The Faculty of Dreams

The Faculty of Dreams is Swedish writer Sara Stridsberg’s second novel, and the second to be translated into English by Deborah Bragen-Turner. Her first, The Gravity of Love, is largely set in a psychiatric hospital, and The Faculty of Dreams, too, deals with questions of sanity. It is based on the life of Valerie Solanas, who is most famous either for shooting Andy Warhol or writing the SCUM Manifesto – the question of where her fame should rest is one the novel asks. The novel retells her life in dreamlike (or, at times, nightmarish) prose, often in dialogue (Stridsberg describes it as a “literary fantasy” but it’s worth noting Stridsberg’s first play was also about Valerie), beginning with her death in 1988:

“It is April 1988 and Valerie Solanas is lying on a filthy mattress and urine-soaked sheets, dying of pneumonia. Outside the window, pink neon lights flash and porn music plays day and night.”

Many of Valerie’s problems (should we chose to see them as such) begin with her mother, Dorothy. Dorothy is reliant on having a man in her life, no matter how that man treats her or Valerie. Valerie recounts more than once how her father, Louis, used to sexually abuse her:

“…Louis used to rape me on the porch swing after Dorothy had driven into town… he was a jumbled agony of tears and lust and the seat cover fabric was a mesh of wild pink roses that Dorothy had embroidered at nights and I counted the roses and the stars in the sky… and I rented out my little pussy for no money and afterwards he always wept and tried to untangle the knot of chewing gum in my hair..”

Dorothy tells Valerie, “Without him, I’m nothing.” (These are imagined rather than realistic dialogues).

“Dorothy falls to pieces without Louis and Valerie falls to pieces without Dorothy.”

This continues even after Louis leaves as Dorothy becomes involved with other men:

“Dorothy keeps on forgetting things. First she forgets her promises, then she forgets her child…”

Valerie is a bookish child whereas Dorothy does not read; later Valerie struggles to gain any praise from her mother when she gains her degree in psychology, and is accepted to continue in a post-graduate research role – Dorothy is, instead, fixated on the recent death of Marilyn Munroe:

“VALERIE: I got a place as a postgraduate.
DOROTHY: She died of an overdose, little Valerie. It’s so sad.”

In a traditional novel we would say it is her childhood, her relationship with her mother, and her friendship with Cosmogirl at university, which influence her revolutionary attitude towards sex, though Valerie portrays her views as self-evident, and Stridsberg leaves the question open, as she does the extent of Valerie’s life as a prostitute. (Both the author – who features in the dialogues – and a journalist attempt to ask Valerie about prostitution but can get no straightforward answer). “Five for a fuck, three for a blow job, one for a hand job,” Valerie repeats throughout the novel, with only the prices changing:

“A whore never sells intimacy. She sells a black hole in space.”

In Valerie’s eyes, men are redundant, as is demonstrated by the experiments she wishes to undertake as a postgraduate:

“There is no reason to involve male mice. Mouse girls can have mouse babies with one another.”

“The male,” she says, “is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage. To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples.”

It is ideas such as these she puts into her SCUM Manifesto, which she later feels is stolen from her by men, just as she blames Andy Warhol for stealing her play, Up Your Ass. Though these fears of theft partly originate in her own paranoia, they can also be seen as representative of a patriarchal society where the ideas of women are devalued or appropriated. The SCUM Manifesto becomes influential in the women’s movement, but Valerie is typically dismissive of this too:

“An army of lobotomized Barbie dolls is marching along Fifth Avenue with their ridiculous posters about abortion and the pill and date rape.”

Valerie’s ideas are not coherent, but she is presented as a chaotic vehicle for change, tragic in her refusal to compromise, or accept any other reality than the one she perceives. Stridsberg has, anyway, pre-empted criticisms of her portrayal of Valerie, with the subject of the novel herself declaring that she doesn’t want “no sentimental young women or sham authors playing at writing a novel about me dying.”

However unpleasant its subject matter at times, The Faculty of Dreams is a novel of great power and force, one in which the reader is immersed in Valerie’s life, her complex character, and her uncertain sanity (“I am the only sane woman here,” she claims). It has been an unexpected highlight of the long list and I fully expect it to be on the shortlist tomorrow.

Celestial Bodies

The Man Booker International Prize long list contained a number of surprises this year, but perhaps the most unexpected inclusion was Jokha Alharthi’s Celestial Bodies (translated by Marilyn Booth). This is partly because its publisher, Sandstone Press, is perhaps the most remote in the UK, based in the small Highland town of Dingwall, and not particularly associated with translated literature (though one of its most successful series is Volker Kutscher’s Babylon Berlin); and partly because Alharthi is from the equally tiny country of Oman, with a population of under five million. The novel is of a type which would normally not attract me – the family saga (the very useful family tree which prefaces the story is a clue) – but is undeniably told with great skill.

