealthy scion of a family of Polish origin. A prominent industrialist in Anschluss-era Austria, he allows bureaucrats from “the German occupation” to take over the estate of his less fortunate neighbour, Count Luna – who is then sent to a concentration camp. This passive, cowardly act haunts Jessiersky. Nothing is heard from Luna after 1946, and his grieving relatives confirm that he never returned from “elsewhere” (the euphemisms employed for the Holocaust continue to hold deep resonance today).

Who, then, is the mysterious stranger giving poisoned sweets to Jessiersky’s children in a Vienna park? The man participating in a hunting expedition near Jessiersky’s country estate? His wife’s secret lover? As Jessiersky’s paranoia grows, his desire to confront and destroy Luna turns murderous – and will lead eventually to a showdown in the catacombs of Rome. An extraordinary work – fantastical, farcical, enriching, terrifying.

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Bora Chung’s first story collection, the creepy, magical realist and sci-fi-infested Cursed Bunny, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2022, having originally been published in Korean in 2017. In Chung’s second book, the melancholy, mournful Your Utopia (like its predecessor published by Honford Star, £14.99, and translated with élan and precision by Anton Hur), the explanatory afterword, written in Seoul in the summer of 2021, reflects in part on the illegal protests in which she participates – a reminder of the pandemic era and the licence taken by governments to control their citizens: “the only thing we can do now, it seems, is endure.”

As for the stories, they are wonderful: icy, unsettling, imbued with world-sorrow. In the title story, its narrator, an “autobody” that can only survive through an ever-dwindling battery recharge and which once had a “human owner”, tells us that “since humans left the planet” dying of “spreading chronic fatigue and pain syndrome, it’s been only machines like 314 and me”. As it turns out, the robot demonstrates more empathy than an actual human.

In A Very Ordinary Marriage, a horror satire on gender expectations, a recently married man discovers that his wife – who constantly makes secret phone calls in an “unearthly” language – is not, as he first assumes, being unfaithful, but is engaged on a mission that will prove to be – in the hypothetical, fictional sense – truly alien. Its clever role reversal has strong parallels with the Angela Carter story Bluebeard’s Castle.

Two other standout stories are The Centre for Immortality Research and Maria, Gratia, Plana, in which Chung explores machine-led possibilities for human redemption amid the welter of existential loneliness.

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“Uncle sits with his stomach crammed between him and the table, and Uncle’s stomach is so fat that it doesn’t seem like part of his body, it’s like a package he’s carrying, or a pet ...” Rebecca Gisler’s (literally) warts-and-all novel About Uncle (Peirene Press, £12.99, energetically translated by Jordan Stump) features a young woman and her brother reluctantly – in the woman’s case at least, as her brother is the favourite – caring for their eccentric elderly uncle, a disabled veteran. The prose is both horrible and beautiful, creating an oxymoron of a book.

Uncle watches TV until the food put in front of him grows cold; Uncle disappears into the basement for days, Uncle has some rather unpleasant habits that are not for the squeamish. He’s lived in this house by the sea in France for years (with its garden slowly “turned into a cemetery”) but has never been swimming in the bay, which he dismisses as an activity merely for tourists. Bit by bit a backstory emerges, not simply about Uncle, but one which also delves impressionistically and impressively into the complicated, cellular history of an entire family.

The Italian-Cuban writer Alba de Céspedes (1911-1997) probably owes the renewed interest in her work to the belated resurgence in English translation of Italian women writers such as Natalia Ginzburg and Elsa Morante, who (again undoubtedly) owe theirs to the Elena Ferrante “effect”. De Céspedes’s Forbidden Notebook (1952) appeared in English in 2023 (in a version by Ferrante’s translator Ann Goldstein) – a subversive story of a woman mired in domestic unhappiness who finds release of sorts through keeping a hidden diary.

