Cousins
In 2007, at the age of 85, Aurora Venturini won a prestigious Argentinian newspaper award for her novel Cousins (Faber, £12.99) – a dark, gnomic, slapstick series of tales about a poor family living near Buenos Aires whose catalogue of terrible misfortunes and tribulations are relayed here in matter-of-fact, wholly original style.
Venturini published a large number of books before her death in 2015. According to Mariana Enriquez, who supplies the book’s introduction, she was also something of a fabulous eccentric with many myths surrounding her.
Now Cousins has received a first-into-English translation from Kit Maude, who does game battle with Venturini’s curiously uninflected prose.
The narrator of this family saga, set in the 1940s and condensed into brief, startling chapters, is Yuna, a young woman with learning difficulties, who explains the family set-up: “We were unusual which is to say we weren’t normal.”
Yuna vividly itemises the novel’s characters – her sister Betina, with her “ogre teeth” and curvature of the spine, who “wheeled her bad luck around the little garden and flagstones of the patio”; her mother; cousins Carina and Petra; aunt Nené; and “diligent housekeeper” Rufina.
Yuna herself is a painter, and this alone gives her life meaning. With scant attention to punctuation, violent and often offensive imagery and an underlying sense of tormented humour, Cousins is on a par with the surrealist fiction of Leonora Carrington.
What You Need from the Night
“I don’t regret anything about my life, at any rate not the one we lived together. I think it was a beautiful life. Others will say it was a shitty life, a life of pain and tragedy, but I say it was a beautiful life.” These are the last words from Laurent Petitmangin’s What You Need from the Night (Picador, £12.99), which arrives in English translation justifiably garlanded with awards from Petitmangin’s native France.
A brief, deeply felt debut that is exquisitely and sensitively translated by Shaun Whiteside, the book’s final sentences take the form of a letter from Fus, the eldest son of the widowed father who narrates the novel.
Fus and his younger brother Gillou were raised by him in a small working-class town in eastern France following the death of their mother from cancer: “The consultant just shrugged his shoulders when I asked him how her last hours had been. ‘Like the days before, more or less. You know your wife never really rebelled against her illness’.”
Fus, a nickname short for the German Fussball (the family lives in Lorraine, near the border), was a young, talented footballer while at school – the novel opens with a soaring description of his ability.
Hero-worshipped by Gillou, it is Fus who falls from grace, dropping out of school, out of sport, taking, in spite of his strong socialist background and to his father’s horror, a serious and dangerous interest in the far right which has a stranglehold on the jobless, twitchy community.
While Gillou heads for university, Fus heads for prison. The whole is an unerring portrayal of what can happen when lack of opportunity leads to a domino effect of despair.
A System So Magnificent it is Blinding
“Th world’s going under, the world is a wonder.” Amanda Svensson’s heavily populated – one might say over-populated – experimental novel A System So Magnificent it is Blinding (Scribe, £9.99, heroically translated by Nichola Smalley) made the International Booker longlist last month.
A self-described family saga, the book’s more than-500 pages centre on triplets Sebastian, Clara, and Matilda, born in a Swedish hospital in 1989 and now, in 2016, scattered across the globe and virtually estranged.
Sebastian is in south London, working for a secretive scientific organisation; Clara on Easter Island “the loneliest place on Earth” and part of a doomsday cult; and Matilda, “probably swapped at birth”, is usually resident in Berlin, but now on the Västerbotten archipelago with her partner Billy, working out how to step-parent Billy’s five-year-old daughter.
Chaos enters the siblings’ variously fraught lives with their mother’s announcement of a decades-long-buried secret which happens to coincide with the disappearance of their ne’er-do-well father (the parents have long since separated).
The trio, plus a huge and ungainly cast of characters both human and non-human, attempt to weave their family together again in a meandering, often impenetrable and overly long story.
Shalash the Iraqi
A brilliant satire, a send-up, and above all a deadly serious work – Shalash the Iraqi (And Other Stories, £12.99) began life as a pseudonymous blog after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
“Shalash the Iraqi” himself is “the author of some eighty posts written in colloquial Baghdadi dialect between 2005 and 2006.”
Genial, friendly in tone, our gossipy anti-hero Uncle Shalash assails the population of Baghdad (through a swiftly inoperative website) with witticism, bon mots, folk tales, political punditry and philosophy akin to Lear’s Fool.
His target is the period he and his fellow Iraqis are living through just after the fall of Saddam Hussein – a time of alleged “freedom” which is in actuality one stinking of corruption, greed, and fear.
The method of conveying the blog is as fascinating and urgent as the dancingly clever entries within it – instalments printed out in advance and passed from hand to hand in a city where access to technology is in short supply.
In his translator’s note Luke Leafgren (who admirably rises to the challenge) describes his task as “improbable, important and impossible in equal measure”. The result is a triumph.
Venom
As brutal and lyrical as it is short, Saneh Sangsuk’s Venom (Peirene Press, £10) combines fable with the dream-soaked, superstitious and subsistence-led life of a small Thai village sometime in the late 1960s.
The village is in thrall to Song Waad, self-appointed medium of The Sacred Mother, or Patron Goddess, to the point where land and money is frequently offered up to the corrupt individual. Only one family and their 10-year-old son resist and are the isolated exception.
One day, far outside the village, the boy is viciously attacked by a king cobra. Instantaneously an outcast – is this a punishment from the goddess? – the child soon has to gather all his wits and strength in a lonely, bloody fight to the end in which the form of human and animal merge.
A gripping, sensual parable, seamlessly translated by Mui Poopoksakul.
All Your Children, Scattered
“Spilled guts can’t be picked up, as the ancestors said.” A monumental testament to human suffering, All Your Children, Scattered (Europa Editions UK, £13.99), delicately translated by Alison Anderson, adds its author Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse to a pantheon of distinguished writers on the 1994 Rwanda genocide, among them Scholastique Mukasonga, whose memoir Cockroaches this novel in many ways resembles.
Like Blanche, the main narrator of the story, Mairesse left Rwanda in 1994 and now lives in France.
In clear-eyed, rich prose, the story of three generations and different fates of Tutsi Rwandans is told: Blanche’s mother Immaculata, struck mute through trauma, who nearly starves to death in her hiding place, the basement of her Hutu neighbour’s bookshop in Butare, during the 100 days of massacre; Blanche’s brother Bosco, who joins Rwanda’s rebel army; and Stokely, son of Blanche, born in Bordeaux and ignorant of his family’s tragic history.
“I am the fruit of a buried past that is still putting down roots,” Blanche reflects, in a book of deep sorrow and profound dignity, it is a commentary both on the violent legacy of colonisation and the pitilessness of human nature.
