LITERARY FICTION
THE WAITER by Matias Faldbakken
(Doubleday £12.99, 240 pp) MATIAS FALDBAKKEN previously published a violent-sounding satirical trilogy, Scandinavian Misanthropy, billed as Norway’s answer to American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis.
It was slated for translation in 2010, but appears to have been quietly dropped so, instead, he’s making his English-language debut with this amiable comedy about a stressed waiter in a top-end Oslo restaurant that’s slowly hitting the skids.
The unnamed narrator’s anxiety isn’t helped when his friend leaves him in charge of his young daughter, Anna, promising that she’ll do her homework as long as she doesn’t fall in with the hard-drinking regulars.
Watching him dish dirt on customers and colleagues is good fun — but you sense a more earnest point, too, as he snatches rare downtime to scroll nervily through the jumble of disaster footage and cat videos flooding into his phone, making the faded grandeur of his 19th-century establishment a symbol of broader, post-internet worries over what we’ve lost.
HOMELAND by Walter Kempowski
(Granta £14.99, 240 pp) GERMAN writer Walter Kempowski (1929-2007) had a surprise bestseller in 2015 with his novel All For Nothing, about the fortunes of a well-to-do family in East Prussia during World War II.
Set 30 years ago, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Homeland revisits that disputed territory — now mostly Polish — through the eyes of Jonathan, a Hamburg-based journalist sent to write about it. The trip forces him to revisit a region where his mother died in childbirth and his father was killed in battle, a tragic start in life that Jonathan isn’t shy to exploit.
As he gradually rethinks his sense of victimhood, Kempowski’s tone flits between sympathy and send-up.
Ultimately, the book isn’t really about Jonathan — a powerful point, for sure, but, given that no one he meets on the road is drawn anywhere near as vividly, I was left in two minds about how far Kempowski’s structural gamble pays off.
CHILDHOOD by Gerard Reve
(Pushkin £12.99, 160 pp) DUTCH author Gerard Reve, who died in his 80s in 2006, enjoyed a posthumous revival when The Evenings, about a bored clerk in postwar Amsterdam, appeared in English for the first time to wide acclaim.
Now, in one slim volume, comes a pair of novellas originally published, like The Evenings, in the late Forties.
In the first, 11-year-old Elmer invites himself to the home of Werther, a local new boy, hoping to show him who’s boss. But, in the peculiar household — Werther’s mother is curiously keen to see them both naked — he gets more than he bargained for.
The second novella, The Fall Of The Boslowits Family, ramps up the tension in an equally oblique fashion, with a narrator recalling Christmas in Nazioccupied Amsterdam.
These are slight works, so subtle as to seem almost inconsequential, generating frustration, as well as fascination, from Reve’s reliance on his ability to wring menace out of things left unsaid.