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Tag Archives: translated fiction


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White King, Juan Gómez-Jurado

This is the third book of the Antonia Scott trilogy. I watched a TV adaptation of the first book, Red Queen (2018, Spain), and enjoyed it. So when the books popped up as cheap ebooks, I didn’t hesitate to buy them. Unfortunately, like another famous European thriller trilogy featuring a genius protagonist, the first book is way better than the sequels. In Red Queen, gay Basque detective Jon Gutiérrez is assigned to assist genius criminologist Antonia Scott while she investigates the kidnapping of a billionaire’s daughter. Scott is part of the Red Queen project, a pan-European agency which uses drugs and neural programming to enhance selected geniuses to make them super-effective solvers of crimes.

Red Queen was followed by Black Wolf (2019, Spain), which had Scott and Gutiérrez involved with Russian gangsters on the Costa del Sol. The title refers to a hired assassin. The events of both novels, however, had all been part of a plot organised by a genius psychopath known as the White King. And that’s what White King (2020, Spain) is about.

Mt White, the genius psychopath, has been hired to steal something. He needs Scott’s help, but of course she would refuse. So he set up the kidnappings in Red Queen, and the murders in Black Wolf, to manipulate her, and the Red Queen project, into a position where he has access to the thing he has been contracted to steal. None of this is especially convincing. Especially since the manipulation seems to depend on minor details from the first two books. 

White King is structured as three murders, one from several years before, one that occurs that very day, and one that is about to happen. All three are linked. Scott is given only hours to solve the murders. In order to motivate Scott, White kidnaps Gutiérrez and implants a bomb against his spine. If Scott fails to solve each crime by the deadline… Gutiérrez loses his head.

I mentioned another popular European trilogy, but unlike those three books, the Red Queen trilogy pits one genius against another, and genius is always difficult to present in fiction. White’s speciality is blackmailing people into performing tasks for him, even tasks completely against their nature – such as murdering all their colleagues. It’s not credible, and like most fiction of this type, book, television or film, relies on people abandoning whatever morals they may possess at the slightest provocation for plot reasons. The other aspect of genius as presented in fiction is vast knowledge. In past works, this manifested as erudite and well-educated, often self-educated, criminal masterminds. But these days, with computers so ubiquitous and intertwined in daily life, and the internet, there’s no need for the villain to have that knowledge, only have access to it. Which means Magical Hackers. And so it is here.

White King’s denouement is cleverly done, however, and Scott is an interesting character. Goméz-Jurado’s prose is choppy, and perhaps a little journalistic, but also plainly written with film or TV adaptation in mind. And the TV series was indeed good. There’s been no mention of adapting Black Wolf or White King. Which is a shame.


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The Employees, Olga Ravn

Back in 2014, Paul Park published the novel All Those Vanished Engines (2014, USA), which comprised three linked novellas. One of these, which shared the book’s title, was originally commissioned to accompany a sound installation by Stephen Vitiello at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in 2011. The Employees (2020, Denmark) by Olga Ravn was inspired by the art of Lea Gulditte Hestelund, a Danish visual artist, after Ravn was asked to provide accompanying text for her exhibition, Consumed Future Spewed Up as Present. Knowing this in no way affects reading The Employees, although it does in part explain some parts of a novel which takes pains to obscure its story.

The novel is told in one- or two-page chapters, each of which is the testimony of a member of the crew of the Six-Thousand Ship, so called because that’s the number of people aboard it. Just like the Three Ship that went to the Moon, and indeed the One Ship that put the first human being in space. Not all of the six thousand are human, some of them are androids – the novel is vague to their exact status, only that they are human in all ways except actually being considered human. Science fiction is normally quite happy to feature chattel slavery without commentary, so why it bothered to invent a metaphor for it will forever be a mystery.

The opening testimonies describe members of the crew, or “employees”, visiting rooms containing “objects” from Hestelund’s installation. There are also visits outside the ship to a valley, although its unclear if the ship has landed on a planet or is in space. At some point, the non-human humans object to not being treated as humans, and mutiny. This is supposed to comment meaningfully on the human, or indeed non-human, condition.

The problem is, there is nothing new here. And couching everything in terms so vague, despite the manifold viewpoints, does not render the story profound or deep. I am in general in favour of science fiction written by non-genre writers. Their unfamiliarity with the tropes and conventions of science fiction can result in something interesting to say about common sf concerns – although that “common” often means their treatment is old-fashioned or adds little to the genre conversation. 

And so it is here: The Employees, while poetically written, contains no new insights into the human condition, or even human resources. Some nice prose, an interesting structure, and a link to an art installation of a real-life artist are married to a story that tries hard to hide the fact it is thuddingly obvious from start to finish.


