World Review of Book — Cambodia to Czech Republic
The Nobel Prize for Literature going to Bob Dylan underlines how many great writers from all over the world are going unnoticed — and often untranslated. You have to look hard for obscure world literature. That’s why I am systematically going through every country, letter by letter, to see what I can find. After A and B, here come the Cs.
Check out more book reviews on my website.
Cambodia
L’Anarchiste — Soth Polin (1967/1979)
Setting: Cambodia before the genocide; Paris during it.
What it’s about: A dark novel about dissolute youth in a society primed for genocide.
Written in two parts with two decades in between. The first part was banned in Cambodia, and the writer Soth Polin became a refugee in Paris. He was a taxi driver when he wrote the second part, as is the narrator who tells most of his tale to the dead body of a client who dies when he crashes. That part of the story is disjointed as if its told over a cab driver’s shoulder.
It begins with trip to brothel interspersed with bland, increasingly rant-y, political reflection (“Every politician is deeply religious but he kills.”). The protagonist displays a brutal, violent ennui, picking on a old woman on the side of the road with philosophical detachment, then musing:
“A respectable history teacher with hundreds of pupils, just kicked an old Vietnamese woman who did nothing to him.”
His parents ask him for money but instead he uses all his savings to print and distribute an article denouncing the government, then flees into exile. The article has no impact but it ruins his father.
The book ends with a grotesque, over-the-top, finale. It’s not a great novel, but in-between it is strong on presenting the survivor guilt of the refugee hearing terrible news from home, telling of how the entire staff of his newspaper have been “liquidated”.
Read this if you liked: It has the same brutal energy as a Martin Amis (e.g. Money). The Anarchist is very similar in structure to The Outsider. Split into two parts: it starts with the protagonist spending a day in dissolute philandering and insouciant, misogynist violence (which is a little too glorified). Like Meursault and his pimp friend Raymond, the characters visit a brothel and go for a swim, with their story interrupted by sudden inexplicable acts of violence. Part two is a sharp contrast, finding the autobiographical protagonist in very different shape, more prone to melancholy and meditations, yet immune to reason.
As my project goes on, I am already seeing how certain kinds of books find their way into translation in different languages. In French, for example, you can find quite a few phallocentric books like this one (see Nimrod in Chad below).
The definitive book from Cambodia? There is very little Khmer literature available in either French or English. Is it more of an oral story-telling culture? I don’t think so: there seem to be plenty of books in Khmer. Another factor might be that the book blurb says there were 200 writers in the country before the Khmer Rouge, but only four survived the genocide. Sadly, Polin himself ended up driving a taxi in California.
Rating: *
Cameroon
Hemley Boum — Les Macquisards (2015)
Setting: 1950s Cameroon — during the war of independence from France.
What it’s about: A cinematic account of a group of independence fighters weaved into a family drama.
The original maquisards were rural bands of French resistance fighters, a name then taken on by anti-colonial forces. But Cameroon’s maquisards are not as glorified or well-remembered as France’s.
This novel tries to put that right. A group of Cameroonian maquisards struggle for freedom against the violence of French colonialists while also straining against the pressures of traditional customs. They infiltrate colonial authorities, hide in a rural part of Cameroon, but are eventually undermined by family secrets that offer a new interpretation of the betrayal and murder of Cameroon’s underground leader Ruben Um Nyobé in 1958 (incidentally, the same year that the European Union came into being — created just as Europe was losing its grip on the world).
The book is essentially an ode built around this forgotten historical figure, without indulging in hagiography. It is almost a backstory, telling the tale of how Ruben is forgotten, and remembered:
“During the next 30 years pronouncing his name, his memory would be equated with a sedition and harshly repressed by the two forces the postcolonial elites. They set out to purge the country of any trace of his existence or his death without ever are succeeding fully. Over the generations his uncompromising fight and his almost Christlike end transcended the obstacles to print themselves in letters of gold in the imagination of the Cameroon and its people. Thus he entered into legend.”