As a family saga, Celestial Bodies lacks a single central character. The blurb identifies the three daughters of Azzan and Salima – Mayya, Asam and Khawla – but it is Mayya’s husband, Abdallah, from whose point of view every second chapter is written, presented in a different font to differentiate it from the third person narrative, the chapters of which are also headed by character names, emphasising that this is a novel of many characters. The three daughters all have different characters. Asima is a bookworm – “The thought of the enormous pleasure of books quickened Asima’s pace” we are told – whereas Khawla is portrayed as more concerned with her looks:

“As usual Khawla was scrunched over in front of her mirror.”

Mayya is the quietest of the sisters:

“Mayya considered silence to be the greatest of human acts, the sum of perfection.”

She is the first married, to Abdallah, who falls for her on a visit with his father. Though they are married for many years, he is never certain that his love for her is returned:

“Do you love me, Mayya? I asked her, once everyone else was asleep. She was startled, I could see that. She said nothing and then she laughed.”

Mayya, we learn, was already in love with another man when she married Abdallah, praying, “I only want a tiny glimpse of him, only one more time.” Love is a frequent subject through the four generations which Celestial Bodies covers. Mayya gives up her love for the marriage her parents wish her to make; Asima similarly marries when asked though she has no previous affections:

“Her heart was vacant enough, so why would it not open up for Khalid?”

Khawla, on the other hand, regards herself as engaged to her cousin Nasir as a result of a childhood promise and refuses the match her parents have made for her:

“She would kill herself if her father insisted on this marriage.”

The novel does not seek to set romantic love above other relationships, however: Asima’s husband is loving but when Nasir returns from Canada it is only because he has run out of money and he leaves a Canadian girlfriend behind him. Though he marries Khawla:

“For ten years, Nasir returned to Oman once every two years to see the new child in his house and to leave Khawla pregnant again.”

More generally, the novel does not seek to portray the family, and country’s, adoption of Western values as ‘progress’ in a simple and unquestioning way. Even the abolition of slavery is treated in a subtle manner, causing a rift between Zarifa and her son, Sanjar, who tells her, “We are free – the law says so,” while she remains loyal to her master, Abadallah’s father. Instead we see scenes repeating themselves, as when Abdallah reprimands his son, Salim:

“Seconds after I had hit Salim I was assailed by a terrible and overwhelming sense that I had just become my father’s twin.”

This sense of repetition is emphasised by the novel’s non-chronological structure. This comes both from Abdallah’s chapters which are presented as a jumble of memories while on a plane journey, and from the rest of the novel, which skilfully moves back and forwards in time from chapter to chapter, and within chapters using phrases such as, “Twenty-three years later, when she would smash her daughter’s mobile phone to bits in anger…” and, “How could Mayya have seen on her baby daughter’s brow, the evenings of sleeplessness that would come as she reached her early twenties…”

This structure shows a great deal of craft on Alharthi’s part but, though the presentation is skilful, the author’s intent does not seem to go much beyond presentation. It is a family saga, in other words, as it proposes the telling of the family’s story, and all the associated tales, as an end in itself. This is not so much a criticism, as the root of my dissatisfaction with the genre. On the other hand, I couldn’t be more pleased that such a small press, and such a small country, features on the long list this year.

The Pine Islands

Marion Poschmann’s The Pine Islands is yet another novel about a middle-aged, male lecturer, Gilbert Silvester, entering a mid-life crisis. Believing his wife to be having an affair, he leaves his house for the airport, and from there travels to Japan. In his white hotel room, feeling as if he has fallen into an ice cube advert:

“He stood in the middle of the room for a while with absolutely no idea what he was doing there.”

While it is not quite Dante wakening in a dark wood, there are plenty of forest wanderings to come in a novel where, for all the earnestness of its two main characters, the tone remains comic.

Gilbert is profoundly aware of the mediocrity of his own life, complaining that while friends “less competent” than himself:

“…were settling down in their own homes with their families and routines, he saw himself forced into carrying out idiotic and meagrely remunerated work imposed on him by people he categorically despised.”

We soon discover that his academic subject is beards, but this does not prevent him having absolute faith in himself, with an arrogance that will not be contradicted. His belief that his wife is unfaithful, for example, is entirely the result of a dream, “an unmistakable warning from his unconscious to his naïve, unsuspecting ego.” On the plane to Tokyo:

“…he repeatedly reassured himself that he had not only done everything right, but that his actions had indeed been inevitable, and would carry on being inevitable, not only according to his personal opinion, but to world opinion.”

Gilbert’s arrogance comes in useful when he encounters Yosa Tamagotchi, a young Japanese man who is planning to commit suicide as he fears he will fail upcoming exams: “He was an only child and on the cusp of disappointing [his parents].” When Gilbert realises what Tamagotchi is planning he immediately begins to talk to him:

“Gilbert had read somewhere that that it was beneficial to start a conversation with a suicidal person to distract them from their thoughts.”

