Following the Six-Day War in June 1967, the poet and writer Mourid Barghouti, then in his early 20s and a university student in Cairo, found himself summarily exiled from Palestine, where he had been born in 1944 near Ramallah in the West Bank. Following decades of living in different cities and countries, he returned briefly to his homeland in 1996; the outcome was the extraordinary and humbling memoir I Saw Ramallah (newly reissued by Daunt, £9.99, in its original subtle translation by Adhaf Soueif and with a foreword by the late Edward Said).
The book – one of the most essential for our times - is less a political memoir than a poet’s lyrical, deeply personal, sensual meditation on exile and belonging. What Barghouti encounters is both familiar and unrecognisable, yet he seems to forensically, mentally examine each place, each rock, each tree to in order to unlock something he can hold on to.
The past returns forcefully, thick and fast: " … in my teenage years, I learnt to tango. In al-Anqar billiard hall I learnt to play snooker. In Ramallah I started to try my hand at poetry and in the Walid and Dunya and Jamil cinemas I grew to love movies. Also: “And in Ramallah I came to know demonstrations for the first time in my life.”
Returning to his old village, he comments despairingly and presciently: “I used to long for the past in Deir Ghassanah as a child longs for precious, lost things. But when I saw that past was still there, squatting in the sunshine like a dog forgotten by its owners … I wanted to take hold of it, to kick it forward, to its coming days, to a better future, to tell it: ‘Run’.” Barghouti died, still in exile, in Amman, Jordan in 2021.
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“How to learn to live again. I wonder.” Pol Guasch, a new voice in an already impressive and increasing body of Catalan literature in translation, has written a fascinating impressionistic novel of dispatches, rich in tone and texture, like a rare plant growing in an arid landscape. In Napalm in the Heart (Faber, £16.99, in an electric translation by Mara Faye Letham), an unnamed young man is trapped in a dystopian nightmare, which seems plausibly real.
Following an apocalyptic event, he is forced to remain in his village, where the dead bodies of many of its inhabitants remain unburied. Outside is a militarised zone, where soldiers prowl and wait. Alone except for his mother whom he must protect, he writes a series of short and impassioned communications to his lover, Boris, who lives on the other side of the forest, and who he at last manages to meet to form some escape plan; an action which will propel the sorrow that infuses the rest of the book.
The novel is deeply, disarmingly playful despite its serious subject matter. In one passage, Guasch riffs beautifully and poignantly on Camus’ The Outsider – “I was thinking: Mother died today, or yesterday, maybe. I don’t know … It was hot. She was cold … I tried to think of the last time I saw her. I didn’t know. I invented a moment. I transferred it into a final meeting: her, in the garden, pulling weeds.” In a book about the violence necessary to survival, Guasch has fashioned a curious and vital coming-of-age work.
“[Victor] Hugo gave free rein to his sensuality until a few weeks before his death,” notes the French Romantic author’s Wikipedia entry - but one of the many obliged to endure the great man’s appetite for sex is absent there: Célina, a 15-year-old Channel Islands servant girl who lived in the Hugo household in Guernsey during the late 1850s almost until her early death from consumption in 1861.
Catherine Axelrad’s exquisite novella Célina, first published in 1997 (Les Fugitives, £12.99, now in a transporting English translation by Philip Terry) is a plain, matter-of-fact and consequently very moving diary of a chambermaid. It carries no salaciousness, but stands for itself: a horribly commonplace story of routine exploitation. It begins thus: “I don’t remember my father’s face and yet I was already six years old the day he went missing … Today when I try to remember his face it’s the face of Monsieur that I see.”
With her fisherman father drowned and siblings who all succumb to tuberculosis, Célina joins the Hugos following a disastrous episode as a serving girl at an inn where she is relieved of her virginity by a “suitor” and then paid by the ageing publican himself for sex – for which she is thrown out by his wife.
“Monsieur” is Hugo, in exile from France due to his political pamphlets denouncing Napoleon III’s coup d’état. Célina, who views him as almost as a misplaced father figure, describes daily life at Hauteville House and her nightly visits from “Monsieur” (and other men: guests of the Hugos). During the 15 years on Guernsey, Hugo would complete Les Misérables and Toilers of the Sea. The visits continue even as Célina’s consumption is diagnosed and becomes more pronounced; in the end she is returned to her mother to die. “I did my best to please him, right up to the day I spat into my handkerchief and realised I didn’t have long to live.” Axelrad’s dispassionate depiction of sullied innocence and forced compromise is brutal and devastating.
New York-based Palestinian writer Ibtisam Azem’s provocative novel The Book of Disappearance (And Other Stories, £14.99, in a stunning translation by poet Sinan Antoon) could not be more timely, using elements of fantasy and magical realism to reflect on the historical consequences of the 1948 Nakba when 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes and forced to become refugees in their own land. It is impossible to read without recognising unspoken parallels with the current situation in Gaza.
In modern-day Tel Aviv, a young Palestinian, Alaa, is obsessed with his late grandmother’s memories of her displacement from Jaffa, the ancient port city out of which Tel Aviv grew. “What we live is truncated,” he writes. “Missing you is like a rose of thorns.” Alaa is missing memory as much as he is a physical presence – the memories that are erased when a people is forcibly uprooted from thousands of years of its own history.
In a parallel narrative, Alaa’s journalist friend and neighbour Ariel, a liberal Zionist Israeli, begins to hunt for “clues” when Alaa, alongside other Palestinians, suddenly vanishes overnight. Four million Palestinians have disappeared of their own “volition” according to government officials. Ariel’s self-interrogation of his own complacency and culpability – as well as others - is at first halting, then revelatory, and finally pitch-dark.
“I started to think it had been some kind of desire, still unknown to me at the time, that brought me to Ermoupoli”. In slow, languid prose, Hanna Johannson writes of a hot summer on a Greek island, where the narrator, a woman in her 30s, joins the older, successful Swedish artist Helena and her teenage daughter Olga on holiday.
The narrator, who we perceive as lonely and jealous, has, by her own admission, a history of infiltrating seemingly stable set-ups and has been fixated on Helena since she interviewed her for a magazine (“I missed yet another family I did not belong to”) but now, with the instincts of a slow-moving and predatory snake, she trains her attention on “this daughter, my rival”.
Olga is an introverted and unhappy 15-year-old who she at first viciously dismisses as being named for a “a violent saint”. Antiquity (Scribe, £9.99, in an illuminating translation by Kira Josefsson) uses a beautiful if enervating backdrop “corroded by sunshine and graffiti”, to ensure that this sleek and cleverly written tale of an unreliable narrator engaged in Humbert Humbert power-play grooming (or is it simply a projected fantasy?) is rather more attractive and less unsavoury than it perhaps ought to be.
The highly acclaimed Japanese author Yoko Towada writes in German as well as in her native language and in her new novel Spontaneous Acts (Dialogue, £15.99, in a sparkling translation by Susan Bernofsky) Towada conjures up an urgent if dreamlike landscape for a fiction which - often bafflingly - seeks to upend conventional ideas about identity, connection and friendship.
Patrik, a young German opera fan who refers to himself as “the patient” has emerged from a Berlin under lockdown with a severe reluctance to leave his home, even as his beloved opera houses are re-opening. He must register for a conference in Paris at which he is supposed to give a paper on the Romanian-French poet Paul Celan’s collection Threadsuns, but when it comes to writing down his nationality, he stalls.
Patrik’s parents, like Celan’s, came from what is now Ukraine. (Celan survived the Nazi concentration camps and killed himself in 1970). A chance meeting in a café with a mysterious Tibetan man called Leo-Eric Fu sparks an intellectual camaraderie that will, through their discussions on history, literature and coincidence, move the indecisive Patrik forward towards Paris and into the future. As Leo-Eric explains: “Time can’t be turned back, it twists on in itself”.
