Natalie Fast

Emma Donoghue’s excellent novel Room was rightly shortlisted for the Man Booker prize and the first four (three really) inept words that came to mind after reading it were: ‘really good, really creepy’. It makes me cringe now to think that I didn’t have anything more intelligent to say; but I was emotionally exhausted and, really, no words can quite describe the world Donoghue has created in an eleven square foot shed. Room is 5-year-old Jack’s world, solely inhabited by him, Ma, Plant and the nightly visits from Old Nick. He hasn’t been lied to about his surroundings, just not told the whole truth. It is from this state of awareness, but not of information, that the unnerving story is told.

“Thought provoking, well designed, short.” ‘Well, that last one is a good thing,’ says a friend who takes about five years to finish one novel. And on this occasion I agree. Peirene Press seek out acclaimed European short literature (never more than 200 pages) and revel in translating it. Peirene’s canon is also short, only three novellas, but already it is diverse. I have picked their first release, Véronique Olmi’s Beside the Sea and their newest, Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman by Friedrich Christian Delius (published in September), and have set aside a day in which to hunker down and read them both.