Reading matters

'The Sirens of Baghdad' by Yasmina Khadra

  Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 307 pages; 2008. (Translated from the French by John Cullen.)

This novel, first published in 2005 under the title Les Sirenes de Baghdad in France, is yet another earnest and thought-provoking story by Yasmina Khadra, the non deplume of the Algerian Army officer Mohammed Moulessehoul. While The Attack was set in war-torn Israel and examined what it is that drives people to become suicide bombers, The Sirens of Baghdad is set in war-torn Iraq and looks at what spurs young men into becoming insurgents.

The story is told through the eyes of an anonymous young man, a Bedouin, who lives in Kafr Karam, a village in the Iraqi desert, a "place so discreet that it often dissolves in mirages, only to emerge at sunset". 

Determined to become more educated than his illiterate well-digger of a father, he attends the university in Baghdad a few months before the American invasion. But when the war begins, the university is vandalised and closed down, and he returns to Kafr Karam, "wild-eyed and distraught".

'The Attack' by Yasmina Khadra

Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 257 pages; 2007. (Translated from the French by John Cullen.)

It's not very often that I get about 10 pages into a novel and decide I absolutely must buy everything else written by this same author. But that is what happened when I started reading Yasmina Khadra's The Attack. I was so stunned and impressed by the novel's opening I just knew that I had to explore her back catalogue as quickly as possible.

But Yasmina Khadra is not really a female author. She is, in fact, a man and former officer in the Algerian Army who used a pen name to avoid military censorship -- or that's the explanation given on the "about the author" page in this book. (You can find out more on the Wikipedia entry and on the author's official [French language] website.)

Khadra has some 20 books to "her" name, but only four have been translated into English. The bestselling 2002 novel The Swallows of Kabul, shortlisted for the 2006 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, was the first. The Attack, also shortlisted for the 2008 IMPAC Award, was (as far as I can gather) the second. This book was also shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt, the Prix Femina and the Prix Renaudot, and won the Prix de Libraires. So, my initial impression, that The Attack was by an author of some standing was pretty much on the money.

The Attack is set in Israel and -- surprise, surprise -- it's about a suicide bomber. It opens with Dr Amin Jaafie, a surgeon in a Tel Aviv hospital, dealing with the bombed and bloodied victims of a terrorist attack in a downtown pizza restaurant that has killed 19 people. As a naturalised Israeli Arab, Amin has worked hard to be respected, admired and accepted by the Jewish culture in which he could so easily be cast as an outsider. A dedicated, highly professional doctor, married to the woman of his dreams, he socialises in the most fashionable of circles, making him a shining example of integration.

But when police inform him that the suicide bomber is his much-adored wife, Amin's carefully constructed world begins to fall apart. His house is vandalised, he is shunned by his colleagues and suddenly his adopted homeland wants nothing more to do with him regardless of his previous social and professional standing.

'The Draining Lake' by Arnaldur Indriðason

Fiction - paperback; Harvill Secker; 312  pages; 2007. (Translated from the Icelandic by Bernard Scudder.)

Icelandic journalist turned crime writer Arnaldur Indriðason became a firm favourite of mine when I read his brilliant novel Tainted Blood (also known as Jar City) back in 2006. The book was a refreshing change to the normal formulaic crime books I'd read in the past, and the setting -- the Icelandic capital Reykjavik -- added an "exotic" touch.

Of course there has been somewhat of an explosion in Scandinavian crime fiction since then, but it is Indriðason to whom I feel most loyal. Indeed, I have made a point of buying each new novel as it has been released, and The Draining Lake was no exception, although it did languish in my reading queue for about six months.

This is the fourth Reykjavik murder mystery -- starring the grumpy but troubled detective Erlunder -- to be translated into English. It is typical Indriðason fare but for some reason I didn't find the story as gripping as the others that preceded it.

'First Love' by Ivan Turgenev

Fiction - paperback; Penguin Classics; 102 pages; 2007. (Translated from the Russian by Isaiah Berlin.)

First Love is Russian writer Ivan Turgenev’s most famous novella. First published in 1860, it has been beautifully repackaged and republished as part of Penguin’s Great Love series.

At just over 100 pages, this is a book that can quickly be read in one sitting (I achieved it via two 20-minute train journeys), although its brevity should not be mistaken for shallowness. First Love is exactly what the title suggests: a man looks back on his first love. “I was sixteen at the time,” he writes. “It happened in the summer of 1833.”

'Prime Time' by Liza Marklund

Fiction - paperback; Pocket Books; 432 pages; 2006. (Translated from the Swedish by Ingrid Eng-Rundlow.)

One of my pet hates is the trite "sells" or subtitles that endorse book covers for no other reason than someone in a marketing department thinks they might hook a potential reader. Prime Time by Liza Marklund is a good case in point. In my opinion, adding the words "Thirteen people. One Murder. Twelve Suspects" underneath the title simply detracts from the book's credibility rather than boosting it.

