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Best of 2024: Fiction
I have a peculiar relationship with literary fiction. If I don’t read enough of it, I feel weird and start craving something worthy and serious. However, if I read too much of it, I get fed up and start finding everything too pretentions or boring or both. So while I generally feel that I should read a bit more in this genre (which some people don’t consider a genre, as it’s ‘real’ literature, but I’m sure you can guess my views), a balance has to be found that keeps me enthusiastic about reading overall.
2024 was in the end a decent fiction year for me, especially considering that some of my favourites in other genres also had a literary bent (Parable of the Sower, I Who Have Never Known Men, Station Eleven, etc). Due to my US trip, I read more American fiction than usual, both new releases and backlist fiction. That said, there were a couple of really big releases I didn’t get to, James by Percival Everett and All Fours by Miranda July in particular. I am planning to get to both of these early in 2025, as well as Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! that I suspect is really good. But even without these three, I have plenty to recommend (in addition to the books already covered on my overall favourites list*):
The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff. I started the year strong with this cold and tough book by Groff. I did not expect to like this as much as I did, but was mesmerised by the language and gripped by the story. Which is especially surprising, considering that there isn’t much of a plot. The book follows a young woman escaping the starving Jamestown settlement in what is not yet the United States in the early 1600s, facing the dangers and the bitter cold of the forest. Groff was excellent at describing the winter in her previous book, Matrix, and she is even better here. Both books also have a religious theme, which this atheist found fascinating. But when Matrix is a relatively conventional historical novel, The Vaster Wilds is basically 300 pages of internal monologue. It’s difficult to recommend, as I don’t know if it will feel as cathartic to others as it did to me, and there is no denying that the story is rather bleak and bare. But if your tastes align with mine and you are drawn to a historical survival story interspersed with philosophical and religious musings, give it a try.
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. I ended the year strongly as well, with the most anticipated novel of the year. I have so many thoughts on Sally Rooney as a literary phenomenon, but I will try to focus on the book itself. The bottom line is that I liked Intermezzo. Is it the best book ever? Of course not. Is it well written, interesting, nuanced and gripping? Yes. It is also gently experimental (we are not talking George Saunders levels here), which works very well in places and less well in others. You surely know by now that the book focuses on two brothers, who have just lost their father, and their complex relationships with each other and the women in their lives. In the end, if you strip off the pretentiousness and intellectual name-dropping and the politics, Rooney’s books are pretty conventional stories about people and their feelings. If you are OK with that, you are in for a treat with Intermezzo.
The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden. This is a very strong debut novel that I read at the wrong time. It’s best suited, I think, for summer – this is when the most sexually charged parts take place and reading them in a heatwave would surely make everything even more intense. It is another family and relationship story, this time focusing on a woman who takes a strong dislike to her brother’s love interest, a dislike that becomes irrational and obsessive and then something else entirely. The book takes place in 1965 in the Netherlands and has another historical dimension that adds depth and intrigue. It is a very assuredly written and almost universally liked. I enjoyed some elements more than others, but if you like exploring familial and sexual tension, the impact of secrets and repression of desires and memories, this could be a very good option.
Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner. This book, on the other hand, is not universally liked, but I loved reading it. I am a sucker for emotionally aloof, highly competent female characters and here we have Sadie Smith (not her real name, of course), an American spy infiltrating an earnest community of environmental activists in France. As if this wasn’t enough, we get the philosophical musings of the environmentalists’ guru, who lives as a hermit and has many far-fetched but strangely compelling theories about Neanderthals and humans and what has gone wrong for our civilisation. This could have been a horrible mess, but Kushner knows what she is doing. If her chosen tropes and style work for you, it’s a great ride. Much like the protagonist, the book keeps you at an arm’s length, so it is not a particularly difficult read emotionally, which is perhaps another reason why I found it so enjoyable. But please be aware that it’s not as thriller-y as the blurb suggests. While it is technically a spy novel, James Bond it ain’t.
