These 21 Books Are the Year's Best, According to 5 Scholars and Translators | QDaily's Annual Book Recommendations ③

This is the first installment of our full run of fiction recommendations. The recommenders here are mostly scholars and translators: Dan Hansong, Huang Hong, Yang Ling, Shi Xiaowei and Kong Yalei.

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

Unlike in past years, we're dropping the five categories we used three years running — humanities, business, science, lifestyle and aesthetics, and fiction — and splitting our recommendations into a fiction half and a nonfiction half.

For the fiction half, as we did last year, we again asked professional readers of fiction to name the best novels they read in 2018, hoping to give you something to go on as you explore the complexity and possibility that fiction holds. The books vary in publication date, old and new, but they meet one shared standard: these professional readers consider them genuinely good novels. There are 13 recommenders in all, of different ages and backgrounds — from writers born in the 1950s to writers born in the 1980s, from novelists and translators to scholars, book critics and book editors. In a sense, that too is complexity and possibility.

This is the first installment of our full run of fiction recommendations. The recommenders here are mostly scholars and translators: Dan Hansong, Huang Hong, Yang Ling, Shi Xiaowei and Kong Yalei.

The Wapshot Chronicle, The Wapshot Scandal and Miss Lonelyhearts

Dan Hansong: associate professor in the English department at Nanjing University, author of Reading Against Reading《以读攻读》, translator of Our Town, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Inherent Vice, Flaubert's Parrot and others.

• Author: John Cheever (US)
• Translator: Zhu Shida
• Publisher: Yilin Press
• Price: 69.00 yuan

Anyone who hasn't read The Enormous Radio and The Swimmer can hardly claim to love foreign literature. But if you insist on bringing the expectations built by John Cheever's classic short stories to The Wapshot Chronicle and its sequel The Wapshot Scandal, you probably won't like them. Some will say the 1958 National Book Award went to this first novel as a kind of compensation for Cheever's great achievement in the short story. Yet nobody understood better than Cheever that the short story and the novel are simply different forms — the pleasure raised by the restraint and precision of the first is not what the second tries to reproduce on its larger social canvas. If the short story is a glimpse of life, the novel is life itself, which usually means sprawling, tedious detail and ritual exposition. Cheever had no wish to go on playing "the Chekhov of the American suburbs" in a novel just because readers expected it; in a new form he was bound to follow a new narrative logic. This semi-autobiographical book tells the saga of an old family in a New England fishing village, but standing closer to his characters cost Cheever none of his usual satirical edge and anger. He stayed fixed on people who have lost their innocent youth and been pushed into an adult world that looks comfortable and is, at its core, chaotic and numb. That contrast across time is stark and unnerving, and it is what separates Cheever from other writers of middle-class life. Cheever seems to want us to see that his broken, fragmentary, eccentric way of writing was not meant to please anyone with fixed ideas about "the great novel"; he was faithful only to what he felt about these strange New Englanders. He wrote his people as funny, even pitiful, but there is a reason for it: precisely because they were still looking for comfort and order in a noisy, disordered world, or because they would not let go of an innocent past, they kept walking into walls. People who have given up don't come away bloodied. I'm not sure you will finish these two books, still less that you will end up loving Cheever's art as a novelist. But if, after an uncomfortable and restless read, you finally see, as I did, the literary force inside The Wapshot Chronicle and The Wapshot Scandal, you will have met a fuller Cheever.

• Author: Nathanael West (US)
• Translator: Xia Wenyun
• Publisher: Nanjing University Press
• Price: 36.00 yuan

Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts has long been hidden behind the huge literary reputation of The Day of the Locust, "the first Hollywood novel." But in Harold Bloom's view, The Day of the Locust doesn't deserve its standing at all — it "wasted West's genius." Bloom tells us, in a tone that allows no argument, that Miss Lonelyhearts is the masterpiece, better than The Sun Also Rises, The Great Gatsby and Sanctuary. Miss Lonelyhearts is a book of real, painstaking labor, and it holds West's most startling verbal gift and his sharpest sense of style. On the surface it is about the "American nightmare" of the Depression years; in fact it uses the language of poetry to test the limits of everyday suffering and the chance of strange grace inside modern experience. "The search for faith" is the central question of Miss Lonelyhearts. An apostate from his Jewish identity, West entered the argument between modernity and religion by the most negative, most extreme route available. Readers must fight to keep their heads above water, because what the book describes is so hideous and ugly that a wave of despair could swallow us at any moment. Yet that intensely uncomfortable reading is the core of the book. Only in the most complete disillusionment and the bleakest pessimism can we see, along with West's protagonist, the true light of faith. Perhaps it is in this sense that we can agree with his hero's verdict on living: between a life "chaotic and disordered but full of meaning" and one "orderly but meaningless," choose the first, and hold to it to the end.

