EILEEN BATERSBY, Literary Correspondent, reveals her favourite 25 works of fiction of 2009 - well 26 actually - as well as her favourite non-fiction
THE TOP THREE
1PEACE
By Richard Bausch (Tuskar Rock)
A ragged division of US soldiers forms a reconnaissance party in the rain. They may be on the winning side but they are miserable. It is Italy, the Germans are in retreat and something very horrible happens. Think of Tobias Wolff's The Barracks Thiefand wonder at Bausch's evocation of exhausted tension. He is widely anthologised in the US if still celebrated in Europe, largely for his collection Aren't You Happy for Me?With its sympathetic central character, Robert Marson – slightly older than the others and sufficiently experienced of life to see that bit further, think that bit more deeply – this wonderful short novel, though removed from Bausch's familiar territory of the wry and ordinary, is dramatic, unsettling, utterly convincing and perfect.
2ALONE IN BERLIN
By Hans Fallada, translated by Michael Hofmann (Penguin)
Echoes of the great Joseph Roth filter through this fast-moving, astutely deadpan thriller set in wartime Germany. The weary inhabitants of a boarding house are unified by their hatred of the Nazi regime. One of the characters is Otto Quangel, a taciturn man who says little, even after his son dies at the front. While his wife weeps, Otto merely broods. Or so it seems, except that he begins a postcard campaign, protesting against the system. Published in 1947, the year Fallada died of a morphine overdose, this first English translation is rendered with characteristic flair by poet Michael Hofmann.
3THE VAGRANTS
By Yiyun Li (4th Estate)
Winner of the inaugural Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award for her collection A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, nothing Yiyun Li had done to date indicated that she would write as powerful a novel as The Vagrants. Set in a Chinese industrial town in the late 1970s, it looks to the public execution of Gu Shan, a political activist who had spent 10 years in prison, and the aftermath of her killing. It is a shocking, brutal story told with understated eloquence and a devastating sense of purpose. It could win next year's Impac – and should.
LOVE AND SUMMER
By William Trevor (Viking)
Possibly will be remembered as the novel that should have won this year’s Man Booker Prize yet was dealt a shock shortlist omission. Trevor’s latest study of small-town life, its secrets, its sorrows and its special menace is brilliant, and yet again demonstrates that here is a writer who can continue to surprise through nuance and the slightest gesture.
SUMMERTIME
By JM Coetzee (Harvill Secker)
Only an artist as singular as Coetzee could tiptoe between genres and decide to handle things his way as adroitly as he does in this witty mock memoir in which a diligent biographer attempts to retrace a specific period in the life of the late novelist John Coetzee. The anger is there, seething through the pages, as is the irony, the humour and the despair. Is he the world’s finest living literary artist? Probably.
MY FATHER’S TEARS
By John Updike (Hamish Hamilton)
Mixed feelings greeted this collection, published within months of Updike's death. These final stories, if not quite as polished in places, are true to his genius. The title story reflects something of the heartbreaking tone of his finest work, A Sandstone Farmhouse(from The Afterlife, 1994).
The narrator of My Father's Tearsrecalls the day he was first setting off to Harvard – "I was going somewhere" – while his father, who was shedding quiet tears, "was seeing me go". Death and age are the themes of this final book, but the fact remains: when Updike was at his best, no one wrote better.
THE IMMORTALS
By Amit Chaudhuri (Picador)
Human comedy is an art, and one mastered by Amit Chaudhuri. Music is both the communal magic and tension of this delicate and gracious novel. The immortals of the title may well refer to the many songs sung, but there are other immortals present: the characters, ordinary people sustained by hope. Most evocatively of all in Chaudhuri’s fiction is the bustling life of India, which sighs, sings and shouts from the pages.
ESTHER’S INHERITANCE
By Sándor Márai, translated by George Szirtes (Picador)
Sharp and elegant, this is another wonder from the Hungarian master, author of Embersand The Rebels. Once destroyed by love an older, wiser, exasperated, though not without humour, Esther, watches as her dishonest former lover returns to snatch the little that remains to her.
IN OTHER ROOMS, OTHER WONDERS
By Daniyal Mueenuddin (Bloomsbury)
Pakistani writer Mueenuddin brings wit, humanity and a cosmopolitan confidence to these eight interlinking stories. It is the sort of collection that, once you read it, you decide to make a point of reading his next book.
THE BLIND SIDE OF THE HEART
By Julia Franck, translated by Anthea Bell (Harvill Secker)
A young mother abandons her son at a wartime railway station. Franck's bold, often shocking family saga is fearless. A winner of the major German literary award, it is so much stronger than Simon Mawer's The Glass Room, which was Man Booker-shortlisted. There is a relentless sense of purpose about the complex, ever-shifting narrative that continually tests the reader.
