A House in Norway

Vigdis Hjorth has twice been longlisted for the International Booker Prize – for Will and Testament in 2019 and Is Mother Dead? in 2023 – but her first novel to be translated into English, by her regular translator Charlotte Barslund, was A House in Norway, written between Long Live the Post Horn! (2012) and Will and Testament (2016). In common with her other novels, we are quickly immersed in the thoughts of its central character, Alma, a textile artist of irregular income who lives alone (her two adult children having moved away). Though Alma’s perspective is all we are offered, Hjorth chooses to write in the third person, retaining a certain amount of ironic detachment from her character, and also allowing an almost monomaniac focus on one aspect of her life, an annexe to her house with a separate entrance which she rents out to enhance her income:

“It was a place for someone who doesn’t mind much how they live, who just needs a bed and temporary lodgings.”

On the one hand, renting out the apartment is something Alma could do without (“she wanted to be left in peace to concentrate on her own priorities”) but on the other she relies on the income it provides as her own work, making tapestries and banners, is unpredictable:

“When it was empty she felt as if she were losing money every day and it made her twitchy.”

We get an early indication of the problems she faces when a Finnish couple simply disappear, only returning to collect their belongings when Alma is on holiday. Her next tenants are a Polish couple who arrive when the woman is pregnant and soon have a baby daughter. She foregoes the deposit when the man offers to tile the bathroom, and later he also fixes the porch. Though she is grateful, and takes over two bottles so brandy, Alma is determined to keep her distance:

“We mustn’t get any more familiar than this, Alma thought.”

Though she spends her time observing the Poles, she rarely interacts with them. In her mind, however, she regards the couple as the cause of this:

“They were keeping all things Norwegian out, Alma thought, while they earned their money. Perhaps they spoke ill of and mocked all things Norwegian as filtered through their own Polishness.”

Shortly after this both husband and wife leave, but, unlike the Finnish couple, they are not absconding together – the husband (Alan – Alma does not generally use their names) has been abusing his wife, Slawomira. Alan does not return, but Slawomira does, anxious about whether Alma will continue to let her stay. Throughout, Alma is noticeably unsympathetic, asking, when the police are there, “but what about me, where does that leave me?” Later, when an interpreter asks about Slawomira staying in the apartment, Alma replies “that she wouldn’t throw her out as long as she got her rent.” The meeting itself “wasn’t a pleasant experience…”

“…she had said her piece and had nothing more to offer, why was she still sitting there, she had better things to do.”

At the centre of the novel lie questions about society and the relationship between those that live near each other. Making a tapestry for her old high school, Alma is reminded of a text she read during her formative years which has stuck with her, about the difference between societies that are “small, close-knit and local, and the distant and loosely connected.” Of the latter she says:

“…they share few values with others and regard their fellow human beings as so remote that the rules about doing unto others couldn’t possibly apply to them.”

Yet rather than applying this to herself, with her isolated life and her tendency to never think of others (her children and her boyfriend feature in the novel but at a distance), she ironically applies it to Slawomira, specifically because she sees other Poles helping her:

“…she was isolated from all things Norwegian, with only loose ties to Norway because to her Norwegians were like ships passing in the night…”

Eventually there is a confrontation of a kind between Alma and Slawomira and perhaps even a level of understand on the part of Alma. By this point, Hjorth has demonstrated the hypocrisy that is commonly applied to immigrants, Alma’s house standing in for Norway itself. A House in Norway is a restrained but pointed critique of the selfish and self-absorbed attitude towards immigration prevalent across much of Europe today.

The Mark

The Mark, the award-winning debut novel of Icelandic writer Frida Isberg, now translated into English by Larissa Kyzer, offers the reader a glimpse of one possible future, though whether its proposal is utopian or dystopian will differ from reader to reader just as it does from character to character. In it, psychologists have developed an empathy test which sets a minimum standard and is designed to highlight those who are more likely to hurt others and commit crimes. If you pass the test, you are ‘marked’, a description that can apply to an individual or an entire neighbourhood. If you fail the test, you will be supported with therapy, but a central question of the novel is whether such failure will automatically make you a second-class citizen. The novel’s success lies largely in Isberg’s approach, focussing her narrative on the lives of four individuals in alternating chapters as a referendum on whether to make the test compulsory approaches.

Oli is the most directly involved in the referendum as spokesperson for PSYCH, the Icelandic Psychological association, who are campaigning for a Yes vote. Oli’s belief in the benefits of a psychological approach is rooted in his own life:

“Oli was allocated a weekly appointment with a psychologist on Tuesdays between French and biology and it was during these sessions that he learned to identify the feeling of turmoil he sometimes felt.”

