Francis Bacon in Of Travel – a staple of secondary school prose anthologies for many years – argued that being on the move was almost invariably being on the make. His advice to the young traveller? “Let him also see, and visit, eminent persons in all kinds, which are of great name abroad; that he may be able to tell, how the life agreeth with the fame.”
Contemporary world literature often wrong-foots the Tudor scholar by showing us not the “eminent persons of all kinds” but the lives of the many millions that struggle to get by in the shadow of exclusion, disdain and neglect. Itamar Vieira Junior in Crooked Plow (Verso, 288pp, £10.99), translated by Johnny Lorenz, offers a compelling chronicle of the lives of impoverished labourers in the Bahia state of northeastern Brazil.
Beginning with a catastrophic incident, which involves a knife and two quarrelling sisters and deprives one sister (Belonísia) of her tongue and the faculty of speech, the novel traces the lives of the inhabitants of the community of Água Negra. Largely narrated from the standpoint of Belonísia, the story tells of the descendants of African slaves who continue to earn no income from their labour but are simply granted the right to settle on land and build mud hovels to house their families. They are constantly at the mercy of drought and flooding and the arbitrary greed and random cruelty of plantation owners and overseers.
Belonísia’s father, Zeca Chapéu Grande, is a healer. Vieira Junior makes much of the uprightness and resilience of individuals like Zeca and his wife Salu, who attempt to provide comfort and coherence to lives that are martyrs to circumstance. The evocation of Candomblé rituals is deft and informed and provides a powerful parallel world to the gritty and brutal ordinariness of the Água Negra everyday. The rituals are no showy carnival cliche but reflect a vital belief system that sustains a community tackling the long legacy of dispossession. One of Brazil’s leading novelists, Vieira Junior provides an immensely readable account of how men and women of no property have to deal with domestic, economic and state violence and of how story and language restore the dignity such people are so often denied.
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If is often said that there would be no Brazil without Angola, such were the volumes of slaves in earlier centuries who were forcibly deported by Portuguese colonisers from their African homeland to work in Brazilian plantations. For Kalaf Epalanga, a transmigrant writer and musician who moves between Portugal and his native Angola, the story of these disruptions is also a narrative of connections. In Whites Can Dance Too (Faber, 315pp, £16.99), translated by Daniel Hahn, Epalanga uses the detention of a musician, also named Kalaf, by the Norwegian border police as a way into describing his own musical odyssey between Luanda and Lisbon and the multiple cultural influences criss-crossing the Lusophone world.
A leading member of the dance collective Buraka Som Sistema, Epalanga is associated with kuduro, defined by the narrator in this debut novel as, “a musical genre born in the interception of house, techno, kizomba, in the late 1980s when the Angolan civil war was at its peak and the youth desperately needed something that could help make sense of the chaos surrounding them”. Whites Can Dance Too uses the complex story of emerging musical and dance forms in Africa to detail the story of his coming of age and the role of Lisbon (“the most African city in Europe”) in the formation of the young artist.
Epalanga is particularly skilful in contrasting the studied disdain of the Norwegian border guards – who regard Kalaf as “no more than an illegal immigrant, undocumented and guilty for daring to stay in Europe” – and the sheer scale and range of the cultural knowledge that constitutes Kalaf’s uniqueness as a maker of music. Aside from Epalanga’s corrosive humour, his ability to vividly sum up the hidden energies of Portuguese shopping malls and Angolan and Brazilian backyards, is yet another intriguing feature of this rich and distinctive first novel.
In another debut novel, this time from the pen of the Hong Kong writer, Dorothy Tse, the repression of energy rather than its expression most concerns the narrator. Set in a place known as Nevers but which bears an uncanny resemblance to the most recent territorial acquisition by the People’s Republic of China and the site of numerous protests, Owlish (Fitzcarraldo, 215pp, £13.99), translated by Natascha Bruce, is a persuasively original account of the erosion of freedom.
Professor Q and his wife Maria live in a perfectly organised tedium. Q, however, through the mediation of the mysterious figure Owlish begins to develop an all-consuming passion for a doll called Aliss. Maria becomes aware not only of her husband’s perverse infidelity but also of the slow ebb of dissent in her government workplace as proposals are replaced by announcements, made without any prior discussion.
An incident involving a visiting mainland dignitary and a painting will finally upend the meticulous order of the lives of the professor and his wife. The routine tale of a midlife crisis in the hands of Tse is transformed into a deeply engaging account of how indifference is no protection against coercion and how the magical can keep dangerous company with the delusional. Tse is forensic in taking on the posturing of the power grab of the “Vanguard Republic” but she is also deeply attentive to the fragile inner worlds of her characters who find that the basic wants – love, freedom, attention – prove the most elusive.
Wang Wei, the main narrator in Finnish writer Kristina Carlson’s novel Eunuch (Lolli, 89pp, £10.99), translated by Mikko Alapuro, is not so sure he wants attention, having successfully avoided it for most of his life at the court of the Song dynasty in 12th century China. Looking back over his life, his thoughts are suffused with the quiet cynicism of those who have observed power too closely, for too long. On the treachery of ambition, he notes, “one will no longer have friends in the outer circle of power if they think one is seeking to enter the inner circle”.
Wang Wei is content to be alive, still maintains his appetite for drink and the pleasures of the table but is repeatedly curious about what the operation on his nine-year old self meant in terms of the experiences he would never have. Companionship comes in the form of his fellow eunuchs and a highly placed woman at court known as “the Old Lady”. She becomes something of an aphoristic sparring partner for Wang Wei (“Unfinished work leaves an ache in the bones”) and, though she decries his laziness, she admires his wit.
Carlson, a previous winner of the Finlandia Prize, has composed a quiet tribute to ageing, the fading of illusions and the continuing vigour of appetite. Eunuch is no soft-focused swan song of extinction but a sharply observed, tightly focused take on what it means to lose friends and gradually part company with the living. Wang Wei observes early on in his account: “It occurred to me that it is not a good idea to carry your entire life on your tongue.” As it turns out, however, his tongue proves well capable of carrying the burden.
The burden of power, and how it might be exercised, is explored in Mariette Navarro’s beguiling fiction, Ultramarine (Héloïse, 143pp, £10.95) translated by Cory Stockwell. While Navarro is primarily known for her work as a poet and for the French stage, her first foray into novel writing has already seen her being awarded a number of prizes including the Prix Senghor and Prix Mémoires de la Mer.
Set on board one of the innumerable container ships that irrigate the global economy, Ultramarine describes a female captain who has to establish her authority in the maritime world of seafaring men. She eventually gains acceptance but then has to deal with a ship that following a strange weather event seems to be inexplicably slowing down and taking on a mind of its own. The captain wonders if there is a link between this climatic event and an earlier moment when she had allowed the crew to swim off the ship.
In one of the most arresting chapters in the novel, Navarro describes how the sailors, who were initially exhilarated by the freedom of moving around in the water, begin eventually to wonder whether they might just disappear into the anonymous immensity of the ocean: “It took only a second, some of them can’t even look at the water any more, for fear of imagining the darkness of the bottom. They struggle to straighten their bodies, to flutter their feet: suddenly, they fall from every possible building, every cliff, every nightmare.”
In this tale of the Young Woman and the Sea there are no heroic set pieces, only the patient purposefulness of a captain determined to bring her crew safely home and begin again the endless conversation between land and shore. Navarro’s poetic precision, beautifully caught by Stockwell, is its own homage to the many Travellers who never get to see “eminent persons” but contribute to keeping them and their worlds afloat.
