Barbi Marković's Minihorror is the collection most likely to make you stop and read a sentence aloud to whoever's in the room. Mini and Miki — their names lifted from Disney's Serbian mouse vernacular — live in a domestic surrealism where the grotesque isn't symbolic, it's just what happens: Mini's family gathers around a pit and makes her climb into it; a dog she draws on a greeting card comes alive and attacks her. Jen Calleja's translation keeps the timing exact, which matters enormously here, because Marković's comedy depends on the gap between deadpan narration and escalating absurdity. The Bernhard debt is real — that compressed, cycling gloom — but the antic energy is entirely her own. Pol Guasch's Paradise Burns arrives from Catalan with a structural argument built into its form: the novel refuses chronology because, as it announces early, ordered stories are lies. What this produces is something closer to grief's actual texture — you get Rita's childhood diary, three sharp-tongued neighbourhood women, and Líton's relationship with René, all circling the fact that Líton is already dead when the book opens. Climate change sits in the background not as theme but as weather: winter now announces itself only through shrinking daylight, and the young men train for wildfires that cannot be extinguished. Mara Faye Lethem's translation handles the shifts in register cleanly. Helle Helle's Hafni Says is the quietest of the four and, on balance, the most precisely made. Hafni, 48, leaves her husband and drives through Denmark. That's it — that's the book. What accumulates is a portrait of how much psychic weight a person carries in ordinary social obligation, and how strange it is to put it down. The details Helle chooses are perfect: washing pants in a sink, opening beer with a metal comb, meeting a dying woman who has decided her job is to keep everyone else cheerful. The novel's achievement is making domestic disenchantment feel like genuine liberation without sentimentalising either. Hamid Ismailov's Googling for Soul is the most formally unruly of the four — stories about Uzbek exiles in Russia, translated by four different people, ranging from blunt comedy to real horror within the same paragraph. The title story is the showpiece: a man believes his life is echoing Andrey Platonov's novella Soul, and also believes that Ismailov himself (the author, present in the text) has been arrested on terrorism charges. The biographical fact — Ismailov was forced to flee Uzbekistan in 1992 — gives the metafictional game genuine weight. The insult delivered by a father to his son ('You have the complexion of a fart') is a useful index of the register. Across the four, what's striking is how little they resemble each other except in their shared refusal of emotional legibility. None of these books tells you how to feel about what you're reading. Marković uses surrealism as deadpan comedy; Guasch uses fragmentation as elegy; Helle uses restraint as precision; Ismailov uses chaos as political statement. The translation work is uniformly strong — Calleja, Lethem, Aitken, and the four-person team on Ismailov all make choices that suggest they understood the register, not just the words. If you're choosing one: Minihorror for maximum strangeness-per-page; Hafni Says for the most finished and affecting single reading experience; Paradise Burns for structural ambition; Googling for Soul for range. None of them are difficult in the sense of requiring specialist knowledge. They're difficult in the sense that they don't do the emotional work for you, which is a different thing entirely.