Frankenstein by Sveta Grigorjeva. As we are on the topic of badass women, Grigorjeva is certainly the badass of Estonian poetry. I admit that I tend to be (overly) critical of Estonian authors who seem to be entirely isolated from the rest of the world. At the same time, I do understand that to be too influenced by it can be a trap. Grigorjeva strikes the right balance for me, aware as she is of the global problems and preoccupations, while deeply rooted in the specific realities of Estonia. She is a political, feminist, provocative writer, but she’s a provocateur with a cause. I deeply enjoyed her latest poetry collection** and I am so glad that a creator like her exists in my little country in the periphery of everything.
Pisiasjad/Details by Ia Grenberg. And here we go with relationships again. Details does this topic in a subdued, thoughtful, slightly melancholy way, often focusing – yes, you guessed it – on small details. It is a lovely, well-observed read. I often like things that are written in retrospect, looking back at something one has done in the past, with the benefit of hindsight, but also with certain detachment. This is the literary device used here and I think it works very well. It will not shake you to your core, but one cannot be shaken to the core with every single book. I read it in Estonian, but it’s also available in English and of course in the original Swedish.
Train Dreams by Denis Johnson and Indelicacy by Amina Cain. I have included these two short American novels jointly for reasons that may not be obvious to anyone but me. Apart from the length (or the lack of it), they are in many ways each other’s opposite. One masculine, rooted in specific time and space, describing and deconstructing quintessentially American places and experiences. The other feminine and feminist, suspended in time and vague about its location, dealing with the personal, turning inward and indoors. Yet they share a certain strangeness, neither is fully realistic nor easy to summarise. They are both also beautifully and sparsely written. And to me, they are about solitude, about the fundamental struggle of being in the world, even if that struggle manifests in different ways.
Värviline Mägi by Joonas Sildre. You may remember (it’s very unlikely, but not entirely impossible) me raving about Sildre’s Kahe heli vahel a few years ago. It’s a graphic novel about Arvo Pärt, a contemporary Estonian composer – very well known in circles where people are aware of contemporary composers. I am bringing up the earlier book at length here because it’s now available in English and if you are into this sort of thing, I highly recommend it. Meanwhile, Mr Sildre has given the same graphic novel treatment to Konrad Mägi, an early modernist Estonian painter – the archetype of a ‘real artist’, always struggling for money, always travelling to Paris or leaving Paris, always suffering from bad health. Bul also, always creating. I have a slight preference for the Pärt book over this one, but I suspect it’s mostly because I read the Pärt book first and was just so blown away by the concept. I recommend both of these if you are Estonian and/or interested in Estonian culture.
You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue. I picked this up thanks to an early review in The Financial Times (I really do rate their book section, although I was slightly disappointed in their ‘best of’ selection this time around) and what do you know, the book ended up among the 5 top fiction releases of 2024 as chosen by the New York Times. And as a reader of the NYT, I am not surprised, this is exactly the type of book they would pick – a translated, anti-colonialist work where you are most of the time unsure what’s going on. It is also, however, very good. It is dreamy, short, layered, powerful and cathartic. We follow the fateful encounter between the Aztec empire and the party of Cortes, but while you may know the story, the point of the book is that no, you don’t. I highly recommend having at least a rudimentary understanding of the relevant historic moment, it will help you to follow along and also make the story much richer.
Just for context and in case you are curious, let me mention that from the more talked-about releases of 2024, I also read Orbital by Samantha Harvey, Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad and Parade by Rachel Cusk. I am happy to have read all of those, but not happy enough to include them on the list.
As always, I’d love to know what you enjoyed reading in 2024.
*Why I have included in this picture two of the books on my overall favourites list, but not the other fiction and poetry books on that list remains a mystery.
**I know, in theory, poetry should be under non-fiction, but I just refuse to acknowledge this. In my nomenclature, it will always be together with fiction.
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