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Translated books round-up: Dazzling debuts, auto-fiction and more

Reviews: The Faces, Ordesa, Slash and Burn, God 99, Night As It Falls, Kokoschka’s Doll

Hassan Blasim’s debut novel is called God 99.

Catherine Taylor
Mon Feb 8 2021 - 06:00

In the depths of grey winter, the latest fiction in translation provides a vivid streak of colour. Global voices, some translated into English for the first time – in this month’s round-up chosen from writers originating from as far apart as Denmark, Iraq, Portugal, Salvador, Spain and France – show that even if our individual existences have shrunk to one town and one street, there is still much out in the world to savour and reflect upon.

The epic three-part auto-fiction Childhood, Youth, Dependency by Tove Ditlevsen (1917-1976), now published in one volume by Penguin Classics as The Copenhagen Trilogy, caused a sensation on its 2019 complete publication in translation (by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman) for its frank and often brutal trajectory of the life of a Danish woman who is also, by the final volume, a drug addict.

The Faces (Penguin Modern Classics, 144pp, £8.99) by Ditlevsen, first published in Danish in 1968 and now exquisitely translated by Nunnally, is a shorter, more twisted and intense novella. It bears comparison with two near contemporaries of Ditlevsen: British novelist Anna Kavan's radical, politicised accounts of her personal experience of madness, psychiatry and psychotherapy, and the New Zealand writer Janet Frame, who consistently channelled her terror of psychiatric hospitalisations throughout her fiction.

In the stark, icily presented The Faces, Lise, a successful children’s author and a mother of three children, suffering with an unfaithful husband and, of more immediate concern to her, from writer’s block, undergoes repeated episodes of hallucination – in her case insistent and frightening visitations from incorporeal faces and voices.

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“During this time the night held the days apart only with difficulty, and if she happened to breathe a hole into the darkness, like on a frost-covered windowpane, the morning might shine from her eyes hours ahead of time.”

As Lise loses her grip on “reality”, attempts suicide and is admitted to state psychiatric care, her tormenting visions eventually help her find a path to navigate the world despite her psychosis, for “what was real in this world, and what was not real?”

Ordesa by Manual Vilas is a work of auto-fiction and is translated by Andrea Rosenberg.

"My mother used to get up early in the summertime to eat fruit. I can see her now." Manuel Vilas's fragmentary and by turns painful and funny Ordesa (Canongate, 304pp, £16.99), translated by Andrea Rosenberg, is also a work of auto-fiction, a poetic jumble of the aphorisms and reminiscences of a man in middle age, recently divorced, living alone in a small apartment and newly sober, returning with his two semi-estranged sons, soon after his parents have both died, to Ordesa, the small town in the Spanish Pyrenees where he grew up.

Like the French writer Annie Ernaux, Vilas crystallises a time, a place, a family and a society. His prose is frequently transcendent, occasionally bathetic. “I am a man of sorrows”, he declares as the book opens, and the clinging ghosts of his past, particularly his parents and grandparents at different stages of their lives, haunt the pages of this book, in a reanimation which, while it is on occasion embarrassingly sentimental, is ultimately a piercingly moving meditation of inescapable regret at time’s passing.

There is little that is sentimental about Claudia Hernandez' Slash and Burn (And Other Stories, 352pp, £11.99). This is a scarring, important work about the experiences and endurance of ordinary women set against the backdrop of the Salvadorean civil war (1979-1992), fought between the military junta government of El Salvador and a coalition of left-wing groups and in which 75,000 civilians are estimated to have died. It is a composite work in which the narrators or characters are given not names but qualifiers, such as Anna Burns uses to great effect in Milkman, also a novel of trauma and its aftermath.

Hernandez, ably and lucidly translated by Julia Sanches (who explains the process in a fascinating afterword), instead uses such terms as “the faraway daughter”, “the missing daughter” and “the distant daughter” and also writes of her interchangeable characters that “they’d assumed the surnames of compañeros fallen in battle, or other names which reminded them neither of their pasts on the battlefield or their pasts before that”.

Similarly, in this brave and salutary book, the worst atrocities are also rendered more sharply by their ambiguous retelling, such as this description of a rapist: “it was said that he broke into the houses of women he desired and stayed there as long as he liked.”

Hassan Blasim's Kafakesque award-winning collection of short fiction, The Iraqi Christ, depicted a modern-day Baghdad haunted by illegal invasion and metaphorical horror. His debut novel, God 99 (Comma Press, 288pp, £9.99), translated into English by Jonathan Wright, one of the great interpreters of Arabic literature, is an irreverent and unsettling account of the refugee experience, conducted as a series of interviews by Blasim's alter-ego Hassan Owl, an Iraq-born writer in exile.

Dreams and memories blur with past and present to strikingly graphic effect, the novel taking its cue from the Islamic belief that God has 99 names. Sprawling and breathtaking, stuffed with cultural and literary references, this is a dazzling work of imagination and ur-reality.

Night As It Falls is the first novel by the French-Bosnian-Montenegrin writer Jakuta Alikavazovic.

Night As It Falls (Faber & Faber, 288pp, £12.99), the first novel by the French-Bosnian-Montenegrin writer Jakuta Alikavazovic, is a dark, brooding jewel of a book, impressively and unashamedly intellectual and multilayered. In Paris, student Paul becomes obsessed with a young woman called Amelia Dehr, who lives in Room 313 of the hotel in which he works as a night guard to finance his studies. "Long, silky hair – one year, two years, five years of red hair; a mass that slipped through his fingers like water ..."

In hypnotic, deeply pleasurable prose, spaciously translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman, Alikavazovic fashions a story of the gravity and passion of doomed first love, which is also a relentless examination of insanity, identity and artistic sensibility.

In Kokoschka's Doll (Maclehose Press, 288pp, £10), winner of the European Union Prize for literature, Portugal's Afonso Cruz has written a novel par excellence that is destined to become a classic of almost byzantine splendour and convolution.

Afonso Cruzafonso, winner of the European Union Prize for literature, is the author of Kokoschka’s Doll. Photograph: Paulo Sousa Coelho

It is based, at least titularly, on the creepy and misogynistic tale of Austrian Expressionist painter Oscar Kokoschka who, having been left in 1915 by his lover Alma Mahler for the architect Walter Gropius, subsequently commissioned a life-size doll in her likeness that he would take everywhere with him and which he eventually decapitated in an “avant-garde gesture”.

Cruz’s book-within-a-book, translated with meticulous care by Rahul Bery, is the work of a playful polymath that combines the Kokoschka curio with the overlapping narratives of two different, yet fatefully enmeshed Dresden families at war’s end in 1945, as that most beautiful of German cities is wrecked by Allied bombs.

Infuriating and impassioned, Cruz, in a labyrinthine tale – at its best worthy of comparison with Gabriel García Márquez – convinces that “nothing is more prophetic than literature”.