Speak, Silence, by Carole Angier (Bloomsbury). This biography of W. G. Sebald, who died twenty years ago, at the age of fifty-seven, examines him using his own methods, with patient excavation of unspoken traumas in his life and the lives of those around him. Angier, who has written biographies of Jean Rhys and Primo Levi, recounts Sebald’s insulated childhood in the Bavarian Alps, his growing awareness of German atrocities, his academic career in England, and his sudden success in middle age. In delicate readings of his work, she identifies sources—landlords, family members, schoolteachers, fellow writers and artists—and demonstrates how his writing stemmed from an ineluctable empathy with misfortune and from a persistent, unceasing exploration of historical memory and its limits.
The Gold Machine, by Iain Sinclair (Oneworld). In 2019, Sinclair travelled with his daughter to northern Peru, to retrace the footsteps of his great-grandfather Arthur. Arthur—sent there in 1891 by the Peruvian Corporation of London, to survey land for coffee colonies—wrote a book about his adventures, an assured Victorian narrative that belied the horrors of colonialism. Those horrors are front and center in Sinclair’s account, a nightmarish reckoning that invokes “Fitzcarraldo” and “Heart of Darkness.” Impeccably researched, the text nevertheless feels unreal, moving uneasily between past and present and drawing parallels between colonialism and tourism. The Sinclairs find themselves—like the indigenous Asháninka, whose ancestors were forced to labor in the colonies—“wandering at a loss through this desert of discredited dreams.”
A Single Rose, by Muriel Barbery, translated from the French by Alison Anderson (Europa). Early in this Zen-inspired novel, Rose, a botanist living in Paris, is summoned to Kyoto for the reading of her father’s will. Rose never met her father, a Japanese art dealer, but he turns out to have hired photographers to secretly document her life for him. Now, at his behest, his assistant guides Rose on a tour of gardens, temples, and restaurants designed to reveal the heart of Japan. At Buddhist sites, she is engulfed with a “tide of sadness mingled with flashes of pure happiness,” and extolls the perfection of the “stillness of motion of the absolute present.” The story is interspersed with aphoristic Japanese tales from various periods, as melancholy is gradually transmuted into joy.
Hard Like Water, by Yan Lianke, translated from the Chinese by Carlos Rojas (Grove). Gao Aijun, the narrator of this boisterous novel, set during the Cultural Revolution, finds his life charmless: his village is like “a pool of stagnant water,” and his wife makes him feel “a clump of cotton” in his throat. Then he meets a beautiful woman, also married, and, to attract her, sets out to lead the “revolution” in their village. In speech larded with Mao quotes and traditional maxims, Gao reveals how their romance, fuelled by the feverish political climate, pitches the village into ever-escalating extremism—a years-long parade of self-advancing schemes culminating in an unthinkable end.