Why you should read it: Despite being a new, award-winning book, it is not to be found on the average Paris bookstore shelf — nor is it translated into English. It is an entirely contemporary take on the colonial novel, with stronger female characters than previous generations. The key clash is between a stereotypical bad guy colonialist who rapes his maids and a woman whose mother was one of his victims - his daughter. She becomes a powerful village figure who mobilises the community against him, issuing pamphlets documenting any abuse successfully driving him mad. The power of the community is much greater in this novel then actual violence.
The definitive book from Cameroon? There is a rich selection of Cameroonian post-colonial literature to pick from. In this genre, Mongo Beti is to Cameroon what Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o are to Nigeria and Kenya respectively. His Remember Ruben is, like Les Maquisards, inspired by freedom fighter Ruben Um Nyobé, whose trajectory was very similar to Patrice Lumumba — an independence leader murdered by colonial forces. Remember Ruben follows two village boys through various inequities, from forced labour under the colonial authorities to the slums of colonial Cameroon, where the resistance figure never appears, but whose presence is often felt.
The work of Mongo Beti and Ferdinand Oyono feels trapped under the shadow of colonialism, with Cameroonians (mostly men) in the victim role and France and the Catholic Church a strong oppressive presence.
Hemley Boum brings the perspective of another gender and another generation: strong, often female, Cameroonian characters taking matters into their own hands.
Read it if you liked: A Grain of Wheat by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.
Rating: **
Canada
Rawi Hage — De Niro’s Game (2006)
Setting: Civil war-era 1980s Beirut
What it’s about: How to make the choice to go into exile. Bassam watches his friend George become a kingpin in the underworld, while he makes his own moral compromises to finance his escape to another country. A story full of anti-heroes.
You’ll like this if you liked: Anything that pits two brothers/friends against each other: such as The Master of Ballantrae by Robert Louis Stevenson.
The definitive book from Canada? See also Timothy Findley’s The Wars: a novel about WWI, shell-shock and the horror of trench warfare split between training camps in Canada and trenches of the western front. Powerful naturalistic writing and the bonds between man and nature that persevere even in the most inhumane situations. Probably the most well-known, and the finest, Canadian novel.
My rating: **
Cape Verde
Chiqhuinio — Baltasar Lopes da Silva (1947)
Setting: Cape Verde
What it’s about: The poverty a boy sees around him as he grows up, and his failure to improve his impoverished society before migrating. Some stoic moments stand out, particularly the carnival-like scene out of an early Fellini film about rural Italy and the fado-like singing that provides temporary solace from grinding poverty. Chiqhuinio and his fellow students unsuccessfully try to challenge the status quo with a newspaper and setting up a union. Eventually an uncle persuades him to leave:
“Do you want to spend your life eeking out an existence on this rocky landscape, selling sugar and oil from a shack?”
Why you should read it: Strong depictions of peasants impoverished by drought, urban workers impoverished by economic decline, and the seedier sides of island life.
The most poignant scenes sees a collier on the dock watching ships passing, hoping one will come in to be refuelled. But they pass by, leaving his children to beg, and his hope sinks lower. He hangs his head and returns to a house with no money, no food, and the rent due. Because she managed to beg some food:
“Hunger is not written on her face today.”
You’ll like this if you liked: Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt.
My rating: * (It’s only available in German or Portuguese but you are not missing anything. There are powerful moments but too much filler.)
Central African Republic
Étienne Goyémidé — Le Dernier Survivant du Caravan (1985)
Setting: French-colonial CAR
What it’s about: Slavery. A peaceful village is suddenly raided by Arab slavers: the majority of the narrative is the forced march told by its last survivor, interspersed with memories and fables from home, which the enslaved villagers tell to maintain some semblance of humanity during an ordeal that leaves them wishing for death as the only means “to put them on an equal footing with their masters”.
