Cities loom large in fiction, whether tangible like Joyce’s Dublin and Hans Fallada’s Berlin, or imagined as in Jan Morris’ Last Letters from Hav. In Dorothy Tse’s City Like Water, translated by Natascha Bruce (Fitzcarraldo Editions, £12.99), the unnamed city is both real and surreal: it is identifiably Hong Kong, but it is elusive and mysterious, like the nightmarish cityscapes of China Miéville.
Our young narrator lives in an authoritarian city state governed by “the Law”, where streets disappear from maps, days from calendars, classmates from schoolrooms, and whole floors from hotels. The television spews lies, while an “internet black hole” devours search results. Even memory cannot be trusted. Protests in the city are met with violence. The very fabric of reality seems to warp. Officers, “giddy with excitement, like mischievous children”, shoot sleepwalking citizens.
Meanwhile, the narrator’s family slowly disintegrates. The mother joins housewives protesting against “fake food”, only for the police to shower the protesters with glittering dust that turns them into statues before they disappear. The father retreats into the livingroom, then into his huge television set, glimpsed only as a walk-on figure in his favourite soap operas. Then there is the narrator’s little sister who haunts the story; forgotten by her parents, she is a voice from a drawer, a doll, a dark figure scaling a building or floating skyward with an umbrella.
Tse’s writing pulses with viscerally poetic imagery. The short, terse chapters, like jagged shards, are filled with fantastical yet excruciating images – the thud of a falling body becomes a meteor crashing through the narrator’s skull, turning her to coral on the ocean floor. Bruce’s fearless translation brilliantly captures this voice – playful yet sinister, surreal yet grounded in pain and resistance. This dizzying novella offers no easy answers, but graphically explores what happens when power dictates truth and we are left only with memory.
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Iranian writer Shahrnush Parsipur also uses surreal events and magic realism to explore oppression in Women Without Men, translated by Faridoun Farrokh (Penguin Classics, £12.99). Originally published in 1989, the book was banned in her home country and Parsipur was imprisoned on several occasions before leaving for the United States.
Set in Tehran in the turbulent summer of 1953, the novel follows five women seeking to escape the brutal everyday misogyny of their society. Mahdokht, a spinster schoolteacher, is so repulsed by what she has seen of sex that she has planted herself in a garden and become a tree so that she can remain a virgin, yet bear seeds that can give birth to thousands.
Munis, who lived under the suffocating control of her brother Amir, who forbade her from leaving the house or listening to the radio, killed herself only to be reborn again and again. Her young friend Fa’iza is in love with Amir and believes marrying an older man will bring fulfilment, but she is cast aside for a “dutiful, chaste” teenage girl.
Zarrinkolah, a prostitute, has begun to see her clients as headless bodies. Lastly, there is Farrokhlaqa, an wealthy, older woman, achieves independence when, after 30 years of loveless marriage, she accidentally pushes her abusive husband down the stairs. With her inherited wealth, she buys a villa in Karadj and, in the garden, is surprised to find Mahdokht. In time, all five women will find temporary solace in this magical garden.
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While the characters represent different aspects of womanhood in a patriarchal society, they are not allegorical figures, but flawed and human and Parsipur’s use of magical tropes, far from creating a fairytale world, is powerfully contrasted with cruel scenes of the humiliations that have defined these women’s lives. Faridoun Farrokh’s graceful translation captures the shifting registers, moving seamlessly between the magical and the mundane, between lyricism and brutality.
Haunting, rapturous and quietly beautiful, Women Without Men also remains a disturbingly relevant act of resistance.
“As Mum lay dying, I was making love.”
In X is Where I Am by Sara Torres, translated by Maureen Shaughnessy (Charco Press, £11.99), Sara has just moved back to Barcelona. Each week, she flies to Asturias to visit her mother, who has been battling cancer for a decade. Sara’s long-term partner, D., is still in London but planning to join her soon. Meanwhile, Sara has become involved with a young woman known only as Girl.
It is as she is heading to Asturias after a night with Girl that Sara discovers that her mother has died. Shortly afterwards, D. arrives from London, and Girl abruptly disappears, leaving Sara to grieve both for her mother and her lost lover. Although D. has always known and accepted Sara’s affairs, she chooses not to ask about them. Now, in their shared apartment by the sea, D. tries to provide Sara with comfort and support, but refuses to try and help her overcome her relationship with “that little girl”, and their relationship becomes fractious.
Shaughnessy’s translation skilfully conveys the raw, overwhelming intensity of passion and also the moments of reflection, of grief, doubt and insecurity.
What is striking about Torres’ autobiographical novel is that its celebration of queer lives and non-monogamous relationships is told with unflinching honesty, depicting the joys of sex alongside neediness and jealousy, and it is searing in its indictment of unconditional love: “I’m sure we all do this. Lie. As if our life depended on it. Search anxiously for unconditional love, selling in exchange the fantasy that we, too, will be able to give it in return.” Above all, X is Where I Am, frankly and vividly conveys the messiness of human emotions – the ways in which love can be conflicted and contradictory.
Jean-Noël Orengo’s You Are the Fuhrer’s Unrequited Love, translated by David Watson (Penguin International Writers, $12.99), offers a stark exploration of Albert Speer, the architect of the Third Reich. Despite its absurdist title – from a remark supposedly made by Karl Maria Hettlage – the novel adopts a restrained style and factual tone that often feels biographical, even as Orengo uses fiction to probe Speer’s character – an ambitious man, capable of deceiving himself and all those around him.
Though Speer rose to become minister for armaments, he succeeded in convincing the judges at the Nuremberg trials that he knew nothing about the death camps. He portrayed himself as the “Good Nazi” and in doing so, escaped the death penalty, and the opprobrium reserved for senior ministers of the Reich. It was a deception that culminated after his release from Spandau prison, when he published Inside the Third Reich, a wholesale rewriting of history published as a “memoir” that was lauded by critics but later savaged by historians. By dint of sheer charisma, Speer even managed to befriend the Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, and even his determinedly sceptical biographer Gitta Sereny.
Orengo’s portrayal is not the epic spectacle so beloved by Speer himself; instead, it is surgical, almost forensic in its historical investigation. David Watson’s translation preserves the lean, spare prose, and the flashes of stream-of-consciousness that provide an emotional undercurrent to the narrative.
Like Laurent Binet in his much-praised novel HHHH, Orengo uses a fictional lens to better see the depths of a man’s moral failings and the blindness of those around him.
