The best recent translated fiction – review roundup

The Red Book of Farewells by Pirkko Saisio; Short Circuit by Wolf Haas; Cosmos by Lucia Odoom; The Fallen Trees Are Also the Forest by Alejandra KamiyaThe Red Book of Farewells by Pirkko Saisio, translated by Mia Spangenberg, Penguin Classics (£14.99)Following Lowest Common Denominator and Backlight, this book completes Finnish author Saisio’s autofictional trilogy. It covers her young adulthood in the 1970s, where she comes out as lesbian (“The electricity doesn’t go out. The Richter scale remains still”) and falls in love. One of her lovers, Havva, is a communist who’s engaged to a man; she relies on his rich parents for funding, but pees in their private pool as a protest. Later, Saisio is voted vice-president of a political drama company, as “she has the skills to bring about the revolution, specifically via theatre” – despite half-baked productions such as the “napalm opera” Vietnam-a-Go-Go. As that suggests, this is a story with a sense of both the ridiculous and the serious. Told in clear prose, it playfully shifts between third and first person as Saisio recounts her memories then analyses them. This enchanting series deserves to become a modern classic.Short Circuit by Wo…