foreign While 2011 has been a bumper year for local fiction, we've loved looking outwards for great international reads as well. Sometimes experimental, sometimes comic, and always brilliant, these are stories that can push and test us, with both the unfamiliar, the unversal and the new. So then, without further ado, here are our picks for the best foreign/translated fiction of 2011, by Will Heyward of Readings St Kilda.

9781921758003 The Messenger
Yannick Haenel (translated from the French by Ian Monk)
As a courier for the Polish resistance, Jan Karski was charged with the mission of a lifetime – convey a message to the Allies about Hitler’s program to exterminate the Jews. After penetrating Warsaw’s Ghetto, he eventually met with top officials in London and President Roosevelt in Washington, yet, as history shows, still nothing was done. Published to immense acclaim in France, under the title Jan Karski, The Messenger, this is a extraordinary novelised biography about one man’s moral courage and our collective humanity, with parallels to Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark and W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.

1935554298 Fiasco
Imre Kertesz (translated from Hungarian Tim Wilkinson)
Fiasco joins its companion volumes Fatelessness and Kaddish for an Unborn Child in telling the epic story of the author’s return from the Nazi death camps, only to find his country taken over by another totalitarian government. The novel is, as Imre Kertész himself said, ‘fiction founded on reality’ – a Kafka-like account that is surprisingly funny in its unrelentingly pessimistic clarity.

paris Never Any End to Paris
Enrique Vila-Matas (translated from Spanish by Anne McLean)
This brilliantly ironic book is told in the form of a lecture delivered by a novelist who is clearly a version of the author himself. The narrator tells of his two-year stint living in Marguerite Duras’s garret during the seventies and his encounters with luminaries such as Roland Barthes, Georges Perec, Sergio Pitol, Samuel Beckett and Juan Marsé. He writes of his attempts at a novel whose text will ‘kill’ its readers, putting him on a footing with his beloved Hemingway (Never Any End to Paris is taken from a refrain in A Moveable Feast.) What emerges is a fabulous portrait of intellectual life in Paris that, with humour and penetrating insight, investigates the role of literature in our lives.

suicide Suicide
Edouard Levé (translated from French by Jan Steyn)
Suicide cannot be read as simply another novel – it is, in a sense, the author’s own oblique, public suicide note, and a unique meditation on this most extreme of refusals. Presenting itself as an investigation into the suicide of a close friend – perhaps real, perhaps fictional – more than twenty years earlier, Levé gives us, little by little, a striking portrait of a man, with all his talents and flaws, who chose to reject his life, and all the people who loved him, in favour of oblivion.

comedy Comedy in a Minor Key
Hans Keilson (translated from German by Damion Searls)
A dark comedy of wartime manners, Comedy in a Minor Key tells the story of Wim and Marie, a Dutch couple who first hide a Jew they know as Nico, and must then dispose of his body when he dies of pneumonia. This novella was first published in 1947 and, now translated into English for the first time, shows Hans Keilson at his best: deeply ironic and brilliantly modern.

animal Animalinside
Laszlo Krasznahorkai (translated from Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet)
This book explodes from its very first line: ‘He wants to break free, attempts to stretch open the walls, but he has been tautened by them, and there he remains in this tautening, in this constraint, and there is nothing to do but howl...’ To create this work that strains against all constraints, László Krasznahorkai began from one of Max Neumann’s paintings; Neumann, spurred into action, created 14 more images, which unleashed an additional 13 texts from the author. Animalinside is the rare case of two matchless artists meeting across disciplines.

irr Irretrievable
Theodor Fontane (translated from the German by Douglas Parmée)
Opposites attract, and Helmut Holk and Christine Arne, the appealing married couple at the centre of this engrossing book by one of Germany’s greatest novelists, could not be less alike. They have been married for twenty-three years – only of late a certain tension has crept into their dealings with each other. Little jokes, casual endearments, long-meditated plans: they all hit a raw nerve. How a couple can slowly drift apart, until one day they find themselves in a situation which is nothing they ever wished for but from which they cannot go back, is at the heart of this timeless story of everyday life.

seamstress The Seamstress and the Wind
Cesar Aira (translated from Spanish by Rosalie Knecht)
Interspersed with Aira’s musings about memory and childhood, The Seamstress and the Wind is a work of fable, delirium and utter comedy. A seamstress who is sewing a wedding dress fears that her son has been accidentally kidnapped and driven off to Patagonia while playing in a big semitruck. She calls a local taxi to follow the semi in hot pursuit. When her husband finds out what's happened, he takes off after wife and child. They race to the end of the world, where the wild Southern wind falls in love with the seamstress, and a monster child takes up with the truck driver.

twoworlds My Two Worlds
Sergio Chejfec (translated from the Spanish by Margaret B. Carson)
Approaching his fiftieth birthday, the narrator in My Two Worlds wanders across an unfamiliar Brazilian city in search of a park. Initially thwarted by his inability to transpose the two-dimensional information of the map onto the impassable roads and dead-ends of the three-dimensional city, he gradually begins to see his own thoughts, reflections, and memories mirrored in the landscape and people around him. Chejfec's My Two Worlds, an extraordinary meditation on experience, writing, and space that challenges the very limitations of the genre itself.

reich The Third Reich (released Nov 22)
Roberto Bolano (translated from Spanish by Natasha Wimmer)
Written in 1989 and found among Roberto Bolaño’s papers after his death, The Third Reich is a stunning exploration of memory and violence. Reading this quick, visceral novel, we can see Bolaño for the first time exploring the themes that would define his works The Savage Detectives and 2666.



Other 'best of 2011' lists:


willheyward Will Heyward works for Readings in Carlton and St Kilda. He has been published in the ABR and a few other publications. He helps edit Voiceworks and is a contributing editor for Higher Arc.