In the opening scene of Wild Thorns by Sahar Khalifeh, translated from the Arabic by Trevor LeGassick and Elizabeth Fernea (Saqi, 248pp, £9.99), Usama al-Karmi returns to Nablus in Palestine after five years. Already angry, he is as unimpressed by his fellow Palestinians as he is by the Israeli soldier who questions him at a checkpoint. “What had happened to these people? Was this what the occupation had done to them? Where was their will to resist?”
In his fury, he can only see weakness in the compromises and accommodations those around him have made with Israel. “By God, murdering such people would be no crime,” he thinks, indicating the limitations of his reasoning. That he will do something violent and reckless is obvious and it is with younger militants that he connects: “It would be among these young people that the spark would be ignited.”
The relevance of this well-constructed and dramatic novel is startling and tragic, given that it was first published in Arabic 47 years ago. Like Gillo Pontecorvo’s film The Battle of Algiers, it brings us into the lives of those who have decided that violence and death will lead to freedom. There is nothing heroic about the climactic scenes of the novel and the portrayal of ambiguity and dismay is achieved with subtle insight. Yet the rage remains as palpable at the conclusion of the novel as it was in the opening chapter. “But the will to live still beats within you, defiant and instinctive.”
Another persecuted community, the Sámi people of Scandinavia, is the subject of Ædnan by Linnea Axelsson, translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel (Pushkin Press, 426pp, £20), a novel in verse that moves as gracefully as a waterfall, from 1913 to the recent past, telling the connected stories of several generations whose lives are, at first, defined by what appears to be the permanence of their nomadic, reindeer herding existence and later by the enforced severing of their traditions.
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Throughout the novel the narrative voices allude to details, more implied than directly stated. We hear from Ber-Jon and Ristin who tell of the birth of two sons whose fates diverge in ways that test their parents. When the stronger boy, Aslat dies, he addresses his parents with touching questions that fall just short of being sentimental: “Didn’t you hear me/ Among the seabirds/as you came walking/with your summer-fat/reindeer”.
Sámi children born later are forced to attend schools where their way of life is belittled and obliterated until later generations can no longer read the landscape with the keen skill of their forebears. A court case is recounted too, one that, too late, acknowledges the wrong that was done. This unique novel beautifully conjures these losses and transitions within the flickering shadows of language.
In Ædnan certain terms – kolt, for example – recur as motifs. The same is true of The Singularity by Balsam Karam (Fitzcarraldo, 188pp, £10.99). But here it is a single word: corniche. It is within or adjacent to a corniche that everything of significance occurs, beginning with a woman’s desperate search for her daughter. The language Karam uses – creatively translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel – creates a haze of disorientation, furthering the mother’s sense of disconnection from the tourist-busy, unnamed place where her destitute children must manage without her.
In the title section of the novel, a woman who earlier witnessed the distressed mother make a cataclysmic decision becomes the focus of the book. Concerns about her pregnancy mingle with memories of her mother’s friend and the daughter, Rozia, to whom she gave birth and whose eventual disappearance will remain a puzzling absence. Violent conflict within the country leads to displacement and the final section of the novel follows asylum seekers in their bewildered attempt to form new lives in unfamiliar locations. Karam infuses this perceptive and compassionate novel with a sense of perplexity that perfectly matches the lives of those she portrays.
Alienation is as much a feature of work now as it was when Marx first established the concept. In The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada, translated from the Japanese by David Boyd (Granta, 116pp, £12.99) new employees are left with a permanent sense of unease, dismayed as to what is expected of them or how their perplexing role might be achieved in a large factory, the purpose of which appears to be designedly concealed from those who work there. Crows circulate menacingly and the information provided to consumers begins to fail: “We beg your forgiveness and pray for your continued how have you been?”
To add to the unstable schema of the novel, Oyamada breaks the timeline by referring in passing to events we have yet to learn about. By the time we reach the suitably bizarre ending, the author has effectively portrayed the confounding maze of modern capitalism to which there is a clearly marked entry point but no exit.
Verdigris by Michele Mari, translated from the Italian by Brian Robert Moore (And Other Stories, 214pp, £13.99) also has a startling ending which upends many of our assumptions. But to get to that point, we spend time with a forgetful workman called Felice and a precocious boy, capable of referencing Bacon’s Novum Organum. Reversing roles, but also allying positions of power, the young boy – whose wealthy father employs Felice – creates a system of mnemonics for the much older man. Breaking through to those memories unveils the astonishing wartime history of the house and grounds. The idiomatic language Felice speaks is rendered phonetically and includes several instances of Hiberno-English. Because of the nature of the novel, the translation needs to combine imagination, whimsy and formal eloquence. This is comprehensively achieved and Moore uses a fascinating translator’s note to explain his methodology in recreating “the beauty and mystery” of this pleasingly strange, crepuscular novel.
The stories in The Book of Prague, edited by Ivana Myšková and Jan Zikmund, various translators (Comma Press, 128pp, £10.99) range across genres, including the realism of Everyone Has Their Reasons by Simona Bohatá (translated by Alžběta Belánová) in which a newly released prisoner attempts to locate traces of his former life as he meanders through Prague only to discover that the most important vestige of his past may be back in the prison.
Several of the stories, including those by Bohumil Hrabal, Patrik Banga and Veronika Bendová, are autobiographical sketches of living in the city. But it is with the more audacious stories – from the birthplace of Kafka – that this collection proves its worth. In A Summer Night by Michal Ajvaz (translated by Andrew Oakland) a man is pursued by a clam through the streets of Prague. Transcendent among them all is Realities by Marek Šindelka (translated by Graeme and Suzanne Dibble) in which a man addresses a woman he has just met, brilliantly critiquing society’s essential emptiness and the ways in which nature would benefit from the extinction of humans. His thoughts extend panoramically beyond Prague in a free-flowing, impulsive association of observations attaining, eventually, the realisation that his perspective is shared by Ana, his new friend: “Of all possible realities, I choose yours.”
