The Details , Ia Genberg, translated from the Dutch by Kira Josefsson The Details , originally published as Detaljerna in Swedish, opens with an unnamed woman, bedridden and in the throes of a burning fever which renews her interest in a half-forgotten book (The New York Trilogy by the late Paul Auster) that is inscribed with a handwritten message from a past lover. Though it is resistant to a chronological order, the book travels along the tectonic plates of pre-internet life in the 1990s, and shifts us into a new air of change at the turn of the millennium. In four chapters named after Johanna, Niki, Alejandro and Birgitte – relationships which have shaken the narrator’s existence – we are transported to a past that is captured as vividly as the state of the soul itself.
The Details is a perfectly written, quiet COVID novel which cleverly disguises the pandemic, offering a genius form of exposure therapy to readers who haven’t felt ready to read COVID novels . Genberg and Joseffson are honey and gold in the book’s final chapter which stays with you. This beautiful little book and its highly perceptive feel for the small details of an entire life is a wonderful addition to the genre’s best coronavirus fiction.
Kairos , Jenny Erpenbeck, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann In Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos , a character asks whether a human being is “a container to be filled by time with whatever it happens to have handy” or if there can be life beyond hi.
