Ali Smith

The final parts of two great European novel trilogies were published in English this year: Jan Kjærstad’s Wergeland trilogy with The Discoverer (Arcadia/Open Letter), and Javier Marías’s Your Face Tomorrow 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell (Chatto). Kjærstad’s trapeze act of interconnection makes life force out of its endgame; translator Barbara J. Haveland navigates this irrepressible Norwegian voyage through the universe with a studied lightness. Marías is simply astonishing. The concluding volume of his mighty Spanish trilogy about power, surveillance, morality and mortality is even more gripping than its predecessors. With its contemporary longsightedness and unique ethic-aesthetic agenda, Your Face Tomorrow seems to me unparallelled in literature – as, in its own right, does Margaret Jull Costa’s translation.

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It’s a huge list, but the fiction section includes some real gems. My personal favorites are:

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Chilean-born novelist Bolaño (1953–2003), beautifully translated by Natasha Wimmer, deliriously tracks Mexico City poets Arturo Belano (Bolaño’s alter ego) and Ulysses Lima as they travel the globe over 20-plus years.

Remainder by Tom McCarthy (Vintage)
In McCarthy’s haunting fiction debut, a semi-amnesiac London everyman uses newfound wealth to re-enact his memories in exacting detail.

White Walls: Collected Stories by Tatyana Tolstaya (NYRB)
Beautiful, imaginative and disconcerting, the Russia of Tolstoy’s great-grandniece is a labyrinth of eras, treasures and horrors: past and present, shabby and brutal, magical and otherworldly.

I’m a sucker for year-end lists (especially those on VH1), but I always have such a hard time coming up with these. If I were to make one for 2008 works of literature in translation, I’d definitely include the Bolano, Fogwill’s Malvinas Requiem, and Enrique Vila-Matas’s Montano’s Malady. That’s all I can think of right now . . . Anyone else have any good suggestions?