In Italia 90, there was genuine shock when the team made it all the way to the quarter-final. The country partied long and hard before the final showdown. Against England. Cameroon did not have Jack Charlton but they had Roger Milla, equally noted for his footballing skills and his corner-flag celebrations.
Roger, the brother of the narrator Choupi in Max Lobe's A Long Way from Doula (Small Axes, 187pp, £9.99), translated by Ros Scwartz, is named after his footballing hero. He disappears from his home in southern Cameroon to pursue his sporting dream in boza, the word used by west African migrants in connection with the clandestine journey to Europe.
Choupi and his friend take to the road to find him and persuade him to return home. In this artfully constructed and absorbing fiction, Lobe sketches in the multiple tensions in modern-day Cameroon around power, status, religion and regional identity. As the two friends travel north to Yaounde and beyond, they discover the unknown wonders of their own country but also the unmistakable dangers of Boko Haram violence.
Lobe shows how, in their different ways, the Christian evangelism of the south and the Islamic radicalism of the north both feed off feelings of despair and dispossession. However, the characters in these pages are anything but passive victims, mutinously alive, irreverent, engaged and challenging.
Choupi’s awareness of his gradual sexual attraction to Simon is beautifully paced, and Lobe is particularly adept at capturing the shift from the lingering pieties of childhood to the abrasive truths of wider, adult worlds. Like the young Burundian novelist Gaël Faye in his excellent Small Country (2019), Lobe has the ability to summon up whole worlds in a careful economy of phrase, bringing individuals and communities to life beyond the photogenic opportunism of breaking news.
Yamen Manai
In The Ardent Swarm (Amazon Crossing, 192pp, £19.99), translated by Lara Vergnaud, Yamen Manai takes his readers to Nawa, a remote village in Tunisia where poverty and neglect are the common currency of daily life. Through the story of Sidi, a beekeeper, Manai tracks the changes in a society that leaves the autocratic embrace of the Handsome One (former Tunisian dictator Ben Ali) for the quicksands of representative democracy.
Sidi’s hives are destroyed in a mysterious attack which leaves most of his bees dead, and the distraught keeper wants to find out what happened, a journey that will eventually bring the reader to Tokyo. The story of the hornets that wreak havoc in Sidi’s bee colonies become bound up with the manipulations of Islamic fundamentalists, whose doctrines of purity are a murderous parody of Sidi’s quiet Muslim faith.
Manai portrays a society where foreign powers instrumentalise religion to protect their own material interests and make sure the poor stay quaint and stay put. Though the parable of the bee colony can feel over-extended in places, Manai avoids didacticism. Sidi is not a holy innocent. He has travelled to and worked as a migrant agricultural labourer in the Gulf States, so he knows the brutal realities of power and possession.
The villagers in Nawa are not hapless dupes but doing what they can to work a system that casually ignores their most basic needs. The disorders of Nawa are not only human. They concern the more-than-human. Through Sidi’s friends, Jannet and Tahar, based in Tunis, we learn of the remarkable complexity of bee worlds, linchpins of biodiversity. The ruthless destruction of ecological habitats and the contagion of global transport are the darker shadows that make The Ardent Swarm as much a cautionary tale about environmental harm as an allegory for the death cults of fundamentalists. Manai’s first outing in English makes the reader want more.
Laurent Binet
Looking at the world from an oblique angle is equally a concern of Laurent Binet in Civilisations (Harvill Secker, 310pp, £16.99), translated by Sam Taylor. Binet is familiar to many English-speaking readers through HHhH (2013) and The 7th Function of Language (2018), which marked him out as a quirky, inventive and often richly sardonic commentator on historical moments, whether it be the assassination of the SS commander Reinhard Heydrich in 1942 or the accidental death of the French critic Roland Barthes in 1980.
In his latest novel, he imagines a world where Columbus fails, dying in obscurity in the Caribbean. On the other hand, Atahualpa, the last Incan emperor, leaves his Old World to explore and conquer the New World of Europe, culminating in his coronation as Holy Roman Emperor. The origins of the European presence in the Americas are imagined through the story of the Viking woman Freydis, though this story peters out early in the book before shifting to fragments from Christopher Columbus’s journal and on to an account of Atahualpa’s European victories.