The Guest Cat and Flood

Huang Hong: professor of French at Nanjing University, Yunshan Chair Professor at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, translator from the French; author of Passing Through《经过》, Idle Reading《闲来翻书》, Duras's Little Music《杜拉斯的小音乐》, A Literary Life《一种文学生活》 and others; translator of The Little Prince, Wind, Sand and Stars, Sunday《星期天》, Flowering《花事》, And Yet《然而》, Dora Bruder and others.

When QDaily asked me to recommend the two best novels I read in 2018, the word that flashed through my head was "cat" — or rather all sorts of cat books, some erudite, some fantastical, some mysterious, some tender. So why not recommend two of those! One is The Guest Cat, by the Japanese writer Takashi Hiraide; the other is Flood, by the French writer Philippe Forest. I can't swear they're the "best," but I'm certain there is a strange, hidden link between the two. It is as if the same cat had traveled through time to burst into one person's life one day and vanish from it another day, and in the sadness that follows, life shows its true color and lets us see, unusually clearly, the soft place deep inside ourselves that we cannot touch. What breaks the dam is always the same thing: the longing and the closeness, stretched long by memory, that we crave and cannot give up.

• Author: Takashi Hiraide (Japan)
• Translator: Li Manhong
• Publisher: Shanghai Translation Publishing House
• Price: 38.00 yuan

"One day a kitten wandered by accident into Lightning Alley. A few days later, the one who resolved to take it in was the five-year-old boy from the household with the big zelkova tree." From the first lines the author makes it clear that this story of "someone else's cat" is true, and set in the closing days of the Showa era. The narrator, "I," is nearing middle age. He had been an editor at a publishing house; after watching several writers he knew and several old friends die one after another, he decided to go on "empty-handed," quit his busy, grinding job and move with his wife into a corner of an old, gracefully aged house, where he shut the door and wrote and lived a quiet, plain life. "I" and my wife had no children. When we rented the place, the elderly landlady had made a point of saying "no pets," but in the end she couldn't hold out against the neighbor boy's stubborn pleading, and gave in. From then on the kitten the boy named "Chibi" ran and played freely in the old courtyard, dropped in on the neighbors on both sides, and slowly grew close to "us." It never meowed and never let itself be held, but over time Chibi became part of our life, "seeping in bit by bit through the crack of a half-open window, like a small stream running steadily down a gentle slope. Accompanied by something you could call fate."

And the river of fate is never a calm river. It was only papered over for a while by the tranquil mood the kitten made, along with the bright moon and the wind in the pines and the cicadas and dragonflies that dropped by. Nothing stays as it is; nothing lasts unbroken. Chibi died. The landlord and his wife, worn down by age and illness, could no longer keep up the old house and moved to a retirement apartment on the edge of town; a few months later the old man died. We had no money to buy the house, not even a small part of it, and had to move out. The house fell further into ruin, and after the bubble economy burst it was finally torn down and became a "pale vacant lot." Nothing was left except memory.

The seasons turn, the world changes, and so much of it is beyond us. Perhaps the only consolation is that a family of stray cats lives outside our new apartment, and one of the kittens looks very much like Chibi.

• Author: Philippe Forest (France); his work in Chinese translation includes Schrödinger's Cat《薛定谔之猫》, And Yet《然而》, The Eternal Child《永恒的孩子》 and others.
• Publisher: Gallimard

The Guest Cat is an autobiographical novel full of Japanese feeling — loose and unhurried, but sincere, using a few sketch-like strokes to show the upheaval of an era and the restlessness of people's hearts through what look like unrelated everyday trifles. I privately suspect that Philippe Forest read Hiraide's The Guest Cat before he wrote Schrödinger's Cat and Flood, because when the French translation appeared in 2004 (Le Chat qui venait du ciel, the title changed to the slightly sentimental The Cat That Came From the Sky, as though it were a gift from heaven), it went straight onto that year's bestseller list.