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On the Calculation of Volume II, Solvej Balle

Tara Selter woke up one day, and it was the previous day. In fact, for reasons unexplained, she is reliving 18 November over and over again, much like Bill Murray in the movie Groundhog Day. In the first book – seven are planned – Tara explored the limits of her condition, spending time in Paris in a hotel, where she had slept the night before, repeatedly visiting the same friends – antiquarian booksellers like herself – again and again, even attempting to explain to them what was happening to her. She returned home, and tried the same with her husband. But she discovered the resources she used, food particularly, vanished from 18 November if she used them, and objects would disappear into 19 November if she did not keep them close to her.

In this second book, Tara decides to try and live a year on the same day. She does this by moving around Europe so that the climate matches what it would be, approximately, on each day of the year had she stayed home in her village outside Paris. It’s a neat conceit, but for it to work Balle needs to get her details absolutely spot-on and, unfortunately, in a few places they didn’t ring true.

But that’s a minor quibble. Balle commits hard to her structure, and is rigorous in working out the details of living the same day again and again, even when it comes to travelling about Europe in search of the right climate for each calendar day of the year. The travel stretches Tara’s resources and ingenuity, as she has no knowledge of the previous day wherever she ends up, and Balle considers all the pitfalls and ramifications that might result.

There is something deeply satisfying in Balle’s careful working out of her central premise, and even after only two books in of a planned seven, the series promises interesting explorations of Tara’s situation. 


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Frankenstein in Baghdad, Ahmed Saadawi

Very little science fiction has been translated from Arabic into English – in fact, I knew of only one other author, Emirati Noura Al Noman, and she hasn’t been published since 2014. Ahmed Khaled Tawfik wrote several sf novels, most notably Utopia (2008, Egypt), and a little hunting revealed it had been translated into English – but with his name spelt Towfik. There’s been plenty of fantasy translated from Arabic, however, from Alf Laylat wa Layla to Naguib Mahfouz, and a number of contemporary writers. Having said that, Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013, Iraq) was not published as category sf, and likely only deserves the label because its central conceit references Mary Shelley’s novel, a proto-sf novel. (The English title, incidentally, is a direct translation of the original Arabic title.) It was nominated for both the Arthur C Clarke Award and the International Booker Prize.

The central conceit of Frankenstein in Baghdad is actually not at all rigorous as science fiction. It’s a neat twist on the original – the monster (because of course Frankenstein is the doctor) in Saadawi’s novel is made from the body parts of victims of IEDs in post-invasion Iraq, and the monster’s mission is to avenge those deaths. But Saadawi seems more interested in telling a more general story about life in present-day Baghdad, as seen through the eyes of a handful of characters. Chief among these are the junk dealer Hadi, who originally creates the monster in some sort of fever dream; Mahmud, a young journalist, who takes Hadi’s tales of a monster semi-seriously, but is more interested in becoming like his rich and powerful editor; Elishva, an old Armenian woman who mistakes the monster for her long-dead son; and General Majid, who runs a secret police bureau of astrologers and magicians who predict bomb attacks in the city.

The novel bounces around between these characters, and a handful of others, mostly centred around the area of Bataween, and occasionally focusing on the monster. Who has discovered that once it avenges the death of one of the people whose parts make up its body, that body part rots and falls off. So the monster needs new parts – and it reaches the point where, with its own small army of followers, it too begins murdering people to keep itself together (so to speak).

The monster is a great invention, and there’s so much commentary that could be attached to the concept, but Frankenstein in Baghdad doesn’t seem all that interested in it. It’s more like an introduction, or a framing narrative, to the personal stories of the book’s cast. Which is a shame. It’s a good novel, don’t get me wrong, and its descriptions of life in post-invasion Baghdad are both heart-breaking and enraging.

A good novel, but one that feels like it failed to capitalise on its central idea.


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Millennium 8: The Girl with Ice in her Veins, Karin Smirnoff

The second book of the third trilogy featuring Lisbeth Salander, genius sociopath hacker. The problem with novels which centre sociopaths as the hero is the villains have to be complete psychopaths in order to present some spectrum of good to bad. So, here, for example, a bad guy who infiltrates a group of eco-activists turns out to be a paedophile, because being on the bad guy’s side is not enough on its own. And when every villain is grotesque beyond plausibility, suspension of disbelief even, then you have to wonder what point the story is trying to make.

