Literary return to school: 10 foreign books to read absolutely

Besides Japanese Murakami, the Irishman Paul Lynch and the American Richard Powersfemale writers have the spotlight in this literary return of January 2025, some recounting their experiences, such as Jenny Fagan et Alison Mills Newmaneven if it is veiled in fiction, like Susan Taubes, or imagine stories that are both realistic and poetic, like Saskia Vogel, Lauren Groff et al Julia Philips.

The City of Uncertain Walls d’Haruki Murakami

“It was you who told me about the City.”

Nearly fifty years ago, while at the head of a Tokyo jazz club, Haruki Murakami wrote a short story called The City of Uncertain Wallspublished in a Japanese literary magazine. In retrospecthe did not judge it up to par. In 1985, he took it over and enriched it until the result The End of Times. But, once again, he felt the narrative was incomplete. Here she is fully satisfied with this 550-page novel, telling how the passionate love of a 17-year-old boy for a teenage girl who reveals to him that she lives in a city protected by high walls – in which he will also stay – will haunt him his whole life, making him absent from the real world. Dreamlike, fantastic, sometimes lyrical and sometimes painfully delicate: a very beautiful Murakami.

Lives and deaths of Sophie Blind by Susan Taubes

“Opening his eyes costs him an immense effort but it happens in another room; then there she is, hurrying down a crowded street, passing chic boutiques, the windows of Place Vendôme catch her eye, with their watches no thicker than a coin, but she knows that it won’t work. not, she knows that she must open her eyes, because she is lying on a bed, in a room.”

The inaugural sentence of Lives and deaths of Sophie Blind says a lot about the talent of Susan Taubes. On November 6, 1969, two weeks after the publication of this first novel, she threw herself into the Atlantic Ocean, offering an (un)suspected echo to the destiny of her heroine Sophie. A fictional double – which was confirmed by one of the author’s friends, Susan Sontag – because she is, like Susan TaubesJewish of Hungarian origin, granddaughter of a rabbi and daughter of a psychoanalyst… and therefore, a woman deciding to leave her husband – the title, in original version, is moreover Divorcing. So intense and daring, demanding in the plurality of its form, this novel tells how a young mother emancipates herself from her clumsy husband, without shedding her childish anxieties, into which Sophie plunges back into fits and starts. Very liberated for his time, Lives and deaths of Sophie Blind was therefore completely misunderstood when it was published, but resonates very strongly today.

Oootlin by Jenni Fagan

“There is always a story before the story and this first story, too, begins long after the beginning of everything.”