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Translated fiction round-up: Piercing Icelandic novel about coercive relationship

Plus works from Nina Berberova, Evelina Santangelo, Julián Fuks, Iris Hanika, Mario Levrero

Thora Hjörleifsdóttir: her novel is as sinuous as molten rock

Catherine Taylor
Mon Sep 20 2021 - 06:00

As its title suggests, Magma (Picador, 208pp, £14.99), the debut novel by Iceland's Thora Hjörleifsdóttir, translated by Meg Matich, is as sinuous as molten rock.

A piercing story of a relationship that moves beyond instant attraction to coercive control into outright abuse, Magma is told in simple, stark chaptered paragraphs humming with lyricism (Hjörleifsdóttir is also a published poet) and the curious world view of a narrator who appears simultaneously very young and very old. “When I feel as if I’ve flayed myself with a potato peeler, I remind myself: Love is a spectrum. It is as painful as it is wonderful.”

Lilja (22) moves into the small apartment of her older “beautiful” university student boyfriend, believing she is making an independent, autonomous gesture: in fact she is slowly ceding her boundaries to him in her quest to be the perfect submissive lover of an increasingly dominant and intimidating man.

Graphic in its depictions of sex and violence, Magma reads on one level like a thriller but its darkness is as much existential as physical. Most affecting is the hammering depiction of a repetitive cycle of control and Lilja’s bursts of freedom, and of the lassitude that results from a beaten-down psyche. Matich’s cool, liquid translation is deft, if studded with a few jarring Americanisms typical of many current European translations into English.

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Nina Berberova’s long life spanned almost the entire 20th century. Born in 1901 in St Petersburg, she left Russia in 1922 and, before settling in the US in 1950, became part of a group of prominent Russian literary exiles in Europe – among them Pasternak, Gorky and Tsvetaeva. Her seminal autobiography and portrait of that generation, The Italics Are Mine, first published in the 1960s, was reissued shortly before her death in 1993.

The Last and the First (Pushkin Collection, 224pp, £12), Berberova's debut novel, was originally published in serial form in Paris in 1929, and now appears for the first time in elegant English translation courtesy of Marian Schwartz. With deceptive lightness and Chekhovian humour Berberova explores the emigré conundrum – in limbo between past and future – in the characters of the Gorbatovs, Russian exiles who have escaped the civil war and are now attempting a new, gruelling life as farmers in Provence.

Conflict arises between the two differing attitudes of the stepbrothers of the family – Ilya Stepanovich, who is committed to this new beginning in a new land, and Vasya, who yearns for the past and will be tempted back to Russia by the arrival of an unexpected letter from Paris.

Berberova is adept at controlling her cast of “many heroes” and her prose is exquisite, such as this description of the farm in early autumn: “This was human habitation created not in struggle with nature but at one with it. The sun was already high in the untroubled sky, and birds flew swiftly in its gleam, like short, darting needles sewing through it.”

The ongoing global crisis engulfing displaced people has, with the rupture of Afghanistan in recent weeks, take on additional grim resonance. In May 2021, according to data from UNHCR, 11,000 migrants arrived in Sicily alone by sea, many classed as unaccompanied minors.

Lost children, either real or imaginary, haunt Evelina Santangelo's From Another World (Granta, 256pp, £12.99). Translated by Ruth Clarke with scrupulous care over its different registers, this is an ambitious, unsettling novel shifting between Brussels, Rome, Palermo and the Po Valley in the autumn and winter of 2020/21. With the autumn influx of desperate refugees "as weak as souls" xenophobia is rife and compassion is scarce.

In Brussels, cleaner Karolina, desperately searching for her son Andreas, whom she suspects is caught up with an extremist group, meets by chance a young teenage migrant, Khaled, and, along with clothes and food buys him a red suitcase. The suitcase and its contents will become a talisman and a desperate secret for Khaled, as he journeys south, heavy wth the memory of his lost four-year-old brother Nadir, with whom he lad left their home in a war-torn country thee years before.

Along with a fatigued local police inspector and a misanthropic recluse, Santangelo’s disparate characters interlink in a sometimes overwhelming, always meaningful, expression of despair and humanity.

The Brazilian author Julián Fuks's Occupation (Charco Press, 280pp, £9.99) is the second in a the loose trilogy of novels begun with the acclaimed and award-winning Resistance; both books appear in a compelling translation by Daniel Hahn. In a brief, wholly mesmerising work, Fuks's alter ego and protagonist, writer Sebastián, alternates between obsessing over different types of occupation and possession: the illness of his father, a former militant; his wife's pregnancy; and his individual conversations with refugees inhabiting a building in downtown São Paulo.

Pressured yet graceful, Occupation dives into dark recesses of personal fragility and solitude amid the interrogation of reasons for creating another person when so many are adrift: “I wanted to long for something in the long passing of the decades.” A country’s history and tormented personal history intertwine, whether it be Brazil, Romania, Syria, Haiti.

Images stick – in hospital, Sebastián’s father has a face “like a startled frog”. Above all Fuks rails at the limits of art to define human experience, as one refugee urges him: “put something more than pain, something more than misfortune, if you want to write something worth writing”.

This December marks the 20th anniversary of the sudden death of the German writer WG Sebald. Much of Sebald's greatest work was a examination of the guilt of Germany's Nazi era as experienced by subsequent generations, a theme echoed by Iris Hanika in her bold and absorbing novel The Bureau of Past Management (V&Q Books, 160pp, £12.99), which won the European Prize for Literature and is now translated sensitively by Abigail Wender.

Archivist Hans Frambach is haunted by the past, which was why he took a job sifting through documents of the Holocaust at the Bureau of Past Management, the testimony of victims searing into his very soul. “That was the essential horror: for him this was the essential thing. That this crime, which was so enormous, could have stopped hurting.”

Similarly affected by their country’s trauma, his friend Graziela finds temporary fulfilment in a sexual relationship, which for a while becomes her life’s determinant. As the novel proceeds both now doubt their respective modi operandi, although for Hans, whose tangible depression crowds the book, an alternative life seems less possible until he makes a surprising intervention against the petty bureaucracy at his soulless and oppressive organisation, which increasingly seeks to “manage” and even erase history.

Geoff Dyer's book Out of Sheer Rage – about his inability to write a "sober, academic study" of DH Lawrence – has become a classic of memoir, biography and procrastination. Something similar is at work – albeit over a much longer 500 pages – in the great Uruguayan writer Mario Levrero's last work (he died in 2004), The Luminous Novel (And Other Stories, 544pp, £14.99), which has been ably and assiduously translated from Spanish by Annie McDermott.

Originally published in 2005, the book charts Levrero’s alternately whimsical, bracingly realistic and always engaging attempts to write “the luminous novel”, for which he has been awarded a prestigious Guggenheim grant. (The book’s “prologue” alone runs to 420 pages.) “I’m not sure what exactly the origin was, the initial impulse”, Levrero muses in a strikingly short preface – but whatever it is, as his subsequent diary of autofiction relays, it has stalled.

His work environment is endlessly uncomfortable and distracting. There is a dead pigeon on the windowsill. He is addicted to computer games and to lengthy examinations of his dreams. To everything except, that is, writing the damn novel: he is afraid of dying before it is completed.

As it is, the book reads like an often manic, frequently poignant last will and testament. It is also most likely Levrero’s masterpiece. Of course.