Maya Slater's 3 favorite reads in 2024

• 2023
• 2024

This book is 666 pages long, a number which I believe traditionally means something diabolical. The book’s last words are: ‘Last night, a new star appeared in the sky […] I know what it means. It means that it has begun:’ as we end our reading, Knausgaard sends us back to the beginning.
The action lasts two days. The star’s arrival is experienced by some 18 or so main first-person protagonists, plus hundreds of other characters, mostly ordinary Norwegians, who live through disturbing and often anguished hours. They suffer distressing, surreal adventures – one man, in his car, crushes battalions of crabs crawling across the road, another views flayed corpses discovered in the woods, a woman meets a man in a lift who is simultaneously dead in his coffin, another corpse wakes and screams as surgeons attempt a post-mortem organ removal for transplant. Knausgaard thinks himself into the minds of a huge range of characters and brings them vividly to life, from a dropout girl with a deadening lack of self-esteem, to an intensely religious female minister falling out of love with her husband, or a professor who, unable to bear his wife’s manic illness, abandons his children for a drinking spree…. The deeply disturbed protagonists feel their problems painfully. Their inglorious behaviour is frequently interrupted by strange sinister portents, usually involving death, which grow more intense till the last chapter. Here, one of these characters, a quiet, understanding companion, sees modern Norwegians as having inherited a vast culture of death, and accepts visible manifestations of the recently dead as possible.
The whole is fascinating, unputdownable. How many unsettling events occur? Knowing Knausgaard, there may even be 666… On finishing the book, to make sense of the emerging patterns I could glimpse, I realised that I must immediately read it again.

A big, brave book written in Stalinist Russia, promptly banned, and published only 29 years after his death. The subject is the transformation of Russia into a Communist state. It reads almost like a fairytale, with witty, surreal touches, and Platonov never seems to take anything seriously, but the facts that he tells in this almost dreamlike way are horrific - random murders, forests destroyed, rootless people wandering the country. The translation is beautifully simple.

This is Paris as you have never seen it (I hope!). A poor English boy finds himself penniless in Paris, and manages to get a job as a waiter in a seemingly smart restaurant. There follows a horrific and hilarious account of the dark underbelly of Paris - filthy kitchens, bullying bosses, sleazy lodgings, scrabbling for tips... I shall never again feel comfortable in a Paris restaurant - but it was a lively and funny read.