Alongside the stress of running the campaign, Oli has personal problems to face as his wife, Solveig, also a psychologist, is against the text becoming mandatory, though we quickly sense that this is not the only issue in his marriage. As the vote nears, he is facing death threats and comes home one night to find his tyres slashed. The vandal is another of Isberg’s main characters, Tristan, a young man who feels threatened by the test having watched his older brother fail and then become addicted to the drug given to him in order to improve his empathy. Tristan drops out of school and works at the harbour, intending to save enough money for a place of his own which he is determined to buy before the vote:

“…all the guys on YouTube started talking about how the only way to be safe, long-term, was to buy your own apartment because otherwise you’d just end up on the street when the powers that be made the mark a requirement…”

Vetur has the opposite problem – she lives in fear of an ex-boyfriend, Daniel, and wishes that the building she lived in was marked but, as long as one resident opposes this, it cannot go ahead. As a teacher, we see the implementation of the test (called a ‘sensitivity assessment’ to make it seem less threatening) in schools though her eyes. She worries not only about the institutional response to those who do not pass, but also how it will affect behaviour on an individual level:

“What if I accidentally discriminate against them or am suddenly afraid of them without meaning to be?”

The final character of the four is Eyja, recently divorced, whose company has decided to become marked – that is, for all its staff to sit and pass the test. She sees her ‘failure’, however, as an affirmation of who she is:

“…these are precisely her strengths, no matter what society says. They are what give her an edge over others.”

Through these four characters, Isberg explores her theoretical future in a very practical manner. All four remain sympathetic, but all four have important weaknesses which are revealed as the novel progresses: Oli’s ironic lack of self-awareness; Tristan’s irrational fears and anger; Ventur’s inability to overcome the past; and Eyja’s attempts to recreate her past to suit her own feelings of victimhood. Isberg also includes some small but significant indications of her future setting such as the AI ‘Zoé’ and the ability of characters to say ‘nine, nine, nine’ to get immediate police help. but at no point does the speculative nature of the novel overwhelm the narrative or the characters.

Translator Larissa Kyzer is brave enough to retain elements of Icelandic where, for example, the word itself is key to the point being made:

“…we’re a society, a samfélag. Sam-, as in co-, as in together. Félag, as in association, fellowship, club union.”

Other elements are included as verbal punctuation, such as “já, já”. The only thing missing is a translator’s afterword which would certainly have been interesting.

The Mark is one of the most intriguing of recent dystopias, perhaps because it’s future is so plausible, gentle even, and its characters so engaging. Rather than simply predict disaster, it offers us a future that is both progressive and restrictive. In the end it refuses to become polemical – read it and make up your own mind.

Money to Burn

Remarkably, Solvej Balle’s planned heptalogy On the Calculation of Volume is not the only seven volume series begun by a Danish author in 2020 and published in English this year. Asta Olivia Nordenhof has also seen the first novel in her Scandinavian Star series (named after a passenger ferry which caught fire in 1990 killing 159 people on board) translated by Caroline Waight. Whereas there is something playful in Balle’s premise which traps her central character, Tara, in the 18^th of November unable to move to the next day, there is little in the way of lightness in Money to Burn. Centred on a couple, Maggie and Kurt, the novel reveals their dysfunctional relationship and the damaged backgrounds which have brought them there.

The reader is introduced to Kurt and Maggie separately in the first two chapters of the novel. They have been together for years and their daughter, Sofie, is an adult who no longer lives with them. Both miss her: Kurt remembers wondering when she would leave “but now that she finally has, he doesn’t know what life is any more.” Maggie reflects it was easier when Sofie was younger and she “had her hands full, and passed out the minute her head hit the pillow.” Sofie’s absence highlights how uncomfortable they feel with each other:

“Yesterday. against his usual routine, he decided to spend the evening at home with Maggie. It was obvious she wasn’t happy about it. She sat very stiffly on the sofa, darting him the occasional sidelong glance, the way a heron does, without moving another muscle of her body.”

The narrative then turns to Maggie’s youth. She leaves her home as soon as she is able – when she visits a pen pal she doesn’t know how or behave – “How is Maggie supposed to know what a family is like?” She leaves for Rome, relying on her ability to pick up men to live:

“…a beautiful woman can always find money and food if she’s willing to do what it takes.”

Her experience with men is not positive, though her awareness of this is partial:

“Maggie was fourteen the first time she was raped. But raped is my word, not hers.”