Flood opens with "I" returning to the place where I was born and once lived. A flood may destroy the city, yet people go on building furiously inside it. Amid the general indifference, the world in front of me is disappearing — a "ghost town" swallowed by time and by emptiness. "I" am withdrawn and see few people. One day a cat turns up, walks into my house and jumps onto my sofa and my bed as if it owned them. It comes and goes for more than a year, until I believe I am its owner. Then one day it vanishes. I search the city for it and find no trace. Its disappearance brings back my earlier life: years ago my only daughter died of illness at four, and I sank into a mourning I could not climb out of, so I left for somewhere far away. It was my mother's grave illness that brought me back to this city, where I again went through the pain and fear of losing someone.

One night a fire breaks out and burns until morning. Fleeing it, I meet two neighbors, a woman who is a pianist and a man who is a writer. We take to each other, but after a while the two of them also disappear without a trace. I don't call the police; I only feel lost and empty. The autumn rains fall on and on, into winter. At last the flood comes. Watching the city go under, I climb onto the roof and weep. Then a cat comes to my side. I know it at once as the one that ran away from me, and I weep harder. A few days later the water goes down and things slowly return to order. My two neighbors still haven't reappeared, but I have made my peace. Perhaps it is this cat, lost and found again, that lets me believe — or at least hope — that what I lost is coming back to me: the good things of the past, the people I loved deeply, in one form or another, visible or not.

Berta Isla, Mac and His Mishap (Mac y su contratiempo), White Blackbird, Black Swan (Mirlo blanco, cisne negro) and Controlled From the Shadows (Desde la sombra)

Yang Ling: associate professor in the Spanish department at Capital Normal University, translator from the Spanish; translator of Love in the Time of Cholera, Secret Harmonies《隐秘的和谐》, Vertical Journey《垂直之旅》, Murder in the Bathhouse《浴场谋杀案》, The Unknown University (co-translated) and others.

• Title: Berta Isla
• Author: Javier Marías; his work in Chinese translation includes A Heart So White, The Infatuations《迷情》, No More Love《不再有爱》 and others.
• Publisher: Alfaguara

Berta Isla mixes romance with espionage, and it opens on a hook: "For a long time she could not be sure whether her husband was her husband. Sometimes she thought he was, sometimes she thought he wasn't, and sometimes she decided to believe nothing at all and simply go on living with him — with this man who was like him and yet so much older than he had been."

The two leads pledge themselves to each other while still young, but fate intervenes: the man, born into a family of spies, cannot escape what is arranged for him, and one day he disappears. Like the wife of Odysseus, the woman is left to a long wait. When the two meet again years later, the setting is the same and everything else has changed.

The novel takes up loyalty and betrayal, life and death, self and other, growth and transformation. The plot twists and turns, and it never runs short of thinking about human nature. It won the 2017 Critics' Prize for fiction, and Spain's El País named it the best novel of the year.

The book also has a feminist tint: the position the woman is left in is a universal one — the disappearance of a man, the absence of the male half of a household. Another theme worth sitting with is the awkwardness of getting something back after losing it. It is awkward for the one who takes the person back and for the one who returns, because other people will say: you were already presumed dead, so you can't be who you were.

As always, the author moves freely among classic texts, weaving his book together with Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot and other giants. Near the end he even borrows a line from Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities to catch how complicated people are: "every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it."

• Title: Mac and His Mishap (Mac y su contratiempo)
• Author: Enrique Vila-Matas; his work in Chinese translation includes Bartleby & Co., Dublinesque, Never Any End to Paris and others.
• Publisher: Seix Barral

Mac and His Mishap, published by Enrique Vila-Matas in 2017, is a story about a writer and about writing, and it folds in the author's own experience of making books and his thinking about literature. Mac, the protagonist, is a nobody who loses his job in the economic crisis and, out of boredom, decides to take up his old hobby of writing again, since becoming a writer was once his greatest dream. He privately renews that vow to his neighbor, a famous writer who in fact has no idea Mac exists. Mac worships the man and often spies on his life. During one of these sessions he happens to hear the writer talk about an early idea he had given up on. Mac decides on the spot to fold his own story into it and finish the thing properly. The whole novel is cleverly built and can be read on several levels — at moments it looks like a writer's diary, at moments like criticism; it has the suspense of a criminal investigation and the arc of a man growing up. Through his narrator the author states his own view of the form: "The novels I like are always like Chinese boxes, with story inside story inside story."