Gilbert distracts Tamagotchi to the point that he shares his hotel room with him that night, and they set off the next day to find a more suitable location for Tamagotchi’s suicide “following the papery authority of the suicide handbook.” Gilbert, however, is frequently unsatisfied by the suggested suicide spots, and quick to share this dissatisfaction with Tamagotchi in a forcefully manner:

“It’s too loud here, Gilbert informed Yosa in a dictatorial way.”

In the first half of the novel Poschmann is generally successful in balancing Tamagotchi’s quest for death with the comic tone of the novel. (There is one particularly funny moment when he and Gilbert are waiting for a bus to take them away from a wood where people traditionally kill themselves but it does not stop for them. Tamagotchi explains this is because it is the same driver as the day before: “He recognised us. He mistook us for ghosts.”) This is largely because, like Gilbert, we regard Tamagotchi’s intentions as not entirely serious:

“…this wasn’t a suicide from one’s own free will, from a serene mindset, ultimately it wasn’t an independent decision but a pitiful attempt at manipulation. Juvenile behaviour that made one ridiculous in death.”

This, however, is revealed to be a further example of Gilbert’s over-confidence, linked to his belief that he ‘understands’ Japan, though the depth of his understanding is confused by a single sentence in the opening pages:

“He had always assumed that, like him, everyone knew the Japanese classics off by heart, but standing in front of the shelf with the pocket books, he had to admit that he himself had at most watched only a couple of Japanese films during his lifetime and had never been able to recite so much as a haiku.”

Does he actually go from believing he knows the Japanese classics “off by heart” to realising he has very little knowledge of Japanese culture at all in one moment (further confused by him having watched more than two Japanese films on the plane)? It certainly doesn’t stop him pontificating about Japan throughout, and his relationship with the country is further complicated by his intention to follow the journey of Basho, whom he compares himself to in grandiose fashion:

“His own project of abandonment also entailed making a clean break… he would undertake a pilgrimage, a journey of spiritual cleansing.”

This is all very funny as long as we are meant to regard Gilbert only as a laughable figure, but in the novel’s second half it seems that we are to assume some development of his character, largely based around his failure to understand his wife’s desire to see the leaves change colour in autumn when he based temporarily in North America, a phenomenon he feels “provokes a hysterical euphoria.” In the novel’s final lines he is planning to invite her to Japan as the “leaves are starting to turn.” It doesn’t help that the wife – indeed every character apart from Gilbert – remains two-dimensional.

What begins as an amusing satire of a Western midlife crisis does not have the courage to lampoon Gilbert’s journey to the East. As it is difficult to see what he learns from his time with Tamagotchi, or form Basho, Japan begins to feel like window dressing, and what was breezy and refreshing at first becomes unconvincing and inconclusive. Its presence on the long list makes the absence of any Japanese literature all the more ironic.

The Remainder

The Remainder is the debut novel of Chilean writer Alia Trabucco Zeran, first published in 2014 and translated last year by Sophie Hughes. Hughes adept translation is particularly important as the novel consists of two narratives. The main narrative (that is the longer one, which tells the story) might be described as a road trip, in which the narrator, Iquela, another young woman, Paloma, (who is also Chilean but has spent little time in the country, living instead with her parents in exile in Europe), and Felipe, (who, though not Iquela’s brother, lived with her as a child as if he were) set off for Argentina to recover the body of Paloma’s mother (Paloma was transporting the body to Chile for burial only for the plane to be grounded by an ash cloud). The second narrative, which originates with Felipe, is a much more abstract and intense affair, rendered in one long sentence in each section, and numbered from 11 to 0 as if counting down. Counting is central to these brief interludes as Felipe begins by telling us that:

“Off and on: one week there, the next nowhere to be seen, that’s how my dead began… they were scattered all over Santiago, those Sunday stiffs, weekly or bimonthly corpses which I totted up methodically, and the tally rose like foamy scum…”

The Remainder is a novel which explores Chile relationship with its past, and the dictatorship of General Pinochet in particular. Iquela’s first chapter (we assume) is set in 1988, on the night of the referendum when Pinochet was voted from power. It is here she meets the teenage Paloma for the first time as her parents have returned to Chile from exile to celebrate the result. Iquela is immediately infatuated with the slightly older Paloma:

“She didn’t even look up when I opened the door. Standing stock-still, her eyes boring into her white espadrilles, hands buried inside her faded-jean pockets and a pair of headphones covering her ears – that’s all it took, she had me.”

The infatuation is beautifully handled as Paloma encourages Iquela to smoke and drink while wandering around the house, entirely at home. The evening ends, however, with a fight between their fathers which Iquela doesn’t entirely understand, Paloma’s father calling hers a “fucking snitch.”

