International Booker Prize 2024: Quick reviews of the six shortlisted novels

The Details, Ia Genberg, translated from the Dutch by Kira Josefsson

The Details, originally published as Detaljerna in Swedish, opens with an unnamed woman, bedridden and in the throes of a burning fever which renews her interest in a half-forgotten book (The New York Trilogy by the late Paul Auster) that is inscribed with a handwritten message from a past lover.

Though it is resistant to a chronological order, the book travels along the tectonic plates of pre-internet life in the 1990s, and shifts us into a new air of change at the turn of the millennium. In four chapters named after Johanna, Niki, Alejandro and Birgitte – relationships which have shaken the narrator’s existence – we are transported to a past that is captured as vividly as the state of the soul itself.

The Details is a perfectly written, quiet COVID novel which cleverly disguises the pandemic, offering a genius form of exposure therapy to readers who haven’t felt ready to read COVID novels. Genberg and Joseffson are honey and gold in the book’s final chapter which stays with you. This beautiful little book and its highly perceptive feel for the small details of an entire life is a wonderful addition to the genre’s best coronavirus fiction.

Kairos, Jenny Erpenbeck, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann

In Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos, a character asks whether a human being is “a container to be filled by time with whatever it happens to have handy” or if there can be life beyond history. The novel dramatises this question throughout.

The book is set in the last years of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) (1949-90) as Western capitalism erodes a collapsing socialism. Against this context, two lovers, the ageing writer Hans and the late teenage Katharina, live out a doomed affair, having met on a bus one rainy evening.

The mundane deceptions of infidelity that make up the book – Hans and Katharina meet in cafes, watch films, listen to music, go shopping, take secret holidays – are freighted with history and emotional intensity as the plot plunges towards its ending, where the links between politics and the personal become tragically clear.

For some, the spiralling, fracturing and intensifying effects this tragic view has on the characters, the plot and the style, might be too much. For others, it might accurately depict the nightmarish dislocations of Europe in the 20th century.

Crooked Plow, Itamar Vieira Junior, translated from the Portuguese by Johnny Lorenz

Crooked Plow, set in Bahia’s hinterlands, examines the struggle for land and the exploitation of quilombolas, descendants of Afro-Brazilian enslaved people who escaped from captivity.

The novel starts with a defining moment in the lives of siblings Bibiana and Belonísia: playing with a knife, one of them ends up mute. Without revealing who cannot speak, Bibiana narrates the first part, recounting the arrival of her family to the Água Negra farm.

In the second part, Belonísia narrates her harrowing journey after marrying an abusive man. However, her story takes a turn when Água Negra’s women reclaim agency, while Bibiana returns home politicised and married to Severo, who organises worker’s rights.

Santa Rita Pescadora, an encantada or spiritual entity of the Jarê (an Afro-Brazilian religion practised in Bahia), narrates the final part, unravelling the violence endured by quilombolas during the slavery period, corononelismo and large-scale corporate agriculture.

In Crooked Plow, Vieira Júnior crafts a rich, multi-voiced novel that does not shy away from portraying the present-day legacies of Brazil’s colonial past.

What I’d Rather Not Think About, Jente Posthuma, translated from the Dutch by Sarah Timmer Harvey

Discussing Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, the protagonist of Jente Posthuma’s What I’d Rather Not Think About observes: “After everything I’d heard, I was expecting a dense, sappy story but was surprised by the novel’s light tone.” This description could refer equally to Posthuma’s own novel, which also focuses on depression and suicide, and which handles its subject matter with wry humour.

We know the novel’s protagonist as Two because she is the younger of twins, and her older brother as One. Two’s grief following her brother’s suicide causes her to reflect on their relationship through a series of fragmented thoughts, across which recurring images surface: the Twin Towers, the reality TV show Survivor and the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.

I found the novel powerful in its probing of the complicated relations between intimacy and distance, love and leaving – themes that rely as much on what is unsaid, as on what is told.

Mater 2-10, Hwang Sok-yong, translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell and Josephine Bae Youngjae

Starting in 1920s Seoul, at the dawn of modern technology, this realistic and dramatic tale of railroad workers was originally published twice weekly in an online journal, keeping readers engaged and eager for the next instalment. It has been republished as a 467-page book, which slowly unfolds not just the story of Jino’s family, but the 100-year history of the Korean Peninsula.

In this sprawling epic, Hwang Sok-yong has created another classic that delves deep into the history of the Korean people in North and South Korea. Readers will learn about the peninsula’s history, from Japanese occupation through the separation of North and South, through the everyday experiences of three generations of a family of railway workers.

Mater 2-10 is a sad and heartbreaking saga about the need to heal. It is also a deft translation, which captures Hwang Sok-yong’s signature unpretentious, unadorned Korean prose.

Not a River, Selva Almada, translated from the Spanish by Annie McDermott

In Not a River, the final instalment in Selva Almada’s “trilogy of men”, past and present collide in a nightmarish sleepwalk towards inevitable violence. Two men take Tilo, the son of their friend Eusebio, on a fishing trip along the very river where Eusebio lost his life some years earlier. They row to “the island”, a closed community that does not trust outsiders. The heat bears down on them as ghosts of both past and present reel them in, and the intimacy of their fishing trip takes a macabre turn as the islanders and the river decide their fate.

In this lean, tense novella, Almada perfects the pared-down style that, as Annie McDermott acknowledges in her excellent translator’s note, is bordering on poetry. Almada takes us to the heart of rural Argentina and uncovers the prejudices, vendettas and settling of scores that characterise her literary work.

This article first appeared on The Conversation.