• Title: White Blackbird, Black Swan (Mirlo blanco, cisne negro)
• Author: Juan Manuel de Prada
• Publisher: Espasa

White Blackbird, Black Swan, published by Juan Manuel de Prada in 2016, is a very entertaining book, and the mockery is plain from the title alone. It is the story of two writers who become friends across a generation. Ballestero, the young protagonist, has only just begun to write when he happens to meet the venerable old writer Saldraña. Having read the young man's newly published work, the old man is astonished and full of praise; from then on — himself pushed aside for political reasons — he takes this gifted beginner under the wing of his "black swan" and works to make him into the rare "white blackbird" of Spanish letters. The mutual admiration soon turns to poison: the old writer becomes a master of psychological control, and the young one is reduced to a puppet on his mentor's strings. To make something of his pupil, the old man breaks up his engagement, and even lets an ambiguous bond grow between the pupil and his own wife; when a woman poet arrives, the relations between the two writers grow more delicate still. The novel's real subject is literature itself. Through it, de Prada thinks critically about the literary world and argues that so-called literary talent is quite capable of devouring the finest writers, while also skewering the many ills of publishing. Like the black-and-white opposition in its title, half the book is farce and the other half is a tragedy with no ending.

• Title: Controlled From the Shadows (Desde la sombra)
• Author: Juan José Millás; his work in Chinese translation includes Three Selves Before the Mirror《对镜成三人》.
• Publisher: Seix Barral

Controlled From the Shadows, which Millás published in 2016, has a plot you would never guess: Damián, unemployed and adrift, steals something from an antiques shop and hides in a wardrobe — which is then sold. So Damián, like a piece of the furniture, sets up house in a married couple's bedroom. Watching the family in secret, he works his way into the mind of Lucía, the wife, comes to understand her fears and her dreams, and in the end finds a value in his own existence. The book brings to mind another Millás novel, Three Selves Before the Mirror: in both, the protagonist discovers himself and the truth of life by slipping into someone else's world — perhaps only by first giving up the so-called self can a person see into the human heart and finally talk to his real self. Beyond that, Millás's plain, highly compressed language and his knack for putting deep ideas simply are what make his work pull at you. As the writer and critic Antonio Iturbe said of it, "every square centimeter of every page tells reality to the fullest extent it can."

The Railroad Man and No Longer Human《不复为人》

Shi Xiaowei: professor in the Japanese department at Shanghai Sanda University, scholar of Japanese literature and translator, who lived in Japan for many years. His translations include The Briefcase《老师的提包》, 1Q84, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, After Dark, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, Novelist as a Vocation, Travels in China《中国游记》 and others.

The Railroad Man is a story collection by Jiro Asada. It holds eight pieces: 1. "The Railroad Man," 2. "Love Letter," 3. "The Devil," 4. "At Tsunohazu," 5. "Kyara," 6. "The Bon Festival," 7. "Santa Claus Is a Loser," 8. "An Invitation From Orion."

Their protagonists are, in order: a railway worker; a street tough and a foreign woman working in Japan; a debauched, demon-ridden university student and a dull, flighty housewife; a salaryman abandoned at birth who meets one misfortune after another; a warm-hearted, credulous woman who owns a clothing shop and a cunning salesman who stops at nothing; a wife left isolated and helpless by her husband's affair; a clumsy, weak pimp who has taken the wrong path but is good at heart; and a salaryman and his wife, adrift after the bubble economy burst. All of them are the comedies and tragedies of ordinary people.

The title story was made into a film in 1999, directed by Yasuo Furuhata and starring Ken Takakura; it was widely praised on release and took startling box office, and it is the best-known piece in the collection, which is why the book carries its name. This may be out of step with the times, but you could say the story creates a moving portrait of a "Japanese Lei Feng." The protagonist, Otomatsu Sato, is the stationmaster of Horomai, a remote little station in Hokkaido — stationmaster in name only, since he has not one member of staff under him and is a one-man operation. He has the "spirit of the screw," decade after decade the same, working selflessly and without fuss. For his work — in other words, to serve the public — he sacrifices in turn his newborn daughter and the wife who stayed with him for years, and in the end he falls at his own post, having given himself to his duty until his last breath.

Otomatsu works for a huge railway company called "Japan Railway Hokkaido," successor to the state-run National Railway. JR Hokkaido has registered capital of 9 billion yen, 6,797 employees, 2,552 kilometers of track, 1,251 passenger trains dispatched a day, and 416 stations, 102 of them staffed and 314 unstaffed. Otomatsu is the stationmaster of one small station among them. The company has been privatized, but its character as a public instrument that carries the traveling public has not changed. As a member of this vast organization, as a railwayman, as a stationmaster, Otomatsu is plainly a "public person." At the same time, as a husband and a father, he is just as plainly a "private person," carrying duties to his wife and daughter that he cannot shrug off.

Through a deeply affecting story, the novel praises the spirit of self-sacrifice with which Otomatsu — an "individual" who is both public and private — "extinguishes the self to serve the public." Yet it also seems to put a question to the "organization," which as a public instrument demands sacrifice from the "individual" without end while ignoring that individual's rights and interests — as if urging readers to think again about what an organization and an individual owe each other.

One of the collection's chief features may be the author's taste for the fantastical. Of the eight stories, only three — numbers 2, 7 and 8 — are purely realistic; the other five are rich in it. Under Asada's pen the boundary between this world and the other dissolves, the everyday and what lies beyond it merge, and the land of the living runs straight into the land of the dead; his characters cross the lines as a matter of course, which produces an effect pure realism could never give. This way of writing is in fact a standard device in classical Chinese fiction, and it turns up often in traditional Japanese fiction as well — perhaps it can be called a shared trait of the Chinese-character cultural sphere, which is why Chinese readers shouldn't find it too jarring.

When the book won the well-known Naoki Prize (February 1997), Junichi Watanabe, one of the eight judges, criticized it bluntly: "The author knows all too well where the tear-jerking points lie, and the shallowness that comes of it is a worrying thing in someone who has been writing novels for many years."

Whether that "shallowness" is really worrying is a matter of taste, and probably differs from reader to reader. But "knowing all too well where the tear-jerking points lie" does look like established fact. I can't speak for anyone else, but while translating this book I was taken in more than once, reduced again and again to an old man's tears by that rascal Jiro Asada's tear-gas shells. Well — there, I've embarrassed myself. My apologies.

• Author: Jiro Asada (Japan)
• Translator: Shi Xiaowei
• Publisher: Dook | Wenhui Publishing House
• Price: 42.00 yuan

As for Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human, it is too famous to need much said about it. I'll make only two points.

First, in China the book usually goes under the title 《人间失格》, but that is only a "non-translation" that lifts the Japanese wholesale — it isn't Chinese, so readers who don't know Japanese can easily take it to mean the wrong thing.

Second, the book's popularity in China is rare anywhere in the world: by my own count, 23 different Chinese translations have appeared to date, while there is only one English translation and one French.

The edition recommended here is a facing-page one — the Japanese original on the left, my own poor Chinese on the right. If you're interested in learning Japanese, reading the two side by side may help. Comparing it with the other 22 Chinese translations might also yield a different sort of pleasure. That, of course, would take a great deal of time, which readers may hold against it. As the translator, I hope the translation alone can still give you pleasure.

Recommending one's own translation is bound to draw the charge of hawking one's own melons. But to be honest, it has been a long time since I read Chinese fiction, and I am ashamed to say I know almost nothing about the state of literature at home. Recommending my own translation is, in truth, a matter of having no other choice. I hope readers will be generous enough to forgive me.

• Author: Osamu Dazai (Japan)
• Translator: Shi Xiaowei
• Publisher: East China University of Science and Technology Press

The Radetzky March and Light Years

Kong Yalei: writer and translator from the English, author of the novels The One Who Loses Nothing《不失者》 and Volcano Hotel《火山旅馆》 among others; translator of The Book of Illusions, Book of Longing, But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz, Light Years and others.

• Author: Joseph Roth (Austria)
• Translators: Guan Er, Wang Ning
• Publisher: Lijiang Publishing House
• Price: 65.00 yuan

The mediocre is in fact as easy to recognize as the great; the great is only far rarer. So we need read no further than the first chapter of The Radetzky March to be almost immediately sure: this is a great voice. Take this passage:

Captain Joseph Trotta von Sipolje stood in the middle of that shabby, threadbare room like a god of war: a glittering sash across his chest, a steel helmet lacquered a glossy black on his head, a pair of tall leather boots polished past shining on his feet; his spurs flashed and flashed; the two rows of dazzling buttons on his tunic seemed about to burst into flame, making the Order of Maria Theresa pinned there look magnificent beyond words. This was how the son stood before his father. The old man rose slowly, as if trying, by the slowness of his welcome, to match his son's radiance. Captain Trotta kissed his father's hand and at the same time bent down to let his father kiss his forehead and his cheeks. "Sit," the old man said. The captain took some of the shining things off his body and sat down.