The novel then moves forward to Paloma’s arrival in Chile with the intention of burying her mother, presumably twenty to twenty-five years later. Iquela is still haunted by her earlier infatuation though this is tempered with an irritation that her mother expects her to drop everything to help Paloma. We see that Iquela’s relationship with her mother, Consuela, is fractious:

“My routine visits to my mother’s house were always brief, as if we’d just bumped into each other on the corner and I had something terribly important to do a few blocks away.”

Similarly, all the characters are haunted by the past: Santiago is described as “this mortuary city”; Iquela comments that “My mother’s memory functioned like a topography of the dead.” The trip to Argentina is both a way of Iquela resolving her relationship with Paloma, and, symbolically, represents a coming to terms with Chile’s past, the freeing of Iquela’s generation from the experiences of their parents. (The ash cloud which prevents the plane carrying Paloma’s mother’s body landing is also mentioned in the opening chapter: “That night it rained ash. Or perhaps it didn’t. Perhaps the grey is just the backdrop of my memory…”)

Unfortunately, this aspect of the novel did not work for me. While there is some dark humour to be found during the road trip, and we see Iquela and Paloma’s relationship develop, there is little sense that they are wrestling with anything profound. Their parents’ story, more interesting than theirs (which is perhaps part of the problem they face), is never fully revealed, almost as if Zeran is resisting writing a novel of that time. Felipe’s interjections (Felipe’s backstory also remains opaque, though we assume his parents were victims of the Pinochet regime) become increasingly repetitive, giving the impression that the number was decided before the content.

There is enough here, particularly in the opening section of the novel, to suggest Zeran’s talent, but I remain mystified by the excessive praise the novel has received. It will come as no surprise, then, that I find this a strange selection for the International Man Booker Prize, especially given the quality of And Other Stories publications last year, with both The Iliac Crest and Tentacle more deserving of a place on the long list.

At Dusk

Hwang Sok-yong’s At Dusk (translated by Sora Kim-Russell) is a novel which holds a generation to judgement and finds them wanting. As the title suggests, it is a generation, presumably Hwang’s own (he was born in 1943), which is approaching its final moments. The novel itself sees a number of characters die, and in the form of Kim Kiyoung the idea of legacy is tackled directly as his fellow architects arrange a retrospective of his work in the final weeks of his life.

Architecture is the window through which Hwang reviews what his generation have made of South Korea, an area where art and business coincide to literally rebuild the landscape. As one of two narrators, Park Minwoo, explains:

“Everyone thinks it’s good to be an architect, because your building will stand long after your gone, but for all you know, they could be left looking greedy and ugly.”

The same idea is idea is expressed by Kim earlier in conversation with Park:

“Is there really humanity in architecture? If there were you’d have to regret what you did. You and the others at Hyeonsan need to think on your sins.”

For Park the issue becomes personal. Contact from an old friend, a girl he once loved, Cha Soona, brings back memories of his life as a school boy in a slum area. Soona is the only other child attending school; seeing her in the street, he remembers was, like “sighting a single white crane in the middle of a disaster area.” They soon take to meeting at the library and grow close, but Park’s ambition to leave coincides with a sexual assault on Soona which makes her withdraw from him and eventually they lose touch. Park’s relationship with Soona comes to represent his relationship with his past. Where he lived has been entirely rebuilt by architects like himself, but not necessarily for the better:

“The boxy two- and three- storey buildings that occupied downtown from the shopping area all the way to the residential area looked bleaker than ever.”

Park himself has been rebuilt in his search for success, realising that he must flatter the powerful if he is to get ahead:

“All you had to do was listen closely to what the person with power said, and then say the same thing, but using different words… Hiding my true thoughts was second nature to me by then.”

His sense of fairness, which we see in his recollections of his childhood and adolescence, also begins to fade:

“I sympathised with those who were fighting social injustices, but at the same time, by having the fortitude to just buckle down and get through it, I was able to forgive myself for not getting involved.”

Park’s narrative is joined by Soona’s recollections as he is sent extracts from a memoir she has written, combining to give us a truer picture of their past. At the same time there is a second narrative from the point of view of a young playwright, Jung Wohee. Jung struggles to make a living, working at a convenience store overnight to subsidise her writing. She is, in some ways, representative of another generation:

“I met countless people my age who were just like me. The reminded me of the tiny mammals who cower among the beast of prey deep in the jungle and must survive on wits alone.”

One reason Jung is able to fend off despair is the example of her friend Kim Minwoo: “For him, the worse things got, the fiercer his approach to life.” Jung and Kim offer some hope to the reader, though it is clear they have been to a large extent abandoned by Park’s generation. This neglect is exemplified by a story Kim tells Jung of an eviction to make way for demolition and rebuilding where a young man is killed by an excavator. Later in the novel Park remembers how, when an eviction was taking place:

“We always jumped in the car and left in a hurry, right before the demolition crews broke up the protestors and sent in the bulldozers and excavators, as if we couldn’t bear to watch it ourselves.”

