The sinistra zone

A collection of aerial photographs of 36 world cities, taken over a period of 10 years, raises questions about 21st-century urban space. Barbieri employs color and registration, and deletes details, in order to distort reality for dramatic effect. Above, "Venezia 09." THROUGH THE NIGHT By Stig Saeterbakken Translated by Sean Kinsella Dalkey Archive , paper , $15. There's a house in Slovakia within whose walls lurk your greatest fears, whatever those may be. Of the people who've been inside, Boris tells his friend Karl, some emerged relieved and joyful, while others never recovered: one turned gray and died, another threw himself under a train. This isn't the kind of story Boris should really be telling Karl, a middle-aged Norwegian dentist who is living through his own greatest fear: the suicide of his teenage son. "A thousand times a day I forgot that Ole-Jakob was dead," Karl explains in the book's opening paragraph. "A thousand times a day I remembered it again. Both were unbearable." The author took his own life in 2012, not long after this book was first published in his native Norway, leading the reader to wonder how much of the pain in these pages is Karl's and how much Saeterbakken's. In Karl's case, it's not always easy to sympathize. Before Ole-Jakob's death, Karl runs offwith a younger woman, only to decide she isn't what he wants after all. He slinks home to a "haughty" wife and a son who barely speaks to him : "The only thing he could use me for now was to ensure he didn't end up like me himself." In the wake of the suicide, Karl leaves again, this time making his way to that house in Slovakia, where the last part of the book is set. These chapters are both nightmarish and dreamlike, a solipsistic despair mixed with sunny visions of "everything the way it could have been. Us, together, for all eternity." Saeterbakken entices the reader along some dark paths from which, in the end, there is no easy escape. THE MATCHMAKER, THE APPRENTICE AND THE FOOTBALL FAN More Stories of China By Zhu Wen Translated by Julia Lovell Columbia University , $26.95. For most of the characters who inhabit the eight stories in this collection, life is a trial: jobs are assigned by the state, living conditions are grim, love's hard to find and bureaucracy is a constant nag. In the face of all this, these men - for all Zhu's protagonists are men - tend toward a kind of self-deprecating resignation to get by. "I have an unusually low opinion of myself," one explains. "It didn't bother me until it was too late, until I became a conscious adult and realized that everyone else shared my view." Among Zhu's Everymen, though, there are also a few shady outliers, like the narrator in "The Football Fan." Over the course of 13 pages, he repeats the same biography six times: "My name is Chen Zhiqiang. I'm 25 years old. I used to work at the Xinhua Printing Factory. My father worked at the same factory all his life. He never smoked a cigarette in his life and then died of lung cancer before he was 50. No one could understand it." The recitations are reminiscent of a P.O.W. giving his name, rank and serial number, and for good reason. Chen, it turns out, is under interrogation for the murder of a neighbor. Even in this grim tale, Zhu manages to inject some of the sly humor that suffuses these stories, which, unlike some of the lives he describes, are never dreary. The miserable Chen describes an outdoor sit-in over factory layoffs where it was so cold that "anyone whose trousers were too thin had to sit in standing up. . . . And so the demonstration petered out, without our gaining a single thing from it." ELÉCTRICO W By Hervé Le Tellier Translated by Adriana Hunter Other Press, paper, $14.95. Two men, four women, nine days. The two men are Vincent and Antonio, a writer and a photographer thrown together to cover the trial of a suspected serial killer in Lisbon in the mid-1980s. And though the story is ostensibly theirs - with Vincent doing the telling - it revolves as much around the women. The first of them is Duck, Antonio's childhood sweetheart, who's also the reason he hasn't been back to Lisbon in a decade. They met when he was 11 and she 7 , and were separated eight years later when a pregnant Duck was banished by her angry father, "sent far away, hidden with an elderly cousin in Braga." Vincent, meanwhile, is mourning Irene, whom he leftbehind in Paris after she wouldn't reciprocate his love. He comforts himself by translating the extremely short stories of the Portuguese writer Jaime Montestrela. (Here's one of the shortest: "On the island of Tahiroha, on Good Friday, cannibals who have converted to Christianity eat only sailors." ) Early on, Vincent discovers his Irene is actually in love with the rather ambivalent Antonio and, in a kind of revenge fantasy, decides to track down Antonio's forgotten love. "I would find a way of rebuilding their lost happiness, I would rewrite fate, I would be their fate." Le Tellier likes wrapping stories inside stories, with yet more of them spilling out in unexpected places. There's Duck, her father, Montestrela, as well as two other women who stumble into the central love triangle - or maybe it's a quadrangle. As Vincent says at the outset, "there was actually nothing extraordinary, fascinating or, in a nutshell, bookworthy about Antonio," but he provides a good enough pretext for what is an engaging snapshot of these briefly intersecting lives. THE SINISTRA ZONE By Adam Bodor Translated by Paul Olchvary New Directions, paper, $15.95. Like everything else in this cryptic novel, its main character is a bit of a mystery. He's about 50 and has come to the Sinistra Zone - a militarized, mountainous area somewhere along the border between Ukraine and Romania - to find his adopted son, Bela, who he fears has "gotten mixed up in something or other." Even his name, Andrei Bodor, is an alias, given to him by a local colonel, who dies of the mysterious Tungusic Flu, which regularly sweeps across the region. During his time in the zone, Bodor (the character) has various jobs, from overseeing the wild fruit harvest (the fruit is for bears that are kept "locked up in the ruins of a chapel and caged in abandoned, caved-in mines" ), to working in a mortuary ("It is the duty of a coroner's assistant to sit in a room with the deceased and keep watch, making sure that the subject does not stir during his shift" ). Adding to its perplexity is the book's structure: 15 overlapping chapters that could double as independent short stories. Treating them as such may be the best way to read Bodor, who doesn't so much advance a plot or a narrative line as paint a picture of an Eastern Europe under Communist rule, where harsh living is controlled by absurd rules, even when you're dead. That same colonel, who succumbed to the mysterious disease on a mountaintop where a bird built its nest in his mouth, is later "sentenced posthumously to death" for smuggling messages and money inside the bellies of fish. If there's a magic realism Easternbloc style, "The Sinistra Zone" is surely its paradigm. Alison McCulloch, a former editor at the Book Review, is an author and journalist living in New Zealand.

When Andrei, a wayfarer and "simple harvester of fruit," arrives in the Ukrainian border town of Dobrin in search of his runaway adopted son he becomes entangled in the bizarre social and political world of the isolated village. Dobrin borders the Sinistra military zone (a pun on "sinister" and the real breakaway territory of Transnistria) where Andrei's son supposedly lives, and Bodor captures the cold realities of this totalitarian state in which each resident fulfills an assigned duty and is subject to the zone commander's whims. The security of Andrei's tenure in the village is threatened when his benefactor, the kind Colonel Borcan, who allowed Andrei to stay without identity papers, dies and is replaced by the ruthless Izolda Mavrodin. She quickly forms a citizen police, "the grey ganders", to monitor locals' behavior and threatens to banish Andrei for whom she sees no purpose in the zone. While Bodor's writing is rich with descriptions of unique characters-from a pair of albino twins to a jovial Turkish trucker unafraid of Mavrodin's threats-the narrative lacks urgency and the myriad peculiar characters distract from Andrei's mission to find his son. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.