By choosing the Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, the 2021 Nobel Prize jury dedicated “an uncompromising and compassionate work”, attentive to the effects of colonialism. We are fortunately republishing two novels by this formidable storyteller, who arrived in the United Kingdom as a refugee in the late 1960s and the first black African author to have won the prize since Wole Soyinka in 1986. Paradise, which tells the story of a boy growing up in Tanzania at the beginning of the 20thand century, and Near the sea (both at Denoël, January), where it is a question, between London and Zanzibar, of the eventful destiny of two men, of betrayal and revenge.
Considered one of the best young Hispanic writers by the journal Granta, carlos fonseca, born in Costa Rica in 1987, became known to French-speaking readers with his second novel, animal museum (Christian Bourgeois, March), which explores the complex relationship between the curator of a New Jersey natural history museum and a famous New York fashion designer. A puzzle that winds its way from Haifa, Israel, to the New York bohemian of the 1970s, passing through the Latin American jungle.
We will have to hang on with the Ecuadorian Monica Ojeda, whose third novel, Jaws (Gallimard, February), which mixes pop culture and poetry, was one of the favorite books ofEl País in 2018. We follow the life of a group of teenage girls in a Catholic school of Opus Dei, reserved for the elites of Guayaquil. A psychological thriller about youth, sex and fear in which Mónica Ojeda, we are told, “recreates a limitless and merciless feminine world, where danger and desire reign like a fascinating two-headed goddess”.
Novelist Jon Kalman Stefansson, whose work balances between the infinitely small and the immensity of the Icelandic horizon, returns to us with Your absence is only darkness (Grasset, February). A rich story in which a man with amnesia finds himself in a village in the fjords without knowing why or how he got there, even if everyone seems to know him. Let’s stay in Iceland, while La Peuplade continues to publish the work of Gyrðir Eliasson with Requiem (February). A “subtle and melancholy” short novel in which the author ofAt the edge of the Sandá (2018) brings to life a composer attentive to the melodies that surround him.
Louise Erdrich, a major literary voice of Native Americans since In the silence of the wind (2013), returns with The one who watches (Albin Michel, February), a sixth novel for which she won the Pulitzer Prize last year. In 1950s North Dakota, a night watchman at a factory near the Turtle Mountain reservation is determined to fight the federal government’s plan to “enfranchise” the Indians, knowing full well that this text is actually a threat to his own. The American novelist, born in 1954 to a father of German origin and a Chippewa mother, was inspired by the figure of her maternal grandfather, who fought to preserve the rights of his people.
The American Joshua Cohen follows in the footsteps of Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, signing with The Netanyahus (Grasset, March) a novel about American society, dysfunctional families and Jewish identity. “The greatest living American author”, if we are to believe the WashingtonPost, delivers a satire of the academic world based on an unlikely episode in the personal history of the Netanyahus, the family of former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Considered one of the greatest contemporary Chinese-speaking writers, the writer Zhang Guixing immerses us in an atmosphere of magical realism taking as a backdrop, in 1941, the Japanese invasion of Sarawak, a Malay province in the north of the island of Borneo, with its jungles, its animals, its inhabitants and their customs. The crossing of boars (Picquier, February) recounts this historic episode through a gallery of colorful characters: villagers, hunters and opium smokers resisting the invader.
The writer Ismail Kadare, who shares his life between Albania and France, often tipped for the Nobel Prize for Literature, returns with Disputes at Mountain peak (Fayard, March). The man nicknamed the “Albanian Victor Hugo” is interested in a mythical episode of the Stalin era: the intriguing telephone call from Stalin to Boris Pasternak in June 1934, the subject of all speculation. Through his investigation, the author of the palace of dreams (1981) offers us a new exploration of the relationship that every writer has with tyranny.