She is raped again at nineteen – “most of the time, she managed not to think about it.” Instead, she embraces promiscuity:

“By the time a few years had gone by, she’d had sex with so many men that she often passed them on the street without being aware that they had recognised her.”

When Maggie meets Kurt, he is married but she regards this as an “abstraction”, a “minor inconvenience”. Soon they are together, but Kurt has a temper, pushing her out of bed when she leaves a party earlier than he wants, spitting on her when she talks about sleeping with someone before she met him. However, Nordenhof is careful to have already presented a different Kurt beforehand, the one who struggles to come to terms with Maggie’s illness – even Maggie senses “her death will be near impossible for him to survive.” Rather than present his character simply for condemnation she more subtly presents the couple as damaged by their past but still able to experience moments of tenderness (we already know that Kurt finds peace (“solemnity”) in the stable with the old horse he has rescued). We also see his generous attitude towards the fact that Sofie has a girlfriend: “A smile that swells.” Kurt’s earlier life is revealed towards the end of the novel, and it is no easier than Maggie’s. Their characters are saved by the fact that they do feel an undeniable love for each other at points in the story:

“I did love Kurt. I loved him boundlessly. I thought he was the only one who truly understood me.”

Despite the irony inherent in the way the story is sequenced, Maggie’s declaration rings true and provokes the reader to question how love might be defined for these characters. The narrative voice is also vital in encouraging the reader to look beyond the facts of the story. The novel begins with a preface which suggests the author has dreamt the characters and setting before finding them in reality. The narrative voice will, at times, converse with the characters: “Are you awake, Maggie?” it asks. And also:

“I want to be happy in the first page of this chapter, Maggie says.”

Both the structure and voice give the narrative a certain objectivity and authority, especially important in dealing with the centre piece of the novel, the fire on the Scandinavian Star, linked to Kurt when he invests the money he has made with a company who become involved with the vessel. The fire was blamed on a known arsonist who died on board but financial irregularities in the companies that bought and sold the ferry might suggest otherwise. This story is at the heart of the series which is described as a critique of capitalism:

“Capitalism is a massacre.”

The success or otherwise of this project cannot be judged in one volume, but there is enough here to say that Nordenhof ’s journey will be well worth following.

The Accidentals

Many of the eight stories in Guadalupe Nettel’s collection The Accidentals (now translated by Rosalind Harvey) revolve around family life. In the opening story, ‘Imprinting’, the narrator discovers her uncle Frank in hospital when she goes there with a friend, Veronica, who is visiting her mother:

“He was the exiled relative of my family, so to speak, a man nobody mentioned out loud, never mind in front of my mum.”

She decides to visit him without telling her mother and finds herself drawn to him by a shared passion for literature and the discovery of a version of her family she feels has been hidden from her. She confesses herself flattered by his assertion, “You’re not like the others. I could see that even when you were little.” It is Veronica who eventually informs her family who turn up at the hospital, a single overheard comment (“Twenty years, and when you find her, you try to do the dame thing to her”) enough to suggest why Frank has been cut out of their lives.

Love and danger are the two key ingredients of most of the families in the collection. In ‘The Fellowship of Orphans’, the narrator, an orphan, spots a man, Manu, he has seen on a ‘missing’ poster sitting in a café. He phones the number on the poster and Manu’s mother asks the narrator if he is sure – “in the last week more than ten people have rung me”. He sends her a photograph and follows Manu to a bench in a park, only to witness the arrival of an ambulance from which two nurses come to collect him:

“I saw how the men took hold of Manu as his eyes grew clouded with worry once more. I said to myself that, although he had a mother, his expression was exactly the same as that of all the orphans.”

In seeking to return Manu home, the narrator senses he has placed further away from happiness.

‘Playing with Fire’ is a more overtly family story as a couple take their two sons for break in the countryside. Unfortunately, one of the sons, Bruno, does not want to be there and eventually the father loses patience with him and hits him. Just moments before the narrators is “certain my husband would never dare do anything of the sort” and the story is one in which all of the characters change or are seen differently. Another family features in ‘A Forest Under the Earth’ which highlights Nettel’s use of ambiguous and complex symbols, in this case a monkey-puzzle tree:

“Whenever I felt unhappy, I would hide up in its highest branches and there I would find consolation.”

The tree, however, begins to change: first the birds leave it and then the leaves turn “a dull, indistinct brownish colour…”

“The trunk, once robust, had acquired a fragile, brittle appearance.”

The story charts the family’s reaction to the tree’s deterioration, from barbecuing under it to prove to their neighbours it is safe, to moving out of the part of the house it overlooks. For the narrator, the tree comes to resemble his life, hollow but still rooted to the same place.

Two stories which particularly stand out concern alternative lives. In ‘The Pink Door’ the narrator’s wife suspects the door of the title houses a brothel and warns her husband, “Don’t even think about showing your face here!” Intrigued, he does return but when he excuses himself by saying he must get back as his wife is baking a birthday cake for his daughter he is offered a sweet which will “sweeten your way back home.” When he returns, he discovers that his daughter’s birthday is no longer that month. Two more visits result in even greater changes in a ‘Monkey’s Paw’ type exploration of where our wishes get us. In ‘Life Elsewhere’ a building also has life-changing ramifications, though these are very much in the mind of the narrator, an out-of-work actor, who discovers a fellow drama student, now successful, rents the flat he and his wife just missed out on, living (as he sees it) the life he might have had.

Nettel has described the short story as a snapshot, and the writing process akin to cropping the frame. This is visible in the economy of her work which, in a few pages, offers the reader unexpectedly revealing compositions which shine a light on the inner lives of her characters.

Abahn Sabana David

Abahn Sabana David is a 1970 novel by Marguerite Duras (though the translation, by Kazim Ali, is from 2016), its title originating from the three (or four) characters who spend the night together waiting for the arrival of Gringo who (in his absence) is portrayed as a powerful man not averse to using violence in the town of Staadt (‘stadt’ is, of course, German for city). Sabana and David arrive at the house of Abahn with instructions to watch Abahn until morning when Gringo will arrive:

“Gringo made a deal with the merchants. They told him, ‘If you let us sell to the Greeks then we’ll give you Abahn the Jew.’ Gringo agreed. The police sleep tonight. The town is Gringo’s.”

They describe themselves as being from “Gringo’s Party”. David carries a gun, its use threatened throughout the novel: according to Sabana, Abahn will “be dead at daybreak.” Just as they settle down to wait, another man appears, also called Abahn, and also a Jew:

“I was passing by. I saw someone crying. I came.”

Sabana and the second Abahn discuss the fate of the original Abahn, now referred to as “the Jew”. The geographical location of the novel is deliberately vague – there are references to the “Nazi gas chambers” (“There aren’t any gas chambers anymore”) but other remarks might make us think of Soviet Russia:

“No, here you get the labour camp or a quick death.”

Outside the house we hear the howling of dogs and, later, shots. (Dogs are a recurring element, from the insult “Jew-dog” to David’s desire to have the Jew’s dogs when he is dead). There are numerous references to a field, the “field of death”, where we assume previous corpses have been buried, as well as a forest. The character’s names seem deliberately wide-ranging: Abahn is Arabic, Sabana Spanish, and David Hebrew. We learn little about their backgrounds. David, we are told, is a stonemason and married to a woman named Jeanne who also belongs to Gringo’s Party. Sabana, who is older, lives with them. Of the reason for the Jew’s death, we are told only: “He was in the Party and he betrayed it.” But loyalties are fragile – Jeanne (Sabana tells the Jew) betrays Gringo by changing the words he asks her to write down (“Gringo told her to write down ‘criminal lies’ but she wrote down ‘criminal liberties’”):

“And one day they will kill her like they will kill you.”

The intensely suspicious atmosphere may well originate in Duras’ experience in the French resistance, during which time she joined the communist party. The novel certainly conveys a twisting web of loyalties and trust. In this is it aided by its pared back style, largely consisting of dialogue with description in short sentences, not unlike stage directions, used to set the scene. Duras was, of course, alternating between fiction and screenwriting at the time and there is little to differentiate the novel from a script apart from the layout.

More problematic is the novel’s use of Jewishness. It goes beyond antisemitic persecution to represent something wider, a more general tendency towards murder and victimisation which may (given when the novel was written) be equally linked to the Soviet Union and the invasion of Prague in 1968. Abahn is “the Jew” and a “Jew-dog” but the novel is not specifically about the treatment of Jews. In this way, Duras allows for a wider range of interpretations but risks diluting the complexity of the novel and the issues it tackles. 

Having said that, the novel’s power lies in its oblique intensity. The tangled conversations do eventually build to a climax and the ending is not what the reader might expect. While Abahn Sabana David is a particular kind of novel, one that has more in common with Beckett’s plays than most fiction, it draws the reader in to its claustrophobic environs and questions the sides we take, or even whether taking sides is possible.