Solemn and mocking. Slow and light. Precise and sorrowful. Funny and holy. It brings to mind many great voices (Kafka, Thomas Mann, Schulz), and yet it is clearly a voice like no other, one that belongs to Joseph Roth alone. But who is Joseph Roth? Another overlooked master, a writer's writer — or you might even say a "writer's writer's writer," since the writers who admire him most are themselves already writers' writers: Coetzee, for instance, and Nadine Gordimer. In a long review, Gordimer borrowed a line from another great German-language novelist, Robert Musil, to describe Roth: a man who is angry at his age can hardly avoid wounding himself. Roth may indeed have died of anger at his time (he died in 1939, only forty-five), but more precisely, he more likely died of holding that anger down and turning it into something else — he spent every bit of his talent making it into art that was composed, elegant and sad all at once. The Radetzky March is the best example.

One more thing: I recommend the translation by Guan Er and Wang Ning. A translation matters to a book the way weather matters to a flight.

• Author: James Salter (US)
• Translator: Kong Yalei
• Publisher: Imaginist | Guangxi Normal University Press
• Price: 67.00 yuan

By some convention or rule, we're supposed to avoid recommending our own work, or work we have a hand in. I have decided to recommend Light Years anyway, even though I am the novel's translator. Mainly because Light Years is itself a book that utterly scorns — and breaks — convention and rule. Concretely: the story is set between 1958 and 1978, perhaps one of the most dramatic stretches in human history, yet not one of the great events of those years appears in it — not the Vietnam War, not the Kennedy assassination, not the moon landing, not the Cuban Missile Crisis, not the Beatles. James Salter filters them out like the sediment of time (and so does Nedra, the heroine of Light Years and his spirit on the page), and what is left at the end is life itself, the essence of life. What is that essence? Nedra's answer: food, sheets, clothes. In other words, the essence of life is its surface. With the riddle of life, the question is the answer: to eat, dress, live, love, be born and die, all of it with love and invention. That sentence, in fact, sums up the whole of Light Years. Through a series of scenes described with almost miraculous vividness, like shots from a New Wave film, Salter all but overturns the traditional literary order: the literature Salter makes, like the life Nedra makes, has essence that is surface, content that is form, detail that is meaning.

The overturning cost him. After it was published in 1975, Light Years was underrated and overlooked for years; it sold badly and won no literary prize. Or rather, you could say it won the highest prize of all: time. Nearly half a century on, it is read more and more widely; it has become a kind of writing bible for many well-known writers in Europe and America; it is becoming, past argument, a classic. More important, standing outside its era has given it a lasting, living force that pushes every reader to ask: how should I live? That question has perhaps never felt as urgent as it does now, when everyone is cut to pieces by the flood of information online — urgent enough that we can take the line Borges used about Oscar Wilde's work and use it to praise Light Years: it seems so young, as if it had been written this morning.

Appendix: Kong Yalei's ten best books of 2018

1. Light Years

I spent a year translating this novel; what I made of it is set out in my translator's afterword, The Light of Autumn《秋日之光》.

2. The Radetzky March

Another overlooked master of the novel. His irony and absurdity give off a blue kind of holiness.

3. Miracle《神迹》

Ready your page-turning finger. Ready your tears. Ready yourself to become a better person. Ready yourself to go on believing in the greatness of the novel.

4. By Night in Chile

One of Bolaño's best. Dense as a meteorite, light as a breeze.

5. The Greenwich Meridian

I wrote a review of a collected edition of Echenoz — borrowing the title of one of his own marvelous short stories, "Twelve Women Arranged Clockwise in the Luxembourg Gardens" — and called it "Fifteen Novels Arranged Clockwise in Jean Echenoz's Park."

6. In Praise of Infinity《无限颂》

Infinite praise for In Praise of Infinity. Infinite admiration for Philippe Sollers. Packed with quotations, aphorisms, insights, original ideas — every paragraph has a sentence worth copying out, every page is lit by lightning.

7. The Book of Leviathan

One of the best picture books for adults of 2017. The best postmodern picture book of the past decade. I had to ration myself to a set number of pages a day.

8. Another Beauty

Susan Sontag wrote a long review of it.

9. Dream Shadows《幽梦影》

The postmodern, fragmentary writing Roland Barthes admired had already reached its peak in Qing-dynasty China. One example: an essay is a landscape on a desk; a landscape is an essay on the ground.

10. The Ongoing Moment

Geoff Dyer is literature's playboy. He changes styles and subjects as freely as he changes lovers. But Beautiful, which I translated, is about jazz. This one is about photography.

The cover image is a still from the film The Railroad Man, via Douban.