What the world is reading: Fiction by bestselling authors

Newly translated into English, these five books give readers insights into lives, cultures, preoccupations, and the human condition.  

A two-hour shutdown of the Paris Metro sends a Vietnamese passenger into a long, stirring reverie. A Japanese soldier continues to fight World War II years after his country’s surrender. Fed up with workplace sexism, a woman fakes pregnancy to get out of certain unpaid tasks.

Vivid characters and memorable storylines abound in five works of fiction, all originally published overseas and recently translated into English. Written by authors from Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, they offer a window into a variety of cultures, customs, traditions, and national histories, which may be unfamiliar to many English-speaking readers.  

Digging up family secrets

Two estranged childhood friends meet up as adults in “Cocoon,” Zhang Yueran’s complex and absorbing drama.

Li Jiaqi and Cheng Gong grew up together in the 1980s in Jinan, a provincial capital in eastern China. Though their backgrounds and social status are very different, the two became unlikely friends when Jiaqi transferred to Gong’s school. In time, complicated family events drove them apart. Now settled as an adult in Beijing, Jiaqi returns to Jinan to care for her grandfather and pays a surprise visit to Gong, whom she hasn’t seen in 18 years. Over the course of a snowy night, the two reminisce about their childhoods, their troubled families, and an intricate web of secrets, including a deadly one that connects the two families with events that took place during China’s turbulent Cultural Revolution. 

Zhang is the author of three other novels and numerous short stories. She’s well known in her native country. Translated from Chinese by Jeremy Tiang, “Cocoon” should win more readers for this exciting young writer. 

Fighting a fictitious war

In his long and celebrated career as a director of both narrative and documentary film, Werner Herzog has been drawn to the lives of unconventional characters, compulsive loners in pursuit of often barely obtainable goals.  

Like many of his films, “The Twilight World,” Herzog’s lean and poetic first novel, is based on a true story, that of Hiroo Onoda, a lieutenant in the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II. Stationed on the Philippine island of Lubang, Onoda is ordered, once Japanese troops have withdrawn, to hold and defend the island at all costs, making his own decisions without orders from higher up, and making his own rules. “You will be like a ghost, elusive, a continuing nightmare to the enemy,” he is told. “Your war will be without glory.” 

Fighting in the jungle using guerrilla tactics, cut off from all communications, Onoda was unaware that the war had ended less than a year after he received his orders. He and a few men under his command continued to fight for another 29 years, raiding villages for food, surviving ambushes from the terrorized inhabitants whose farms were being plundered, and keeping constantly on the move. Years later, Onoda mistakes American planes flying to Korea and then to Vietnam as proof that the war continued. He is convinced that leaflets dropped on the island urging him and his men to surrender are fabrications by the enemy. 

Translated from German by Michael Hofmann, “The Twilight World” is a sublime meditation on time, self-discipline, purpose, and unswerving devotion to a hopeless mission. 

An immersive monologue

“Chinatown,” by Thuận and translated from Vietnamese by Nguyễn An Lý, opens in the Paris Metro in 2004, where a suspicious duffel bag is discovered. During the two-hour delay, as authorities investigate the potential terrorist threat, the unnamed narrator falls into a dreamy, 158-page monologue. She recalls major events in her life: her childhood in Vietnam in the 1980s; her move to Soviet Russia during the Gorbachev era; her brief marriage to Thuy, her high school sweetheart, who left her 12 years ago and who is hated by her parents for his Chinese heritage; and her present-day life in Paris, where she teaches English and works on a novel.  

First published in Vietnam in 2005, “Chinatown” unfolds as a single paragraph, unbroken except for two lengthy excerpts from the narrator’s novel in progress, “I’m Yellow,” about a man who leaves his family. The stream-of-consciousness monologue, the narrator’s endlessly swirling thoughts as she ruminates over her life, trying to make sense of her past, hark back to the Modernist literary movement of the early 20th century. The author’s reliance on repetition of thoughts and remembrances gives the novel’s prose a propulsive quality, driving the largely plotless narrative forward. 

While the style may not appeal to everyone, the adventurous reader will find much to enjoy and admire in this unconventional novel. 

A curious collection

A young woman discovers sparrows living in her rib cage. A soldier becomes trapped in a minefield during the Iran-Iraq War and turns into a scarecrow, frightening off birds that would carry off the bones of his fallen comrades. The girls in an Iraqi village wake up, each with a starfish in her hair. Butterflies emerge from Walt Whitman’s beard, which grows wildly over a public park, “spread out everywhere, like white algae.” 

Transformation is a prevalent theme in Diaa Jubaili’s engaging and highly inventive story collection, “No Windmills in Basra.” Many characters undergo a metamorphosis, changing from one thing into another, and the cloud of war hangs heavy over many of the stories. Published in the author’s native Iraq in 2018 and drawing heavily from Arabic folk tales, the 76 very short stories that make up the collection also show the strong influence of Latin American magic realism as well as echoes of writers like Kafka, Chekhov, Cervantes, and O. Henry. 

Jubaili is well known in his country, having published nine novels and three other collections of short stories. Translated from Arabic by Chip Rossetti, “No Windmills in Basra” is Jubaili’s first book to be rendered into English. Most of the stories are less than two pages long. Though reading “flash fiction” can feel at times like trying to make a meal out of hors d’oeuvres, the book offers an intriguing glimpse of an important and, for many English speakers, poorly understood part of the world.  

Carrying a lie to term

There’s a touch of magic realism in “Diary of a Void,” Emi Yagi’s debut novel, translated from Japanese by David Boyd and Lucy North. Shibata works for a company that manufactures cardboard tubes for paper products. The only woman in her section, she is expected to perform tasks such as making coffee, buying supplies, and cleaning up after everyone else, on top of her regular duties. Tired of this treatment, she tells everyone that she’s pregnant. “What I did wasn’t supposed to be an act of rebellion – more like a little experiment,” she says. “I was curious. I wanted to see if it even occurred to any of my coworkers, maybe someone who’d actually been in the meeting, to clean up.” 

In the first weeks, Shibata finds that pregnancy involves some unexpected benefits. Her co-workers are deferential, and she’s allowed to leave work promptly at 5 p.m., which is early enough to get to the grocery store before the produce section is picked over. With extra time, she cooks herself elaborate meals, takes long baths, watches classic movies on television, and joins a mommy aerobics class. 

Shibata’s lie requires effort to maintain. As the weeks progress and she works harder to uphold the ruse, her pregnancy seems more and more real to her, to the point where a co-worker can feel the baby kicking and an ultrasound reveals a fetus flashing the peace sign. Readers with a taste for the absurd should find this short, quirky novel highly entertaining.