On the other hand, this is a deckare, a thriller, so I guess making a point is not, well, the point of the book. The Girl with Ice in her Veins (2025, Sweden) is not a translation of the book’s original Swedish title, Lokattens klor, which means “the lynx’s claws”, but neither of the titles is especially relevant to the plot – although there is a a newly-introduced character nicknamed Lo, lynx. She’s a baddy, of course.

Like the preceding novel, The Girl in the Eagle’s Talons (2022, Sweden), The Girl with Ice in her Veins is set mostly in the invented north Swedish town of Gasskas. It also features the same cast – not just Salander and Blomkvist from the original trilogy, but also Blomkist’s daughter and family, Salander’s niece, and the trilogy’s main villain, disabled white supremacist millionaire Branco. The ecological theme also continues, although this time it’s opencast mining rather than windfarms.

Salander’s niece, Svala, is interning at the local newspaper and has joined a local group of eco-activists. After discovering a local abandoned sanatorium is secretly in use, Svala’s mentor at the newspaper is murdered. A bomb explodes near a disused mine, which appears to be in the process of being re-opened. There is also a consortium interested in opening a new mine in the area.

It’s all connected, of course, although the novel seems more interested in the depredations of the secondary cast, especially the villains. The Cleaner is hired to murder someone in Copenhagen, who turns out to have connections to the new mine in Gasskas, but instead he decides to help Svala. A visiting Greek/Chinese millionaire, who is interested in investing in re-opening the old mine (which is actually owned by Gaskass kommune), turns out to be the father of Blomkvist’s grandson. But because he’s a baddy, he’s also a domestic abuser and made his fortune through people trafficking. Branco pops up every now and again. He’s after the harddisk containing billions in cryptocurrency which Svala was given by her mother and which she has hidden. He’s also less interested in business and more in his white supremacist political organisation.

The Girl with Ice in her Veins resolves its main plot-threads, but Branco once again escapes. So that’s the plot of book three – as yet untitled – sorted. The prose is present-tense again, and often choppy. It mostly works, but occasionally gets perilously close to the fourth wall. I did spot a couple of weird choices in translating Swedish words/culture, but fewer than in the previous book. The Girl with Ice in her Veins is not a great book, but then the series could hardly be called a great series. The first book, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo/Män som hatar kvinnor (2005, Sweden), was a solid serial killer hunt thriller, but it’s been downhill since then. I must admit, I do wonder how far they plan to take the series. Blomkvist is now in his sixties, Salander is slowing down too… The Girl in the Eagle’s Talons and The Girl with Ice in her Veins do feel a little like they’re moving Svala to centre-stage, so who knows…


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The Girl in the Eagle’s Talons, Karin Smirnoff

The start of the third trilogy featuring Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist, and a new author. As indicated by the title, I read it in English – and… a new translator too. This time it’s a professional translator from Swedish to English. The English version keeps up The Girl… book titles, which are not of course direct translations of the original Swedish titles. In this case, it’s Havsörnens skrik, The Sea Eagle’s Cry – but weirdly, it’s a boy who finds himself in the titular, er, appendages.

Blomkvist is in the invented town of Gasskas in Norrbotten, a county in the most northerly part of Sweden. He’s there for his daughter’s wedding. To the head of the Gasskas kommune (district council/municipality). Who Blomkvist doesn’t like from the moment he meets him as he seems to be a bit of a chancer. Honest – but not the most transparent of politicians. Especially when it comes to a deal to build Europe’s biggest windfarm on land in the district. There are three companies in line to take a third each of the contract, but one wants 100% of it, a shadowy Swedish company run by a disabled psychopath who lives in a refurbished military bunker near Gasskas.

Lisbet Salander is in Gasskas because her half-brother’s daughter – previously unmentioned in the series, unsurprisingly – is about to go into care, and Salander is the only surviving relative. The daughter, Svala, is a genius like Salander, and also has the same genetic condition as her father which means she doesn’t feel pain.

The two narratives are connected. Svala’s mother is missing because she’s been kidnapped by the psycho millionaire. Blomkvist’s soon-to-be son-in-law is being threatened by the same psycho to give him the entire contract. The two stories intersect when Blomkvist’s grandson is kidnapped at the wedding.

There’s little that’s new here, except perhaps the setting: the Swedish north. Blomkvist is a bit more of a fogey than in earlier novels, and Svala fills more of Salander’s typical role than Salander does. The villains are almost caricatures – they even have a secret underground lair!

The writing is better than the Lagercrantz trilogy, although that’s hardly a high bar to clear. Everything is in present tense, which gives it more urgency, and often drops into choppy sentence fragments. It works, to an extent – although I don’t think the material is really strong enough for it, given everything is so clichéd. 

