Thus, it wasn't so surprising that an American, Jonathan Littell, should have won the Prix Goncourt. His novel The Kindly Ones is of a scale and density that's rare in French publishing, and they must have been overwhelmed with gratitude that someone had taken an interest in their language. The industry and the research that must have gone into producing this 984-page novel of Nazi barbarity during the Second World War, chiefly on the Eastern Front where the atrocities really flourished, is quite frightening.

The details are minute and unrelenting. I certainly agree that Littell deserves recognition because this sort of uncommon energy is really beyond the call of duty. It's as if he's trying to knock Tolstoy off his perch. But, while the history is marched through the pages with a ruthless efficiency, the novel part of this novel, for me, doesn't stand up so well. I find a narrator who masturbates to the Martian novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, while inserting objects into his anus, hard to take seriously (and no great surprise that Littell also scooped the Literary Review's Bad Sex Prize).

It's significant that the group that comes out best are the crime writers because even if many of them aren't especially talented, the convention, in the crime world, that you need characters, a story and events stands them in good stead. This is a convention that many of the "literary" authors ignore at their peril. The contemporary German novels I've read in the last few years haven't impressed me much, but Petra Hammesfahr's The Lie was blissfully removed from much of the aggressively arty posing of Deutsch letters. Apart from its far-fetched initial premise, that a woman bumps into her double, a double so perfect she can fool her husband, the story is extremely clever, twisty and elegantly written. High-class crime, like P. D. James.

The Russian writer Boris Akunin's creation Erast Fandorin, a man as perspicacious as Sherlock Holmes, as unkillable as James Bond and as fisty and tao as Bruce Lee, is a preposterous figure from the norms of pulp fiction or comics, but Akunin pulls it off brilliantly. The screen version can't be far off. Several volumes of his adventures have reached the English language, and I can endorse The Coronation, the story of a royal kidnapping set around the coronation of the last Tsar Nicholas II. The Coronation is both a ripping yarn and an intriguing insight into the milieu of the Romanovs. I challenge you to guess the true identity of the supervillain.

One wonders whether Japanese literature is really as wacky as the stuff that's delivered to us, or whether that's what the publishers think will sell. Is life in Japan as outlandish as the two Murakamis would have us believe? Is it all about torture and kinky sex as the pen of Yasutaka Tsutsui would suggest? I can't help feeling there probably are novels about dejected teachers rolling cigarettes in provincial schools or little old ladies fighting planning applications, but no one bothers to translate them.