Haunted houses and haunted people are fertile subjects for stories – think Julio Cortázar’s unsettling allegorical classic House Taken Over, or the psychological wartime tales of Elizabeth Bowen. The Argentinian author Samanta Schweblin, with her translator Megan McDowell, recently won the US National Book Award for translated fiction for their new book Seven Empty Houses (Oneworld, £12.99) – seven takes on homes and non-homes, on displacement and belonging.
Savage and surreal, the inhabitants of these fictions are on a journey deep into the self – but what they discover is not what they, or the reader might expect. In the opening story, None of That, an adult woman dutifully accompanies her mother, a task that has fallen to her since childhood, on her restless forays to strangers’ homes – “for as long as I can remember, we’ve gone out to look at houses” – which her mother will invade, disrupt and remove objects from in her quest to find what it is she is seeking – something integral and lost.
The powerful Breath of Depths sees an elderly woman, who years before suffered the loss of her child, circumscribe her life by making daily lists; but when her domestic circumstances alter, she is left flailing. The woman in Out experiences an odd encounter after she is suddenly compelled to leave her home in the middle of the night; returning, she finds what she has left “terribly unchanged”. Schweblin’s narrators are gloriously unreliable; her stories have the scope of cinema.
Only part of the remarkable life of Sevgi Soysal (1936-76) is covered in her autobiographical novel Dawn (Archipelago, £13.99). Set in a Turkey reeling from the military coup of 1971, left-wing journalist Oya is caught up in a raid that targets a dinner party of like-minded friends. Arrested with others, she is brought to prison and interrogated and tortured throughout the long, hot, early autumn night – until dawn, a reality and a metaphor, arrives.
As translator Maureen Freely writes in her introduction to the novel, which was first published in 1975, a year before Soysal’s death from cancer aged 40, “though it is set in the early 1970s, it could just as easily have happened yesterday. Like Orhan Pamuk’s Snow, it is the Turkish tragedy writ small”. Oya is a feminist as was Soysal; her extrajudicial incarceration is intended as much to humiliate her as a woman as it is to punish her for her political activism. Dawn is a rich, characterful and intense work, in which Freely does ample justice to Soygal’s direct, unshowy prose.
Five different stories explore Germany’s troubled recent past in Philippe Claudel’s stark, evocative German Fantasia (Maclehose Press, £12), impeccably translated by Julian Evans. Emanating from the page as vividly as dreams or nightmares, each story is stalked by a ghostly figure named Viktor. In an afterword Claudel explains that “the incoherence of history and the roles men play in it” was his principal motive for writing the book.
A young soldier deserts the war, taking a lonely, furtive path through ruined villages, scavenging abandoned clothes and eating raw potatoes. One vibrant May evening an old man sits beneath linden trees reimagining his first sexual experience at the age of 15. In a newly unified Germany, a young, bored care worker torments the elderly patient she has been hired to look after.
The influential German abstract artist Franz Marc, who died as a casualty of war in 1916, is resurrected in a moving and disturbing section, as a psychiatric hospital’s longest-serving inmate; in 1940, his case and his fate will be decided by none other than Hitler. In the final, almost unbearable section, a Jewish child, who has somehow escaped the massacre of her family and community, is arbitrarily rescued by an older woman: “War, the cruellest of chance’s incarnations, had pushed them towards each other”. A stunningly rendered book of mayhem and memory.
“In the beginning, it was just the smell. His smell, the smell of jack fruit, a smell that comes to me to this day in the most unexpected places – on holiday in Mexico, sipping margaritas by the sea, suddenly it’s there, the same smell that I smelled walking through the forest.” Julia, an architect, is part of a team engaged in the design of the Olympic Village for Brazil’s Olympic bid. It is 2014 and Brazil is about to host the World Cup. The future is tangible, exciting. A regular runner in the hillside around Rio de Janeiro, Julia sets off one afternoon – not her usual time – after a work meeting. In the silence of the forest she is abducted by a man and raped repeatedly at gunpoint, then left, bloody, bruised and violated to make her way back to a world forever changed.
Tatiana Salem Levy has used, with permission, the ordeal of a friend to write about the attack and its aftermath. The result is Vista Chinesa (Scribe, £8.99), translated by Alison Entrekin, a graphic, beautifully paced novella. Julia’s account of the incident is interspersed with the events of the rape, the reactions of her family, her partner, her friends, doctors and police officials, as well as recollections from Julia’s past. It is a reckoning and a rebirth; an unsparing look at the consequences of gendered violence, and of the complex history of a city, a land and a people.
Whimsical and somewhat otherworldly, Animal Life, the latest offering from Icelandic writer Auõur Ava Ólafsdottir (Pushkin Press £9.99), translated by Brian FitzGibbon, is a thoughtful reflection on life and death wrapped up in a quirky seasonal story. Midwife Dómhildur (Dyja) delivers her 1,992nd baby in the week before Christmas; no big deal since midwifery is the family business.
A storm is coming; retreating from the anxiety of her meteorologist sister for whom the extreme weather is a further confirmation of the climate crisis, Dyja unearths a treasure trove of letters and documents left to her by her great aunt, Fifa, a midwife. One document called Animal Life seems to predict environmental disaster; Dyja tries to build her own windbreak against fear with lists of songs, with wordplay, with repeated incantation of light against the darkness of the Icelandic winter. It’s a book that is more than the sum of its parts, if somewhat bogged down by a determined feyness.
December Breeze (Europa Editions, £12.99), translated by Isabel Adey and Charlotte Coombe, is considered one of the finest works of the Colombian author Marvel Moreno (1939-95). Heavily autobiographical and set in Baranquilla (disguised here as Puerto Colombia) where Moreno grew up near the Caribbean Sea, the novel focuses on three women, Dora, Catalina and Beatriz, who come of age in the Colombia of the 1950s and 1960s.
Catalina or Lina is the narrator, looking back from her home in Paris on an era where women had no economic independence under a fierce patriarchal system. All three women come from wealthy families but even so their lives are dictated by men. Moreno writes sensually and with great dedication of the Colombia of her youth, far away from the capital Bogotá, and of the distinctiveness of her three protagonists who each represent a type: the pious, overly religious Beatriz; Lina, who dares to enter a beauty contest; and Dora, whose discovery of bodily pleasure means that she is prevented from marriage to a man of her social class.
Lina’s grandmother, with her memories of an earlier Colombia, her wisdom about the violence of men, and why women are repressed in society, is a touchstone in the book. In an epilogue some of the bitterness that Lina has expressed in writing her story evaporates, as she recalls “the breeze that always came in December, to the evenings when, sitting round a table at the country club ... my friends and I amused ourselves trying to predict our destinies with a deck of cards.”
