Anita Brookner’s books of the year

My reading this year has been retrospective, dominated by Stefan Zweig, the most gentlemanly of writers. Beware of Pity, translated by the estimable Anthea Bell, remains powerfully shocking, yet classically restrained, while The Post Office Girl, in a less memorable translation, is queasily convincing. Both are published by Pushkin Press.

Zweig seems unfazed by the horrors he implies, and indeed his understated worldliness is a corrective to contemporary fashions. I make exception for two of those contemporaries: Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)  and Colin Thubron (A Mountain in Tibet), both of whom do an excellent job of dealing with fears all the more potent for being largely concealed. I was disappointed by Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child, which I found excessively long and on the whole unresolved.

For comfort reading I had recourse to the golden age of French crime novels: not only Simenon but Noelle Loriot and Boileau-Narcejac, two writers with a single voice.