Fiction chronicle May 2022
Unimaginable, imagined, imaginary
On Pollak’s Arm by Hans von Trotha, Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan, Civilizations by Laurent Binet & It’s Getting Dark by Peter Stamm.
On Pollak’s Arm by Hans von Trotha, Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan, Civilizations by Laurent Binet & It’s Getting Dark by Peter Stamm.
On The Passenger, by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, Hard Like Water, by Yan Lianke, Awake, by Harald Voetmann & A Sunday in Ville-d’Avray, by Dominique Barbéris.
On “The Invisible Land,” by Hubert Mingarelli, “Ferdinand, The Man with the Kind Heart: A Novel,” by Irmgard Keun, “Dissipatio H.G.: The Vanishing,” by Guido Morselli & “Mr Cadmus,” by Peter Ackroyd.
A review of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Machado de Assis, The Dominant Animal and Aug 9—Fog by Kathryn Scanlan & The Caretaker by Doon Arbus.
On Interior, by Thomas Clerc; The Sweet Indifference of the World, by Peter Stamm; the short-story collection Machines in the Head, by Anna Kavan; and Beyond the Sea, by Paul Lynch.
On The Ditch by Herman Koch, translated by Sam Garrett; Family Record by Patrick Modiano, translated by Mark Polizzotti; Metropolitan Stories: A Novel by Christine Coulson; and Girl: A Novel by Edna O’Brien.
On Metamorphica, by Zachary Mason; The Thirty-Five Timely & Untimely Deaths of Cumberland County, by Mason Ball; 77, by Guillermo Saccomanno; Article 35: A Novel, by Tanguy Viel; and Rock and Roll Is Life, by D. J. Taylor.
On Hazards of Time Travel: A Novel, by Joyce Carol Oates; Kolyma Stories, by Varlam Shalamov; The Kremlin Ball, by Curzio Malaparte, & To the Back of Beyond, by Peter Stamm.
On Nightmare in Berlin by Hans Fallada, Theory of Shadows by Paolo Maurensig, A Legacy of Spies by John le Carré & The Accusation: Forbidden Stories from Inside North Koreaby Bandi.
On Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, Autumn by Ali Smith, Universal Harvester by John Darnielle, Ill Will by Dan Chaon, & I’d Die For You by F. Scott Fitzgerald.