Let your fingers do the walking. This was the tagline from advertisements for the Golden Pages, the classified telephone directory of my childhood. In an era of climate crisis and flight shaming, the words take on a new meaning as we think about how books in translation allow us to travel to near and distant places without fouling the atmosphere or torching the planet. In the books under review, the reader is transported to Taipei, Tokyo, Santiago de Chile, Siberia, Berlin, Stockholm, Paris, London — forms of imaginary rambling without the attendant (carbon) footprint.
The journey described in Miguel Bonnefoy’s Heritage (translated by Emily Boyce, Gallic, 159pp, £9.99) is that of a French winemaker, Michel René, who is ruined by the 19th-century phylloxera blight and ends up by chance in Valparaíso, Chile. Knowing no Spanish, he gives the name of his birthplace (Lons-le-Saunier), instead of his own name, to a distracted customs officer, and so begins the ‘Lonsonnier’ family’s long sojourn in their adopted country. Tracing the fortunes of successive generations of the family over a century, from wine entrepreneurs to aviation pioneers, Bonnefoy offers an exquisitely detailed account of people caught between New World possibilities and Old World allegiances.
The central, animating metaphor of Bonnefoy’s tale is flight. From Thérèse Lonsonnier’s careful assembly of a noisy, brightly-coloured aviary to her daughter Margot’s painstaking construction of a light aircraft, taking to the air is an abiding family passion. Moments of aerial release are juxtaposed against the grounded realities of war and conflict. Lazare, the son of the family patriarch, loses his two brothers in the first World War, and Margot is actively engaged with the Allied air force in the second World War, as the land of their ancestor summons them to the flag. In some of the most grimly realised pages in the narrative, Margot’s son, Illario Da, is brutally tortured in the Kissinger-sponsored, Pinochet-organised decimation of Chilean democracy. Flight as both a form of liberation and the expression of desperation structures this deft and moving account of lives in transit.
Where our lives might all be heading is a question that troubles the twenty-something characters in Johanna Hedman’s The Trio (translated by Kira Josefsson, Hamish Hamilton, 327pp, £14.99). Hugo, Thora and August are variously to be found in Stockholm, Paris, London, Berlin and New York, but the Swedish capital provides the principal backdrop for their teasing out of love’s entanglements. They experience differing degrees of attraction for each other as they navigate the uncertain passage from college to work.
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The sense of detached disillusionment is familiar from the fictional worlds of Sally Rooney’s stranded millennials, but Hedman is remarkably assured in giving voice and depth to characters who see distance as a curse not a consolation. Thora, at one point in an exchange with Hugo, reflects: “I looked at him and wondered if self-awareness was worth anything at all, if all it yielded was carefully worded observations of your own behaviour.”
The trio of the title try to pick their way past the trigger warnings of class, geography (capital cities versus the provinces) and professional orientation (art, the law, advertising), only to find themselves repeatedly caught between the impulse to freedom and the pressure points of need. Part of the problem is that the scales are increasingly difficult to match, the enormity of the climate catastrophe, for example, and the need to just get by. At the home of her well-got parents, Thora wonders: “As we were discussing various interpretations of Adorno and Žižek in my parents’ diningroom, the ice caps kept melting and the oceans kept rising. That simultaneity was dizzying.” Orientation — personal, political, economic (the housing crisis looms large in the story) — becomes increasingly complicated for characters forced to make do with a combination of irony and occasional good luck. Hedman’s debut novel is sharp, vividly imagined and affecting in a way that both intrigues and captivates the reader.
Capture is very much on the mind of Chō Norie, originally from Taiwan and now working in an office job in Tokyo. In Li Kotomi’s Solo Dance (translated by Arthur Reiji Morris, World Editions, 251pp, £13.99), Chō repeatedly tries to free herself from the memory of a brutal sexual assault in her native Taiwan and from the social pressures preventing her from expressing her true sexual orientation. Chō's real name is Yingmei — she who greets the plum blossoms — but she changes her name to sound more Japanese. Changing name, changing language, changing country are radical moves to ease the pain and humiliation of her earlier experiences in Taiwan and to test out a new lesbian identity in Japan (even if Japan is referred to, at one point, by the narrator as a “queer desert”).
An iconic figure for the young Yingmei, as she tries to make sense of her sexuality and circumstances, is the real-life, experimental Taiwanese writer and advocate for LGBT rights, Qiu Miaojin, who took her own life in Paris in 1995 aged 26. Thoughts of death and self-harm dog Yingmei. Only writing provides a temporary sanctuary from the repressive turmoil of her surroundings where she is made to feel somehow responsible for the crime that has been committed against her. Her growing distress leads her on the “solo dance” of the title, a suicide mission to a picturesque site in Australia. Deeply embedded in both Chinese and Japanese traditions of writing, Li Kotomi’s novel is a disturbing and persuasive account of her heroine’s troubled search to safely embrace her sexual identity.
Embracing whole worlds is the tentative and ultimately doomed project of Daniel Guebel’s extraordinary novel, The Absolute (translated by Jessica Sequeira, Seven Stories Press UK, 464pp, £12.99). The story of several generations of the Deliuskin family is narrated by the daughter of one Sebastian Deliuskin and includes the composer Alexander Scriabin as part of an imagined family tree. The novel is divided into six books and moves from the 18th to the late 20th century in settings ranging from Siberia to provincial Argentina.
The successive generations of the family are consumed by obsessive projects that go from using sex as a basis for musical composition to deciphering the Rosetta Stone, attempting to assassinate the archduke Franz Ferdinand, and building a time machine to put an end to mortality. Napoleon, Lenin, Eva Perón, Rasputin and Madame Blavatsky appear and disappear as their paths intersect with the fevered wanderings of family members. Scriabin’s mystical project of creating a shared human community through music and altering the course of history through his compositions runs through the exalted absolutism of the often crazed Deliuskins.
For the Argentinian novelist, an avowed admirer of Borges, Nabokov and Dostoevsky, the search for an absolute understanding of music, history, politics, religion and the body is never abstract. It always pirates the senses. When Frantisek Deliuskin thinks of leaving the company of his gluttonous GP, Propolski, tiring of his excesses, his mind is checked by his physical frailty: “[T]he briefest list of his illnesses kept him anchored to his chair: stabbing pains like blows to his kidneys, a dark urine, a confused wild stampede of earthy colours spraying the porcelain of the toilet bowl at his moment of greatest intimacy.”
Part of Guebel’s fictional project is to enter into the mindset of the different generations, and this is not without its moments of discomfort as assumptions and prejudices are left in their unvarnished ugliness. The sheer scope and the ambition of the writing are refreshing in their enthusiasm for the multitude of human passions and preoccupations. The language constantly tacks through different styles and registers and is capable of producing startlingly arresting images. In one passage, the activities of the founding father, Vladimir Deliuskin — who exhumed the skeletons of mammoths from Arctic ice for sale to natural history museums — are seen through the eyes of the son, Frantisek: “His feet grew cold, and a mammoth was a mammoth was a mammoth, even if it emerged from the waters like an inebriated bubble, a wobbly diadem of frozen beauty.” The image of an inebriated bubble, if anything, suggests more than it describes, and Guebel’s prose throughout, in the able hands of his gifted translator Jessica Sequeira, adds to the many pleasures of this wholly original text. Guebel’s great novel is a timely reminder of why our translators are our best travel writers, bringing us on excursions and to places that we can only ever read about.
Michael Cronin teaches in Trinity College Dublin. His Eco-Travel: Journeying in the Anthropocene has just been published by Cambridge University Press