The two narratives do, of course, unite, in a way that is both unexpected and satisfying. Hwang does not seek to resolve Park’s crisis of faith, nor reward Jung’s loyalty to her friend, but both characters are subtly changed by the end.

Kim Kiyoung is not regarded by his peers as particularly successful architect, but Park is forced to reassess his legacy:

“But though he had mostly designed smaller buildings in small towns and provincial cities and remote parts of the country, they were novel for being public buildings.”

How we define success, and what we value and reward, is the problem, Hwang suggests, in this concise but powerful examination of where it all went wrong in a country we are frequently asked to emulate.

Jokes for the Gunmen

The title of Mazen Maarouf’s Man Booker International Prize long-listed short story collection (translated by Jonathan Wright), Jokes for the Gunmen, gives a fair indication of its contents as the twelve stories within generally combine a sense of ever-present threat with surreal humour. Maarouf is a Palestinian-Icelandic writer who lived in Beiruit before moving to Iceland, a fact that might explain why so many of the stories adopt a child’s perspective.

This is certainly true of the title story, which is also the collection’s longest at thirty-eight pages (most are much shorter, the shortest being ‘Curtain’ at five pages). The sporadic violence of the setting of many of the stories is immediately identified:

“We could hear gunfire from time to time, but we grew used to it, as one grows used to the honking of passing cars.”

In this atmosphere “power was the most important subject” and, at school, the students boast of “how their father beat them”:

“These stories illustrated the power each father had in his household.”

When the narrator discovers that his own father has been seen being beaten up in the street by the gunmen he sets out to re-establish his father’s power. He attempts to provoke his father with no success, and then begins to injure himself and blame these injuries on his father, but the other pupils are not convinced. Soon the story takes the kind of surreal turn we will come to expect as he concocts a series of schemes to prevent his father being assaulted, such as selling his twin brother’s organs to the gunmen, acquiring a glass eye for his father in the belief that this will frighten the gunmen into leaving his father alone, and hiring bodyguards for his father.

A similar tone is found in ‘Gramophone’, where the father also remains at some distance despite being at the centre of the story his son is telling. Here the father is employed as a ‘gramophone operator’ in a bar:

“He spent hours and hours behind the bar, turning then handle of a Berliner gramophone from 1900 – there was no electricity and the bar was usually lit by candles.”

The father is the lone survivor of the bombing of the bar, but loses both his arms. Later, he requests that the narrator donate one of his arms – “They said on television that it’s medically possible.” The narrator’s reaction to this (“I didn’t feel angry or disappointed. I was just sad”) sums up the tone of much of the collection.

In ‘Matador’ it is an uncle who is the adult male character:

“My uncle died three times in the space of one week.”

On the first occasion he is revived by the narrator punching the soles of his feet – “I got the idea from Rocky in the film.” The narrator is also present on his second resurrection, when he is attempting to dress him for the funeral. These deaths are presented humorously, with the narrator at one point commenting:

“His repeated deaths had made him bad-tempered.”

But the story’s strangeness lies, rather, in the uncle’s obsession with being a matador, which has led him to strangle cows with his bare hands in the local slaughterhouse. It is this, his stifled dream, which eventually kills him.

These stranger elements – as had been said of Latin American magical realism – have likely been lifted from reality, as, for example, the cow which wanders into the bombed cinema where civilians have been sheltering in ‘Cinema’. Maazan perhaps draws attention the danger of this in ‘Biscuits’ where he attempts to convince his mother that a man who they saw crossing a busy motorway was unharmed as he had the power to turn every car he touched to biscuit. The mother is unconvinced:

“The old man was dead and covered in blood. He’d made a desperate attempt to block the motorway, but a car ran him over. I didn’t see any biscuits.”

The story, however, is used to convince the care home that his mother has Alzheimer’s, perhaps warning us not to be distracted by the quirkiness of what has gone before. Interestingly the story forms a bridge between those set in war-torn Beirut and those, like ‘Other People’s Dreams’ and ‘Aquarium’ where the surreal, rather than the atmosphere of violence, dominates.

Overall, Jokes for the Gunmen is an accomplished debut which suggests a writer who is equally adept at observing and imagining. Whether it will make the short-list is difficult to predict as some of the pieces are slight in comparison to others and tonally it does not have an enormous range. Despite this, Maazan is a clearly a writer to watch out for, and hopefully his work will now be experienced by a wider audience.

