Boyd Tonkin

Foreign fields: Boyd Tonkin chooses his favourite shorter classics in translation

A wide range of authors includes Colette, Italo Calvino, Clarice Lispector, Natalia Ginzburg and Tove Jansson

Colette, author of Chéri , aged 20. Getty Images

If I had a rouble or a euro for every reader who fulfilled their lockdown promise to devour Dostoevsky, Tolstoy or Proust my bank account would hardly grow by a single penny. Duty, guilt and pride never made the pages turn more swiftly, whatever a book’s length. Almost all vows to catch up on doorstopper classics from the global canon will have failed to outlast the fallen blossoms.

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