The best recent translated fiction – review roundup

Minihorror by Barbi Marković; Paradise Burns by Pol Guasch; Hafni Says by Helle Helle; Googling for Soul by Hamid Ismailov

Minihorror by Barbi Marković, translated by Jen Calleja (Faber, £14.99) This eccentric and fantastical collection of very short stories is bursting with weird life. Mini and Miki (the Disney mouse names in Serbian) are a sometime boyfriend and girlfriend living in Austria. They visit Mini’s family, who gather round a pit and make her climb down into it (when she told Miki “they’re dragging me down”, he thought it was a metaphor). They visit Miki’s family, where a dog Mini draws on a card comes alive and attacks her. Things swing from hopeful – “they’re having fun like a couple in an advert” – to dismal: a hair dye goes wrong and “Mini looks like a 13-year-old dog”. Minihorror combines a Bernhardian comic gloom (“in summary, everything’s tainted, and existence is a particular hardship”) with antic energy. “Miki isn’t sure what to think about life. Is it good? Is it bad?” It’s everything, just like this book.

Paradise Burns by Pol Guasch, translated by Mara Faye Lethem (Peninsula, £12.99) “Stories, if you give them an order, aren’t stories but lies.” Catalan author Guasch makes the point vividly in this novel which flits briskly from present to past and from narrator to narrator. It’s set in a changed climate – “One only knows it’s winter now by the shrunken days and long nights” – where young men join a firefighting service and fight “wildfire simulations of blazes that could not be put out”. The central characters are friends Rita and Líton, but Líton is dead when the book begins – “twenty-four short years, a life as fleeting as a shooting comet” – so the story goes backward, to find out why. The jumpy narrative ranges from Rita’s childhood diary, to three “crafty old biddies” in the neighbourhood, to Líton and his lover René. But inside the hectic structure is a tribute to the value of friendship, and how a friend “has to be the net beneath the tightrope that is life”.

Hafni Says by Helle Helle, translated by Martin Aitken (Akoya, £12.99) Hafni, at 48, is leaving her husband – literally, by taking a road trip through Denmark. “Many’s the time he’d cycle off and I’d be standing at the kitchen window wishing the wind would take him.” Now it’s her turn to go. Alongside details of life away from home – washing her pants in the sink, opening beer bottles with a metal comb – she reflects on how liberating it is to be free of a sense of obligation. The rules she has lived by can be abandoned, if not forgotten. “No more phrases like ‘you shouldn’t have’.” She meets new people – such as a dying woman who sees it as her duty to keep everyone around her cheerful – and wobbles between hope and fear. But ultimately this is a subtle, affecting story of what happens when a woman stuck in her life says, “I don’t want to be me. I want to change who I am.”

Googling for Soul by Hamid Ismailov, translated by Shelley Fairweather-Vega, Dani Ismailov, Irina Buss-Zolotareva and Andrew Bromfield (Glagoslav, £17.99) This sequence of stories about Uzbeks, often exiled in Russia, is full of rampant action, blunt comedy and real horror. In the title story, a man believes his life is echoing the events of Andrey Platonov’s story Soul, and also believes that Hamid Ismailov, the author of this book, has been arrested on terrorism charges. (In reality, Ismailov was forced to flee Uzbekistan in 1992.) Other stories include a man driven to penury by the escapades of a nephew he’s never met before; two in-laws thrown together by fate; and a girl with a precious doll (her story seems more subdued than the others until her drunk father chases her with a knife). Ismailov’s characters have a lively line in insults: “You have the complexion of a fart,” says a father telling his son to eat better. “It’s as if the world had rejected seriousness,” says one character – but Ismailov’s blend of seriousness and sparkle is a seductive combination.