Every time the longlist for the International Booker Prize is released, my reading pleasure is exponentially increased. Some years, it is better than others to be sure, but this year looks most promising.
Here are a few of the works I have already acquired, sent to me by the most gracious publishers:
A hot, motionless afternoon. Energy and El Negro are fishing with Tilo, their dead friend’s teenage son. After hours of struggling with a hooked stingray, Enero aims his revolver into the water and shoots it. They hang the ray’s enormous corpse from a tree at their campsite and let it go to rot, drawing the attention of some local islanders and igniting a long-simmering fury toward outsiders and their carelessness. It’s only the two sister - teenage nieces of one of the locals, Aguirre - with their hair black as cowbird feathers and giving offa scent of green grass, who are curious about the trio and invite them to dance. But the girls are not quite as they seem. As night approaches and tensions arise, Enero and El Negro return to the charged memories of their friend who years ago drowned in the same river.
As uneasy and saturated as a prophetic dream, Not a River is another extraordinary novel by Selva Almada about masculinity, guilt, and irrepressible desire, written in a style that is spare and timeless.
What I’d Rather Not Think About by Jente Posthuma, translated from the Dutch by Sarah Timmer Harvey, was sent to me by Scribe.
What if one half of a pair of twins no longer wants to live? What if the other can’t live without them?
This question lies at the heart of Jente Posthuma’s deceptively simple What I’d Rather Not Think About. The narrator is a twin whose brother has recently taken his own life. She looks back on their childhood, and tells of their adult lives: how her brother tried to find happiness, but lost himself in various men and the Bhagwan movement, though never completely.
In brief, precise vignettes, full of gentle melancholy and surprising humour, Posthuma tells the story of a depressive brother, viewed from the perspective of the sister who both loves and resents her twin, struggles to understand him, and misses him terribly.
The Details by Ia Genberg, translated from the Swedish by Kira Josefsson, was sent to me by HarperCollins.
An intoxicating novel in the vein of Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti, about a woman in the throes of a fever remembering the important people in her past, her memories laid bare in vivid detail as her body temperature rises.
A woman lies bedridden from a high fever. Suddenly she is struck with an urge to revisit a novel from her past. Inside the book is an inscription: a get-well-soon message from Johanna, an ex-girlfriend who is now a famous television host. As she flips through the book, pages from the woman’s own past begin to come alive, scenes of events and people she cannot forget.
There are moments with Johanna, and Niki, the friend who disappeared years ago without a phone number or an address and with no online footprint. There is Alejandro, who appears like a storm in precisely the right moment. And Brigitte, whose elusive qualities mask a painful secret.
The Details is a novel built around four portraits; the small details that, pieced together, comprise a life. Can a loved one really disappear? Who is the real subject of the portrait, the person being painted or the one holding the brush? Do we fully become ourselves through our connections to others? This exhilarating, provocative tale raises profound questions about the nature of relationships, and how we tell our stories. The result is an intimate and illuminating study of what it means to be human.
Don’t these look fabulous?! I hardly know where to begin, for each of the titles in the International Booker Prize longlist give me a glimpse into a world that is not my own, while expanding my understanding of those who inhabit it with me.
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