The Death of Murat Idrissi

The death of Murat Idrissi is central to Tommy Wieringa’s Man Booker International Prize listed novel The Death of Murat Idrissi (translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett), but Murat Idrissi himself is not. Instead Wieringa tells the story of Moroccan immigrants from the point of view of second generation, Dutch passport-holding Ilham. Murat is largely silent, out of sight, and, eventually, nothing but an awkward encumbrance to be disposed of: in other words, a representation of Western attitudes to those who attempt to cross from Africa to Europe.

Ilham, and her friend Thouraya, agree to smuggle Murat from Morocco to Spain in the boot of their rented car. They are pressured into doing this by their new friend, Saleh, who claims cars are never checked, by the poverty of Murat’s family, and by Murat’s mother, who claims she will kill herself if they do not take him. They are also offered money.

Ilham’s trip to Morocco appears ill-fated from the start, when a minor car accident deprives them of much of their money. This is one reason they befriend Saleh, who, like them, benefits from a European passport, another being the protection afforded by a male escort as “women in Morocco rarely travel alone”:

“He kept the boys at bay. At bakers’ stands in the Casbah they had seen hornets teaming over the sugar-coated croissant; that’s how it was with the boys, too.”

Though Alham’s parents are Moroccan, she feels alienated from the country:

“She couldn’t stand the poverty, the heat, and the dust. It exhausted her. There was compassion in her, but beneath the surface also the conviction that poor people had only themselves to blame for living like this.”

This attitude she applies to her own father, comparing him to his brother:

“Life beat them down. Her uncle rose to his feet again, her father remained lying; he was the weaker of the two.”

Looking out at the Moroccan landscape she thinks, “It’s the world of her mother, a world she can’t accept.” However, she is equally aware that neither is she regarded as Dutch, particularly after 9/11:

“Then two planes drilled themselves into the heart of the Western world… She watched as the little opportunity, the crack that had posed a possibility, sealed over.”

Later she tells us that the only Dutch people she sees are at the call centre where she works, and when the two women are back in Europe it is a group of men of North African extraction which Thouraya seeks to attach herself to. Alham recognises in one the determination to assimilate:

“Suddenly she got it. His mimicry. The hard work – how he had become a perfectly assimilated migrant’s son. He would beat them at their own game and be Dutcher than the Dutch.”

In this way Wieringa, in a slim novel, covers a range of immigrant experience, highlighting that immigrants are not one homogenous group, or all on the same ‘side’. It’s a novel remarkably free of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ characters, with all displaying elements of selfishness, from Saleh’s failure to check on Murat during the ferry crossing, to Thouraya’s sexual needs.

This is the first time I have read Wieringa and he reminded me a little of Peter Stamm, another writer where ordinary, almost banal characters, have their lives interrupted by something extraordinary. As Alham asks at one point:

“Could this really be them, whose lives have turned into a nightmare at the snap of a finger?”

Murat’s fate, as revealed in the title, provides the kind of tension one would normally associate with a thriller, but Wieringa is not interested in melodrama. Alhama’s emotions tend to be fleeting and superficial; nothing, apparently, touches her deeply.

The Death of Murat Idrissi is a sly, subtle – one might even say cagey – novel. A simple story which refuses to simplify the issues it raises, it’s difficult not to read it as a commentary on Western indifference disguised in such a way as to make blaming others (as its characters frequently do) the easiest way out.

Man Booker International Prize 2019

Today saw the announcement of the long list of the Man Booker International Prize. It contains eight women and five men, and (although nationality can be slightly more contentious), six European writers, three from South America, two books originally written in Arabic, and one each from South Korea and China.

Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi (Oman), translated from Arabic by Marilyn Booth (Sandstone Press)

Love in the New Millennium by Can Xue (China), translated by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen (Yale University Press)

The Years by Annie Ernaux (France), translated by Alison Strayer (Fitzcarraldo Editions)

At Dusk by Hwang Sok-yong (South Korea), translated by Sora Kim-Russell (Scribe)

Jokes for the Gunmen by Mazen Maarouf (Iceland and Palestine), translated from Arabic by Jonathan Wright (Granta)

Four Soldiers by Hubert Mingarelli (France), translated from French by Sam Taylor (Granta)

The Pine Islands by Marion Poschmann (Germany), translated by Jen Calleja (Serpent’s Tail)

Mouthful of Birds by Samanta Schweblin (Argentina and Italy), translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell (Oneworld)

The Faculty of Dreams by Sara Stridsberg (Sweden), translated by Deborah Bragan-Turner (Quercus)

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk (Poland), translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Fitzcarraldo Editions)

The Shape of the Ruins by Juan Gabriel Vásquez (Colombia), translated from Spanish by Anne McLean (MacLehose Press)

The Death of Murat Idrissi by Tommy Wieringa (Netherlands), translated by Sam Garrett (Scribe)

The Remainder by Alia Trabucco Zerán (Chile and Italy), translated from Spanish by Sophie Hughes (And Other Stories)

Almost all are published by small presses, with two for Fitzcarraldo, Scribe and Granta, and one for Sandstone Press based in Dingwall, a small town in the Highlands with a population of under six thousand.

