Anyway, as promised, here's the next set of 18 books under 180 pages that you should get your pandemic-fogged brains around. I dare say I think this one is even better.
THE NOTEBOOK by ÁGOTA KRISTÓF
The opening salvo in what is probably my favourite trilogy of all time (Jens Bjorneboe's History of Bestiality comes a close second), The Notebook is a spare, harrowing tale of debasement and despair. Set in a small Hungarian village towards the end of World War 2, it is the story of twin boys who are willing to do literally anything, not only to survive, but to get ahead. That their brand of evil stems, above all, from the moral vacuum created by war makes The Notebook all the more horrific.
CLASS TRIP by EMMANUEL CARRÈRE
Carrère is best known for his brilliant works of narrative non-fiction but, for my money, Class Trip is his finest moment. A father takes his son for a two-week school getaway in the mountains. Soon after the kid is dropped off, one of his classmates goes missing. This is psychological terror at its absolute best.
THE MURDER FARM by ANDREA MARIA SCHENKEL
I'm a sucker for a great crime thriller and The Murder Farm is one I go back to time and time again. A family and their maidservant are found murdered on their farm in rural Germany. Through a chain of voices, snippets, documents and unsettling religious rants, Schenkel leaves it to the reader to piece together the genuinely shocking truth.
THE CREMATOR by LADISLAV FUKS
It is quite unfortunate that Fuks is all but forgotten these days. As a chronicler of the absurdity of life, mostly through the prism of WW2, he is without compare and, frankly, we'd all do well to read him right now. The Cremator is both charming and terrifying, a salutory warning about the ease with which a well-meaning functionary can slide into brutality. The titular Mr Kopfrkingl is always certain that he is doing good - freeing souls from the shackles of this world - even when his cremations extend to the living.
THE TOPLESS TOWER by SILVINA OCAMPO
Ocampo's writing is often overshadowed by her marriage to Adolfo Bioy Casares and friendship with Borges, but she was bloody great in her own right. This wonderfully surreal novella matches almost anything written by the aforementioned "superstars" - a boy is tricked by the devil into entering a painting of a strange tower. Once inside, he too begins to paint, only to find his creations spring to life.
JULIA PARADISE by ROD JONES
I have Tobias McCorkell to thank for introducing me to this forgotten Australaian gem. Discomforting and hallucinatory, to say the least, Julia Paradise is a story of obsession and perversion set amongst the Australian expats in 1920s Shanghai.
KNELLER'S HAPPY CAMPERS by ETGAR KERET
Imagine a summer camp - American style - where all the campers are recent suicides. It's an afterlife with a difference. And it's where Mordy finds himself immediately after death. When he learns his ex-girlfriend is also there, he sets off to find her and rekindle the romance. Yeah, it's weird and sad and should probably come with a trigger warning, but it's also oddly sweet and comforting.
TALKING TO OURSELVES by ANDRÉS NEUMAN
I'm a recent convert to the astonishing beauty of Neuman's writing and, I have to say, I'm very glad to have discovered him during this pandemic. He really is a master of curious empathy and this short novel serves as a perfect distillation of his literary depth: a dying man takes his young son on a roadtrip in an attempt to create one special memory before he dies. While they're away, the mother, left at home, attempts to come to terms with her grief-induced infedility. Through the interspersed perspectives of the boy, the father and the mother, Talking To Ourselves is a richly melancholic meditation on the importance of the small things we most take for granted in life.
MACHINE by PETER ADOLPHSEN
It's almost impossible to describe the experience of reading Adolphsen. I was hard-pressed to choose between Machine and The Brummstein but I think it is the former's manic unpredictability that sealed it for me. A mad, mind-bending collision of fragmentary moments that, taken together, make the reader question the line between fate and chance. It's the butterfly effect on speed. And acid. And mushrooms.
EXQUISITE CADAVERS by MEENA KANDASAMY
Presented as a highly innovative dual narrative, Exquisite Cadavers is mostly about Karim, a Tunisian immigrant, and Maya, his English wife. Struggling to make ends meet, and in the face of constant casual racism, theirs is a love circumscribed by the realities of Brexit-era London. Meanwhile, in the margins, Kandasamy tells her own story of writing the book, giving us a glimpse into the way her own life and observations - particularly of the abysmal treatment of women, political dissidents and minorities in Modi's India - inform Karim and Maya's story. A work of rare genius.
ONE OF THE BOYS by DANIEL MAGARIEL
Scenes of an ordinary domestic life slowly unravel to paint the portrait of a man who manipulates and viciously abuses his children. We see it from the perspective of the younger boy, at first wholly in awe of the father who rescued him from a mother he is told was dangerous and neglectful. It's all great fun, and life in a new town seems like a lark, but then the cracks begin to show.
SENSELESSNESS by HORACIO CASTELLANOS MOYA
Until I got to thinking about the novellas I love, I'd forgotten quite how incredible this one is. A writer is hired by his friend to proofread the testimony of survivors of decades old massacres in an unnamed South American country. The friend works for the church. Problem is, the more the writer reads, the more he is convinced of the church's complicity in the old regime's crimes. A document of relentless brutality that reads like an indictment of our collective silence.
ADDRESS UNKNOWN by KATHERINE KRESSMAN TAYLOR
Okay, so this barely scrapes in as a novella. At best it's a long short story, but it was published as a stand alone volume so I'm claiming it here. Address Unknown is an absloutely ingenoius epistolary tale in which the reader's initial disgust and frustration at the injustice of life under Nazi rule (and the deceitful duplicity and opportunism of "friends" in crisis) is turned into a weird sense of triumph at the revenge-as-redemption twist. I don't want to give too much away but do yourself a favour and spend half an hour reading this.
KHIRBET KHIZEH by S. YIZHAR
For me, this is the crown jewel of Israeli literature. It was also the first book to truly question the foundational narrative of the state itself. A young soldier takes part in the clearing of a Palestinian village during the War of Independence. It is, in reality, a massacre, one that the powers that be take great pains to cover up. In its wake, the soldier undergoes a personal moral reckoning that ultimately destroys him. That Khirbet Khizeh was written by an Israeli politician is almost unthinkable thse days.
WHITE HUNGER by AKI OLLIKAINEN
Set during a brutal Nordic winter, where crops have failed and people are succumbing to starvation, disease and hypothermia, it tells a tale not dissimilar to something Cormac McCarthy might conjure. A young family sets off on foot towards Russia in the hope of finding food. That's about it. They trudge across the frozen wasteland, witnessing the horrible casualties in nature's war against humankind. Just one warning: don't get too attached to anyone in this book.
IN THE ORCHARDS, THE SWALLOWS by PETER HOBBS
Set free after fifteen years in the dank prison of a repressive regime, the narrator yearns for his lost love - a politician's daughter with whom he spent one moment of intimacy in his father's orchards. It is what sustained him through his suffering and what fuels his recovery. Hobbs is, I believe, a poet and this reads almost like a prose poem. Every sentence radiates with beauty and longing, even in the face of great pain and loss.
THE MEURSAULT INVESTIGATION by KAMEL DAOUD
In what has to be one of the most audacious experiments I've encountered in recent times, Kamel Daoud has sought to reclaim the unnamed Arab murdered by Mersault in Albert Camus's classic L'Etranger and, in giving him a name and life story, not only engage directly with the original novel but also explore issues of identity, colonialism and the ownership of narrative.
ALL MY FRIENDS ARE SUPERHEROES by ANDREW KAUFMAN
I honestly can't even begin to count the ways I love this book. It is the sweetest, quirkiest, most charming and funny little book I think I've ever read. A lovelorn guy who lives in a world of superheroes sits next to his wife (The Perfectionist whose ex, The Hypno, has convinced her he is invisible and inaudible) on a plane, trying to convince her that he exists. Full of whimsy and sweetness, without ever slipping into cliché, this is the kind of book that will make you feel good about life. And fuck knows we all need that right now.
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