In Memory of Memory, Maria Stepanova’s extraordinary personal archival interpretation of generations of Russian-Jewish family history, was published in English translation in 2021. Now comes a much shorter but no less essential book, written with deep insight, despair and an intrinsic sense of the alarming recurrence of the present’s failure to learn lessons from the past.
The Disappearing Act (Fitzcarraldo, £12.99), expertly translated by Sasha Dugdale, is the dreamlike testimony of a novelist, known simply as M, who is witnessing from exile her country of origin’s invasion of a separate sovereign state. Creatively and psychologically paralysed by the horrors of war seen at a distance, M can no longer write; every innocuous image becomes superimposed with horror, and so she retreats into self-erasure and memory in order to survive, never mind evolve.
“Now it suddenly seemed to her that the whole grand process of growth and feeding resemble the chicken factory or the cattle yard, where you are lovingly tended until you reach the necessary weight.”
Édouard Louis, the auto-fiction writer who has said of his body of work that “I want to make violence a literary space”, exploded on to the French and then global literary scene with his first book, The End of Eddy (2014; English translation by Michael Lucey in 2018). His part-sociological, first-person accounts of growing up queer in a violent, reactionary, working-class home have opened up debates and interest in a neglected and underwritten part of society.
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Louis’s latest book, the brief, no-less incendiary Monique Escapes (Harvill, £14. 99), in an impressively low-key translation by John Lambert, focuses on Louis’s mother, Monique: trapped in an abusive relationship with a partner, which echoes the pattern of domestic tyranny displayed by her ex, Louis’s father.
Louis’s economical prose is lethal and compassionate: “her crying made me cry” – not simply about the current situation but his mother’s entire viability as a person. Together with family and friends, he helps her escape her desperate situation and enter a new life but without basic skills, because she has never been allowed to learn how to use a computer or learn to drive.
As Louis notes, devastatingly, “all these absences in her life were part of the same system.” Musing on Virginia Woolf’s essentials for female independence, he comments that “freedom has a price”. Louis never shirks from the economic realties that keep people from moving forward, as the book unfolds in thriller-like stages.
A world that is almost impossible to conjure or reconcile with the brash 21st century is brought to vivid and timeless life in Anna Nerkagi’s haunting White Moss (Pushkin Press, £12.99), subtly translated by Irina Sadovina. Like Nerkagi, her main character Alyoshka comes from a nomadic Indigenous community, the Nenets, who mainly inhabit the Polar Ural tundra, living in small camps.
His mother and the community elders insist that at 26 he must be wed, yet, like “scorching salt sprinkled on a healing wound”, Alyoshka cannot forget his first love, his neighbour’s daughter, a “bird-bride” who had gone away several years before. His mother is anxious. “Her son needed to be married off, even kicking and screaming. The heart doesn’t count. The human heart is stupid.”
Alyoshka could be a volatile young man out of a Turgenev novel, with his impassioned fretting and inability to grow up; his parent’s anxiety the same as any mother worried about the future of her family. Complete with a varied cast of characters and the ever-present threat of “Soviet Power”, this is a deeply impressive, glowing work, as rhythmic as the seasons by which the Nenets track their course.
Michelle Steinbeck’s Favorita (Faber, £16.99) is an absolute joyride of a novel. Surreal, highly dramatic and a feminist must-read, it is the Swiss novelist’s second book, in a stunning and sure-to-be-prizewinning translation by Jen Calleja.
From the moment Fila picks up the “mortadella-coloured rotary phone” at her late grandmother’s home, we are transfixed by what follows. At the other end is a voice informing Fila that her long-absconded, mayhem-causing mother, Magdalena (also known as Favorita), is dead: “It would be best for you to come here,” the voice tells her. “But don’t believe them when they say it was her liver. Your mother was murdered.”
So begins Fila’s odyssey from Switzerland to southern Italy to collect her mother’s ashes, and the beginning of her quest to uncover Magdelena/Favorita’s history – the importance of which becomes inseparable from the murder of farmer’s wife Sisina in the 1940s: “killed and then dragged through the mud for half a century”.
Fila’s journey to find out what happened to the mother she never really knew (excommunicated from the family when she began advertising the services of her brothel) will take her to “the city in the south … acting all innocent, but the early morning heat is a foretaste of its true colours”. Kidnappings, murder, revenge, and a heady dose of nightmarish illusion abound; throughout, Steinbeck’s luscious prose is gripping and devouring.
In an afterword she states: “At the core of this novel is the confrontation between the reality of various cases of femicide and their portrayal in society.” It is an electrifying work of fiction.
A small-scale, acute portrait of a mother-daughter relationship in a time of crisis is a marvel. Helle Helle’s They (Akoya Publishing, £12.99), in a meticulous translation by the acclaimed Martin Aitken, is a novel about the past and the present and what happens when one of a close-knit pair has a curtailed future.
In the small Danish town of Redby (“2,572 inhabitants”) a 16-year-old girl is absorbed in school, friendships, possibilities. Her single-parent mother thinks back to when she had her child: “a brightening in the east, the baby in the bassinet on the garden table.” But the mother is becoming ill. In early April she tells her daughter: “I must have swallowed a stone. They go for a walk in the playing fields, the anemones are out”. Later, the cuckoo and the lapwing will be heard, an attention to detail and surroundings that is specific and almost unbearably poignant.
By June, “her mother can’t get through the bread and jam … but lots of people have no appetite first thing in the morning”. The girl is moving fast towards adulthood, separating, intent on her own relationships, her life, at the same time as her beloved mother grows seriously ill, “even though she is actually only forty-one”. There is no sentimentality in this beautiful novel, but adjustment, compassion and wonder: “some leaves descend one at a time, the name of the road is something containing blue”.
“It’s 5am and the world is cast in gold.” This magical line is the opening to Pirkko Saisio’s Backlight (Penguin International Writers, £14.99), in a sparkling translation by Mia Spangenberg. It is the second volume in her much-praised Helsinki trilogy (of which Lowest Common Denominator was the first, centring on her childhood) and depicts the author’s coming of age in late 1960s Finland.
Written mostly in the present tense, the book is entirely irreverent, witty and impressionistic. Saisio’s gift is to render this autobiographical history as freshly as if it happened yesterday, even as she describes a changing Finland and the effects of the cataclysmic year of 1968, when Pirkko gets a summer job at a Swiss orphanage, her destination inspired by countless rewatches of The Sound of Music.
As with every teenager, Pirkko is the centre of her own world. She hates God, her communist father and her breasts, and is coming to terms with her own identity and crucially, sexuality. (Saisio is something of a queer icon in Finland, and is herself much influenced by the life and work of Tove Jansson). Her precocity is infectious: “I don’t know who Sigmund Freud is, and I don’t even know his name, since I won’t take psychology until high school. That’s why I have the right to plunge into shameless dreams at night.”
The third and final volume of the trilogy will focus on Saisio’s young adulthood: already the series stands against Tove Ditleveson’s The Copenhagen Trilogy as a seminal work of Nordic artistry.