It would be fair to say that the list surprised even the most battle-hardened observers of translated fiction prizes, including, as it does, four English language debuts and two other books which mark the author’s second appearance in the language, while eschewing established names such as Haruki Murakami, Javier Marias, Sjon, Matthias Enard, Karl Ove Kanuasgaard, Dag Solstad and Elias Khoury. Also missing are the much fancied Convenience Store Woman (Japan is, in fact, unrepresented, with Yoko Tawada’s The Last Children of Tokyo another notable absentee), and any of the eligible Charco Press titles, with Resistance and Fish Soup in particular having been regarded by many as strong possibilities. Peirene Press, once a regular competitor for the preceding Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, is missing for the third year in a row.

On initial inspection, the prize seems very open this year, though if past record (including the IFFP) is an indication of future potential, Juan Gabriel Vasquez is appearing for the fourth time, having featured for The Informers in 2009, The Secret History of Costagauna in 2011, and The Sound of Things Falling in 2014. Other returning authors are Can Xue (The Last Lover 2015), Samanta Schweblin (Fever Dream 2017) and last year’s winner Olga Tokaczuk. However, Xue is likely too impenetrable for a Prize which requires a certain amount of popular appeal, a collection of short stories has only won once, and no-one has won the prize twice. Despite a certain amount of controversy over its inclusion (isn’t it non-fiction?), and having read only five of the books so far, The Years, which has all the hallmarks of a major work, might just be the one to watch.

Four Soldiers

Hubert Mingarelli’s first appearance in English was his 2012 novel, A Meal in Winter, translated by Sam Taylor, which was long-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2014. Four Soldiers is an earlier novel which won the Prix Medici in 2003 and is now also translated by Taylor. In many ways it is a remarkably similar book. Anyone who has read A Meal in Winter will recall it is about three German soldiers, a Jew and a Polish soldier (in other words, four soldiers) inhabiting an abandoned cottage, temporarily isolated from the war. In Four Soldiers the war and the nationality of the soldiers are different – it is 1919, the Russian Civil War, and the soldiers are Russian – but the complex, even delicate, web of relationships Mingarelli weaves is just as affecting.

In the novel’s opening pages we learn how the four soldiers come to be together. First the narrator meets Pavel and we see the bond they share when an officer shoots a mule in the head. The soldier who was leading the mule takes out his knife and the two comrades decide to make themselves scarce, the first of many scenes in which they will attempt to temporarily remove themselves from the war:

“So Pavel and I both ran towards the ditch, hurtling down into it and coming out the other side, and then into a field to get away from the road.”

“We’ll join them on the road tomorrow,” Pavel suggests, “no one will notice we were ever gone.” Next they are joined by an Uzbek, Kyabine:

“He was built like a lumberjack and sometimes he seemed a bit slow.”

Kyabine’s strength is frequently put to good use, for example when he carries the roll of polythene they find in an abandoned factory, or when they come to build a hut to shelter in throughout the winter:

“While the three of us paused for breath, Kyabine valiantly kept going.”

The fourth soldier, Sifra, is invited to build the hut with them:

“He was very young and a good shot, and he owned cavalry boots. We’d never heard of him having any trouble with anyone about anything.”

The comradeship of the four soldiers is what makes the hardships of the winter bearable: as the narrator thinks to himself when the hut is completed, “That’s it, I’m not alone in the world anymore.” They are united not only by their roles (if Kyabine is the strong one, Pavel is the clever one, designing the hut so that they stay warm all winter) but by the routines of their friendships. Some are humorous, such as Kyabine begging for tobacco when he has gambled away his own; others reflect both the stress the soldiers are under and the depth of the affection for each other, such as when Pavel wakes the narrator every night after a nightmare (in which Sifra cuts his throat) and they go outside together until Pavel is calm again. Another routine which unites them is a watch which they took from the body of a cavalry officer which has a picture of a woman inside. They take turns to sleep with the watch, neither entirely believing nor disbelieving the idea that it brings them luck.

Just as in A Meal in Winter, a fifth figure is introduced, an new recruit, Kouzma Evdokim, whom the soldiers call the Evdokim kid. That he is not initially trusted is seen when the soldiers at first stop going to the pond, an idyllic location which only the four of them know about:

“Pavel said it was risky, showing it to the kid, because Sergeant Ermakov might change his mind and put him in a different tent.”

The kid carries a notebook with him and soon the other soldiers are making humorous suggestions of what he should write down (“You should write that Kyobine is a cheat”). They begin to see him as an observer, the narrator wondering at one point:

“Seriously, what could the Evdokim kid be thinking about all of this?”

