18 Novels of the Year, Chosen by 11 Expert Readers | QDaily's Annual Book Picks ①

The 11 recommenders are Ha Jin, Ken Liu, Zhu Yue, Lu Nei, Shuang Xuetao, Zhang Yiwei, Shi Xiaowei, Huang Hong, Dan Hansong, Kong Yalei and Chen Yikan.

Another year is over, and it is time again to recommend the year's good books.

Unlike previous years, we have dropped the five categories we kept for three years running — humanities, business, science, lifestyle and aesthetics, and fiction — and split our picks into fiction and nonfiction instead. Both lists will run this week, one after the other.

On fiction: if you have read our pieces over the past two or three weekends, you will have noticed a new column, "Saturday Fiction," which publishes one short story every Saturday. In the column's preview piece, “Read the Novels That Give Off Light, and Try to Keep Them Burning”, we said a great deal about how we understand fiction and why we are doing this, so we won't repeat it here.

As we did last year, we again asked expert readers of fiction to recommend the best novels they read in 2018, hoping to give you some bearings as you explore the complexity and possibility that fiction holds. The publication dates run new and old, but the standard is the same throughout: these readers consider them genuinely good novels. There are 13 of them in all, of different ages and backgrounds — born anywhere from the 1950s to the 1980s, and working as novelists, translators, scholars, book critics and book editors. In a way, that is itself an expression of complexity and possibility.

Because the annual list has to be limited to newly published novels, we could not show everything our contributing writers recommended. Even in the recommendations we do print, most of the blurbs are short extracts we took from a small part of a longer piece, not the whole of it. We will publish the complete recommendations one by one next week.

The nonfiction titles cover several subjects across the humanities, science and economics. Once the nonfiction list is out, we will run articles introducing them subject by subject, a series that should last until around Chinese New Year.

As before, our editors and reporters have read every book that came within our view, and they introduce them to readers in good faith.

We have also drawn on our contributing writers to help finish the list. They are always ahead of the rest of us, and they see deeper. Our thanks to all of them.

Below is QDaily's 2018 fiction list: 18 novels, chosen by 11 expert readers.

Miss Lonelyhearts

• Author: [US] Nathanael West
• Translator: Xia Wenyun
• Publisher: Nanjing University Press
• Price: 36 yuan

Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts has long stood in the shadow of The Day of the Locust, the book often called the first Hollywood novel. But Harold Bloom thinks The Day of the Locust does not deserve its literary standing at all — it "squandered West's genius." Bloom tells us, in a tone that leaves no room for argument, that Miss Lonelyhearts is the real masterpiece, and that it surpasses The Sun Also Rises, The Great Gatsby and Sanctuary. Miss Lonelyhearts is a work of painstaking labor, and it shows West's most astonishing gift for language and his sharpest sense of style. (Dan Hansong, associate professor, Department of English, Nanjing University, and translator from English)

The Wapshot Chronicle

• Author: [US] John Cheever
• Translator: Zhu Shida
• Publisher: Yilin Press
• Price: 69 yuan

A reader who has not read "The Enormous Radio" and "The Swimmer" can hardly claim to be a serious lover of foreign literature. But if you stubbornly carry the expectations built by John Cheever's classic short stories into The Wapshot Chronicle and its sequel, The Wapshot Scandal, you probably won't like them.

I am not sure you will finish both books, and even less sure you will end up loving Cheever's art as a novelist. But if, after a stretch of uncomfortable, restless reading, you finally see, as I did, the literary power held inside The Wapshot Chronicle and The Wapshot Scandal, then you will come to know a fuller Cheever. (Dan Hansong, associate professor, Department of English, Nanjing University, and translator from English)

Light Years

• Author: [US] James Salter
• Translator: Kong Yalei
• Publisher: Imaginist | Guangxi Normal University Press
• Price: 67 yuan

Since it came out in 1975, Light Years has been underrated and overlooked; it sold badly and never won a single literary prize. Or perhaps it is fairer to say that it won the highest prize of all: time. Nearly half a century on, it is read more and more widely, it has become a writing bible for many well-known American and European writers, and it is now, beyond dispute, becoming a classic. More important, its timelessness gives off a lasting, vivid life force that pushes every reader to ask: how should I live? (Kong Yalei, writer and translator from English)

The Radetzky March

• Author: [Austria] Joseph Roth
• Translator: Guan Er, Wang Ning
• Publisher: Lijiang Press
• Price: 65 yuan

Greatness is in fact as easy to recognize as mediocrity; it is only far rarer. So the first chapter of The Radetzky March is enough to confirm, almost at once: this is a great voice. Look at this passage:

Captain Joseph Trotta von Sipolje stood in the middle of that shabby, threadbare room like a god of war: a gleaming sash across his chest, a black-lacquered steel helmet on his head, a pair of leather boots polished to an impossible shine on his feet; his spurs glittered; the two rows of dazzling buttons on his tunic seemed about to burst into flame, and made the Order of Maria Theresa on his chest look tremendously imposing. This was how the son stood before his father. The old man rose slowly from his seat, as if trying to match the brilliance of his son with the slowness of his welcome. Captain Trotta kissed his father's hand, and bent down at the same time to let his father kiss his forehead and his cheeks. "Sit," the old man said. The captain took off some of the glittering things he wore and sat down.

