The best recent translated fiction – review roundup

The Holocaust and history; a young gay man in South Korea; a wartime epic from Finland; plus two tales of love and abandonment

The Memory Monster by Yishai Sarid, translated by Yardenne Greenspan (Serpent’s Tail, £12.99)
“This is where the illusion we call humankind was erased,” a guide to Holocaust sites tells the visitors on his tour. He is so steeped in its history that he has become corrupted by the horror, increasingly unable to see good in the world (humans are “worms with aspirations”) and even applying its grim lessons (“it’s all about power, power, power”) to his son’s problems at school. Sarid boldly highlights the risks of “harnessing [ourselves] to the memory chariot” and of how remembrance can calcify our views, in this complex, rewarding story of a man brought low by good intentions.

Love in the Big City by Sang Young Park, translated by Anton Hur (Tilted Axis, £9.99)
It’s a mark of the generous spirit of the South Korean author’s English-language debut that it made me laugh on the first page. The novel’s loosely autobiographical account of a young gay man losing and finding his way in a conservative society isn’t always so funny, but even bad news is delivered with a spark. “Your mother has cancer! In the uterus! Hallelujah.” Despite the loss of friends, lovers and parents, “the only three things floating around my brain were iced Americano, Kylie Minogue and sex”. Kylie’s name later becomes a euphemism for something darker, and the modulation of tone casts out any initial fear that the novel might just skate across the surface.

Land of Snow and Ashes by Petra Rautiainen, translated by David Hackston (Pushkin, £12.99)
In 1944 Finland reversed its second world war allegiance to the Nazis following a treaty with Russia. This debut novel is set in part during that shaky period, narrated by a soldier working in a Nazi camp in the northern town of Inari, “at the edge of the earth”. His diary alternates with the story of photographer Inkeri after the war, ostensibly reporting on the loss of the local Sámi culture, but really looking for her husband who went missing in the war. In the 1944 sections, we find out what happened to him. Rautiainen’s prose is occasionally clunky as it makes points about cultural domination (“Photography was about power – a form of manipulation”), but the book reveals so much more about a war we thought we knew that it feels like a potted epic.

The Child Who by Jeanne Benameur, translated by Bill Johnston (Les Fugitives, £8.99)
A woman has disappeared: the central character in this elliptical novella is no longer there. Her son wanders through the neighbourhood in rural France, imagining a dog for company, singing to scare off loneliness. His father and grandmother are also affected by the silence that has taken the woman’s place. Rather than a plot, the book is driven by reflections on the love between parent and child and between husband and wife. And then there’s a first-person narrator who talks to the child directly: “I’d like to say to you that the world is immense and lovely, that there’s a path for you too.” It adds a sweet overtone to the sadness of this curious and pleasing story.

Tropic of Violence by Nathacha Appanah, translated by Geoffrey Strachan (MacLehose, £8.99)
This brilliantly vivid novel explores lives and afterlives on the island of Mayotte, a French territory in the Indian Ocean. Central to the story is Moïse, a “wild boy” of 15 abandoned by his mother, adopted by nurse Marie, and then alone again when Marie dies. Mayotte is a “sweet, beautiful country” but Moïse is stuck in its run-down “dump” known locally as Gaza. He falls in with a criminal gang, before killing its leader – and all this in the first 20 pages. The pace is kept lively by multiple narrators, some of whom are dead, but as Moïse – still a child, who all along just wants “someone to fix me a bowl of cereal” – discovers, death is not the end.