The counterfactual tradition, the world of the what-ifs, has a strong utopian dimension and it is no surprise that Thomas More appears in the pages of Civilisations corresponding with Erasmus of Rotterdam. Foreigners point out what is invisible to the natives and, like Montesquieu’s imaginary Persian noblemen in his Persian Letters (1721), they have a nose for injustice. From there it is not hard to imagine what would happen if society had been ordered along more egalitarian principles.
The Empire’s Ten Laws, promulgated by the newly crowned Atahualpa, prefigure a communist Eden (“The seventh [law] says that all workers should be provided with everything they need in terms of food and clothing, and even cures and medicines if they fall ill”) albeit one ruled by an absolute monarch.
The Aztecs turn up to trouble this reign of peace and plenty and the 16th century moves on to the more familiar terrain of warring alliances. Binet uses considerable wit in his tale, crowned by a fraught gathering in Bordeaux of Miguel de Cervantes, El Greco and Michel de Montaigne.
For all its narrative and documentary bravura, however, Civilisations feels like an overly elaborate conceit, captivating in its details but all too predictable in its historical reversals.
Predictability is one charge that cannot be levelled against the current wave of women's writing coming out of Germany. The likes of Jenny Erpenbeck and Judith Schalansky have revealed the range and quality of women writers on the contemporary German literary scene. Daniela Krien's Love in Five Acts (MacLehose, 249pp, £19.39), translated by Jamie Bulloch, and Anke Stelling's Higher Ground (Scribe, 274pp, £14.99), translated by Lucy Jones, will only add to the sense of excitement around this writing for English-language readers.
Daniela Krien
Krien is already known for her striking Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything published in English translation in 2013. Love in Five Acts follows the lives of five women living in the city of Leipzig whose lives are loosely interconnected. They are in the middling years, dealing variously with dating, parenting, loss, separation, work, partners, trying to make chaos manageable and meaning attainable.
Brida Lichtblau, a writer, is not sure what to make of all these experiences: “The wisdom of age seems to be worthless. Younger people aren’t interested in it and the elderly are too old to be able to make anything of it.”
Krien excels in the detail on which a life turns and she uses understated humour to great effect, as when she describes Paula’s partner, Ludger, mansplaining his way through the benefits of the tempering principle for heat distribution in old houses. The irony is perfectly judged in scenes where the parents of Götz meet Malika’s parents for the first time and East/West tensions diligently stalk the evening.
The changing political atmosphere of Germany is caught in an overheard kitchen conversation or a throwaway remark. Love in Five Acts is hopeful but never sentimental about how love might be parsed, and Krien is unfailingly impressive in her depiction of the lives of these five very different women.
Anke Stelling
The lives of women in the middle years are also the fore in Higher Ground, the first of Stelling’s novels to be published in English. Resi, a writer, lives in Berlin with her husband (a painter) and four children. The lease on the building is owned by an old school friend of Resi and she receives a notice to quit, a reaction to her unflinching description in a novel of her better-off former friends who live together in their communal property, K23.
Part of Higher Ground is presented in the form of advice from Resi to her 14-year-old daughter Bea, setting her right about what Resi sees as the pitfalls of intimacy and the harsh social realities of most people’s lives. Resi is angry, uncertain, explosive, demanding.
Stelling is brilliant on the quantum universe of parenting, the sheer unpredictability of it, a welcome release for the reader from the policed platitudes of Health and Living supplements. She is forensic in her description of the thousand silent cuts of class and the sacrifice zones of social mobility: “That’s the awful thing about failing to move up in the world: there’s no way back down.” The novel moves effortlessly between time periods in recent German history and builds up the composite picture of a generation that has too often seen many of its ideals disappear into trust funds.
Resi’s fury at what has been done to women, to the marginalised, is unrelenting but she is no blank cipher for outrage. In this compelling novel she is hugely, humorously, angrily, complicatedly alive. Resi tells her daughter, “shame makes you small and dumb […] So please, Bea, ask why. And then try as hard as you can to resist.”
Michael Cronin is director of the Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation
