To be honest, I’ve had a lot of trouble putting together this first blog post for the Best Translated Book Award. At this point in the judging process, it feels impossible at best and disingenuous at worst to try and construe some long thought out observation or prediction of what is to come. The judges are still getting to know each other, new books still flood our mailboxes every day, and there is just flat out too much reading left to do over the next several months. In that regard, this is actually quite an exciting time for us judges as well. There are just so many possibilities. No clear favorite has yet emerged. All there is to do is read. So, I’ve decided to simply lay out a few titles and themes that have caught my eye so far. Consider it a glimpse of the vast field still in play before the inevitable culling to come. A time when anything could happen.

The Elephant(s) in the Room: This could very well be the year of the big book for the BTBA. Several massive and dense literary tomes—the kind that make book geeks in general and translation nerds specifically swoon with anticipation—are in the running. First and foremost, there is the undeniable “final” novel from the Hungarian wizard László Krasznahorkai, . If any title can be considered a betting favorite right now, this is it. Brimming with Krasznahorkai’s darkly comedic yet apocalyptic prose—rendered beautifully by Ottilie Mulzet—and with the added weight of finality behind it, this could make the modern master a three-time winner of the award. (He’s already the only two-time winner.) But in page count and prominence, there is another giant on the horizon that could possibly topple the Baron. Meticulous and engrossing, Vasily Grossman’s mammoth World War II opus has all the trappings of not only a great book but an important one. Replete with action-packed battle scenes and a list of characters that goes on for pages, this is truly epic Russian literature. I eagerly await this clash of titans.

New Kids on the Block: We judges are also blessed this year with the inclusion of Edinburgh’s . This fascinating indie has been a cult favorite at Brazos Bookstore for awhile now, but newly acquired US distribution brings their terrific catalog of Latin American literature to the BTBA for the first time with three eligible titles—, , and the Man Booker International longlisted . And it is this last novel by Ariana Harwicz that is perhaps poised to make the biggest splash with American readers. Hallucinatory, unsparing, and teetering on the edge of horror, this psychological portrayal of a young wife and mother coming undone has the visceral impact of death metal. Whether or not it wins, Die, My Love is an unforgettable read. Just go buy it now.

Country Roads Take Me Home: An astonishing number of eligible titles this year deal with explicitly rural locales and concerns. Perhaps, there have always been a good number of translated works set in the country and I am only now noticing with this new crop of BTBA candidates. But there are several very promising novels I’ve come across with a rural setting/story. So many in fact that I find it at least worth mentioning here. There are existential detective and gothic horror stories set in cloistered towns cut off from civilization, like Jean Giono’s , Paolo Maurensig’s campy , and Tokarczuk’s . There is also the aforementioned Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, set in the absurdly provincial village of the Baron’s youth where all the follies of man are played out. But perhaps the strongest example I can give of this trend is Jean-Baptiste del Amo’s stunning . Through Frank Wynne’s immaculate translation, this family saga of a small French pig farm rising to industrial prominence in the twentieth century describes the day-to-day drudgery and brutality of farm life with an unnervingly tactile sensibility. The smells. The dirt under your nails. It’s all there.

Rock ‘n’ Roll Will Never Die: Finally, I have to quickly shout out the all-around coolest book I’ve come across so far. The first volume in French author and certifiable badass Virginie Despentes’s trilogy is a hilarious and biting satire of an aging record shop owner’s fall from grace after the internet puts him out of business. Translated (again) by Frank Wynne, this is without a doubt the best book by Despentes I’ve read. It’s a fun romp run through with myriad music references and a sly social commentary that dispels masculine and pop cultural illusions.

Keaton Patterson buys books for a living at Brazos Bookstore in Houston, Texas. Follow him on Twitter .

by Ófeigur Sigurdsson, translated from the Icelandic by Lytton Smith (Iceland, Deep Vellum)

Why should Ófeigur Sigurðsson’s Ö��æ�ھ�: The Wasteland win the 2019 Best Translated Book Award for fiction? To start, it’ll be easier to go over all the reasons it shouldn’t win. It’s too absurd. Too funny. Too outlandish. Too wrapped up in the mythology of its own making. There’s too much about Viking sagas, penis amputation, Icelandic goats, natural disasters, and most importantly it goes on and on about the virtues of death metal. All of this is couched in a complex, densely nested narrative structure that removes the reader from the truth by no fewer than three degrees. But all these reasons are actually beside the point. Ö��æ�ھ� should win the 2019 BTBA, because it really just doesn’t give a fuck whether it wins or not. It is a novel that exists solely by its own volition. It is a fictional force of nature that claimed every single literary award Iceland—quite possibly the most literary country per capita on the planet—has to offer. ORAEFI plays by its own rules, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Sigurdsson didn’t so much as write it as divine it out of the cold northern ether. Quite simply, Ö��æ�ھ� is.

But let’s break it down to the nitty-gritty. At its core, Ö��æ�ھ� is about the power of story—how stories embed themselves into our lives and the very world around us. This is most conspicuously portrayed by the Austrian protagonist, Bernhardt Fingerberg (a completely unveiled nod to the misanthropic rants of another famous Austrian), who has come to a desolate and remote region of Iceland for his research into toponymy—the study of place names. Never has there been a more aloof and idiosyncratic hero in contemporary literature. He is a highly educated fool totally at the mercy of his own obsession. And while he faces harsh elements and unspecified dangers at every turn of his quixotic quest, it is in essence the stories behind the places he goes that threaten to envelope him completely. Sound weird? It is. That is Ö��æ�ھ�.

Moreover, Ö��æ�ھ� is also about the imperfect art of translation. The narrative is recounted by a bedridden Bernhardt—who speaks no Icelandic—to an eccentric veterinarian who only half understands what her charge is saying and does not hesitate to embellish the tale at every turn, and has written it all down in a letter to another unnamed narrator—maybe Sigurðsson himself— who has no idea why this strange story has been sent to him. This makes Ö��æ�ھ� a flashpoint of miscommunication that nevertheless somehow manages to epitomize our need as a species to make sense of the world and its happenings. Even when that sense is founded on misunderstanding. Translation—the necessity of deciphering that which inevitably remains closed off from our own immediate experiences, but somehow still brings us toward unearthing a hidden kernel of humanity. Ö��æ�ھ�, like translation, is an insurmountable distance bringing us ever closer to a truth of our own making.

Now, you may be reading this and thinking—WTF!? And that is fine. In fact, that is the point. Ö��æ�ھ� wants you to be confused, to give yourself over to that confusion, to lose yourself in it, and ultimately to see that perhaps that is all there is. This makes it as ballsy a book as I have ever read. A swaggering, sui generis titan of a novel that strides across the imaginary landscape like a Viking marauder laying waste to all the lesser narratives it encounters. It beheads undeserving texts like its cousin, CoDex 1962, and holds the dripping bloody remains aloft as warning and enticement to readers everywhere. Behold, here is Ö��æ�ھ�. Look upon it and tremble…or laugh. Both are equally warranted responses, and all the proof needed that Ö��æ�ھ�: The Wasteland—the product of Sigurðsson’s infinite imagination and Lytton Smith’s undeniable talent as a translator—is without a doubt the best translated book of 2019. Now, cue the death metal.