The Vice-Consul

Marguerite Duras’ The Vice-Consul was originally published in 1965 and quickly translated into English by Eileen Ellenbogen (1968). In the novel the lives of characters in various states of desperation coincide, an atmosphere intensified by the oppressive heat of the Indian setting. The Vice-Consul of Lahore is in Calcutta awaiting judgment after an act of violence that is at first kept from the reader. There he falls in love for the first time in his life with the wife of the French ambassador, Anne-Marie Stretter. His story is juxtaposed with that of a nameless beggar woman who is thrown out of her home when she falls pregnant, later gives the baby away, and now lives among the lepers of the city.

It is with the beggar that the novel begins, driven out of her home by her mother. Her wanderings at first seem to have direction, at least in her mind, but increasingly become aimless. When the baby is born a white woman takes her in and she immediately escapes, leaving the baby behind:

“The baby has been given. It has been received. It is done.”

The Biblical phraseology of her story is presented as the work of Peter Morgan (“She walks on, writes Peter Morgan”) rather than Duras herself. Morgan is a friend of Anne-Marie and we will later discover she has helped him with the story of the beggar woman, based on a woman who lives among the lepers of Calcutta. Distancing is function of Duras’ writing but here this further barrier absolves her of the difficulty of a white writer telling the story of an Asian woman. The story itself, for all its detail, takes on the aspect of a fable, and the character of the woman (and particularly a song she sings) could be said to haunt the white characters. (For example, when they go to the Prince of Wales Hotel, she follows them). Morgan represents a European view of India:

“Peter Morgan is young. He wants to shoulder the misery of Calcutta. He wants to plunge into its depths. He wants to do it now, to get it over with, so that wisdom may start to grow out of bitter experience.”

He sees India as a challenge but one from which he hopes to benefit; other characters admit the test, one which perhaps the Vice-Consul has failed. When we first meet the Vice-Consul, we are quickly introduced to the idea that his presence is awkward – Charles Rossett, new to India, “comes upon him so suddenly that, this time, he cannot avoid an encounter.” When he discovers that the Vice-Consul has been invited to a reception at the Embassy he is “scarcely able to conceal his astonishment.” The Ambassador tells Charles he expected the Vice-Consul to offer his resignation, but weeks have now passed since his arrival in Calcutta.

The reception at the Embassy takes up the central section of the novel. Much is made not only of the Vice-Consul’s presence but also whether Anne-Marie will dance with him as she traditionally does with all her male guests. Duras largely uses dialogue at this point, from the general “People are saying…” to the conversations taking place on the dance floor. It become increasingly clear that the Vice-Consul sees this as his opportunity to get close to Anne-Marie, both physically (by dancing with her) and emotionally:

“The look in the Vice-Consul’s eyes is painful to see. It is as though he were waiting for someone to show him kindness, even perhaps love.”

Much of the novel’s success revolves around the ambiguity of the Vice-Consul’s character. As readers, should we sympathise with the conformist character of Charles who seems placed to be the viewpoint we can identify with? Or, perhaps, the fear society feels at the Vice-Consul is a result of his sincerity? Anne-Marie will herself admit:

“…it’s hard for everyone at the beginning in Calcutta. I myself went through a period of intense depression.”

(Ther are rumours she attempted suicide). It is speculated that it was the suffering he saw that drove the Vice-Consul to act as he did in Lahore, and it is perhaps the sincerity of his love that means Anne-Marie must refuse him (as she takes a new lover every year). “He’s here, and he must live as best he can,” she tells her friends, admitting that only by adopting an emotionally distanced, cynical approach to life can she survive:

“I can only be the person I am here with you by… frittering away my time like this… don’t you see?”

The novel, therefore, can be read as a display of colonial attitudes, something Duras understood well, and something even the Vice-Consul finally accepts. It is another of Duras’ miniature masterpieces, now sadly out of print.

Requiem

Requiem by Shizuko Go won the Akutagawa Prize in 1972 and was translated into English by Geraldine Harcourt in 1983. It was the author’s first novel, based on her own experiences during the Second World War when she worked in a factory instead of going to school and suffered from tuberculosis which would eventually lead to her losing a lung. The novel opens at a point where Setsuko, who has lost her mother, father and brother, as well as her best friend Naomi, has given up on life even though the war has recently ended.  One of her few remaining possession (her home has also been destroyed) is a grey notebook which contains letters from her friend Naomi:

“…she didn’t want to let go of the small notebook she held tightly in her left hand – not even for a second. Setsuko knew she was going to die. She wanted to die hugging the notebook to her breast.”

The novel incorporates many of these letters as it returns to the days when Setsuko and Naomi were still at school, recounting Setsuko’s experience of the war years with occasional reminders of her hopeless present. The two girls are quite different – Setsuko is a model student, but Naomi comes from a non-conformist family which disagrees with Japan’s militancy. Her father is in prison and other pupils in the school object to her attendance (“your individualism is unpatriotic!”) but, when Naomi strikes another girl, Setsuko supports her:

“…if the headmaster had seen fit to admit Naomi in full knowledge of her background, then it wasn’t the pupils place to criticize.”

Though Setsuko is older, they become friends – Naomi looks up to Setsuko and attempts to emulate her:

“I think I’ve changed a great deal since we became friends. I no longer quarrel with all comers. In fact I smile at everyone. … I tell myself that Setsuko would be upset if I was quarrelsome, and so I put up with the slights and forget them as quickly as I can.”

The girls exchange letters as, by this point, Setsuko’s year group are working in a factory. They find it difficult to meet – Setsuko is exhausted after her work and Naomi must increasingly look after her mother who has taken to drink. Ironically, just as Japan is losing the war and the population is suffering, Setsuko encourages Naomi to become less questioning and more conformist. Conversely, Naomi encourages Setsuko to read. One book which is important to them is Roger Martin du Gard’s Les Thibaults, the first volume of which, ‘The Grey Notebook’, is about two school friends writing to each other. (The final volumes, deemed inappropriate – that is, pacifist – are not translated into Japanese and the girls must read Naomi’s mother’s summary).

However, the novel does not simply move from the present to a chronological telling of the past. Setsuko’s memories are fragmented – for example, when she remembers Naomi hitting another pupil, the blood becomes the blood of Sawabe, a boy who has befriended her at the factory:

“Setsuko covered Jun Sawabe’s wound with both hands, trying to staunch the flow, and wept aloud. However tightly she pressed her fingers together, blood welled up between them.”

This is the first mention of Sawabe in the narrative, but he will reappear, demonstrating his care for Setsuko when he asks a friend out look out for her when the children at the factory must walk home after a major air-raid. This is one of the most horrific sections of the novel, as the group make their way through the destruction not knowing if their families have survived:

“It was all they could do to avoid stepping on the bodies strewn about the road like so many charred pieces of wood.”

Setsuko finds her mother alive, but her home destroyed. He father has not returned from work – her mother will spend the days ahead looking for him, but the body will never be found. They move into a damaged railway car and we can see Setsuko beginning to question the war for the first time:

“Now Setsuko began to wonder how many Chinese these bombs had killed, how many families’ houses and lives they had taken.”

She thinks of a time when she had celebrated this destruction and wonders if American children are now doing the same.

Requiem is a short novel but a powerful one. By including a number of characters who do not agree with Japan’s militarism, Go demonstrates that not all Japanese shared the state’s view, but by showing how these characters are treated she highlights how difficult opposition was. Focusing the novel on the two children makes clear the innocent suffering than war entails: this was Go’s message forty years after the war ended, but sadly it one we have still not heeded.

The Country of Others

Leila Slimani’s The Country of Others, translated by Sam Taylor, is the first volume in a trilogy tracing the history of both Morocco as a nation and one family in particular from the end of the Second World War (the second volume, Watch Us Dance, appeared in English in 2023). It opens with a marriage that is a direct legacy of the war, between a young French woman, Mathilde, and a Moroccan soldier, Amine, who has returned to his home country after fighting for France, decorated with both medals and a new (pregnant) wife.  Having spent time living with his family, they are now travelling to the country where he owns some land:

“They got off the cart and walked to a small, charmless little building with a corrugated-iron roof. It wasn’t a house, just a series of small, dark, damp rooms.”

The novel is subtitled ‘War, War, War’, a reference to the war which has just ended as well as the threat of violence which hangs over Morocco as nationalists challenge the French colonists, but also the ‘wars’ which take place within its characters, particularly Mathide, who struggles to come to terms with her new life (an adventure that is partly a reaction to feeling her life put on hold during the war). Amine has his own war to fight with the land:

“During the farm’s first four years they would encounter every imaginable disappointment and life would begin to feel almost biblical.”

Amine, however, is determined to make the most of the land he has, constantly exploring new methods of farming but, though this is regularly touched on in the novel, Mathilde remains the author’s central preoccupation, as she is for herself in her letters to her sister:

“Amine was rarely mentioned in her letters. Her husband was secondary character, a vague presence in the background.”