When Sifra puts his rifle back together without looking, it is the kid’s reaction which interests the other soldiers:

“Kyabine removed his hands from Sifra’s eyes and he looked at the astonished expression on the Evdokim kid’s face.”

The kid’s notebook becomes steadily more important to the soldiers as they recognise he is creating the only record of their time together, and in this we see a defence of writing itself. This particularly applies when they discover they are, once again, going to move on and return to the fighting:

“…say that we’re all sad because we had some good moments here, some really great moments, and we know that we won’t have any more, and where we’re going there won’t be any good moments, because all that is behind us now. You understand? That’s what you should write.”

If you are assuming that the book we are reading transpires to be the kid’s work, however, nothing could be further from the truth. Like A Meal in Winter, Four Soldiers is a short novel, written in a deceptively simple style, but the story it tells is undeniably powerful.

Mouthful of Birds

Samanta Schweblin’s debut novel, Fever Dream, burned with nightmarish intensity, and so it’s no surprise to discover that many of the short stories collected in Mouthful of Birds similarly exploit our darkest fears. More than one explores the same parental anxiety, a fear that encapsulates both the terror of a child’s death and the haunting doubt of their otherness. In ‘Butterflies’, one of the shortest stories, a father waiting for his daughter at the end of the school day catches a butterfly:

“A brownish butterfly lands on Calderon’s arm and he quickly traps it. The creature struggles to get away, but he presses its wings together and holds it by the ends.”

When the school doors open, instead of children, “hundreds of butterflies of every colour and size rush out towards the waiting parents.”

“Calderon…stands motionless. He can’t bring himself to life his foot from the one he has killed. He is, perhaps, afraid of recognising his girl’s colours in its dead wings.”

In one surreal moment Schweblin reveals the damage parents fear they might accidentally inflict. In ‘Underground’ Schweblin taps into the fear of disappearance, and in the title story she examines the lengths to which the parent-child bond will stretch. The father who narrates the story is quickly aware something is not right the moment his daughter, Sara, greets him, “Hi, Dad” –

“Although my little girl really was a sweetheart, two word were all it took for me to realise that something was really off about the kid…”

An empty bird cage provides the first clue. His ex-wife, Silvia, can no longer cope, and he is, understandably, appalled:

“She eats birds! Have you taken her to the doctor? What in the hell does she do with the bones?”

He takes Sara to live with him, her mother providing a daily supply of birds – but what will he do when Silvia fails to turn up and cannot be contacted? The story demonstrates the way in which parents adapt to their children (though we may think it’s the other way round), and, in the horror of Sara’s blood-stained mouth, highlights the fear of their children’s loss of innocence.

Though children only appear in a few of the stories, violence and death are common to many of them. In ‘The Test’ the narrator must beat a dog to death in order to prove himself to local criminal gang:

“Beating a dog to death in the Buenos Aires port is the test they use to see if you’re capable of doing something worse.”

Though he successfully carries out this task, he discovers the world is more dog eat dog than he originally suspected. In two of the stories violence is linked to art. ‘Heads Against Concrete’ features a painter who turns an act of childhood violence into an artistic obsession bringing him many commissions:

“They pay me whatever I ask. Later I see the painting hung in their enormous, empty living rooms, and I think that those guys deserve to see themselves good and smashed on the ground by my hand, and they seem very much to agree when they stand in front of the paintings.”

When he is asked by a Korean dentist to decorate his waiting room, the violence suddenly spills from the painting. In ‘The Heavy Suitcase of Benavides’ we see the same process in reverse as a murdered body is put on display as if it is a work of art. Schweblin seems to be suggesting care should be taken when we glorify harm as an art form.

Though these themes resurface, the collection as a whole demonstrates Schweblin’s versatility. She can work within the limits of a few pages, as in ‘The Digger’ (with its wonderfully unsettling conclusion, “You can’t dig…the hole is yours”), and she can develop character over the longer form. She is adept at the surreal, as a story like ‘The Merman’ makes clear, where the narrator falls for the titular sea creature:

“I kiss him, and I feel the cold of his mouth awaken every cell in my body, like a cool drink in the middle of summer.”

Despite its mythological premise, the story exemplifies the compulsion of lust. She can also write entirely naturalistically, as in ‘Santa Claus Sleeps at our House’, a story which contains the pathos one might expect from the title, though in an unexpected way. Her particular talent, though, is to transform the ordinary into something menacing, even terrifying, which is both explicable and incomprehensible at the same time. We see this to greatest effect in stories like ‘On the Steppe’ and ‘Toward Happy Civilisation’. The latter begins with a train station which will not sell tickets and where trains will, therefore, never stop, and heads full steam towards a conclusion of which Kafka would be proud, proving, as so many of these stories do, that Fever Dream was only the first sight of an extraordinary writer.