THE COMPLETE COSMICOMICS
By Italo Calvino (Penguin)
First chance to have all of these extraordinary bursts of the imagination gathered together. There is an innocence about this book, as well as an honesty and a longing for the world to be better. It is as if Calvino and Saint-Exupéry had entered into a dialogue, after which they both decided it would serve the common good if Calvino were to share his findings.
THE TRUE DECEIVER
By Tove Jansson, translated by Thomas Teal (Sort of Books)
A dark, dark tale from the remarkable Jansson, who was initially world famous as a children’s author but turned to adult fiction in her 50s, after her mother died. Set in a depressed fishing village, the main character is a strange young woman with a flair for maths and a backward brother. Distanced from everyone, even the dog that accompanies her, she has designs on a house owned by a reclusive illustrator. It is a shift of wills played out with measures of suspicion and menace.
THE ARCHIVIST’S STORY
By Travis Holland (Bloomsbury)
Pavel Dubrov is a depressed widower and former teacher now working in the archive of the Lubyanka Prison. His task? The destruction of literature. Part of his duty is the verification of the final work of Isaac Babel. He meets the writer, his glasses are missing. “Somehow he had expected Babel to appear as he once did in his dust jacket pictures.” American Holland’s profound Impac-shortlisted debut, about one man’s doomed attempt to right a wrong, engages from the first sentence to the closing words.
THE POST OFFICE GIRL
By Stefan Zweig, translated by Joel Rotenberg (Sort of Books)
Christine, a young woman, is caught up in a dreary life working for the Austrian postal service. After years of living in the US, the girl’s aunt makes contact and invites Christine’s mother to join her in a Swiss hotel. But the mother is ailing and the daughter goes. Her life changes. Shades of Joseph Roth and, increasingly, Thomas Mann are evident. Christine consolidates her fairy tale with lies, but the truth eventually surfaces. Part dark romance, part morality play, this forgotten classic was one of the year’s revelations.
RANSOM
By David Malouf (Chatto)
Few writers possess the natural lyric grace of Malouf. In this beautiful narrative he looks to the Iliad– a familiar story made different by the subtle emotion he brings to his study of a grieving father intent on buying back his son's body from the enemy.
THE DOG
By Kerstin Ekman, translated by Linda Schenck and Rochelle Wright (Sphere)
Detached, sophisticated narrative that follows a puppy in its battle to survive. Ekman places the puppy in a world full of enemies, without ever relaxing its sense of being alone. Born into a domestic environment, the dog is forced to retreat to a wild state before again reverting to domestication on engaging with man through the arrival of moose hunters. Intelligent and beautifully descriptive, this is a special book.
BOOK OF CLOUDS
By Chloe Aridjis (Chatto)
An original and beguiling tale of a life in flux, this little personal odyssey of a novel takes the narrator, Tatiana, from Mexico, where her family run a deli, to Berlin. There she supports herself through a series of half-hearted jobs. It is Paul Auster, only better. Aridjis conveys a convincing sense of Berlin, as the narrator speaks to the reader as if seeking some assistance in understanding all that has happened. This is a whimsical, confident book sustained by offbeat charm and intelligence.
WANTING
By Richard Flanagan (Atlantic)
Based on a true story rooted in colonial abuse of the native population, this beautifully choreographed and violent book by the gifted Tasmanian could have livened up the Man Booker bunfight but was, of course, overlooked. The tragedy of a bright young girl’s life that ends in adult squalor serves as a powerful metaphor for a wider saga.
MAP OF THE INVISIBLE WORLD
By Tash Aw (4th Estate)
Abandoned by his parents, Adam later watches as his brother is given the chance of a new life, while he is left behind in an orphanage. Later the Dutch man who adopts him is arrested, and so Adam is again alone. Set in Indonesia and Malaysia, this is an exciting, important novel that looked a likely Man Booker contender yet was overlooked.
THE RIDER ON THE WHITE HORSE
By Theodor Storm, translated by James Wright (NYRB Classics)
Here is a ghost story worth reading, particularly as it is so brilliantly contained within ordinary life. The Rider on the White Horseis a German literary landmark and the prose equivalent of Caspar David Friedrich's atmospheric mood paintings. Storm hailed from the marshy polder-and-dike Frisian landscape, and his mastery of the long short story is unique, as is his approach to narrative.
THE HOUSEKEEPER + THE PROFESSOR
By Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder (Harvill Secker)
Last year she impressed with the three darkly surrealist stories of The Diving Pool, and this year Ogawa is represented by a tender work, which was first published in Japan in 2003. The professor is a mathematician traumatised by an accident; the housekeeper is a single mother who works for an agency. The professor has no memory. Each morning the housekeeper must reintroduce herself. It is a miracle of a book.
