In January 1963, Enayat al-Zayyat, a young Egyptian writer, took her own life at the age of 26. Her only novel, the autobiographical Love and Silence, came out four years later. In 2019, poet Iman Mersal, following years of interviews and research, published a deeply immersive non-fiction work, — a personal journey to discover the true story behind this potent, decades-long myth. In Traces of Enayat (And Other Stories, £12.99), now translated from Arabic into English with delicacy and finesse by Robin Moger, Mersal tracks down, among other witnesses, Enayat’s film-star best friend who allows her to read previously unseen diaries.
This multilayered story is as much concerned with the specific moment in which Enayat lived – a young woman in post-revolutionary Cairo – as to the reasons behind her early death. Mersal’s poet’s eye, wandering and forensic, makes her quest a joyous if poignant one to follow. “There is an intense curiosity,” she writes, “which possesses us when we encounter a writer who is truly unknown.”
Best known for the international bestseller Lullaby, Leïla Slimani’s arguably more interesting work is that which is focused on her Franco-Moroccan antecedents. Slimani’s grandmother, originally from Alsace, as a young woman in 1944 married a Moroccan soldier and went to live on a remote farm in her husband’s country, enduring economic hardship and cultural displacement.
Slimani used this story as the basis for the first volume in a historical trilogy, which began with the well-received The Country of Others (2020). The second novel in the series, Watch Us Dance (Faber & Faber, £14.99), like the previous work translated by Sam Taylor, finds the family in 1968 Morocco, where Mathilde and Amine Belhaj have overcome the lean years and now enjoy an improved status in society. While the first book concentrated on Mathilde’s often difficult assimilation into her new life, the second predominantly deals with the couple’s children, Aïcha and Selim.
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The backdrop, Morocco 12 years after independence, is relayed through the perspective of a large cast of characters/extended family (Slimani provides a handy dramatis personae, but it still overwhelms). Ambitious Aïcha goes back to her mother’s roots in Alsace to study medicine, and Selim gets lost on the burgeoning late 1960s hippy trail. Rich in drama, which constantly spills over into soap-opera territory, the novel is a fascinating if over-explanatory portrait of a country taking its first tentative steps towards modernisation.
In April 1908, the aftermath of a devastating house fire in La Porte, Indiana, led to a gruesome discovery. Among the dead bodies was the headless torso of a middle-aged woman, initially identified as Belle Gunness, the mother of the three children who had also died in the fire, which was found to have been started deliberately. A local man connected with Belle was accused of arson. Most disturbingly, investigators found 11 additional corpses on the property; these had pre-deceased the fire. It is still not known whether Belle Gunness actually perished that day or faked her death, but alive or dead, she would become notorious as “America’s first serial killer”.
In My Men (Pushkin Press, £16.99), translated with typical virtuosity by Damion Searls, Victoria Kielland creates an extraordinary, visceral fictionalisation of Belle’s life. Born Brynhild Størset in Norway, she emigrated to the US at the age of about 22, working as a domestic servant and later in a butcher’s. Her two marriages led to fat insurance policies and the early deaths of both husbands. Later she became suspected of luring men to her remote homestead and killing them. In Keilland’s capable hands,
Belle’s story is not one of a police procedural or thriller – though it is undeniably nasty. The prose flies and flays, is porous and illuminating. Here is Belle’s journey by sea to America: “There was nowhere to rest, nowhere to go, a thousand worn-out questions in the middle of the ocean. She was surrounded. All this that could kill and crush her, that could swallow her up and fill her throat with suffocating white foam.”
An ecological disaster, and a deadly plague that besets a city leaving the most vulnerable to fend for themselves: Fernanda Triás’s Pink Slime (Scribe, £12.99), a multiple prize-winner in the author’s native Uruguay, feels more than unpleasantly timely. “The beginning is never the beginning,” comments the book’s unnamed narrator, a woman who has stayed behind while others, less materially disadvantaged, flee as toxic algae swamp the river and a mysterious “red wind” takes hold of the city: “what we often mistake for the beginning is just the moment we realise something has changed.”
The novel, written in 2018/19, was first published at the height of the Covid pandemic in 2020 and has now been beautifully translated by Heather Cleary. Reflecting on the past and two former relationships which once seemed so important to her, the narrator becomes absorbed in the care of a child, Mauro, who has been infected by the mysterious plague, which mercilessly attacks the skin. Of the past, “Memory is a broken urn,” Triás writes. It’s a dystopic work worthy of JG Ballard, where even in hopelessness there remains a flickering shard of hope or resignation.
The easily applied catch-all term “gothic horror” has become something of a descriptor for a specific genre of Latin American writing by women – think Samanta Schweblin, Lina Meruane or Mariana Enriquez. Argentina’s Augustina Bazterrica can be added to the list, with her delightfully unexpected, tar-dark short fiction collection Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird (Pushkin Press, £12.99), translated by Sarah Moses. Bazterrica is the author of a previous novel, Tender is the Flesh, and these short stories amplify its surreal theme, in which all animal meat is contaminated by a virus, leading to the legalisation of cannibalism.
The first story, A Light, Swift, and Monstrous Sound, sets the tone with black comedy: in suburban Buenos Aires, a woman witnesses an elderly neighbour’s dentures fall on to her patio, to be swiftly followed by the neighbour, whose physiognomy, even in death, assumes an expression of hatred that appears to be directed at her. “He’d chosen your patio, he’d chosen you. He’d tried to kill you, or at the very least, harm you. Menendez had gone to so much effort, you thought, and yet had been so ineffective.”
Each story is pleasurably brief, gorgeously cutting, flirting by turns with Angela Carteresque subversive fairy-tale (The Wolf’s Breath, Hell) or dripping with fatalistic vengeance (No Tears); satire and wordplay (Tiecher vs Nietzsche); or the nightmarish terror of a woman walking alone at night in a seemingly deserted city in the final, swallowing-up tale The Solitary Ones.
Shifting relationships and altered circumstances proliferate in the fiction of Daniela Krien. The Fire (Maclehose Press, £16.99), the follow-up to her successful Love in Five Acts, sets a middle-aged couple, as awkward as the strangers they have grown into, in a tense landscape, temporarily unmoored from daily life and routine. The fire at the centre of the novel is both real – the burning down of their holiday home, forcing long-term and now empty-nester couple Rahel and Peter to spend three weeks on the secluded farm where Rahel had spent a happy childhood – and symbolic.
The book is a slow burner, Krien’s balanced prose, smoothly translated by Jamie Bulloch, aching with double meaning: “Rahel sits outside until her eyes have become accustomed to the darkness.” The intersecting of troubled past, uneasy present and increasingly uncertain future makes for a quiet, reflective read.