(Kong Yalei, writer and translator from English)

Swing Time

• Author: [UK] Zadie Smith
• Translator: Zhao Shujing
• Publisher: Shanghai Translation Publishing House
• Price: 65 yuan

The author keeps pushing at the edges of our stereotypes about women's writing, and the surprise is a real pleasure. You expect a story about the friendship of two girls learning to dance to be beautiful, romantic, something like Hana and Alice — and what you get instead, without warning, is a contest among race, society, a leftist mother, fame and money, and talent.

I started out reading this novel as a model for writing about "friendship between women." It seems to tell us that throwing yourself into the world carries risk for a woman, but that there is nothing to be afraid of. Literature offers no way out of that, but in choosing which material enters literature, women writers have a language of their own. (Zhang Yiwei, writer and teacher of creative writing, Department of Chinese, Fudan University)

The Sympathizer

• Author: [US] Viet Thanh Nguyen
• Translator: Chen Hengshi
• Publisher: Shanghai Translation Publishing House
• Price: 65 yuan

The Sympathizer, by the Vietnamese-American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen, tells the story of a North Vietnamese spy planted in South Vietnam. It is set in 1975, as the Viet Cong take Saigon and American forces make their great retreat. The narrator, secretly a Viet Cong agent, flees to the United States with his South Vietnamese "superior" and goes on spying there, reporting on the enemy back to the North. All through it, as both refugee and spy, he endures extraordinary torment and struggle, in body and in mind.

The book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; the judges called it "a layered immigrant story, a pungent monologue by a two-faced man, a voice that spans two worlds, Vietnam and America."

Recommending it to us, the writer Ha Jin said the novel "takes aim at the Vietnam War from the angle of a Vietnamese spy, and its prose has an American kind of sweep." (QDaily)

United States of Japan

• Author: [US] Peter Tieryas
• Translator: Li Yi
• Publisher: New Star Press
• Price: 45 yuan

What would the world look like if the United States had lost the Second World War to Japan?

In 1948 the Axis powers win the war; Japan and Germany carve up North America, and the West Coast is renamed the "United States of Japan." Forty years later an illegal video game called United States of America spreads across the continent. It asks players to imagine what the world would look like if the Allies had won…

That is the story told in United States of Japan, a series by the Chinese-American science fiction writer Peter Tieryas. There are two volumes; the Chinese edition has published the first so far. That first volume borrows the premise of Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, and turns on a wildly over-the-top anti-Japanese war drama set on American soil.

The writer and translator Ken Liu once wrote a blurb for it: "Under tyranny, the spark of hope never goes out. United States of Japan is written absolutely brilliantly." Recommending it to us, he said it was the most entertaining science fiction novel he read this year. (QDaily)

The Guest Cat

• Author: [Japan] Takashi Hiraide
• Translator: Li Manhong
• Publisher: Shanghai Translation Publishing House
• Price: 38 yuan

"One day a kitten wandered by chance into Lightning Alley. A few days later it was the five-year-old boy from the house with the big zelkova tree who decided to take her in." From the opening line, the author makes clear that this is a true story about someone else's cat, set in the last days of the Showa era.

The kitten, named Chibi by the little boy, ran and played freely in the courtyard of the old house, wandered in and out of the neighbors' homes, and slowly grew close to "us." She never meowed and never let anyone hold her, but over time she became part of our lives.

The seasons turn, things change, and so much of it is beyond anyone's control. The only comfort, perhaps, is that a family of stray cats lives in front of our new apartment, and one of the kittens looks just like Chibi. (Huang Hong, professor, Department of French, Nanjing University, and translator from French)

The Stationmaster

• Author: [Japan] Jiro Asada
• Translator: Shi Xiaowei
• Publisher: Duke | Wenhui Press
• Price: 42 yuan

The Stationmaster is a collection of short stories. The protagonists of its eight stories are, in order: a railway worker; a street tough and a migrant woman working far from home; an amorous, dissolute university student and a foolish, restless housewife; an office worker who grew up an orphan and has met one misfortune after another; an amorous, credulous woman who runs a fashion boutique and an unscrupulous, cunning salesman; a wife left isolated and helpless after her husband's affair; a clumsy, feeble pimp who has strayed onto the wrong path but is kind at heart; and an office-worker couple adrift after the bursting of the bubble economy. All of it is the tragicomedy of ordinary people.

Perhaps the collection's most distinctive feature is the author's fondness for the fantastical. Of the eight stories, only the second, seventh and eighth are pure realism; the other five are all steeped in the supernatural. Under this author's pen, the boundary between the human world and the other world dissolves, the everyday and the uncanny merge, and the realm of the living and the realm of the dead run as one thread; his characters cross between them as a matter of course, which produces an effect that pure realism could never provide. (Shi Xiaowei, professor, Department of Japanese, Shanghai Sanda University, scholar of Japanese literature and translator)

Football

• Author: [Belgium] Jean-Philippe Toussaint
• Translator: Yu Zhongxian
• Publisher: Hunan Literature and Art Publishing House
• Price: 11 yuan

The writer Lu Nei recommended this book to us. In it, Jean-Philippe Toussaint traces his memories of football back to childhood, and football also ties together his pursuit of travel and of time. He said: "This is a book that will not please intellectuals, because they are not interested in football, and will not please amateur football fans either, because they will find it too intellectual. But I still had to write it. I was not willing to cut the thin thread that still ties me to the world."

Toussaint is Belgian and writes in French; the labels pinned on him from outside include leading figure of the "new new novel" and of "minimalist fiction." Alain Robbe-Grillet, the father of the nouveau roman, called his work "the art of abstract painting in narrative form." Whether those descriptions are fair is open to argument, but Toussaint's fiction at least shows us once again how much possibility fiction holds and how far its boundaries reach. It is worth a look. (QDaily)

By Night in Chile

• Author: [Chile] Roberto Bolaño
• Translator: Xu Quan
• Publisher: Horizon | Shanghai People's Publishing House
• Price: 49.80 yuan

The English edition of By Night in Chile came out in 2003, the first of Roberto Bolaño's novels to be translated and published in the English-speaking world.

The critic Susan Sontag praised the novel extravagantly: "A stunning river of feeling, intelligent contemplation, captivating fantasy — By Night in Chile — is the real thing, and a rare one: this is a contemporary novel destined to hold a permanent place in world literature."

Both Kong Yalei and Lu Nei recommended it to us. Kong Yalei called By Night in Chile "one of Bolaño's best works — dense as a meteorite, and light as a breeze."

The whole book runs to just over 90,000 characters, split into two paragraphs, the second of which is a single sentence. Over the course of one night, a priest burning with fever looks back at the important moments of his life, murmuring to himself…

Set against the greatness of 2666, By Night in Chile clearly falls short, but you can read it as a clue to how Bolaño went on to write 2666 — or simply enjoy, for its own sake, the brilliance of a genius's early work. (QDaily)

Penguin Little Black Classics, Series One

• Author: [Italy] Giovanni Boccaccio / [US] Edgar Allan Poe / [Russia] Anton Chekhov / [France] Gustave Flaubert / [Japan] Yoshida Kenkō / [Russia] Leo Tolstoy / [Austria] Rainer Maria Rilke / [Japan] Ryūnosuke Akutagawa / [UK] Thomas Hardy / [UK] William Blake
• Translator: Wen Jieruo / Cao Ying / Feng Zhi / Ma Ainong / Yu Xi / Wen Dong / Wen Zheng / Wang Jinxiao / Ru Long / Zhang Ling / Zhang Yang / Xie Wanrong / Zhang Chiheng
• Publisher: CITIC Press Group
• Price: 149 yuan

CITIC has put out a set called Penguin Little Black Classics, and I think it is excellent — I bought several sets to give away. Tolstoy, Chekhov, Rilke, Boccaccio, Flaubert and the rest, all made thin and packed into a little black box, a few short pieces from each writer. They are comfortable to read, not many words, and they give you a sense of achievement: you finish one in no time. I don't need to spell out what these writers are worth. I never used to find Boccaccio interesting; reading him this time, I did. He is quite dirty, and aimless, simply telling a handful of stories that don't mean much, and yet he is lively, full of passion for this world rather than in thrall to the next. I think that might be a reminder to us clever moderns: literature and the literary are two different things. Exactly why they are two different things, I can't say for the moment. (Shuang Xuetao, writer)

Yingwuxiong (《应物兄》)

• Author: Li Er
• Publisher: People's Literature Publishing House
• Price: 79 yuan

Lu Nei recommended Yingwuxiong, the only work of mainland Chinese literature on this year's list.

