Brazilian author Antônio Xerxenesky’s An Infinite Sadness (Charco Press, £11.99), translated by Daniel Hahn, is a novel of remarkable truth and tenderness that explores the fragile border between sanity and despair with consummate clarity.
In the aftermath of the second World War, Nicolas, a young French psychiatrist and his wife, Anna, move to a small village in Switzerland near the clinic where he will be working. Horrified by the lobotomies and electroshock therapy then commonly practised, Nicolas is an advocate of talking therapy. The work is difficult, and the knowledge that some of those he is treating are former Nazis disturbs him, but he strives to relieve his patients of their burden of trauma, guilt or tragedy.
Nicholas considers his own life unremarkable – he did not fight, witnessed no horrors and spent the war in Vichy France but when a new doctor arrives from Harisau, he begins to feel vulnerable and exposed and gradually discovers within himself the black morass of melancholia.
Hahn’s translation captures the bucolic splendours of the Alps, the claustrophobia of the clinic, and the anguish and dread of the patients with a profound humanity that is lucid yet tremulous.
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Despite the historical setting, Xerxenesky has said the novel is about “the mental health crisis after a traumatic collective experience that revealed that our neighbours can defend authoritarian, racist and fascist ideas”, a clear echo of Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency in Xerxenesky’s home country.
The power of the novel stems from its devastating honesty. Here, depression is something that seeps, clouds the mind, corrodes meaning. Through Nicolas’s therapy sessions and his own unravelling, we see how the self can fracture. Ultimately, An Infinite Sadness is a study of the “thinking reed”: the mind that bends but does not break.
In his first novel, The Fallen, Carlos Manuel Álvarez focused on the four members of a Cuban family during the bleak Special Period of the 1990s, charting their decline and disillusionment. His new novel, False War (Fitzcarraldo Editions, £14.99), translated by Natasha Wimmer, is a haunting meditation on exile – not merely as geography, but as a state of mind.
The cast of charters is much larger, and though many are known by descriptors: Barber, Instrumentalist, Client, Fan Boy, Adolescent – each is a vivid, breathing character. They span several generations of those for whom the revolutionary dream curdled and who live scattered across the globe – Paris, Miami, New York and elsewhere.
Álvarez has not fashioned a linear story, but braided these threads together into a polyphonic motet of voices that are alternately sardonic, weary and, above all, angry. It is a tribute to Wimmer’s peerless translation that she effortlessly captures their range, cadence, humour and rage.
At times, the countless threads become disorienting, something that deliberately reflects the disjointed, dislocated lives of people searching for meaning- whether the writer in Miami who lost his fiancee in a Mexico earthquake, or the woman who can find comfort only by hiding in her wardrobe.
Two sections, Modern Lives I and II, are separated by a two-part interlude, which is the linchpin of the novel. In this, “the dissident”, who has made a life in Berlin, bemused to be celebrated precisely for being persecuted at home, travels back to Cuba after his sister’s death; there, he becomes “the exile”, returning to the nameless rural village his sister never left: “The real far-flung place is the rural village, this little piece of land in the middle of nowhere. There’s no proof of its existence, and therefore it is truly extraordinary to be here, where his sister never got to leave, and where, by extension, she never was.”
False War is a poignant study of exile and exclusion, one that avoids the easy tropes of nostalgia and sentimentality: for Álvarez, exile is not an escape but a condition – permanent, internal and profoundly personal.
Exile is also at the heart of Ivana Sajko’s Every Time We Say Goodbye (V&Q Books, £10.99), translated by Mima Simić. After the break-up of a long-term relationship, a young man takes a train from Croatia heading north. He has only the vaguest of plans; he is not truly looking for new beginnings, but an impossible return to the safety of a place and time – the Berlin that shaped his imagination as a child when he lived there with his grandmother.
As he hurtles towards the future, he tries to piece together the fragments of his past in a notebook and Sajko brilliantly captures the way in which his mind hums and crackles with shifting thoughts in chapters that each comprise a single winding sentence, a roiling river branching into tributaries of dense, emotionally charged scenes.
Simić’s thrilling translation is endlessly inventive in rising to the challenge and is marked by pin-sharp imagery and a finely tuned ear that recreates the novel’s cascading prose with power and precision. Each sentence breathes with the rhythm of movement and memory.
Sajko vividly captures the way in which travel suspends both time and place in scenes that are at once real and dreamlike – border towns, desolate platforms, padlocked snack machines, suitcases struggling to contain entire lives – evoking generations of exile and migration, the inevitable aftershock of the wars and purges that have defined the Balkans. Every Time We Say Goodbye is a threnody to leave-taking – elegant, mournful, and profoundly human.
Loss is very much at the core of Mariusz Szczygieł’s Not There (Linden Editions, £12.99), translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Across these fragments of reportage – portraits of a Czech poet, a Ukrainian soldier, a Polish accountant, an Albanian painter, the writer’s own father – Szczygieł traces the negative space left by loss (of a person, a colour, a cheese fork, a child), but if the book’s title suggests an inventory of losses, its pages are alive with the traces of what is not there: it is a meditation on absence that hums with the quiet pulse of what remains.
The pieces range from single paragraphs to essayistic portraits of much greater length, fashioned from the testimonies of many individuals. In one of the most powerful pieces, The Colours Have Run, Szczygieł posts an advert on Facebook looking for people who are “faking something or pretending something is missing in their lives”. Karol replies, I am the secret something in my own house. In my own family. His is the story of the trans man, reborn 27 years earlier when he began the road to transitioning.
“When his grandma mistook him for her son, Karol was pleased that she saw the man in him. When the youths on the tram shouted ‘homo’ he was pleased because they took him for gay, in other words saw him as a boy, rather than a girl.” In Karol’s story the things that are “not there” are guilt, shame, depression and fear.
Though rooted in fact, these essayistic pieces drifts toward the metaphysical and the poetic. “Everything must have its own form, Mariusz, its own rhythm,” says his mentor Hanna Krall in one of the shortest texts, “Especially absence.” It is precisely this rhythm – tender, exact, humane – that binds these disparate pieces in Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s translation, which captures the changing modulations of each voice, and her deftness allows a single sentence to hold pain and playfulness in the same breath.
Not There ultimately celebrates what endures: the stubborn glow of memory, the joy of small human continuities. In Szczygieł’s world, absence has its own heartbeat, one that reminds us that to write about what has disappeared is to affirm what is still present – the fragile, flickering persistence of being.