A light-hearted example of Amine’s desire to experiment is when he grafts a lemon branch onto an orange tree – a symbol for their marriage in which the traditional and the modern also battle it out. The marriage is a passionate one – when they first arrive in Morocco, they do not leave their hotel room:

“She never wearied of Amine’s hands, his mouth, the smell of his skin, which – she understood now – was somehow connected with the air of this land.”

Once they are in the countryside, however, she noticed a changed: “Weighed down by all his worries and humiliations… his personality had darkened.” Their marriage makes them both outsiders to an extent – Mathilde is not part of the French community, and Amine is treated with suspicion by the nationalists (of which his brother, Omar, is one). There are misunderstandings such as when Amine tells Mathilde he is going out and she thinks she is invited, or when their daughter, Aicha’s, school friends, assume Amine is the family’s chauffeur. The cultural divide is, however, more serious with regard to women. As Slimani has said:

“For people who feel threatened by modernity, by everything coming from the West, a woman’s body becomes the space where identity and tradition must be preserved.”

Amine’s sister, Selma, is regularly abused by Omar who sees it as his role to keep her in check – punishing her before she has done anything he regards as wrong:

“Since developing hips and breasts, Selma had been declared fit for combat and her brothers often sent her hurtling into walls… They beat her pre-emptively, imprisoning her before she did anything stupid, because if they waited then it would be too late.”

Amine does not seem to share the extreme views of his brother, but when he discovers a photograph of Selma with a French man in the window of a camera shop, he threatens to shoot her. Even Mathilde has to compromise, realising that Selma cannot enjoy the kind of freedom she imagined. The novel ends with the nationalist uprising, promising freedom from French rule, but not for the female characters.

The Country of Others uses the marriage of Mathilde and Amine to capture the turbulent ten years following the end of the Second World War. It portrays a marriage that is tempestuous but not without love. Occasionally its scope is such that storylines rather disappear from sight, such as Mathilde setting up a clinic, or Aicha’s experiences at school. Despite this, it leaves the reader with a strong sense of the complexity of the marriage at its centre, a vivid, sensuous portrait of Morocco and a desire to move onto the next volume.

Our Lady of the Nile

Our Lady of the Nile was Rwandan author Scholastique Mukasonga’s first novel, originally published in 2012 and translated into English by Melanie Mauthner in 2014. It is set in a girls’ school with only a small number of Tutsi pupils, mirroring Mukasonga’s own experience when she attended the Lycée Notre-Dame-de-Citeaux in Kigali as part of a ten percent quota. In 1973 all Tutsi children were forced out of schools and Mukasonga, now a social worker, left Rwanda for Burundi in fear of her life. The novel itself, without leaving the school setting, builds up to this point though no dates are mentioned. Much of its cleverness lies in taking a genre associated with children and darkening it almost beyond recognition, the bitching and bullying we might expect foretelling terrible violence.

The school is an impressive four-storey building “higher than the government ministries in the capital”. It is for the children of important people – when the girls arrive, they do so in a procession of “Mercedes, Range Rovers and enormous military jeeps”. Most of the pupils are the daughters of politicians and businessmen but there are also Tusti pupils there on a quota, including Veronica and Virginia. The tension between some of the Hutu or ‘majority people’ pupils and the Tutsi is evident from the start when an old photograph of the unveiling of the ‘Our Lady of the Nile’ statue is unearthed where the chiefs have been marked with red crosses or question marks:

“ ‘The chiefs’ photos have suffered the social revolution,’ said Gloriosa laughing, ‘a dash of ink, a slash of machete, that’s all it takes… and no more Tutsi.’”

Gloriosa, her father a government minister, will become one of the most fervent anti-Tutsis in the school.

While this forms a dangerous background, in many other ways the school proceeds as in any other boarding school novel. Virginia is blackmailed by Dorothee into writing her French essays for her (as she has caught her hoarding sugar to take home); Immaculee worries about her ‘sweetheart’ seeing other girls; an attractive male teacher from France creates a stir with his long hair, which he refuses to cut. Yet, it also very much a novel of its place, with Immaculee going to Nyamirongi, the rainmaker, to ensure her boyfriend remains faithful. There is also a trip to see the gorillas by an incensed Goretti:

“I don’t want to leave the gorillas to the whites. They’re Rwandans too. We can’t leave then to foreigners.”

Gloriosa laughs at the idea and is annoyed when Immaculee says she will go too:

“I’ve had enough of cruising around with my boyfriend on his bike… I want something more exciting… I’ll be a girl who’s scared of nothing. I’ll be an adventurer!”