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Now Her Side of the Story, a novel originally published in 1949, comes from Forbidden Notebook’s publisher (Pushkin Press, £20), in an illuminating translation by Jill Foulston, and with an afterword by Ferrante herself. At nearly 500 pages this novel, (its original, more intimate title is Confessions of a Woman) is an epic – an epic of the life of Alessandra, who grows up in Rome as fascism and later war grip Italy.

It opens without preamble, setting the scene in somewhat laconic, immediately tantalising fashion: “I met Francisco Minelli for the first time, in Rome, on October 20th, 1941. I was working on my dissertation, and my father had been nearly blind for a year because of a cataract. We were living in one of the new apartment blocks on the Lungotevere Flaminio, where we’d found a place soon after my mother’s death. I considered myself an only child, even though before my birth my brother had come into the world, revealed himself to be a boy wonder, and drowned at the age of three.”

Devastating and eclipsing, this event (the boy was called Alessandro) will overshadow Alessandra’s life. Pressured by her family to marry traditionally, she rebels, and becomes embroiled in the underground resistance (de Céspedes herself was imprisoned twice for anti-fascist activity) through her love for Minelli, an older academic, whom she marries at 19. Yet while this relationship is the pivotal point of the story, it is the story of Alessandra’s childhood and adolescence, and the influence of her mother and grandmother, at which the novel most excels. As Ferrante writes in her afterword, the lesson Alessandra – overly romantic, hopeful – will learn too late is that, in common with her female relatives, her fate is that she, like they, “emerges into death”.

Femicide in Brazil is the bleak, urgent backdrop to Patrícia Melo’s assured, profuse novel The Simple Art of Killing a Woman (Indigo Press, £11.99, translated with equal verve by Sophie Lewis). A mix of crime thriller, reportage and mythology, the novel focuses on an unnamed lawyer researching a wave of murders of Indigenous women in a town bordering the Amazon jungle, mainly at the hands of violent partners.

A trial is taking place with three privileged, affluent men accused of killing a 14-year old Indigenous girl. The lawyer is attempting to escape an oppressive family and an abusive relationship with her own partner; added to this is the legacy of her mother’s death as a result of domestic violence. The novel delves deep into both the darkness of brutality and the wealth of potent myths and folklore permeating this part of Brazil.

Each chapter, sombrely, begins with the stark facts of a woman’s murder, a growing litany, a chorus of outrage: “Killed by her husband. Elaine Figueiredo Lacerda, 61, was gunned down on her own doorstep on a Sunday evening” reads the first. Lyrical, appalling prefaces which become longer as this lacerating yet somehow – thanks to Melo’s and her protagonist’s doggedness – life-affirming book progresses.

“What the public found most alarming, even more than Kajii’s lack of beauty, was the fact that she was not thin.” Based on the real-life story of Japan’s “Konkatsu Killer”, in which a gifted home cook preyed upon – and then dispatched – lonely businessmen she met in chat rooms, Butter, by Asako Yukuzi, (4th Estate, £14.99, in an accomplished translation by Polly Barton), is no lean, mean read, but a rich, multilayered work of fiction – and food – to puzzle over and savour.

Rika, an ambitious journalist, is the sole woman on the news desk, working late into the night, barely able to slip out for a bowl of ramen. Her relationship with her boyfriend, which once seemed ideal, is increasingly combative. When the opportunity comes to interview the incarcerated serial killer, Manako Kajii, (Rika writes and asks for her recipe for beef stew, which Kajii had served to one of her victims) their encounters become infused with specific gourmet instructions to Rika to buy, cook and eat the food that Kajii cannot get in prison, afterwards relaying the whole experience to her.

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This, together with Kajii’s gradually uncovered history, leads to a physical and psychological transformation for Rika. Soon the serial killer “with a maternal smile” sets the journalist on the trail of her background, and the possible reasons for her crimes. But is Rika, awakening to her own role in accepting the misogyny and impossible double standards of Japanese society, being manipulated and, indeed, seduced? Butter is a slow pressure-cooker of a read, sensual and provocative.