The slavers’ brutality is laid bare in raw, microscopic detail: the raid on the village, the planks around the villagers necks, the heat of the march, the desperation for water at the wells, the constant cruelty of the slavers. The slavers themselves are two-dimensional, seen only as phantoms and beasts, and the narrative might well have done with more personalisation to better understand what drove the trade.
Why you should read it: For the subtle sub-text: the triumph of oral narrative, of the word, over both the slavers and the colonial modernity contemporary to when the elder “last survivor” tells the story to the village’s descendants after they laugh at him for refusing to use the products les Blancs. The novel starts with the villagers’ awe at the new buildings, institutions and airplanes of the French, but that evening they still return to the traditional fireside where the elder shows his scars and tells them:
“Sooner or later the war will start again, and this time we will emerge the victors.”
The best book from CAR? There are not many books from CAR available, even in French. This book is out-of-print, making it shockingly hard to get a hold of a copy of such an important book. Another book from CAR takes a much different stand on colonialism. In L’Odysee de Mongou, by Pierre Samy Macfoy, village chief Mongou gladly hands over the reins of power to the French in exchange for prosperity — the French take control of education, religion and trade with little or no consequence. Not only is it written like a school textbook, it offers a complete whitewash of colonial history. Mongou goes to fight from France in WWI, is treated like royalty and never makes it to the front, and his compatriots come back from that brutal war only with smiles and medals.
To read if you liked: Olaudah Equiano, Twelve Years a Slave.
Rating: * (a powerful story, but one that begins and ends too abruptly)
Chad
Chroniques Tchadiennes — Nétonon Noël Ndjékéry (2008)
Setting: 21st Century Moundou — the second city of Chad
What it’s about: A deeply poetic, yet entirely modern, telling of life in Chad told through a series of vignettes that piece together a simple “Romeo & Juliet” style love story.
The hero is a struggler: amember of generation “Bac + Zero” — youth who complete their school exams only to find no job prospects waiting for them. Because he is left-handed, his family and teachers assume he is a good-for-nothing. But being passed over in favour of his younger brother saves his life when his family is slaughtered during a coup.
He considers life in his country a desert, but when he meets a certain girl, his perspective suddenly changes:
“This country certainly is a desert. But nothing changes as much as a desert. Dunes shift without seeming to. And, by dint of patience, they will overcome the thickest of forests.”
Why you should read it: The title translates as Chadian tales, but also refers to the chronic diseases affecting Chadian society: war, dictators, corruption and, never mentioned but ever-present, AIDs. The “chroniques” in the title can be understood as these chronic afflictions that ail the country but also “chronicles” or short news reports, which are delivered with the remote irony of a journalist.
The life of the hero Souloulu evolves through these various disasters, watching his country move from one trauma to another. Through him we meet a broad ensemble: forced, early marriage, warlords, generals, tricksters, sex workers, prophets.
The author is not shy about presenting the grimy underside of everyday life but presents it in deeply poetic prose:
“He felt like a ball bounced back by wall of questions”
“La faim (f,a,i,m) justifie tous les moyens” (Hunger, instead of “the ends” or “ la fin”, justifies the means)
…or looking at a broken condom bought at second-hand the market, that “damp piece of rubber next to its stapled packet” in which he regretted “not being to read the future”.
When the parents of Souloulu’s love interest, Haidara, (the “purveyors and cookers of meat” both literally and metaphorically), intervene to marry off the heroine to a corrupt official made rich by the oil-boom, the girl quickly suspects something:
“Haidara suspected that this particular carnivore was not just interested in extricating the best sheep testicle — based recipes that he was mad about from her parents.”
The definitive Chadian novel? In its engagement with the many challenges the country has faced in recent years, and the way it intersperses them with several lives, translating their impact into daily life. Forbidden love during civil war is also a theme in “Alice and her legs” by Nimrod, which is a bit too much “Lolita” for my taste. A predatory, pervy school teacher taking advantage of a school girl caught up in a mass of refugees fleeing civil war ought could be a good story, without the leering (“And yet I have never kissed a woman’s feet before” after half a page dedicated to a teenagers legs and watching them play basketball). Yet it ends with a powerful account of Chadian soldiers massacred by Qaddafi-backed forces.
