First published in 2016.
The Brothers is an early Peirene publication, and one I had not been able to find a copy of. It really took my fancy, particularly since I will happily read anything set within the bounds of Scandinavia. This particular novella takes the Finland of 1809 as its setting, and has been translated from its original Finnish by Emily and Fleur Jeremiah. The blurb hails it ‘a Shakespearean drama from icy Finland’, and it has been written by an author who is quite the celebrity in his native land. 
The brothers of the book’s title are Henrik and Erik, who fought on opposing sides in the war between Sweden and Russia. To borrow a portion of the blurb, ‘with peace declared, they both return to their snowed-in farm. But who is the master? Sexual tensions, old grudges, family secrets: all come to a head in this dark and gripping saga’. Its attention-grabbing beginning immediately sets the scene, and demonstrates the chasm of difference between our protagonists: ‘I have barely caught the crunch of snow and I know who is coming. Henrik treads heavily and unhurriedly, as is his wont, grinding his feet into the earth. The brothers are so different. Erik walks fast, with light steps; he is always in a hurry, here then gone’. Later, of Henrik, Erik tells Anna: ‘… he said that we came into this world in the wrong order. That he’s not comfortable here and doesn’t want to remain here, that he wants to see the world’.
Multiple narrators lead us through the whole. We are treated to the distinctive voices of the farmhand, Anna, Henrik, Erik, and their mother, the Old Mistress. This technique makes The Brothers feel like a multi-layered work from the very beginning. Their voices are distinctive, and the farmhand especially – contrary perhaps to expectations – is sometimes rather profound: ‘A human being never sheds his past. He drags it around like an old overcoat and you know him by this coat, by the way it looks and smells. Henrik’s coat is heavy and gloomy, exuding the dark stench of blood’.
As one might expect, the landscape plays a big part in this novella, as does darkness, both literally and metaphorically. Characters are often compared to things like trees and woodpiles. Sahlberg captures things magnificently; he is perceptive of the smallest of details. Of the Old Mistress, he writes: ‘Her eyes change again. A moment ago, they were shaded. Now they darken, open out in the middle, become tiny black abysses which suck in the gaze’. His prose is thoughtful too, and he continually views things through the lens of others, thinking to great effect how a particular scene will make an individual feel. For instance, the Old Mistress says, ‘But boys are fated to grow into men, and a mother has to follow this tragedy as a silent bystander. And now it seems they will kill each other, and then this, too, can be added to my neverending list of losses’. Sahlberg is that rare breed of writer who can get inside his characters’ heads, no matter how disparate they are, and regardless of their gender and age. Each voice here feels authentic, peppered with concerns and thoughts which are utterly believable, and which are specifically tailored to the individual.
The politics of the period have been woven in to good effect, but Sahlberg makes it obvious that it is the characters which are his focus. Their backstories are thorough and believable; they are never overdone. The Brothers is an absorbing novella and, as with all of Peirene’s publications, a great addition and perfect fit to their growing list of important translated novellas.
The twelve stories collected in Things We Lost in the Fire are of ‘ghosts, demons and wild women; of sharp-toothed children and stolen skulls’. They are almost entirely set in the Argentinian capital, Buenos Aires, described in the book’s blurb as a series of ‘crime-ridden streets of [a] post-dictatorship’. Here, ‘exhausted fathers conjure up child-killers, and young women, tired of suffering in silence, decide there’s nothing left to do but set themselves on fire.’
In her introduction, Larrington sets out the importance of the poems within The Poetic Edda. She believes that the collection is ‘comic, tragic, instructive, grandiose, witty and profound’, and that it contains scenes which have been ‘vividly staged’. Larrington goes on to write that the Edda, incorporating as it does ‘comedy, satire, didactic verse, tragedy, high drama and profoundly moving lament’, is one of the greatest masterpieces in world literature. Larrington’s introduction is well written and informative, and is split up into useful sections which deal with such different elements as the Old Norse cosmos and mythological history.
Territory of Light, which was first published in a serialised form in a magazine between 1978 and 1979, has been variously described as ‘spiky, atmospheric and intimate’ (Spectator), and ‘disturbing and dream-like’ (Financial Times). The novella, which begins in springtime, takes as its focus a young woman, who has been abandoned by her husband, and who has to start a new life in a Tokyo apartment with her young daughter. Territory of Light charts the protagonist’s life over the course of a calendar year, as she struggles to bring up her two-year-old alone.
Harcourt’s English translation in 2018. As with Territory of Light, this novella focuses upon a female protagonist named Kōko, a young woman who has been ‘defying her family’s wishes’ for some time. She has, against what was viewed as acceptable in Tokyo society at the time, brought up her eleven-year-old daughter, Kayako, alone in her apartment. After embarking on a ‘casual affair’, she finds herself pregnant once more, and is forced to juggle her present and future selves.
Through its interconnected stories, the novel transports us to the night world of Shinjuku in the late ’60s, where we are introduced to the bartenders, bar owners and hostesses that make up the nightlife of the area. Initially, we become acquainted with the “main character”, Senda, who at the beginning is a bartender at The Pot Still and in later stories he manages to open his own bar, Lui. Alongside Senda we encounter an array of characters, from Yoshie and Kyoko, the two female co-owners of another bar, to hostesses, gangsters and past loves and acquaintances that form part of Shinjuku’s history through their stories. Although their world is often engulfed in deceit and quite unhappy endings, the characters of this novel have managed to form a kind of community between them, where instead of rivalry they show unexpected kindness and help each other out when needed. This has got to be the most surprising and pleasant part of the book for me, as I never expected to feel a sense of ‘family’ and ‘homeliness’ in a story about people who live after dark.
Kamchatka follows ten-year-old Harry, whose name is a false one he has to adopt after his family are forced to flee, calling himself after Harry Houdini, an obsession of his. Harry, whose world is made up of make-believe and superheroes, lives in Buenos Aires during the 1976 coup d’etat. His father leaves the family – Harry, his mother, and his younger brother, who calls himself Simon – at a petrol station on the outskirts of the city: ‘He kissed me, his stubble scratching my cheek, then climbed into the Citroen. The car moved off along the undulating ribbon of road, a green bubble bobbing into view with every hill, getting smaller and smaller until I couldn’t see it any more. I stood there for a long while, my game of Risk tucked under my arm. Until my abuelo, my grandpa, put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Let’s go home.”‘
Translated into English by Alice Copple-Tošić and published by Cadmus Press, The Five Wonders of Danube consists of five chapters, each one taking place in or around a different bridge of the Danube river.
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