Fiction

2007 The Best Books

By BENJAMIN LYTAL
December 19, 2007

Some books are easy to recommend. Most avid readers had heard of Roberto Bolaño's "The Savage Detectives" (FSG, 592 pages, $27) by this April; the buzz had been building for years. The novellas coming out from New Directions since 2003 always seemed like good recommendations: They were short, politically authentic but very youthful, and could be advertised as a kind of Latin American nextwave, something better than magical realism. Bolaño's "The Savage Detectives," a long novel from a big house, was more coherent than anything previously translated, and in many ways it firmed-up the universe in which his other stories take place. But I would still recommend Bolaño's "By Night in Chile" first. It reads like a single night, intense and complete, while "The Savage Detectives" contains calendars of afternoons.

Per Petterson's "Out Stealing Horses" (Graywolf, 258 pages, $22) was less anticipated, but numerous critics noticed it once it got here. Not as heady as W.G. Sebald, Mr. Petterson seems to have slid into American consciousness in a similar way, from a similar place: Their very reserved way of ranging out across the European terrain, with World War II persisting in the back of their minds, is very strange and impressive to us. One author I know compared it, very favorably, to Marilynne Robinson's "Housekeeping," and that comparison seems right: Ms. Robinson's highly personal views of American history have enabled her to write about its people and their landscape with such rare, poignant authority. "Out Stealing Horses" does the same, convincingly, for a northern Norway landscape we will probably never know. A tale not only of a mind in winter, but of a city man's mind in the country, the story is tough and graceful enough to please almost any reader.

But the book that, this year, I have most wanted to recommend is almost totally unknown. "Missing Soluch" (Melville House, 507 pages, $16.95) is Mahmoud Dowlatabadi's first novel translated into English, and it has hardly been reviewed at all. I've found references to Mr. Dowlatabadi in articles about Iranian censorship, but that's all. "Missing Soluch" is an Iranian book, and I don't know how to place it in that national literature. It has stayed with me because I don't know where to leave it; it remains a question mark.

"Missing Soluch" is not a perfect book, but it makes a deep impression. It reads like an ancient thing. Its characters could not be called mythic or epic, but they inhabit a village in pre-revolutionary Iran that belongs to a genre other than that of the bourgeois novel. To see them come alive in Mr. Dowlatabadi's book is to see how the novel works, and how reliable a medium it can be. His heroine, the stoic Mergan, would never guess that a novel is being written about her.

Other, disparate writers — Jamaica Kincaid, Paul Bowles—have brought us into equally hermetic souls. Mr. Dowlatabadi should perhaps join their ranks, but other readers will have to read him, and confer. "Missing Soluch" was one of the most wholesome, transporting books I read this year. Because of its lack of context, it remains the most intriguing.