You’ll like this if you liked: True Romance, the Quentin Tarantino movie! It has the same irreverent-but-melancholy tone.
Rating: **
Chile
Alejandro Zambra — Ways of Going Home (2013)
Setting: Late Pinochet era and present day.
What it’s about: Gloomy scenes under a dictatorship where things are left unsaid and silence speaks volumes.
It loses the thread a little when it jumps to the passive present day author who seems to spend most of the novel dealing with writer’s block:
“I like that my characters don’t have last names. Its a relief…Instead of writing, I spent the morning drinking beer and reading Madame Bovary.”
Rating: * (The back-and-forth in time doesn’t quite work.)
China
Dai Sijie — Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (2000)
Setting: Rural China during the Cultural Revolution.
What it’s about: Two young intellectuals are sent to the countryside for “re-education”. They both fall for a local seamstress, who they decide to teach to read, teaching her to read using a chest of hidden novels. She, however, ends up teaching them a lot more about life.
Although it romanticises the Mao era somewhat, the story of the bourgeois boys from the city adapting to rural life is charming and uplifting.
The scenes of rural life leave a lasting impression. When the boys first meet the seamstress:
“This was a sign that she had taken a liking to us. On this mountain an invitation to take a drink of water meant that your host would crack some eggs over the boiling pan and add sugar to make a soup.”
The best book from China? Several other writers have engaged with the harsher aspects of Communist Party rule, such as Yiyun Li, Mo Yan, Ha Jin.
Why you should read it: For the paean to the power of reading.
Still on my list: The Four Books by Yan Lianke.
Further reading: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/12/dream-of-the-red-chamber-cao-zuequin-chinas-favourite-novel-unknown-west
To read if you liked: Reading Lolita in Iran, Fahrenheit 451.
Rating: *
Colombia — Heart of Darkness
Jose Rivera— The Vortex (1924)
Setting: Early 20th century rural Colombia
What it’s about: Part magical realism, part adventure story tinted with expose on social injustice in the rubber trade. A hectic, nightmarish journey through plains and jungle that moves between frenetic pace and slow drawl like the fever that affects its characters.
Feverish narration takes the story along at a nice flowing pace, with the narrator challenging the reader with his fevered delusions, betrayals and distrust. He is frank in his own moments of abuse and indifference of his own that challenge the adventure narrative, such as when two companions die: “the disaster overwhelmed me with a sense of beauty”.
“The jungle protects itself against its opponents and at length it is man who’s defeated.”
Why you should read it: Two-thirds through, what was a surreal adventure story in the spirit of Borges suddenly becomes a passionate exposé on the exploitation of rubber workers in the spirit of Roger Casement (like Casement, Rivera saw the abuses first hand and wanted to expose them. He also contracted a virus in the jungle and wrote the book while recovering, which might explain the feverish tenor of the book).
You could fault Rivera, who himself campaigned for their rights, for the side-part Indigenous characters play in the story, he at least documents their plight, such as when one sums up the indentured labour on a rubber plantation:
“Hard work. Bad people. Kill Indians.”
The strongest point of the book is when the plot stops in the middle of the jungle to introduce, over several chapters, a new character who gives an account of the indentured labourer forced into rubber tapping.
The best book from Colombia: Sorry to fans of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but this puts the “real” in magical realism.
Read this if you liked: The Invention of Morel by by Adolfo Bioy Casares.
The journey deep into the jungle and its horrifying secrets are reminiscent of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. This book has several Kurtz’s, although they are at the same time more familiar and more caricatured. But there are moments of fevered immobilism when the characters are trapped at river stations that also reflect the high tension of Conrad’s other classic, Victory. Rivera also takes a page out of Conrad’s book by presenting the story through different forms: letters, notebooks, stories told by characters, and reports from officials — lending the story a documentary realism that lends geopolitical immediacy to the story, just as Conrad’s did.
