"The weather was once a reason to stay home. Today, it's a reason to take to the streets, to protest." Ida, the Dutch climate scientist at the heart of The Opposite of a Person (Daunt Books, 236pp, £9.99) by Lieke Marsman, translated by Sophie Collins, takes to the hills rather than to the streets to chart the accelerating attrition of climate change.
Up in a research station in the Italian Alps, Ida is drawn into extended meditations on the imminent climate catastrophe while picking her way through the shapeless wreckage of her relationship with ex-partner Robin. When eventually Robin comes to visit Ida in her Italian eyrie, a sudden natural catastrophe occurs with devastating consequences.
Marsman, the Dutch poet laureate, is relentlessly inventive in her fiction, blending essay, poetry, aphorism and random jottings into a careful trawl through the fears of a generation around environmental fecklessness, the commodified language of desire, the long tail of depression, and the corrosive loneliness of a crowded planet.
Climate commentators such as Naomi Klein and Timothy Morton share the pages with Leopardi, Houellebecq, Duras, Rhys and Pessoa. In a world where even the weather can no longer be a banal filler for small talk, Marsman suggests that new conditions of living demand new forms of writing. The narrator has little patience with the supposed apathy of the generationally drifting snowflakes:
“I know that my apathy is the result of the state that my parents’ generation have left the world in, my cynicism an expression of dismay and my jokes a way of keeping going in a world that I didn’t choose, that I would never choose, a way out of which I cannot see.”
Whether stripping away the pretensions of greenwashing (“Want to get rich? Create a problem and make sure you’ve patented the solution”) or teasing out the absences that make hearts grow fonder and languages richer (“the battle, the distance between lovers has an obvious function: it makes sure that love does not expire, because it is constantly deferred”), Marsman’s text is wry, spirited, troubling and a marker of an intriguing new talent.
Alejandro Zambra
The Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra shares Marsman's poetic sensibility but is especially interested in poets themselves and their real or invented worlds. In tracking the separate careers of two aspiring poets, Gonzalo and his stepson Vincente, Chilean Poet (Granta, 358pp, £16.99), translated by Megan McDowell, offers an at times excruciatingly funny account of the mixture of high-minded seriousness and delusional narcissism that informs the everyday ambition of the versifiers of Santiago de Chile.
Pru, an American journalist who fetches up in Chile after an unhappy break-up, is commissioned to write a piece for a US magazine on the poetry scene in Chile. A vague romantic entanglement with Vincente provides an initial entry into the unsparingly competitive and gossipy world of Chilean letters. The highpoint of the novel is Pru’s trip around the country, inspecting the advance posts and siege positions of the standing army of poets.
Her verse odyssey takes her from Roddy Godoy, a practitioner of “preverbal postpoetry”, to Hernaldo Bravo, who only writes 1,000-page books (short books are for those who are “afraid of poetry”), to Miles Personae, a committed left-winger who writes dramatic monologues in the voices of torturers and criminals from the Pinochet regime. Inevitably, Roberto Bolaño, another writer who will translate the Chilean poets into prose, appears at strategic points in Zambra’s novel.
Gonzalo aspires to be a father, however, as well as a poet. There is much considered and sensitive exploration of father-son relationships that avoids the usual Oedipal bust-up of sullen dads and angry sons. Along with Pru, Vincente’s mother, Carla, provides a valuable counterpoint to the predominance of male voices, showing that free spirits are not as free as they imagine.
Zambra’s latest work is a highly entertaining, engaging and complex detailing of why words matter and why their makers, for all the unavoidable posturing, still count.
Jeanne Benameur
Jeanne Benameur's The Child Who (Les Fugitives, 128pp, £10.99), translated by Bill Johnston, is not so much a piece of prose about poets as it is a piece of prose that approximates to the condition of poetry. A child in rural France, abandoned by his mother, lives in the shadow of his father's erratic temper. He is the unlikely offspring of a wandering, maverick mother and a settled, defensive father.
The young boy fills solitude with a dog that is real to him but invisible to everyone else, and he spends his days trying to understand the hidden language of his lost mother. The disappointments of the human world bring him closer to the non-human, to the animal and to the forest. When he remembers his mother, it is for gestures rather than words: “Your mother’s index finger passed back and forth across your forehead. She was smoothing your father’s shouts in your head of a child, wiping away finger by finger the hand that strikes, and gradually the terrifying things pulled back, lost their power to make you smaller.”
Benameur’s particular strength lies in her ability to give a distinctive voice to the voiceless even if, at times, the overly romanticised opposition between the bohemian freedoms of the open road and the stale rancour of the settled can seem a little too pat.
Juli Zeh
What the open road might bring, not in the form of consolation but in terms of terror, is revealed in Juli Zeh's taut epic of domestic trauma, New Year (World Editions, 282pp, £12.99), translated by Alta Price. Henning is cycling up to the mountain village of Femés on the island of Lanzarote on the first of January. Not surprisingly, as he battles the wind and the gradient, his thoughts ("New year, new you") turn to where things stand in his life. The tasks of parenting two young children are taking their predictable toll, and his relationship with his wife, Theresa, is beginning to buckle under the pressure of his repeated and increasingly unsettling panic attacks.
Henning’s ruminations are cut short by intense dehydration upon finally reaching his destination. When he is invited into a house for refreshments, the narrative moves into an earlier period in Henning’s life when he and his sister, Luna, along with their parents, spent a holiday on the island. There follows a remarkable section in the novel where the German writer captures the bewilderment of two children who are abandoned by their quarrelling parents, and are left to fend for themselves and each other as best they can.
Zeh maps in painstaking detail the descent of the children’s world into increasing vulnerability and danger, with no sense that help might be at hand or that an end might be in sight. Though the children survive the ordeal, the damage is enduring.
In addition to being a successful novelist, Zeh has served as honorary judge in the constitutional court of Brandenburg. She is especially deft in this compelling novel for suggesting rather than explaining, and thereby avoiding the morality tales of the didactic in favour of a more complex exploration of the causes and consequences of grief and harm.
Ihsan Abdel Kouddous
Thoughts of the grief caused to the self and of the harm caused to others plague the sleepless nights of Nadia Lutfi, the heroine of I Do Not Sleep by Egyptian novelist Ihsan Abdel Kouddous (Hoopoe, 354pp, £14.73), translated by Jonathan Smolin. Among the most successful and prolific authors in the Arab world before his death in 1990, Kouddous is largely unknown outside of the Middle East and north Africa. His hugely popular novels appeared initially in serial form, with a number of them made into films that not only were box office hits but also launched the careers of actors such as Omar Sharif.
I Do Not Sleep, the first of his novels translated into English, is narrated by Nadia. Only 21 at the end of the story, Nadia reflects back on a life of cruel manipulation and the wanton destruction of the happiness of those who stray into her orbit. In this “revolution against myself”, she preys on the vulnerable and exploits the weak.
After her parents’ divorce and the departure of her mother when she was two years of age, Nadia becomes the revered object of her father’s doting adoration. As a result, she begins to tyrannise the servants and becomes increasingly trapped in a prison of her own self-regard. Her cousin Kawthar, her stepmother, Safi, and her suitors Mustafa and Samir all fall foul of carefully orchestrated schemes of seduction and betrayal.
Nadia constantly resorts to the language of theology to describe her condition – “I’m evil. I’m hooked on evil” – but repentance is always a distant prospect as she wrestles with anxieties that resist explanation and chase away sleep. Kouddous’s tale of harshness and neglect, set in the gilded cages of Egyptian middle-class proprieties, makes for a new and welcome insight into worlds long hidden from view.
Michael Cronin is director of the Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation
