Fathers and Fugitives by SJ Naudé; Untold Lessons by Maddalena Vaglio Tanet; A Man With No Title by Xavier Le Clerc; Command Performance by Jean Echenoz
Fathers and Fugitives by SJ Naudé, translated by Michiel Heyns (Europa Editions, £14.99)
“Writing fiction is a disruptive compulsion,” says Daniel, “the last refuge of someone who cannot do anything useful.” Daniel, a gay South African writer living in London, has “tended to blindly pursue my own interests”; Naudé delights in putting him in tricky situations – and I delighted in reading about them. He shacks up with a couple of odd Serbs; he attends his dying father, a man who once “never let him finish a single sentence without interrupting”, and is now largely silent; he reluctantly goes to Japan with his cousin. The results are coolly funny, frequently surprising and in parts almost overwhelming in their emotional force. The division of Daniel’s life into discrete parts gives a rich story arc for such a short book. Some of the plot points land with a bit of a thud, but the quality of Naudé’s prose and his dry vision of the world make this a late entry for one of the best novels of the year.
Untold Lessons by Maddalena Vaglio Tanet, translated by Jill Foulston (Pushkin, £16.99)
It is 1970 in the northern Italian city of Biella, and a teacher has gone missing. The disappearance of Silvia seems to be linked to the death of her pupil Giovanna, a girl who was beaten at home and responded first by “rip[ping] the hair from her calves with duct tape”, and then by filling her pockets with stones. “They found her three kilometres downstream.” We follow Silvia to her hiding place in the forest, where local people’s fears that she is “half dead with hunger and off her head” may not be far off the mark. Meanwhile, another pupil, Martino, determines to find her. Tanet’s skill is to use short chapters shuttling between characters to create a matrix of voices, relationships, gossip and guilt. But in a book full of upended expectations, the most surprising detail is that it is all based on a true story.
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