Summertime’s easy reading
From fantasy to wildlife, Mail & Guardian books editor Darryl Accone picks his great summer reads
by Robert Seethaler (Picador) English-language readers were introduced to Robert Seethaler last year with a translation from the German by Charlotte Collins of his novella A Whole Life (Picador). There, in just 124 pages, he tells an epic about Andreas Egger, a manual labourer, who lives one of those apparently small lives that are really big in their courage, self-reliance and intimations of mortality.
Collins is back to render Der Trafikant into 234 pages of limpid English as The Tobacconist. It’s an elevated love triangle of sorts, ineffably poignant, featuring the teenaged Franz, fresh from the country; Otto Trsnyek, founder, owner and proprietor of Trsnyek Tobacconist’s, purveyor of newspapers, stationery and tobacco products since 1919; and one of the shop’s regulars, Professor Sigmund Freud.
With its routines and steady patronage, Otto Trsnyek’s is a comfortable, reassuring miniature world. of genres here, from science fiction But without, the time is out of joint: it to historical fiction to alternative is 1937, and none of the three men can history to fantasy. For his tropes, put that right. Liu draws on Chinese and Japanese culture and history, on questions of consciousness and computers, on the line between history and denialism, and on the magic of written characters. The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu (Head of Zeus) Ken Liu is a winner of the Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy awards, a great science fiction and fantasy writer and a new master of the short story. This collection presents 15 stories that thrill with their vision (An Advanced Readers’ Picture Book of Comparative Cognition), grip with their humanity (The Literomancer), and will endure with their appreciation of how to be fully in the moment always (Mono no aware) and how to be principled and brave and not regret the cost (The Litigation Master and the Monkey King).
There is a dazzling mix and array
Epitaphs and Dreams: Poems to Remember the Struggle by Patrick FitzGerald (Porcupine Press) The power of the word to capture, celebrate, mourn, interrogate or commemorate the moment is evident in South African poet and activist Patrick FitzGerald’s gathering together of poems he wrote largely during the struggle against apartheid. His introduction and concise notes set the poems in their context of time and place, and the effect is to remind the by Lian Hearn (Picador) Lian Hearn’s five novels dazzled young adult and adult readers alike, with their deftly drawn world of a medieval Japan that was and was not medieval Japan. Hearn had a predecessor, Lynn Guest, whose historical novel (The Bodley Head, 1980) is a compelling fiction set at the time of the Minamoto family and the Cloistered Emperor in the late 1180s.
After a two-book interlude, Hearn returned to her favoured historicofantasy setting with Eight Islands, the first in a two-book saga, The Tale of Shikanoko. Lord of the Darkwood