droll

Andrey Kurkov’s latest novel to be translated into English, The Silver Bone, has begins in dramatic fashion. Its hero, Samson Kolechko, is walking in the streets of revolutionary Kyiv. It is the spring of 1919. Suddenly, two Russian Cossacks appear. They chop off his ear with a sabre before riding off. “Hot blood poured down his cheek and seeped under his collar,” Kurkov writes. Samson’s unfortunate father is cut down and killed.The severed right ear – recovered and placed in a tin – plays a central role in Kurkov’s…

The horizons of Iceland’s isolated Westfjords, shot in airy widescreen and crisp black and white, seem boundless. Not that you would know it from the life of Jón (Þröstur Leó Gunnarsson). Dour and middle-aged, he lives with his elderly, hectoring mother (Kristbjörg Kjeld) and a dog called Bresnef, days away from the nearest neighbours. But when his mother dies, Jón must fulfil her last wish and drive her corpse across the country. Away from the prison of his home, he starts to question his life. And Mama has plenty to say…

The films of the Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki (Le Havre, The Man Without a Past) rank alongside abandoned teddy bears strapped to the bumpers of bin lorries and really ugly dogs in rehoming centres as the most melancholy things in the world. And his latest, Fallen Leaves, is no exception. Themes in this tragicomic romance include chronic alcoholism, job loss, isolation and despair. The soundtrack features ballads about inclement weather, disappointment and cemeteries (with special emphasis on disappointing, rain-lashed…

I discovered that Dubravka Ugrešić had died last month, aged 73, in that strange, uniquely modern way one does: by noticing a sudden proliferation of quotes from her works on Twitter. For a moment I could suspend the sadness and scroll through her sharp-witted wisdom. But there was a darker irony to the scene – one that Ugrešić, a writer all too attuned to the impoverishment of literature in the name of consumption, would have found quite amusing. Visit her website and the text that greets you reads: “Who knows, maybe one…