Which is a shame, because Prime Time is quite a good thriller that doesn't need to be cheapened by marketing hype. The novel stars a gutsy heroine, the crime reporter Annika Bengtzon, who has appeared in three previous novels -- The Bomber, Studio 69 and Paradise -- none of which I have read. According to the author's wikipedia entry the books haven't been written in chronological order, so it probably doesn't matter. As it was, I felt the book was a good, stand alone read but as someone who enjoys exploring an author's back catalogue from the beginning there's always the nagging feeling that I might have missed out on something...

'In the Wake' by Per Petterson

Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 202 pages; 2007. (Translated from the Norwegian by Anne Born.)

Judging by the amount of Scandinavian crime fiction hitting our shelves these days, anyone would be forgiven for thinking that this was the only genre Scandinavian writers were capable of creating. Thank goodness, then, for Per Petterson. This Norwegian writer has penned one short-story collection and six novels, although only two have been translated into English (a third, In Siberia, is due out at the end of the year) and they are as far from crime thrillers as you can imagine.

The beautiful, introspective Out Stealing Horses was published to critical acclaim in its native Norway in 2003, but it didn't hit the big time until it was translated into English and scooped the Independent Foreign Prize for Fiction in 2006. Suddenly Norway's best kept literary secret was out of the bag and English-language readers like me clamoured for more. Cue the translation of In the Wake, a novel that predates Out Stealing Horses by three years, but which feels more accomplished and -- if it is possible -- more touching, more painful and more despondent.

'Strangers' by Taichi Yamada

Fiction - paperback; Faber and Faber; 208  pages; 2005. (Translated from the Japanese by W.P. Lammers.)

Sometimes you pick up a book and find yourself so lost in the story that whenever you put it down -- if you can put it down -- that you find yourself thinking about it, and counting the hours, minutes, until you can resume reading it again.

When I initially picked up Taichi Yamada's Strangers, a slim volume with slightly too-large print, I had no idea what to expect from it. Little did I know the stranglehold it would have over me for the three days it took me to read. Every time I had to close the book, owing to my deep and abiding need for sleep during a hectic working week, I did so reluctantly. And every morning I'd wake up, a little knot of excitement in my tummy, knowing that this magical, haunting, little book was awaiting my eager eyes.

Paradoxically, as much as I could not wait to reach the final, chilling conclusion, I also did not want the story to end, and I admittedly dragged it out for at least a day longer than was truly necessary.

Strangers is one of those beguiling tales told in simple, hypnotic prose. The first person narrative by 48-year-old Harada, a depressed and slightly jaded TV scriptwriter living in Tokyo, is strangely addictive despite the sometimes clunky sentence structure and the not-quite-right dialogue littered with American slang (perhaps a fault of the translator rather than the author?)

'Voices' by Arnaldur Indriðason

Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 344  pages; 2007. (Translated from the Icelandic by Bernard Scudder.)

Voices is the third Arnaldur Indriðason book to be translated into English featuring the troubled detective Erlunder. Set in the Icelandic capital, Reykjavik, it's a powerful police procedural that pulls no punches in its depiction of a sordid crime and its aftermath.

The story opens with the murder of a hotel doorman in the room in which he has lived for the past 20 years.

The man was sitting on the bed, leaning against the wall. He was wearing a bright red Santa suit and still had the Santa cap on his head, but it had slipped down over his eyes. A large artificial Santa beard hid his face. He had undone the thick belt around his waist and unbuttoned his jacket. Beneath it he was wearing only a white vest. There was a fatal wound to his heart. Although there were other wounds on the body, the stabbing through the heart had finished him off. His hands had slash marks on them, as if he had tried to fight off the assailant. His trousers were down round his ankles. A condom hung from his penis.

'School's Out' by Christophe Dufosse

Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 400 pages; 2007. (Translated from the French by Shaun Whiteside.)

I'm not sure what it is with modern French novels, because I never really seem to enjoy them despite the fact that the blurb makes them sound fantastic. The cover of School's Out boasted all kinds of glowing reviews from "cool, sexy and sinister" to "forcibly reminds one of Donna Tart's A Secret History". And the note about the author on the first page said it had been translated into 10 languages and was the winner of the Prix Premier Roman, which is a French prize for first novels (I think?), so how could I go wrong?

The story opens with the death of a young teacher at a secondary school. He has killed himself by leaping out of a classroom window and it is largely thought that his class of unruly 13-year-old students are to blame. But when Pierre Hoffman takes over the class for the rest of the school year he finds the students incredibly well-behaved, quiet and submissive. But he soon learns that there is something slightly abnormal about them, as if they are "existing only as a whole, in a group". Cue spooky music here...

'I'm Not Scared' by Niccolo Ammaniti

Fiction - paperback; Canongate; 225 pages; 2003. (Translated from the Italian by Jonathan Hunt.)

Books about childhood that truly get inside the mind of a child are difficult feats to accomplish. How do you recapture the innocence, that naive sense of wonder, that wide-eyed outlook on life untouched by greater human experience without talking down to your reader or coming across as if you're trying too hard?

Whatever the trick, Italian author Niccolo Ammaniti has achieved it. In spades.

The somewhat ludicrously titled I'm Not Scared is a delicious treat, one that transports the reader back to that time when the adult world was incomprehensible and the best thing about life was riding your bicycle throughout the long, hot school holidays that lay ahead every summer.