Alta Ifland's Blog: Notes on Books - Posts Tagged "21st-century-literature"

In Andrea Canobbio’s Three Light-Years, the narrator (who makes several discreet appearances at the beginning and the ending of the novel) imagines the three years, which led to his birth, before his mother’s pregnancy. This is the frame, or rather, the pretext of the drama involving two main characters: his father, Claudio, and the woman he falls in love with, Cecilia—both doctors in the same hospital. In intelligent, thoughtful prose—for which we have to thank the translator, Anne Milano Appel—Canobbio takes us through the daily lives of these characters. For a while, Claudio, who is unattached, seems both like a hopeless lover and a voyeur into Cecilia’s life, a recently divorced woman with two growing children. Then, the balance shifts, and Cecilia responds to Claudio’s attentions. When, finally, the reader is led to believe that a relationship between the two is possible, fate intervenes: Claudio is introduced to Silvia, Cecilia’s eccentric sister. The novel’s ending is somewhat ambiguous, yet the narrator gives us subtle hints about how he grew up and who raised him, so we can imagine the outcome of the drama between Claudio, Cecilia and Silvia. This is a novel about contemporary couples, which should resonate with readers everywhere.

In Baboon, Naja Marie Aidt’s stories are built around the familiar themes of sex, love and desire, yet there is nothing “familiar” about them. The reader is dropped in the middle of each story (the first story of the collection starts with “Suddenly”) without much information about the characters. The pacing is breathless: short sentence follows short sentence at a frantic speed. Written in a minimalist, concise style—brought to us in English through Denise Newman’s beautiful translation--the prose is striking through its clarity, word choice and rhythm. Aidt pushes her characters into a realm half-way between hyper-realism and her own version of surrealism.

The unorthodox sexuality of some of the characters is part of the economy and the strangeness of the overall narratives. In one story, a man who is very much in love with his wife meets another man, and then “something happened.” The pace of the story changes, the reader is sure that the couple will split, but at the end, this expectation is thwarted. In another story, a couple goes to a city where women are in control, but everything seems to be happening in a dream. Other stories, like Candy, in which a couple goes shopping, hide something uncanny under a mundane appearance. This uncanny character, the ambiguity of the settings and the author’s voice give Baboon its originality.