“This is not the end of the story”, warns a profoundly disturbing satirical novel about the flamboyant history, double-dealings, long-held secrets and local atrocities of a small Austrian town, which, altogether, come to represent the guilt of an entire nation.
The story opens in summer 1989, with the imminent reunification of neighbouring Germany. As rich as a hefty slice of Sachertorte, Eva Menasse’s Darkenbloom (Scribe, £20) has been hailed as a literary masterpiece in its original German and now appears in English in a persuasive and exemplary translation by Charlotte Collins.
The titular Austrian town with a creepily gothic name seems the very bedrock of “civilised” society, and yet “the walls have ears, the flowers in the gardens have eyes”. This scene of eternal watchfulness is set for the arrival of an outsider intent on uncovering mass graves from the Nazi era. Yet many of the outraged inhabitants claim to know nothing of Darkenbloom’s former times. Multiple narratives build up into a complex, thriller-like story of the processing of collective memory and denial (its message reminiscent of Jonathan Glazer’s recent film The Zone of Interest), rendered more urgent as refugees from former East Germany begin to arrive in the town.
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“We must cultivate our garden” is possibly the most famous quote from Voltaire’s 1759 theological novella Candide and in Argentinian poet Federico Falco’s poignant and meditative The Plains (Charco Press, £11.99), in a luminous translation by Jennifer Croft, his narrator Fede does just that, eschewing the drama, noise and personal heartbreak of big-city life in Buenos Aires for a remote vegetable patch in the country, beginning in the scorching heat of January and ending in the soft spring of September.
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Here the jarring daily business of the capital is replaced by a new existence, one divided into seasons and reflections: about Fede’s past and that of his wider family – especially his grandmother (“she is the one who passes on the baton of memory”) – and the turbulent recent history of Argentina. Most crucially, he frets over and mourns the loss of his relationship with former partner Ciro, the central figure of his Buenos Aires life. The melancholic aspects of this beautifully rendered novel and its refusal to follow formal patterns of narration, its prose imbued with hurt and healing, are reminiscent of Jeremy Cooper’s ostensible nature diary Ash Before Oak.
In 1991 Susan Sontag, rummaging in a second-hand bookshop in London, picked up a novel by a little-known Russian-Jewish writer. Leonid Tsypkin had died almost 10 years earlier of a heart attack at his desk in Moscow on his 56th birthday. He had twice been refused application to leave the Soviet Union and join his son who had emigrated to the US.
Tyspkin was a doctor who endured a “hidden life” as a writer under Brezhnev. His father and siblings had suffered greatly during Stalin’s Great Terror of the 1930s; some were murdered. His mother died during the German invasion of Leningrad in 1941; his grandmother and other relatives from Belarus perished in the Holocaust.
Thanks to Sontag, that randomly discovered book, a reimagining of Dostoevsky’s sojourn to a German spa town, was published as Summer in Baden-Baden in 2001, achieving the status of cult classic over the ensuing years. Tyspkin’s shorter fiction has been revived in a stunning English version by Jamey Gambrell. The Bridge over the Neroch (Faber, £9.99) opens with a meditation on time that is extraordinary to read at a distance of what is now 50 years: “The smell of the metro in 1972 is identical to that of the metro in 1936, and for a second I experience the same feeling of irrational, trenchant joy that I did then, in 1936; it seems to me that right now, when I rise to the surface, I’ll be under the same blinding sun near the Sokol metro station.”
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Immediacy, historical import and a sensual recognition of place and circumstance are hallmarks of Tyspkin’s prose, as is the cataloguing of the relentless anti-Semitism experienced by Russia’s Jewish population. An entire family story is contained in Norartakir, a testament to the “insulted and the injured”. The main protagonist and his wife take a holiday near the Turkish border; a vacation that turns into a series of humiliations.
The other works in the collection are no less devastating, including The Cockroaches, the final story, about an infestation of cockroaches in a Moscow apartment building leading to the persecution of one old lady for the protection of another: its overall sense of survival at all costs can be read as allegory.
“Is it possible, in a country as historically brutalised as South Africa, to be a good father to a son?” SJ Naudé posited in a recent interview. Bleak but extravagantly written, his new book Fathers and Fugitives (Europa Editions, £14.99) is a four-part novel of fathers, sons, the legacy of exile and a reckoning with past and future selves.
A brief tour de force with a tractable main character, it is set against an everchanging backdrop of Europe, South Africa and East Asia. Daniel, a queer South African journalist, lives a sexually varied if emotionally shut-off life in London. Despite being effectively estranged from his elderly father he makes the journey back to Cape Town to oversee the old man’s last months.
In a no-holds barred translation from Afrikaans by Michiel Heyns, the novel’s ambitious twists and turns, its swift accumulation of years, can be hard to follow. The father’s will provides the catalyst that introduces a new character who will in turn upend Daniel’s rather cosmopolitan life: his cousin Theon, unmet since childhood. The pair bond to support the seriously ill son of one of Theon’s farm workers, travelling to Japan to find an unorthodox cure. The is a novel of entanglements, interventions and failures, which constantly returns to the image of the fragile connection between child and parent: “His father is present, outside the frame, holding one end of the thread.”
“I was a victim and I try to understand the victim.” Aharon Appelfeld (1932-2018), the only child of assimilated German-speaking Jewish parents from Czernowitz, Romania (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine), survived the Holocaust which took away his mother and father. For 20 years following his emigration to Israel after the war aged just 14 he was unaware that his father had also made it out of Europe. They were reunited in the 1960s.
One of Israel’s foremost writers, Appelfeld had immediately set himself to learn the Hebrew of his adopted country – which then became the language of his books. Unlike the majority of postwar Israeli writers, however, he set his works firmly in the Europe of the late 19th century to the 1930s. His fiction and an autobiography recalling that vanished world are most effective for being understated and oblique.
Badenheim 1939 (Penguin Classics, £9.99), in a fluent translation by Dalya Bilu, Appelfeld’s most widely praised novel, focuses on a fragrant, jocular and ultimately ridiculous spa town during the last summer before the war, oblivious to the dangers ahead even as the mostly Jewish townspeople become subject to registration by the menacing officialdom of the Sanitation Department. Badenheim gradually becomes closed off from the outside world until finally, in the last foreboding paragraph: “an engine, an engine coupled to four filthy freight cars emerged from the hills and stopped at the station. Its appearance was as sudden as if it had risen from a pit in the ground.”
My Favourite (Indigo Press, £12.99, buoyantly translated by Holly James), a sparklingly written novel of a young woman’s trauma and liberation, won a slew of European literature awards on its original French-language publication. “He confiscated all our joys. He massacred all our pleasures” says Jeanne of her abusive father, Louis. “I would have given anything to be able to sustain myself with happy memories.”
Growing up in fear in the beautiful Valais area of southwest Switzerland, Jeanne is disgusted at the local doctor’s seeming cowardice and complicity in her father’s reign of terror. Her mother and sister seem unable to break from their way of life, but Jeanne escapes to university in Lausanne where she discovers solace in the form of lovers and swimming in Lake Geneva (“the symbol of my exile”) – though her anger and confusion are never far from the surface, especially when she becomes deeply attracted to Paul while still with her partner Marine. A tragedy returns her home as this finely wrought book coalesces in a storm of anger, yearning and wild hope.