This is the English prose, of course, so it seems the translator is much better. There were a couple of questionable choices: Systembolaget is referred to throughout as “the off-licence”, which may well be a UK term for a shop that sells booze, but Systemet is the state liquor monopoly chain, which is not quite the same thing. The word “Lapp” is used interchangeably with “Sámi”, even though it’s considered offensive, and it’s not always in dialogue or in the POV of characters who are prejudiced. And someone orders “a pizza salad”, but “pizza salad” is the name of a side-dish in pizza restaurants here (the indefinite article looks odd – like, you order a pizza and say “and garlic bread”, not “and a garlic bread”).

So, slightly better than the preceding three books, and makes good use of the series mythology. They are at least better than Dan Brown’s “weapons-grade bollocks” – and English is his first language! – but even for a commercial thriller this is near the bottom of the barrel.

And yes, I really should try reading the books in Swedish.


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Memory of Water, Emmi Itäranta

Shortlisted for the Clarke Award in 2015 – and it’s not often a translated work makes it onto the award shortlist. In fact, the only one prior to Memory of Water (2012, Finland) was Stanisław Lem’s Fiasco (1988, Poland), although there have been four since Itäranta (Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013, Iraq), The Electric State (2017, Sweden), Vagabonds (2011/2012, China) and The Anomaly (2020, France)).

Memory of Water was originally published in Finnish. There’s no mention of a translator, and Itäranta lives in the UK according to the bio, so I’m guessing she translated the novel herself. That might explain a couple of word misuses, such as “the hidden core of the profession pertains that tea masters were once…”, and “woolgathering” when context suggests it should be “digressing”. Less understandable is the use of Scandinavian Union as the name of the novel’s setting, when it seems to be set in Finland, which is not a Scandinavian country, and both Sweden and Norway are described as polluted and uninhabitable.

Several centuries from now, climate crash, and war, has drastically changed the face of the Earth. Many former nations are now underwater, and the Chinese rule pretty much everywhere. Water is so scarce it is controlled by the military. Noria is the daughter of a tea master, and his apprentice. He shows her the family secret: a hidden spring.

After Noria’s father dies, she becomes tea master, and her mother moves to the capital, Xinjing. In a nearby garbage dump, Noria and her friend find a series of CD-ROMs which contain the log of an expedition to the Lost Lands (ie, Sweden and Norway) several centuries previously. The expedition was presumed lost and the Lost Lands uninhabitable. The novel never actually reveals what’s in the logs, only that it contradicts what everyone has been told. Noria, and her best friend, to whom Noria revealed the secret of the spring, decide to retrace the route of the lost expedition. Before they can set off, the military arrest Noria.

Memory of Water is not the first sf novel to feature a Chinese-controlled future. Two examples which spring (ahem) to mind are Gwyneth Jones’s Bold as Love quintet (2001-2006, UK) and David Wingrove’s Chung Kuo series (1989-1997 and 2010-2014 and 2017-2024, UK). Nor is it the first sf novel set in a Europe mostly underwater. Despite that, Memory of Water’s setting never quite convinces. The writing is lovely, and the surroundings are described in poetic and leisurely detail (sometimes somewhat over-leisurely). But the scarcity of water doesn’t – I’m tempted to say “hold water”, but that would be cruel. Anyway, it doesn’t seem entirely credible, and if it were indeed true then I doubt the tea ceremony would still exist centuries later. The fact Sanja can fix “past-technology”, including a CD-player, is not really feasible either, but it breaks suspension of disbelief less than the water thing.

Which is a shame, as the “water thing” is what the novel is actually about.


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On the Calculation of Volume I, Solvej Balle

It’s probably premature to review this first volume before having read the rest – although only two have so far have been published in English, the third is due in November, the fourth in April next year… and to date only six of the planned seven have been published in the original Danish. (I should point out it’s not On the Calculation of, volume 1, but On the Calculation of Volume, part one.)

The basic premise is: antiquarian book dealer Tara Selter, resident in France, visits Paris to purchase new books for the home-based business she runs with her husband. While there, she wakes up one morning and discovers she is reliving the previous day. In fact, every day from that point on is 18 November. Just like Groundhog Day.

She returns to her husband, and explains the situation to him. But the following morning… is 18 November again for her, and she has to explain all over again. And again. And again. While she is stuck in time, he continues travelling forward day by day.

Tara tries several different ways to live – spending the day over and over again with her husband, living in his shadow as he repeats his 18 November… She discovers that any changes she makes carry over to her next 18 November – so if she takes food from village shops, their stock diminishes on the one day she inhabits. She explores the limits imposed on her as he lives the same day over and over again – some items return back to the beginning of the day with her, some are lost to 19 November, and so on.