This ‘betrayal’ of Gloriosa will prove to be significant later when Immaculee will, once again, refuse to accept her authority.

One of the strangest characters in the novel is Monsieur de Fontenaille, a white settler who lives near the school who has developed an obsession with the Tutsi, believing they are descended from “the empire of the black pharaohs”. He encourages both Virginia and Veronica to pose for him, but is otherwise harmless:

“He’s not like the other whites, who only what to fling you into bed. What he wants is to play out his crazy notions. I’m his Isis.”

However, though he means no harm, Fontenaille also demonstrates the dangers of placing race above individual, and believing some races are superior to others. Fontenaille’s beliefs link directly to Gloriosa’s plan to replace the nose of the Lady of the Nile statue as she believes it is too narrow – too like a Tutsi. It is from this point the novel takes much darker turn and we see the damage a school bully can do when empowered by racism. Mukasonga, much like William Golding before her, uses her group of school children to show the violence that can be born from prejudice and fear, the difference being that whereas Golding’s novel was a thought experiment. Mukasonga’s is history.

Vengeance in Mine

Marie Ndiaye’s latest novel, Vengeance is Mine (translated by Jordan Stump) is perhaps her most disquieting and intense yet. It begins when Gilles Principaux walks into the office of Maitre (an honorific title of a lawyer) Susane requesting that she represent his wife, Marlynne, who is awaiting trial after killing their three young children. Susane is convinced that she knows Principaux, believing him to be “the teenager she’d fallen in love with for all time, long ago, in a Cauderan house” and cannot think of any other reason he would have come to her:

“I who am not a lawyer known throughout Bordeaux, particularly given the seriousness of the case.”

The memory, presented initially as “luminous” and “the happiest moment of her life”, will grow in ambiguity as the novel progresses. The original meeting took place when Susane was ten and Principaux (if he is, indeed, who she thinks he is) was fifteen when her mother took her to a house where she was employed to iron. They never met again, and her mother can no longer remember the house or even the name with any certainty. Susane regards the meeting, which allowed her a glimpse into the lives of the middle classes, as the reason she became a lawyer, and her mother encouraged her to go with the boy “aiming to lift her daughter high above her own station.”

Susane’s life is further complicated by her housekeeper, Sharon, an immigrant she helping to achieve legal status, whom she employs “as an act of militancy, to help further a cause I support” but whose presence in her house makes her feel “uncomfortable” as she cannot accommodate herself to their employer / employee relationship wishing for a stronger, purer bond:

“I’ll never let you down, Sharon, believe in me, thought Susane as hard as she could.”

This is not only revealing in terms of the unexpected importance she places on their relationship, but also in demonstrating the intensity of Susane’s feelings which she rarely communicates.  As the reader is locked into her point of view, the narrative itself can be uncomfortably claustrophobic as we are hemmed in by the ferocity of the character’s emotions with no outlet.

The same applies when considering her difficult relationship with her parents, a difficulty that is similarly caused by a love that is demanding both of others and herself:

“She loved them so!

“And how it hurt to love them, sometimes!”

When she questions her mother about Principaux she knows “she was trying to tease out a truth that was secretly what she’d come looking for, not knowing of that truth would be good for her.” To what extent her obsession with this early memory is to blame for the uncomfortable nature of her relationship the reader must decide (though the novel is at pains to avoid any clarity of cause and effect). Her only friend is an ex-boyfriend, Rudy, whose young daughter, Lily, Susane’s parents sometimes look after.

Children, and their need for love and protection, is a recurring theme in the novel. When Rudy asks Sharon to look after Lily, Susane worries about her safety even though she suggested it. (Lily’s mother is largely absent, another adult who does not accept the responsibility of protecting their child – though it is also hinted that Susane may be the mother). The murder of Principaux’s children raises the question of whether Marlynne alone can be blamed or whether her husband’s “strange coldness” makes her seem “less blameworthy than the father with his surprising reactions.” He certainly seems to be more concerned with his wife (who does not want to see him) than he is with his loss. And behind all of this is the memory that Susane holds dear, and the suspicion that there is more to it she cannot remember – perhaps she, too, was not protected.

All this may make Vengeance is Mine seem like a difficult novel to love, yet its hypnotic prose carries the reader along with an unyielding tension. On the rare occasions we escape Susane’s viewpoint, it is to encounter the other characters in statements such as they might give in a court, with each individual trapped in their own version of events. As is often the case with Ndiaye’s novels, it veers unexpectedly towards the end but on this occasion, it does not lose focus. It is easy to see why John Self selected it as one of the best translated novels of 2023.