Four years on from Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, it has become too easy for those of us living outside the region to shrug with distracted indifference at the daily loss of life. In My Women (Indigo Press, 96pp, £10.99) by Yuliia Iliukha, translated from Ukrainian by Hanna Leliv, the author examines the impact of the war on women, commencing each short chapter with the phrase, “The woman who ... ”
The concerns and perspectives of these women differ significantly, as does the way each is affected by their circumstances: “The woman who returned to the destroyed village wept over the skeleton of her cow.” “The woman who could not take it any more drank a bottle of wine every night.” “The woman who fed abandoned cats found herself alone in her nine-story apartment building.”
Each story develops like photographic film, until we see lives in such sharp detail that each chapter could be enlarged to become a novel. The scrupulously told stories are sometimes macabre, sometimes mysterious. But in every case they are startling.
After the Russian invasion, the Ukrainian author Artem Chapeye volunteered to join the army. His novel, The Weathering (Seven Stories Press UK, 208pp, £12.99), translated by Daisy Gibbons, was written before the war began. So, it is not war that causes the disappearance of the majority of the population, but a strange combination of ecstasy and erasure, an overwhelming desire to succumb: “Joy entered me, so intense, to the point where I wanted to lie down right there and dissolve forever.”
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This occurs when the narrator and his wife are staying in a remote area of the Carpathian Mountains, without contact with other people, until it becomes necessary. When they require fresh food, they find the nearest village deserted. Upon returning to Kyiv, they find sparsely populated streets and an island of people in the Dnipro river who have been deemed dangerous.
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What follows is a disappointing blend of dystopian cliches and reminders of our shared experiences of empty streets and restricted routines during the lockdowns. A more engaging approach would have involved exploring the overwhelming strangeness of the character’s circumstances and the psychological impact of living without hope. In contrast, the affable narrator suggests, allowing for some ambiguity, that a superior type of society might be possible. As the author and the people of Kyiv found after the novel’s original publication, such optimism is rarely justified.
A far more enigmatic variant of a dystopian future is created by Antoine Volodine in The Monroe Girls (Archipelago Books, 256pp, $22), translated from French by Alyson Waters. From “the third floor of a ward for schizophrenics”, the bifurcated narrator, Breton, observes a woman jumping from the fourth floor of a nearby building, one of several paramilitary women to do so. She survives and disappears into the dark streets.
Further into the shadows of this world is “The Party”, for whom Breton is of use because of his ability to discern the activities and thoughts of those who occupy the darkest of recesses, even beyond the point of death. “The dead are slow, stubborn, and they return.”
Justifiably paranoid about the intentions of these women and their deceased trainer, Monroe, The Party is, in true left-wing fashion, fracturing into a multitude of subsets: “The Men from Kronstadt”, “The Seven Women of the Liberation”, “The Marxists of Great Compassion”, etc. Yet, the impression increases that all of this is happening in a desolate world. “‘There’s no one in the streets,’ I commented. ‘There’s no one anywhere,’ said Benton.”
Volidine conjures a world in which oppression is sufficiently internalised for direct authority to be unnecessary. The narration is a series of discoveries we share with Breton and our perplexity only increases as we stumble towards each disclosure in this slyly humorous and subversively inventive novel.
Those feelings of bewilderment and displacement are also central to Tarantula by Eduardo Halfon (Hamish Hamilton, 192pp, £10.99), translated from Spanish by Daniel Hahn. In an unadorned style, the narrator, Eduardo, recounts the rebellious 13-year-old he was when he was sent to a summer camp for Jewish boys and girls in his native Guatemala by his father, who is not pleased by the boy’s questioning of his religious inheritance.
The hard-line nature of the camp becomes clear when the children are forced to endure a day of humiliation, intimidation and brutality that is intended to replicate a day in a concentration camp. The remainder of the novel is a very well-realised working through of the narrator’s inability to understand what occurred on that day. Years later, he meets Samuel, the man responsible for the violence. “Si vis pacem, para bellum, he said in a hoarse voice.”
We get a real sense of why, for such people, the Holocaust did not instil a feeling of compassion for the wretched of the Earth and instead created a determination that such degradation would never again be visited upon Jewish people. But at what cost? The novel’s childlike form becomes more impressionistic as Eduardo tries to work through his confusion and sense of powerlessness, together with his own less deterministic feelings about Jewishness, leaving both the narrator and the reader with many unresolved questions.
Another powerless, Jewish child, forced to respond to the whims of adults, is the focus of Worlds Apart (Moth Books, 304pp, £12.99) by Julia Franck, translated from German, with considerable verve, by Imogen Taylor. Although it is classified as a novel, with the author emphasising the subjectivity of all authors in a preface, this is really a memoir.
However it might be classified, it is a fascinating and well-told story about narrator Julia’s chaotic East German upbringing, in which all the usual expectations are reversed within her family, to the extent that Julia is secretive and embarrassed when she achieves the highest possible grades in her final-year exams: “My mother, who was deeply suspicious of any form of achievement, disapproved of high achievers on principle.”
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While Julia’s maternal grandmother, the sculptor Ingeborg Hunzinger, was an enthusiastic communist, her mother Anna, a sometime actor, lacked all sense of discipline. When they moved to a cottage in a village, Anna liked to shower in the garden, using rainwater and, if the weather suited, remained naked, outside and inside, for the rest of the day. “We had a lot of visitors.”
When Julia is caught shoplifting items she will never otherwise possess, her mother is unperturbed. “No incident, not even this, could arouse Anna’s anger or provoke her into being strict or authoritarian.” But what could be seen as heroic nonconformism feels like neglect to Julia. From an early age, she and her older siblings – each with a different father – must fend for themselves, while Julia is the chief carer of her younger twin sister.
Eventually, the burdens become overwhelming, and she seeks release by living elsewhere and, in a poignant series of encounters, reconnects with her estranged father. By the end of this well-crafted Bildungsroman, the most astounding realisation is that, despite all the privations and neglect a person might suffer, love can still survive.
Love of a more tentative and circumspect nature quietly lights The Old Fire by Elisa Shua Dusapin (Daunt Books, 166pp, £14.99), translated from French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins. Agathe, the narrator and her sister Véra must perforce meet when they have to clear out the contents of their recently deceased father’s home. It soon becomes clear that Agathe has an uneasy relationship with her sister, stemming, in part, from feelings of her superiority to Véra, who has been aphasic since the age of six.
Otherwise, only an incident in which Véra tried to drown a kitten when they were both young can explain Agathe’s animosity. That Véra communicates by writing messages on her phone emphasises the sense of silence within the novel, even during conversations between the sisters or with their genial neighbour, Octave. When alone, as Agathe likes to be, she reflects on incidents from her life: the circumstances in which her now estranged mother left when the girls were very young; the end of her recent pregnancy; the screenplay of Georges Perec’s W, or the Memory of Childhood that she is working on.
That this novel, without pathos or dramatic revelation, manages to be both beguiling and moving is a beautifully restrained achievement.
