Due to ravages of Fake Time, feel unable to do proper justice to 39 Thunderclap - Laura Cumming so will just heartily echo @Terpsichore 's previous praises. It's the only WPNF book I've finished so far, so obviously my pick 😀 But aside from that, it's likely to be my non-fic book of the year - genuinely revelatory, enabling me to see paintings in a completely different way (several, actually).
Glad you found things to appreciate in 8 Lives @cassandre ! To be fair, I’m of Korean heritage so already familiar with the background, and had just finished two Korean books, with non-fiction about WWII to boot, namely:
40 Greek Lessons - Han Kang (tr. Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won)
A Korean writer and lecturer suddenly becomes mute, a condition she'd once experienced in adolescence. Attempting to regain a connection to language, she begins to attend evening classes in Classical Greek, taught by a man who's hiding the fact that his progressive loss of sight is now nearly complete. The woman's third-person narrative alternates with the man's first-person one (mostly addressed to various people he's lost); neither protagonist is named, b/c Literary Fiction.
The Lit game was strong in this, with lovely passages on language, from the shapes of Korean diphthongs to the Greek middle voice, to the fundamental embodied processes of shaping and receiving sounds, seeing and making and feeling marks, all exquisitely translated. However, I found the Fic bits much weaker - arguably unnecessary (though admittedly linguistics essay collections tend not to sell as well as elegant novellas). Certain characters and plot points in the male teacher's story in particular were so mawkish and melodramatic they became unintentionally funny - not in the gleefully batshit way of The Vegetarian, to make a point, but seemingly just due to genre conventions of psychologically nonsensical but 'symbolic' behaviour.
41 Miss Kim Knows and other stories - Cho Nam-Joo (tr. Jamie Chang)
Eight short stories, mercifully unlinked, but sharing a contemporary South Korean setting and interest in women's lives. Precise, unfussy prose with a particularly good ear for dialogue (Chang did an excellent job rendering various levels of Korean formality and slanginess in Br. Eng). The most 'on brand' entries for readers of Miss Kim Ji-Young, Born 1982 are probably the Dear John letter to a controlling fiancé, the slyly funny mundane-weird office slice-of-life, and and the very meta one in which the writer of a hit feminist novel is accused of appropriating another woman’s lived experience. The other stories cover a surprising range, and even the slightest (puppy love derailed by Covid and running out of free texts) was enjoyable. I continue to be baffled and dispirited that so moderate and centrist a writer as Cho has become a lightning rod for the toxic anti-feminist movement in SK.
42 Coffee with Hitler - Charles Spicer
Previously reviewed by Terpsichore. Narrative history of the English amateurs associated with the Anglo-German Fellowship (1935-39) who sought to ‘civilise’ rather than 'appease' the Nazi regime, and through this, re-examining some more famous figures associated with Appeasement. Seeks to reclaim the nuance and contingency of Anglo-German relations and complicate popular narratives of stupid/weak/evil ‘guilty men’ and pure 'war heroes' and very much succeeds. However, as with any revisionist history (and books that used to be PhD theses) the piling up of Evidence in exhaustive detail did make my eyes glaze over at times and lose sight of the bigger picture/argument. Still full of fascinating facts and insights, sensibly organised and well written - accessible but still scholarly.
Currently appreciating the elegance of Enter Ghost and glad to have the other top tier WP novels yet to come.