Good books we read this year
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We know that we are probably too late for any recommendations for presents, but we wanted to take the opportunity and share some of the books that we as Elsewhere editors enjoyed the most this year.
Anna’s picks:
And the Walls Became the World All Around, Johanna Ekström, Sigrid Rausing - translated by Sigrid Rausing
I’ve just finished reading this remarkable memoir, the last book of Swedish writer Johanna Ekström, that she asked her close friend Sigrid Rausing to finish after her death. Rausing transcribed and edited the thirteen handwritten notebooks given to her by Ekström, to create a book that is incredibly moving, beautiful and immersive, and that is also about friendship and grief. These last notebooks describe dreams, the view from the window, the ordinary moments of life, relationships and memories, along with meditations on illness, loss, writing. These fragments are interwoven with Rausing’s own voice, so that the book becomes like a dialogue, but one that is fractured and undone by time and distance.
Published by Granta Books, 2024
Roman Stories, Jhumpa Lahiri - translated by the author and Todd Portnowitz
I really enjoyed these compelling and well-crafted stories which evoke the city of Rome, its inhabitants and temporary settlers. Lahiri has chosen to write in Italian, and her fascination with language and place, as well as the streets and neighbourhoods of this city shines through, as well as a draw to the transient in her choice of subjects and stories that seem to reveal moments of uncertainty.
The Singularity, Balsam Karam - translated by Saskia Vogel
I found this book captivating and powerful, a work of imaginative empathy, by Swedish-Kurdish author Balsam Karam. A book about migration and loss, it is stylistically inventive, and the writing is lyrical and poetic. The book circles outwards from a moment that haunts the narrator, to which she is perhaps the only witness, when a woman searching for her missing daughter vanishes into the sea. The narrator finds herself unable to forget the unknown woman, and the book traces her own grief at the loss of a child and a refusal to let go. Together these events become the site for an unspooling of memories, as the narrator writes in fragments, the pages of a notebook, about leaving behind a language, a country, an identity, and the arrival to another place. In imagining the unknown woman as present, the book seems to map the inner distances of memory, the voices of the displaced and unseen, and of those who carry with them the stories of the lost and the missing.
Published by Fitzcarraldo, 2024
Marcel’s picks:
Ghost Wall, Sarah Moss
This summer, I read Sarah Moss’ “Ghost Wall” again, a hard-hitting small novel about a group of experimental historians, human sacrifice and power dynamics. Like in her novel “Cold Earth” which has a similar setting, Moss’ atmosphere of dread and eeriness here is perfect.
The Language of War, Oleksandr Mykhed - translated by Maryna Gibson, Hanna Leliv and Abby Dewar
The Russian invasion of Ukraine and Vladimir Putin’s attempt to recreate the Russian empire remains a bloody reality, and this books is one of the best about that reality for Ukrainians. In this extremely personal war diary/memoir/report, Oleksandr, whose parents survived the Russian massacre in Bucha, charts his failings to write about the war experience. His openness as a writer combined with conversations with other people directly affected by the war creates a devastating book that is crucial to the understanding of the Ukrainian experience. Everyone who still thinks that Ukraine should give up so we in Western Europe can live unmolested by the war should be slapped in the face with it.
Resistance, Halik Kochanski
As someone who grew up in Germany, I’ve always been fascinated by the history and legacy of the resistance fighters and partisans who defeated National Socialism after a long and difficult struggle. This excellent and exhaustive account of European resistance against Germany from 1939 to 1945 surveys the many ways people fought back against occupation, propaganda and totalitarianism, and the endurance needed to do so. Covering the lives (and deaths) of many resisters and all the different aspects of resistance from creating an underground press to blowing up railways, it almost becomes a handbook of future resistance.