The  New York Times recently published a feature on its ‘Ten Best Books’ for each year since 2000. Only a few were British (e.g., Ali Smith’s Autumn in 2017) and those were practically the only ones I had read. But despite the tempting titles I noted from the NYT list, my attention had turned East to works from Europe.   

Sometimes the encounter was accidental. I fished Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book (Sommarboken, 1972) out of a ‘Little Free Library’ while walking to the post office. It was, in the words in the flap, ‘profoundly life-affirming’. Even that didn’t scare me off—as it might have in an American writer. Its setting and themes—childhood imagination, nature on an island in the Gulf of Finland, generational bonds—were as advertised. The careful prose and lack of a predictable narrative arc also appealed to me. Jansson offered sweetly constructed vignettes of lives separate from mine, in a place I didn’t know existed.

A more deliberate choice was to look into the works of French Nobel Laureate Annie Ernaux. The Years (2008), as we say in America, knocked my socks off. I have made my way through the lesser works in her oeuvre as her fame prompted translation, and recently came across the first Englishing of Regarde les lumières mon amour (2014; Look at the Lights My Love, Yale UP, 2023). Her choice of subject is akin to William Cowper’s ‘I sing the sofa...’ which opens The Task (1785)—it is evidence one may write about anything. Ernaux explains:  ‘Therefore, in order to “relate life,” ours today, ...