The Deserters (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 220 pp, £14.99) by Mathias Enard, translated from French by Charlotte Mandell, bears the hallmarks of Enard’s bric-a-brac erudition and his agility in crossing time periods, cultures and locations. As an Arabic scholar, he has deep roots in north African and Middle Eastern history, but his outlook is identifiably European.
The standard of his novels ranges from excellent to merely very good. They are always interesting.
There are two main strands in The Deserters. It opens with an unnamed soldier, a deserter from an unidentified conflict in the Mediterranean. He tramps across the uplands, avoiding the villages, to return to a lonely cottage once owned by his family.
Hiding there, he meets a woman with short hair (a symbol of her persecution) escaping with her donkey. The encounter has a “beauty and the beast” feel, recognisable from the romantic aspects of other Enard novels.
The second strand centres on a colloquium for a deceased East German mathematician and internee of the Buchenwald camp, Paul Heudeber. Narrated by his (now elderly) daughter, it tells of Heudeber’s disillusionment at the socialism that emerged in East Germany, and the pain of his Cold War separation from Maja, a charismatic political activist in the West and suspected spy.
Mandell’s translation is harmonious throughout – it delights in precision without ever seeming fussy: “elucubrations”, “clinamen”, “phalanstery”.
The span of this novel extends from the second World War to the Cold War to 9/11 to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Though Enard traverses time cleverly (a strength of his), this is a lot of ground to cover in a short book, resulting in trade-offs between breadth and depth.
Nevertheless, The Deserters is brimming with interesting ideas as it looks at today’s world with a long sightline back through 20th-century history.
Death and the Gardener (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 212 pp, £18.99) by Georgi Gospodinov, is translated from Bulgarian by Angela Rodel. Memory is a core theme throughout Gospodinov’s body of work, including his International Booker Prize-winning novel Time Shelter; however, this book takes a more personal turn as he gives an account of his father’s death from cancer.
The book does not shy away from the grim details of diagnosis and treatment. Speaking to his father’s doctors, the serious news is coded in the technical Latin vocabulary of medicine: “Until now I had known that Latin was a dead language. Now I know that it is the language of death. Death speaks Latin.”
And yet, this is a beautiful testimony of a loving son towards his father, who is vividly depicted as a tall, good-humoured gardener, full of stories and exaggerations. It is also a book about how to die and how to witness death. The kind of book that we will all need to read at some point in our lives. The challenge in a grief memoir is to transform it from a personal record to something that matters to the reader.
With gentle wit, insight and love, Georgi Gospodinov has written a tender filial tribute with universal resonances.
A gardener is also central to The Rarest Fruit (Bullaun Press, 224 pp, €14.95) by Gaëlle Bélem, translated from French by Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint Loubert.
Set in the writer’s native Réunion Island (an overseas French territory, east of Madagascar), it tells the true life story of Edmond Albius, a Black slave born on the island around 1829. After the death of his mother and disappearance of his father, Edmond is taken on by a recently widowed slave owner who passes on his passion for botany.
Though Edmond is employed only as a gardener, he is a prodigious talent and discovers an innovative method for pollinating vanilla flowers artificially. Albius’s method leads to an explosion in the popularity of vanilla as a flavour; his technique for manual pollination is still used today. It is an extraordinary success, though not one that Edmond ever gets to share in fully – his life into adulthood is beset by adversity and sadness.
The narrator self-describes as a “chronicler”, giving a reportage feel to the prose, albeit enriched by vivid attention to botanical and local detail. The flowing translation makes judicious use of footnotes to illuminate the text without getting in the way.
A fascinating novel that sheds light on an obscure talent truly deserving of celebration.
That’s All I Know (Daunt Book Originals, 210 pp, £9.99) by Elisa Levi and translated from Spanish by Christina MacSweeney, is all about voice. Lea is 19 years old, her gut is burning, she smokes joints, hallucinates and has no sense of smell.
For the entirety of the novel she is sitting on a bench, speaking to a man in his 60s whose dog has disappeared into the forest. Lea is a garrulous character, babbling to the man about her own family and life and the goings on in her small village.
She seems at once older and wiser than her age, yet also childish. She is perceptive and insightful in that way of people who have no filters. The press material cites Beckett as an influence but there is also a note of Carson McCullers here.
Lea’s older sister, Nora, is brain damaged and paralysed: “as useless as a vase with no flowers”. Nora is a burden to her mother and will become Lea’s burden in time – the question of burdens is important to the story.
There are risks that such a singular – and single-voiced – novel could become wearing, but instead we become drawn in and hypnotised by Lea’s rhythm. Her patter worms into our minds. The background hum of menace is slow release. With its end-of-the-world references, this novel works as a fine piece of storytelling but is also rich in symbolic possibilities.
On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle is to be a septology of novels about Tara Selter, a woman who is stuck in time, repeating the 18th of November. I recently reviewed the excellent first volume – since shortlisted for the International Booker Prize – so I opened Volume II (Faber, 204 pp., £12.99), translated from Danish by Barbara J Haveland, hungry to know where the series would go next.
Unable to move forward in time, Tara seeks momentum by hitting the road, first by travelling to Brussels to enjoy an early November Christmas with her parents and sister – they adapt surprisingly easily to Tara’s predicament – and then by chasing the seasons. She heads north through Odense, Stockholm, Bergen to experience winter, and then south to find spring and summer in cities including Montpelier and Düsseldorf.
However, she can only ever return to the same “neutral November” because “time is a container … it stays still, it is a vessel”.
The prose is steady and the emotional range disciplined. Balle doesn’t milk the premise – she uses it more as a recurring motif at the centre of a wider improvisation. Told in short daily sections, with snack-sized block paragraphs, there are gaps in time for the reader too, contributing to a sense of disorientation.
Having now read and enjoyed the first two books, I am all-in for the full septology. By the end of this volume, you get the sense that Balle knows she already has the reader hooked.