Rating: *** (and yet its quite hard to get, I’m lucky they had it in my local library! This should be a Penguin Twentieth Century Classic.)
Comoros
The Republic of the Beardless — Mohamed A. Tohiri (1985)
Setting: The Comoros Islands during the Cold War (1970s roughly).
What it’s about: A dictator takes control of the island, empowering the young people to run his dictatorship and wiping out both colonial bureaucracy and traditional structures. A curious mix of satire and harrowing Khmer Rouge-style brutality.
The strongest moment is the chapter based on the inter-ethnic violence that forced Comorians to flee Madagascar in the 1970’s, and the divisions they caused when they arrived on the islands but didn’t fit in.
The definitive Comoros novel: A book about a coup and its overturning by foreign mercenaries is appropriate for country that had 18 coups between independence in 1975 and 2000.
Similar to: Reasons of State by Alejo Carpentier (like Tohiri, a diplomat which might explain why both novels feel quite contrived, with the characters are two-dimensional)
Rating: * (quite predictable, doesn’t bring anything new to the table)
Costa Rica
The Assault on Paradise — Tatiana Lobo (1998)
Setting: Central America of the early 1700s
What it’s about: A languid, charming adventure story depicting early colonial society in Costa Rica — officials and politicians, the conquistadores, the church, the inquisition, the adventurers, the soldiers and above all their victims — the slaves and Indigenous Peoples.
It follows a Spanish scribe Pedro who comes to the “New World” to hide from the Inquisition. The first thing he sees when he lands is a slave market. He gets drawn into the intrigues of colonial society, but eventually develops sympathy for the short-lived Indigenous uprising.
He starts as a rogue but by end of the novel he is transformed by his Mayan encounters, particularly a core part of the novel when he maroons himself on a remote strip of beach with two Mayan women and two runaway slaves.
Pedro developed an aversion to wards them either because he could not abide suffering or because those Indians were so submissive. He was deeply disturbed by their sullenness, their sadness, silence, and their mute rancor camouflaged as servility.
Pedro is paid for his work in cocoa beans, which become a sort of de facto currency. But when he stores them under his bed they rot and attract cockroaches – as clear an image of tainted wealth as you could imagine. The metaphor is taken further when we see the Inquisition skimming cocoa beans of the payments taken from their flock:
“He sometimes called upon Pedro to help count the number of cocoa beans collected for the right to go to heaven and then invited him to have a cup of chocolate.”
Upon hearing the whooshing sound of the beater in the kitchen of the priestly residence, Pedro imagined the souls of the faithful being ground up, pulverised, dissolved in milk and then gulped down by the officer, to finally end up, after a tour through intestines, in the drainage ditch where the slaves and servants emptied their masters potties.”
Why you should read it: It is a fine blend of dark, comic humour (for the base, often petty intrigues of colonial society) and poetic lyricism (for the desperate, hopeless attempts of Indigenous societies to maintain against the brute force of the invaders).
“The lands here in America are a nest of maniacs how are our descendants going to recover the wits lost in this enormous insane asylum?” “Lunacy is worldwide.”
The definitive book from Costa Rica? The accumulation of petty details create a vivid picture of life in the newly-conquered Americas.
Read this if you liked: The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, Candide by Voltaire.
Still on the list: Mamita Yunai by Carlos Luis Fallas on harsh conditions suffered by workers on banana plantations.
Rating: **
Croatia — Every name has a story
Sonnenschein / Trieste — Dasa Drindic (2007)
Setting: Gorizia/Goritz/Görz/Gorica/Gurize, a town on the border between Slovenia and Italy that passes between several countries and regimes in the 20th century.
The English title of the book is Trieste, where some of the plot takes place, which is far less appropriate than Sonnenschein (sunshine), the original title in Croatian and the name of a castle turned into a “euthanasia centre” by the Nazis.
Through Gorizia flows the beautiful river Soča, along which vicious battles were fought in WW1:
“A river of a vivid turquoise hue. In its riverbed it holds a history which eludes historians. Quiet one moment, raging the next. When it rages, it is mighty. When it is quiet, it sings.”
What it’s about: History. The Holocaust. It’s about the many stories behind the many names. About shifting borders and memories (personal and collective), and people dealing with the past. Following the thread of one women it weaves in many lives, many tragedies. It starts gently but before long drags you deep into the darkest depths of history. It is hard to read and hard to talk about. It is precise, compelling, terrifying. I’m not even going to try to get into the plot: all you need to know is that it brims with anger and it very skilfully weaves together personal and narrative history.
From an old woman’s rocking chair, fleeting memories and moments, trial transcripts and biographies, flit by, characters like Francesco Illy of Illy coffee, members of the S.S., the people who suffered and died, the people who carried out despicable atrocities, and the people who kept quiet and survived. The people who lived “while trains rumbled past”:
“In war and skirting war, these blind observers look away with indifference and actively refuse to feel compassion; their self-deception is a hard shield, a shell in which, larvae-like, they wallow cheerfully.”
Why you should read it: If the only survivor of the Shoah you can name is Anne Frank. The power of the book can be summed up by the list of 9,000 murdered Italian Jews (which a former student posts the old woman when he like so many others discover the terrible history of WW2) — Alhadeffs, Ottolenghis, Sonninos. It spares no scorn for the hypocrisy of a world that continued life after the war as if nothing had changed while also challenging us not to understand the ambiguous individual decisions made in wartime.
A painful, but necessary read, a little like the protagonist feels sifting through her memories and documents:
“Haya senses that a little cemetery is sprouting in her breast with a jumble of tilting tombstones…knocking against her ribs.”
The best book from Croatia? It is set in Slovenia, but this is a book about much more than any one country.
Similar to: There really is no book like this one. The pace and tone has a slight similarity to Peter Carey (Such as Parrot and Olivier in America), but is far darker, and deeper.
Rating: *** Judge this book by the blurb on its cover that says: “A masterpiece”.
Cuba
Sea of Lentils — Antonio Benitez-Rojo (1985)
Setting: Four separate 16th century narratives spanning Castille, the Spanish Netherlands, Florida, and various Caribbean islands, among them, a Hispaniola full of ‘scoundrels’ “crazed by the idea of the island as one enormous [gold] mine”.
What it’s about: This is one of the few novels to graphically portray the horror of the Conquista — the Spanish genocide of the Amer-Indian peoples: the brutality of Europeans, the enslavement of Indians in mines.
It also tells of the entry of the English into the transatlantic slave trade, suggesting a passing of the terrible baton of brutality. Slavery, torture, starvation, massacres, beatings flash momentarily into view, obscured mostly by the general debauchery of the Spanish invaders.
A cast of dodgy characters is the poor adventurer who sails with a villainous, distant Columbus. He finds himself worshipped by local tribes, carried around in a hammock and allowed to brutalise and sodomise at will, who fortunes are carried up and down by waves of abuse:
“One afternoon, as you came home with two guinea pigs you’d shot with crossbow, you found nothing left of your village, your castle,m your servants, anything; a mounted part of hidalgos had set fire to the palm huts after disembowelling every Indian at hand…you wandered through the Vega of villages deserted, sacked, and burned.”
Antonio Benitez-Rojo is more academic than novelist, but this gives us a novel of historical richness that humanises a long-past genocide and adds colourful historical detail such as the book’s title: The sea of lentils is both a cartographer misnaming the Antilles but also an allusion to the way Europeans saw the new world as a source of wealth and resources when they see the map of the New World:
“Lentils of gold, silver, pearls, hides, accents and tastes and colours unsurpassed.”