It’s all very cleverly worked-out, and written in an appealing flat lucid prose. This first volume (did you see what I did there?) is Tara exploring the “rules” which seem to govern her situation, both in her home village and in Paris. She inevitably grows distant – first from her husband, then from other people, then from her own life. The novel – it’s short, only 166 pages – is almost entirely set-up. But then there are seven books (each one also short) in the series. Nonetheless, On the Calculation of Volume I (2020, Denmark) doesn’t feel abrupt or incomplete. It reads like the first step on a journey toward the solution of an impossible mystery (although the shadow of Groundhog Day does lie a little heavy across it).


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Walking Practice, Dolki Min

The debut novel of a South Korean illustrator, recently translated and published in English, and one of four winners of the Otherwise Award this year. The narrator is an alien living in Seoul who must concentrate on presenting a human appearance, or they’re liable to sprout arms and legs and eyes in odd places. They enjoy dating people online, arranging to meet them at home for sex and then, well, eating them. Yes, the narrator presents as both male and female during the story, and the title refers in part to the different gaits required to pass as each gender. 

The prose tries to maintain a chatty tone, which I found grating. I know almost nothing about contemporary Korean literature, so I’ve no idea if it’s a popular style there (although I recall something similar in Greek Lessons (2011, South Korea) by last year’s Nobel laureate Han Kang when I read it earlier this year). I’ve read enough translated fiction, and even fiction in its original language and then translated into English (Swedish and French fiction, mostly) to know there’s a difference between translation and transliteration – and sometimes the latter often fails to take culture into account, both the original and that of the language being translated into (the same occurs all the fucking time from UK to US English, of course). The English translation of Roadside Picnic (1972, USSR) by the Strugatsky brothers didn’t work for me because it relied too much on American idioms, and I don’t expect to find them in a Russian novel. Larsson’s Millennium trilogy was translated by an American who’d lived and studied in Denmark but was unfamiliar with many elements of Swedish culture and society. It showed. On the other hand, the English subtitles for a Swedish detective show I watched recently failed completely to transliterate a common Swedish expression because there was no obvious way to do so and keep the original sense.

Then there’s the writing system… Korean, of course, has its own writing system, Hangeul, and it’s very different to the variations on the Latin alphabet used by many other languages. An afterword by the translator points out the difficulties she had representing the author’s Hangeul orthographic tricks in the Latin alphabet. The nearest she could manage was through varying the kerning – which, as she admits to worrying about, does indeed look like bad typography or misprints.

Obviously, there’s more to Walking Practice (2023, South Korea) than the tone of its narrative and the fact the English reading experience is a poor copy of the Korean reading experience. There’s a cinematic feel to the story, but unlike a movie there’s no story arc or resolution. Korean cinema doesn’t follow Hollywood story paradigms – it’s something to do with cats at present, isn’t it? – which is a good thing, and I’ve seen many excellent South Korean films. In future, I think, I’ll stick to their movies.


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Black Wolf, Juan Gómez-Jurado

The second book in a trilogy featuring Antonia Scott, a neurodivergent super-genius who works for a secret European agency dedicated to solving high-profile crimes. She’s assisted by Jon Gutiérrez, a gay Basque police detective. The two first appeared in Red Queen (2018, Spain), which was adapted for television in 2024.

In Black Wolf (2019, Spain) The pair are asked to assist in investigating the attempted murder of a Russian mobster’s girlfriend in Málaga. The girlfriend escaped, and is now on the run, but the mobster did not – and it turns out she was the financial genius behind all his shell companies and money laundering schemes. And because of that, the head of the Russian mob in the area wants her dead. So he asks his superiors back in Russia to send him some help, and they send the Black Wolf, a renowned assassin.

But when Scott and Gutiérrez stumble across a shipping container containing dead women who’d been trafficked to Spain, and the container is linked to the dead mobster, Scott is determined to take down the Russian mob in Málaga. But things aren’t as simple as they seem. Someone is attacking the organisation Scott works for, the police in Málaga are not as honest as they should be, and even the Black Wolf has her own agenda.

It all comes to a head in a villa in the woods near Madrid during a snowstorm. The Russians attack, and the handful of good guys – Scott, Gutiérrez et al – in the house have to hold out until the police arrive. Black Wolf is a more straightforward narrative than Red Queen, and its focus on the Russian bratva in Spain leaves less room for social commentary. There are still plentiful hooks to the third book, White King (2020, Spain), however. This is a good series, with a pair of engaging leads, and is already being compared to Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, although I’d argue it’s probably better, and I can understand why the first book was adapted for TV. It would be nice to see the other two adapted as well.