THE SHAPE OF HIM
By Gill Schierhout (Cape)
A beautifully written love story spanning the 1920s up until 1945, in which a woman recalls the horror of watching her partner succumb to brain disease. The narrator’s thoughts are strange and candid. Sara is a woman without expectations, who appears to have had no life prior to meeting the doomed Herbert Wakefield. Chance events shape her destiny. There is an unnerving intelligence and sensitivity about this South African debut that should have been more widely celebrated on publication.
THE COST OF LIVING
By Mavis Gallant (Bloomsbury)
Too Much Happiness
By Alice Munro (Chatto)
Cheating? Never. Two great Canadian masters of the short story share honours here, though Gallant’s early stories prove the stronger volume.
THE QUICKENING MAZE
By Adam Foulds (Cape)
Drawing on the real-life experience of poet John Clare, who was to die hopelessly insane in 1864, this imaginative, atmospheric period novel has style and a host of characters, including Tennyson's troubled brother. Much of the action takes place in Dr Matthew Allen's asylum with a difference. The Magic Mountainit is not, but Fould's Man Booker-shortlisted debut is charming, at times funny, but for the surprisingly vague handling of Clare.
THE TIN DRUM
By Günter Grass, translated by Breon Mitchell (Harvill Secker)
In this, the 50th anniversary year of its publication, why not celebrate Grass's burlesque debut? This is a fantastic new translation, the translation Grass always wanted. It conveys the sheer movement of a narrative that reads as a picaresque cartoon underlined by polemic and fable, a love of country and a fear of history. The Tin Drumhas had an enduring impact on international fiction, and to read this new translation is to experience a novel you may or may not already know, and discover a living, talking, shouting work of art.
The best in non-fiction
The Bedside Book of Beasts: A Wildlife Miscellany
By Graeme Gibson (Bloomsbury)
The title does not do justice to this glorious feat of scholarly imagination. Gibson, author of The Bedside Book of Birds(2005) is an anthologist of cunning flair. Medieval texts and art are brilliantly juxtaposed with Audubon's wildlife and folk art. The images are seductive, the use of quotation inspired and the polemic well made. Here is a beautiful book that will not only beguile, it will teach.
Maps in Those Days: Cartographic Methods Before 1850
By JH Andrews
(Four Courts Press)
Maps are power. They are also magic – the paths of adventure, the code to breaking secrets, to understanding a landscape. John Andrews is a practical geographer, but he is also a philosopher possessed of curiosity and imagination. Within the covers of this scholarly volume is mystery defined. It is a history and also a romance. If there is a complete book about cartography as a science and as a specifically European art developing during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, this is it.
Eclipse
By Nicholas Clee (Bantam)
Genius is too small a word for Sea the Stars the culmination of 300 years of thoroughbred breeding, and in the year of his triumph Clee’s witty homage to the mighty Eclipse is all the more timely. This lively, informed Georgian social history recalls the all-conquering horse that began it all, in an exciting narrative populated by swaggering gamblers and horse lovers, most notably Dennis O’Kelly, Eclipse’s larger-than-life Irish owner.
The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy
Translated by Cathy Porter (Alma Books)
How she remained married to the beyond difficult Tolstoy for close on half a century remains one of life’s great mysteries, and Sofia’s diaries provide rich, at times peevish, but invariably vivid insights to the Russia of her lifetime.
Amazing Rare Things: The Art of Natural History in the Age of Discovery
(Kales Press)
The English botanical artist Mark Catesby (1682-1749) and the German Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717) are well represented in this extraordinary compilation of antiquarian prints, including work by Da Vinci from the Royal collection.
The Strangeness of Tragedy
By Paul Hammond (Oxford)
The most compelling of literary genres in which the protagonists invariably destroy themselves and involve us in the horror. Hammond explores classical literature, pursuing themes of hubris and self-destruction, culminating in the sense of fascinated horror experienced by Shakespeare’s Richard II.
Samuel Johnson
By David Nokes (4th Estate)
Biography can be an unsavoury journey into the bad luck of a fellow human, yet Nokes manages to be thorough but always honourable. As with his 1997 study of Jane Austen, this is a truly great book in which Johnson the man strides and stumbles, and no, Nokes doesn’t like Boswell either.
Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives
By Brian Dillon (Penguin Ireland)
Dillon’s mind is as interesting as that of the people he writes about. The first person I turned to here was the eccentric Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, for whom a chance unwelcome handshake could result in a lawsuit. This is a bizarrely unputdownable, ironic book in which Dillon manages to make the reader feel more witness than voyeur.
Second Readings: From Beckett to Black Beauty
by Eileen Battersby was published this week by Liberties Press