Why you should read it: One of the few books to engage with the dark genocidal history of the Conquista and the English role in the slave trade.
The most fascinating narrative is the story of a Spanish trader from the Canary Islands Verde successfully enticing John Hawkins to become England’s first slave trader. Unravelling like a detective story, it is a subtle but powerful evocation of the dawn of a terrible chapter in world history — made more powerful by not going into its consequences, but acting as a sort of creation myth, cynically romantic.
Interweaving that narrative with the brutality of the Spanish soldiers in the New World is enough to foretell the chilling abuses yet to come, ending with a speech to his crew announcing the venture:
“Why should the Negro be a chattel to the Portuguese alone and all the Indies’ riches go to Spain?…we shall leap ashore and seize them by their necks and thrust them bound into our hold”
Further reading: The Open Veins of Latin America.
The definitive book from Cuba? More defining of the entire Caribbean, if not the Americas in general. For Cuba, try Contrabande, an adventure tail in the spirit of Jack London’s Tales of the Fish Patrol, in which fishermen, impoverished by the competition of indsutrialised US fleets, turn to smuggling rum. It is built on a Zorba style relationship between the gentlemanly narrator and his garrulous, man-of-the-world captain, Shark.
Still to read: Carlos Acosta Pig’s Foot.
Read this if you liked: Lord Jim, H Rider Haggard.
Rating: **
Cyprus
The Cypriot — Andreas Koumi (2006)
Mundane prosaic affair set in Cyprus at the end of British rule. The book cover calls it a great holiday read, as if that’s a good thing and the prose lives down to that billing. A romance shuffling between grimy north London and an increasingly-divided Cyprus like a holidaymaker between the beach and buffet, it has a few good moments but fails to inspire with the material at its disposal.
Czech Republic
Trans — Pavel Hak (2006)
Setting: A dystopian, yet all too possible, global future.
What it’s about: A wild, frenetic novel that follows a refugee who flees a brutal police state, only to encounter more cruelty and violent on a long, global journey, through Africa and European prison camps — all reduced to their worst possibilities, several circles of hell.
The “hero” Wu Tse, starts of as a slave labourer in a country very resemblant of North Korea, shifting frozen bodies in the midst of a famine.
A stripped down, brutalist prose creates an eerie, nightmarish impression on the reader to capture the desperate plight of statelessness, with nowhere to turn.
Increasingly feverish pace with no escape, from the military dictatorship to a harsh mega-city to mad scientists carrying out medical experiments to merciless border guards and harsh prison camps.
Why you should read it: It is a raw, unforgiving book full of faceless brutality that eventually dehumanises the protagonist himself, who has to take increasingly violent measures to stay alive.
Icy cold. Stomach cramps.
Scarred lips. Teeth.
The ultra-securitised world of surveillance, violence, cannibalism and corruption, a world stripped of human rights, compassion or justice, progressively corrupts everyone it touches.
Read it if you liked: 1984, The Road.
The best book from the Czech Republic? Though overshadowed globally by Franz Kafka, Jaroslav Hašek and Milan Kundera, there is a hugely rich body of Czech literature. For the Habsburg era, try Prague Tales by Jan Neruda from the excellent Central European Classics series from the Central European University. This collection of short stories offers intimate, wry sketches of daily life in a Habsburg city. The Habsburg Empire’s polyglot politics do simmer menacingly below the surface of these stories. The tension between the (minority) language of administration, German, and the language of daily life, Czech, is dealt with through everyday scenes office politics.
The standout novel from communist times is My Golden Trades by Ivan Klima, with its series of slightly overlapping stories about people trying to maintain a private, limited existence under a smothering surveillance state.
Rating: ** Some misgogyny loses it one star.
Pick of the bunch: Dasa Drndic’s Sonnenschien is overwhelming, but Colombian Jose Rivera’s The Vortex is such an original, visceral work that is tragically unappreciated in English. I only found it because of a tip from a Professor of Literature! A must-read.
