BOOKS THAT WILL KNOCK YOUR SOCKS OFF (1 OF 2) BOOKS OF THE YEAR

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Dec 3, 2006

Todd McEwan, author JAVIER Marias's Your Face Tomorrow 2: Dance And Dream (Chatto & Windus, GBP17.99) will have you shouting from your roof.

How rare to be so gently reminded of our responsibilities to the past, with humour and a universal humanity almost non-existent in British fiction.

Equally enthralling was Suite Francaise (Chatto & Windus, GBP16.99), by Irne Nemirovsky, murdered in Auschwitz in 1942. Her voice and sensibility stand vibrant and complete, even in an incomplete work. That this surfaced after so long is a testament to its value and to those who cherished it. Robin Robertson's third volume of poetry, Swithering (Picador, GBP8.99), proves an honest, nerve-rackingly lucid vision of the world he is building: "Dragged through other people's lives, pursued through my own", as he writes of Strindberg, one of his compelling anti-heroes. Not to be missed. But the novels that appeared this year from Chris Bachelder ( U.S.

, Bloomsbury, GBP7.99) and Thomas Bernhard ( Frost , Knopf, GBP12.26) were also heartening events in a very cold literary climate.

Robyn Marsack, head of the Scottish Poetry Library I LUGGED home the catalogue of the V&A summer exhibition, Modernism: Designing A New World (V&A Publications, GBP24.99) and haven't regretted the effort. Dynamic Czech graphics, elegant Finnish glass, brilliant Bauhaus photography all the confident innovations of the interwar years, are still exciting. Tomas Transtrmer is Sweden's greatest living poet, fortunate in his poettranslators Robert Bly, Robin Fulton and now Robin Robertson, whose versions in The Deleted World (Enitharmon, GBP8.95) are tender, melancholy, piercing. I've just caught up with Vesna Goldsworthy's Chernobyl Strawberries (Atlantic, GBP7.99) in the new paperback edition, a marvellously poised account of her Yugoslavian childhood and English married life. She's candid without trespassing on others' privacy, witty, and very touching.