Fiction by Hye-Young Pyun, Lena Andersson, and Tove Jansson

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Danger warnings are more common than actual danger.  And yet when danger finally does strike, it does so without warning.  That was why the man thought nothing of the quarantine notices and infectious disease prevention regulations posted all around the airport.  He knew that the more caution signs there were, the less danger he was in.  As if overhearing the man's thoughts, a health inspector in a hazmat suit who was scanning the temperatures of disembarking passengers looked hard at the thermometer and gave him a warning frown.  Was it the man's slight fever?  The stink of alcohol wafting off of him?  He clamped his mouth shut and slipped a hand up to his forehead.  It felt like the lid of a rice cooker set to warm.
--From City of Ash and Red, a novel by Hye-Young Pyun, translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell (Arcade Publishing, 2018). Originally published in Korean as Jaewa Ppalgang (Changbi Publishers: South Korea, 2010).  Please note: this book contains some specific violence that may not be for everyone. 

Traffic was at a standstill, the cars blocked by a crowd of pedestrians in the middle of the street.  Their voices were nearly loud enough to drown out the blaring of horns.  What had happened?  She could feel everyone's eyes on her.  Could sense them stopping mid-sentence to stare at her.  Stepping back to open a path before she could get too close.  Turning their heads when her eyes met theirs.  Whispering to the people next to them.

        Of course, if she'd actually found the courage to lift her head and look, she would have seen that the others barely registered her presence, but she couldn't manage it.  Se-oh let her head drop further and further.  Any moment now someone was going to recognize her and grab her by the throat or curse at her and demand to know where she'd been hiding.  She hurried away from them.  

--From The Law of Lines, a novel by Hye-Young Pyun, translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell (Arcade Publishing, 2020).  Originally published in Korean as Seonui beopchik (Muhakdongne Publishing Group: South Korea).

Every other weekend, Hugo went away.  He said he was going to Borås, where his frail mother lived, but there was something about these trips to Borås that did not quite add up.  There was an unusual vacuum around them, the way unusual vacuums usually surround lies.  The baffling thing was that there was no reason to doubt that the trips were genuine, in the same way that there was no reason he should name a place where he was not going.  But there was still something not quite right.  

        On one of the evenings when they met over food and wine and then went back to his studio, [Ester] saw a train ticket sticking out of the inside pocket of his jacket, which was hanging on the back of a chair.  When he went to the toilet she got up and walked round the room, looked at the art works on the walls and gave the ticket a slight tweak, so light that it hardly counted as an act.

        The ticket was from the previous weekend.  Stockholm-Malmö return, it said.  Not a hint of Borås.

--From Willful Disregard, a novel by Lena Andersson, translated from the Swedish by Sarah Death (Other Press, 2016).  First published in the United Kingdom by Picador (2015).  Originally published in Swedish as Egenmäktigt förfarande – en roman om kärlek (Natur & Kultur: Stockholm, Sweden, 2013).  This segment is from page 38 in the paperback. 

In the past few months at home in Stockholm, she'd written her first play, which was to be performed the coming autumn at a country theater in Västerås.  The play would send her life in a new direction, but of this she knew nothing yet.  The production was called Threesome and was a melancholy reflection on the agonies of love.  Ester Nilsson had striven for psychological realism, and that's exactly what she thought she'd achieved, but the critics would call it absurdist.

        ...

        Threesome was about a man trapped in an unhappy marriage who meets another woman but can't bring himself to leave his wife.  The play was not prophetic.  Nothing is prophetic.  What may look like a prediction is really just a heightened awareness of what has previously come to pass.  What has happened will happen again sooner or later, somewhere, sometime.  And it's likely that it will happen again to the same person because people have their patterns.  

--From Acts of Infidelity, a novel by Lena Andersson, translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel (Other Press, 2018).  First published in English in the United Kingdom by Macmillan Publishers International Limited (2018).  Originally published in Swedish as Utan personligt ansvar (Natur & Kultur: Stockholm, Sweden, 2014).  These segments are from pages 3-5 in the paperback.  

On a windless day in November, shortly after sunrise, she saw a squirrel on the boat beach.  It sat motionless near the water, hardly visible in the half-light, but she knew it was a living squirrel, and she hadn't seen anything alive for a very long time.  The gulls didn't count, they were always flying away.  They were like the wind across the waves and the grass. 

--From "The Squirrel," a short story Tove Jansson.  This story (pp. 38-55) and "The Summer Child" (pp. 150-165) were included in The Woman Who Borrowed Memories: Selected Stories by Tove Jansson, translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal and Silvester Mazzarella (New York Review Books, 2014). The stories were first published in Swedish by Schildts Förlags AB (Finland).  English translations first appeared in several books (Sort of Books: London, 2006-2013).

Books by Tove Jansson, Ernest Hemingway, Ayşegül Savaş, Dai Sijie, and Yiyun Li

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"When are you going to die?" the child asked.
        And Grandmother answered, "Soon.  But that is not the least concern of yours."
        "Why?" her grandchild asked.
        She didn't answer.  She walked out on the rock and on toward the ravine.
        "We're not allowed out there!" Sophia screamed.
        "I know," the old woman answered disdainfully.  "Your father won't let either one of us go out to the ravine, but we're going anyway, because your father is asleep and he won't know."
        They walked across the granite.  The moss was slippery.  The sun had come up a good way now, and everything was steaming.  The whole island was covered with a bright haze.  It was very pretty.
        "Will they dig a hole?" asked the child amiably.
        "Yes," she said.  "A big hole."  And she added, insidiously, "Big enough for all of us."
--From The Summer Book, a novel by Tove Jansson, translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal (New York Review Books, 2008).  First published in Swedish as Sommarboken (Schildts Förlags AB: Finland, 1972).

As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.
        Now that the bad weather had come, we could leave Paris for a while for a place where this rain would be snow coming down through the pines and covering the road and the high hillsides and at an altitude where we would hear it creak as we walked home at night.  Below Les Avants there was a chalet where the pension was wonderful and where we would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright.  That was where we could go.  Traveling third class on the train was not expensive.  The pension cost very little more than we spent in Paris.
--From A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway's memoir of his life as a young writer in Paris between 1921 and 1926.  He finished the book in 1960 in Cuba.  I was reading the Vintage Classics version (Random House: London, 2000).  It was first published posthumously in Great Britain (Jonathan Cape: London, 1964).  As I understand the story, his fourth wife, Mary Hemingway, edited his manuscripts and notes after his death to create that particular version of the book.  There is also a "restored edition," which contains additional stories left out of the original published book (Scribner, 2009).

I met M. some months after I moved to Paris from Istanbul.  I arrived in the city without a job or a place to live.  I was enrolled in a literature program in order to obtain a visa, but I knew even before I came that I would not attend any of the classes.
        I had enrolled in the same program once before, a few years after I graduated from university in England.  I had a different vision of myself then, and I worked steadily to achieve it.  I was living in London with my boyfriend, Luke, and putting together my life piece by piece.  I imagined that Luke and I would move to Paris, become its natives, and lead the kind of creative life attributed to the residents of the city.  We even spoke to each other in French while we cooked dinner, in preparation for our new life.  
--From Walking on the Ceiling, a novel by Ayşegül Savaş (Riverhead Books, 2019). 

In 1971 there was little to distinguish us two--one the son of a pulmonary specialist, the other the son of a notorious class enemy who had enjoyed the privilege of touching Mao's teeth--from the hundred-odd "young intellectuals" who were banished to the mountain known as as the Phoenix of the Sky.  The name was a poetic way of suggesting its terrifying altitude . . .
        The Phoenix of the Sky comprised some twenty villages scattered along the single serpentine footpath or hidden in the depths of gloomy valleys.  Usually each village took in five or six young people from the city.  But our village, perched on the summit and the poorest of them all, could only afford two: Luo and me.
--From Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, a novel by Dai Sijie, translated from the French by Ina Rilke (Anchor Books/Random House, 2001).  Originally published in France as Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise (Gallimard: Paris, 2000).

Love is made not to last, I said.  A contestable statement, though he chose not to argue.  Love was the word we had used at his leave-taking, he knowing it was final, I sensing it was the case.  But between sensing and knowing there were seven hours and four states.  Only today did I register that people often in their condolence letters called the loss unfathomable.  The distance at the moment of loss could be calculated: 189,200 fathoms.  (What does it matter that fathom is no longer used to measure from here to there?  To obsolete is to let age, from which death is exempted.)
        Not clear, though, is how to fathom time: from a moment to . . .  Can forever be the other end point?
        But why does it bother you if you insist time does not apply to us anymore? Nikolai said.
--From Where Reasons End, a novel by Yiyun Li (Random House, 2019).  The book is a series of imagined conversations between a mother and her sixteen-year-old son in a suspended, timeless state following his death by suicide.  Li wrote the book after the death of her own teenage son.  It's an unusual, affecting meditation on life, death, and the limitations of language.