Five Books to Keep This Easter Interesting

Easter is one of those times where even people who don’t usually have time to read feel like it is time to relax and spend a few hours in the company of a book. Here are five suggestions to keep those hours fun and, more often than not, more than a little weird.

VANISHING WORLD, Sayaka Murata

Granta Books, pp. 250

Murata is the author of Convenience Store Woman, Earthlings, and Life Ceremony, contemporary cult classics which have rightly cemented her reputation as the author turning society’s pieties and conventions on their head. 

Implicitly taking inspiration from the current crisis of low birth rates affecting Japan—Vanishing World takes from where Life Ceremony left off by imagining a world where sexual taboos and icks have led to artificial insemination becoming the dominant mode for reproduction. Prepare then for a classic sci-fi narrative in which well-intentioned schemes to better humanity have to face the (liberating) reality of human instincts and imperfections, just injected with Murata’s signature blend of absurdism and body horror.

Translated from Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori.

SEPARATE ROOMS, Pier Vittorio Tondelli

Sceptre, pp. 209

All of us have a handful of writers which they associate with the feeling of youth. For me, one of these is Italian writer and chronicler of 1980s provincial Emilia, Pier Vittorio Tondelli. I still remember picking up a copy of his first story collection Altri Libertini [Other Beatniks] having read a profile in the Italian Rolling Stone. I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t imagine myself one as one of his yearning, slightly desperate characters. 

Separate Rooms, the last novel he wrote – as a farewell, having being diagnosed by AIDS –  notably lacks any of the joie de vivre of his debut. In telling the story of a writer grieving the death of his lover with no sentimentality, it is probably the better book for it. Hopefully this new edition (and the forthcoming adaptation by the filmmaker Luca Guadagnino) will be the beginning of a much-deserved rediscovery.

Translated from Italian by Simon Pleasance.

CALLS MAY BE RECORDED FOR TRAINING AND MONITORING PURPOSES, Katharina Volckmer

Indigo Press, pp. 176

Katharina Volckmer is the author of The Appointment, a wonderfully daring novella consisting of a single monologue in which a young woman lays herself bare — covering a range of touchy subjects — to a silent Jewish physician. 

This sophomore release features the same provocative voice and explores a main character not at home in their own body, one who dreams of fulfilment — existential as well as sexual. In Calls May Be Recorded, Volckmer strikes a note far more emotional and earnest. Indeed, Jimmie might feel the queer reincarnation of A Confederacy of Dunces’s main character Ignatius J. Reilly, rotting away as he is in a London call centre, but his struggle is that of a pure soul trying to escape the cage of his own cumbersome body.

WE PRETTY PIECES OF FLESH, Colwill Brown

Chatto & Windus, pp. 336

This is a bit of a cheat because after reading it in an early form, I completely missed its publication in February (and consequently spurned the chance to recommend it then). But after seeing the Italian translation in Rome this week I was reminded to right that wrong, especially given that the book didn’t cause the stir it so thoroughly deserved.

Structured around drawn-out vignettes that jump in time and told in a rich Yorkshire dialect, it is a sort of How To Have Sex that throbs with the energy of unforgettable night-outs fuelled by cheap alcohol and drugs. This is a book that provides both a memorable snapshot of rave culture at the turn of the millennium in the north of England and a complex portrait of female friendship with its dynamics and conflicts. And ultimately, what it feels like to be a teenage girl.

FUN AND GAMES, John Patrick McHugh

4th Estate, pp. 224

Speaking of the challenges and fun of teenage years, Fun and Games is a coming-of-age story which explores the messiness of those unforgettable years on the cusp of adulthood, just this time from a male point of view.

Set on the west coast of Ireland, it follows working class 17-year-old John over the course one summer as he juggles the stakes of life at that age, all the while dealing with the fall out of his mother inadvertently sending a nude to a man other than his dad – which then gets circulated around the whole town. One of the most talked-about debuts of the year, and rightly so. 

Bartolomeo Sala is a writer and reader based in London. His writing has appeared in Frieze, Vittles, and The Brooklyn Rail. Read more of Bart’s writing for Something Curated here.

Header image courtesy of Chatto and Windus.