Europe’s most exciting authors
From a Dutch best seller about childhood loss to a passionate lesbian romance in France, a refugee’s journey from Iraq and the dark side of Sweden... here’s a look at novelists telling fresh and engaging stories about Europe.
MARIEKE LUCAS RIJNEVELD
When Marieke Lucas Rijneveld was three years old, his 12year-old brother was killed by a bus as he walked to school from the family farm. Rijneveld’s response to this early confrontation with the unthinkable was not to draw a veil over it, but to build two books around it. “I think it’s unfortunate for a family to have a writer born into it,” says the 28-year-old author. In the devoutly religious rural community among which the Rijneveld family still live, the exposure was sudden and extreme. When Calf’s Caul, a poetry collection, was published in 2015, its young author was heralded in the national media as a new star of Dutch literature. More challenging still for the family was the novel that arrived three years later, De Avond Is Ongemak, will appear in English as The Discomfort of Evening, and has just been longlisted for the International Booker prize. “All the shopkeepers and hairdressers were talking about it, but my family is too frightened to read it,” says Rijneveld.
In The Discomfort of Evening, Matthies dies in a skating accident, leaving his 10year-old sister Jas fantasising about how to prevent the family from being destroyed in the aftermath. She keeps two toads in a box under her bed, thinking that if they can be persuaded to mate, her parents might too, and everything will be all right again. Meanwhile, left to cope with the emotional turbulence of adolescence without adult support, she plays games with her surviving brother and sister that become increasingly wild and dangerous.
ANDRZEJ TICHÝ
As a young man travelling around Europe in the late 1990s, the Malmö-based writer Andrzej Tichý remembers telling friends about the conditions endured by marginalised groups in Sweden. “And they just would not believe me,” he recalls. “From the outside, Sweden was this harmonious, social democratic paradise. But it was never actually true,” he says. He cites historic statesanctioned forced sterilisations of those deemed to be mentally or pphysically impaired, and discrimination against Jews, Roma and indigenous peoples. “And there has always been the day-to-day treatment of the poor and of immigrants, let alone the junkies and criminals,” he adds. “Of course, there were places in the world that were worse, but Sweden was never perfect,” he says.
The poor and the immigrants, the junkies and the criminals, loom large in Tichý’s prize-winning novel Wretchedness. It is his fifth novel, but the first to appear in English, and opens with a cellist on his way to a classical concert being asked for money by a drug addict on the street. The encounter summons a swirling sequence of flashbacks from the cellist’s own chaotic past.
NAOISE DOLAN
It is no longer the curse of the Irish author to be compared to James Joyce. These days, if they happen to be sharp, socially conscious and writing about twenty something living now, they will be announced as the new Sally Rooney, and also as some kind of child prodigy, even when they are well into their 20s. Naoise Dolan, 27, finds this all hilarious. “In any other career, it is completely normal to get going in your 20s – we’ve just normalised the desperate state of affairs around writing,” she says. “And the idea that young women couldn’t ever have had an emotional or interesting life, or that it’s somehow cringeworthy to capture the present moment – both are ridiculous to me,” she adds.
Despite the inevitable comparisons, Dolan’s debut, Exciting Times, is more caustic and cynical than Rooney’s writing, if just as clever. It follows Ava, a 22-yearold who had “been sad in Dublin, decided it was Dublin’s fault and thought Hong Kong would help”. There, she meets 29-year-old banker Julian, an only child who went to Eton. Their relationship is sexual, if carefully ambiguous, and is built mostly on their mutual enjoyment of acidic banter over any deeply-felt romance. When Julian temporarily moves away, Ava meets Edith, a young and wealthy Hong Kong lawyer. It is here that Dolan’s novel feels most contemporaneous; all the fretting over love and class could be compared to Austen or Wharton, but her light treatment of bisexuality and polyamory is utterly 2020.
HASSAN BLASIM
“The thing I write best is violence,” says Blasim. His acclaimed short-story collections, The Madman of Freedom Square and The Iraqi Christ, are fervent, unblinking depictions of post-invasion Iraq, the country of his birth, though their violence is focused through the lenses of surrealism, humour and poignancy. The former was longlisted for the Independent foreign fiction prize in 2010, and the latter won it in 2014, becoming the first title translated from Arabic to do so.
In 2000, Blasim left Iraq, where he had been persecuted for his film-making and where his writing is still banned. He spent four years walking illegally across Europe, eventually settling in Finland. His debut novel, God 99, draws on his experience: its protagonist (called Hassan) is an Iraqi refugee attempting to establish himself as a writer in Finland.
And the idea that young women couldn’t have had an emotional or interesting life, or that it’s somehow cringeworthy to capture the present moment — both are ridiculous to me. NAOISE DOLAN, AUTHOR