Finnish autofiction and an Austrian maze: recent translated fiction finds fresh ways to bend reality

Two very different kinds of invention

Recent translated fiction is showing how elastic the novel can be. In a Guardian Books roundup, Pirkko Saisio’s The Red Book of Farewells and Wolf Haas’s Short Circuit emerge as striking examples of books that use formal play to deepen their emotional and intellectual impact rather than merely decorate it.

Saisio’s The Red Book of Farewells, translated by Mia Spangenberg and published by Penguin International Writers, completes the Finnish author’s autofictional trilogy after Lowest Common Denominator and Backlight. Set during her young adulthood in the 1970s, it follows her coming out as lesbian and falling in love, while also tracing the political and theatrical worlds that shaped her. The book moves with a clear style and a deliberately shifting perspective, alternating between first and third person as Saisio revisits her memories and then pauses to examine them.

What gives the novel its distinctive charge is the way it keeps both seriousness and absurdity in view at once. Among the scenes highlighted in the roundup is the story of Havva, one of Saisio’s lovers, a communist engaged to a man who depends on his wealthy parents for money and later responds with a small act of defiance by urinating in their private pool. Saisio’s own political life is equally vivid: she is elected vice-president of a political drama company because, the novel suggests, she possesses the skills to make revolution happen through theatre, even when the results look dubious, as in a “napalm opera” called Vietnam-a-Go-Go. The reviewer’s verdict is clear: the trilogy deserves to become a modern classic.

If Saisio’s book uses autofiction to braid together memory, politics and desire, Haas’s Short Circuit takes a more overtly playful route through narrative uncertainty. Translated by Jamie Bulloch and published by HarperVia, the novel begins with Franz Escher, a jigsaw enthusiast and “merciless hair-splitter,” who calls in an electrician to fix his power and accidentally kills him. While waiting for the ambulance, he reads a novel about Elio, a witness-protected man who once helped put his own mafia family behind bars and now passes the time by reading a novel about Franz Escher. The structure is as recursive as it sounds, with each story turning toward the other until the two are forced into contact.

That looping design is central to the book’s appeal. The roundup describes a narrative that treats time less as a straight line than as a circle, and that keeps multiplying identities and situations as it goes: there are courtships conducted through car alarms, competing funeral orators and characters who may not be who they seem. The question of whether the electrician Franz kills might also be Elio adds another layer to the puzzle, making the novel a game of causes, effects and possible doubles.

Haas’s novel also sits in a recognisable literary tradition. The Guardian piece places it near the slipstream fiction of Christopher Priest and the lighter experimental work of David Mitchell, suggesting that Short Circuit combines conceptual trickery with readability. In other words, it is not simply a novel to decode, but one that uses its elaborate design to keep the reader entertained as well as disoriented.

Taken together, the two books point to one of the pleasures of translated fiction: the chance to encounter narrative forms that feel both new and culturally specific. Saisio’s novel brings Finnish political and sexual history into a lucid, self-questioning frame, while Haas’s book turns crime, coincidence and literary nesting into a comic hall of mirrors. The roundup also notes other recent translations, including Lucia Odoom’s Cosmos and Alejandra Kamiya’s The Fallen Trees Are Also the Forest, underscoring the range currently arriving in English. For readers, the message is simple: translation is not just carrying stories across languages, but opening up different ways of telling them.