The writer Li Er is said to have spent a full 13 years on this book. Borrowing the narrative habits of the four classical categories of Chinese texts — canons, histories, philosophers and collections — he records the talk and conduct of all sorts of people alive today, intellectuals above all. Each chapter takes its title from two or three characters of its opening line and then unfolds at its own pace, narrating or arguing, praising or mocking, singing or weeping…

The novel topped the long-fiction list of Harvest magazine's 2018 literary rankings. The citation read: "Thirteen years of dedicated writing brewed a work that marks a leap in the intellectual grounding and technical means of a generation of writers. 'Yingwuxiong'! This name that seems at once real and false, this character at once sincere and hypocritical, strings together more than 30 years of the vivid, fleshy lives of the intellectual class, sketches their spiritual trajectory, and in the end forms a vast star chart of the era." (QDaily)

Beyond Consideration (《度外》)

• Author: Huang Guojun
• Publisher: Houlang | Sichuan People's Publishing House
• Price: 45 yuan

The author, Huang Guojun, died at thirty-two. His father, the writer Huang Chunming, once wrote a poem called "Guojun Isn't Coming Home for Dinner," which circulated widely online for a while, but mainland readers who have actually read Huang Guojun's own work are probably still few.

Beyond Consideration is a cold, austere book, and a nearly perfect collection of stories. Apart from the piece "Three Imagined Stories," his fiction does not usually put "story" at the center: the narrative is not driven forward by plot but unfolds through shifting, circling points of view. What stands out most is his narrative technique and sense of form.

The stories make heavy use of montage, flashback and blank space, which makes you rethink the relationship between film and fiction. (Zhu Yue, writer and literary editor at Houlang)

Rain (《雨》)

• Author: [Malaysia] Ng Kim Chew
• Publisher: Houlang | Sichuan People's Publishing House
• Price: 38 yuan

Rain is an unusual book. It cannot simply be filed as a story collection, because it holds together so strongly as a whole, and yet it is not a novel in the traditional sense either. It is more like a narrative labyrinth, knotted and interwoven.

The book gathers sixteen pieces. The first, "Rainy Day," is a poem; the other fifteen are stories. Eight of them carry special numbers, and not in sequence — unnumbered pieces are set in between.

Ng Kim Chew is an ethnic Chinese Malaysian, but he went to Taiwan to study young and has lived there for thirty years. Even so, he has always insisted on the identity of a Malaysian Chinese writer, and shows again and again his concern for the Chinese community in Malaysia. So Rain is a work that displays enormous imagination and modernist experiment with form, and carries a strong concern for reality at the same time. (Zhu Yue, writer and literary editor at Houlang)

The Friend

• Author: Sigrid Nunez
• Publisher: Riverhead Books

Sigrid Nunez's The Friend won the 2018 National Book Award. Its protagonist is a young writer who, after the suicide of an older writer who was both her mentor and her friend, grieves by taking in the Great Dane he left behind.

The New York Times wrote that the novel suggests something larger than a passion for writing has vanished from our culture, and that the novel itself celebrates the very values it holds dear.

Recommending it to us, Ha Jin said The Friend is "mostly reflection on life and on writing, and it also describes the friendship between a woman and a dog — a very wise novel." (QDaily)

Normal People

• Author: Sally Rooney
• Publisher: Faber & Faber

Two things draw me to Rooney's novels above all, and both are rooted deep in my own middlebrow taste. The first can be put like this: however lofty the literary ideal, in the end it still cannot beat clever people saying clever things. Rooney has shrugged off many of the labels of Irish literature with real ease, but that trust in talk, and that generosity toward it, remain as solid as ever — the novel is driven almost entirely by conversation.

The second thing that draws me to Rooney sits in her two book titles combined, and seems to have to do with "normal" and with "conversation." Rooney's characters live in what looks like a fairy-tale world of human relations, one where the most ordinary piece of common sense is actually honored: that what two people owe each other is worked out between the two of them, and has little to do with anyone else. (Chen Yikan, book critic and translator from English)

Asymmetry

For a whole year the reading world in Europe and America talked about this book that way, but the novel is not nearly so combative — you can just as easily read it as two beautifully made realist stories. To me it also felt unusually sunlit. Just after Chinese New Year I went, with no plan at all, to spend three sun-soaked, idle weeks in Thailand, the deadliest part of which was that I had my small child with me, so every day I played endless rounds of hide-and-seek with him in a little plaza with nothing in it. It was during those games that I listened all the way through the audiobook of Asymmetry. I was not especially thrilled by it at the time. Only at the end of the year, when recommendations from every direction suggested it might be the most favored novel of the year, did I go back and read it properly, and notice how the details of the first part seep, through the female protagonist's mind, into the fiction of the second — a structure that is not just a device for making an argument, but also gives the whole book a flowing inner life. (Chen Yikan, book critic and translator from English)

The cover image is of Taman Negara National Park in Malaysia, via Wikipedia.