Works in translation: Short stories from Ukraine and a compelling novella

For thirty-five days, after Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24th, 2022, the Kyiv-based writer and photojournalist Yevgenia Belorusets blogged about day-to-day life in a country under violent siege. "The word 'war' is even less comprehensible during wartime than in peacetime, when it's used quite differently," she commented in one of her final posts. In early April Belorusets temporarily left Ukraine for Italy. By this time her blog had been widely and avidly shared. Belorusets's first work of fiction, a tantalisingly oblique collection of very short stories called Lucky Breaks, translated from Russian by Eugene Ostashevsky (Pushkin Press, £9.99), should find her an even wider audience. Lucky Breaks is not straightforward; it is as sharp and fragmentary as the shards of lives upended.

There are elements of legendary Ukrainian writer Isaac Babel’s sardonic wit, but this is fiction mostly about women in a state of fugue: dislocated and forever altered by the ongoing conflict with Russia, one that began long before the current invasion. “You can’t really live in this country – you’re threatened from every side at every moment” points out the narrator of Lena in Danger. Language is either discombobulated and lamenting, as in My Black, Broken Umbrella in which an ordinary domestic item is destroyed due to its resemblance to a weapon of destruction; or pared down, such as in My Sister, which sparsely describes the sinister horror of the abduction of an informer from suddenly silent streets: “The pedestrians were all gone, as if they had died out.” Roaming the country from Donestk to Dnipro, ordinary lives unfold to produce extraordinary outcomes.

It is hard to believe that Sunken City (Serpent's Tail, £9.99) is Marta Barone's first novel. In limpid, exact prose, beautifully translated by Julia MacGibbon, Barone recounts the autobiographical story of a young woman trying to piece together the facts about the many lives of her father LB, a doctor who advocated for workers' rights and was imprisoned in 1986 for his membership of a militant group during Italy's so-called Years of Lead, the period during the 1960s and 1970s of bombings and political assassinations, the most notorious being that in 1978 of the former prime minister Aldo Moro.

The daughter, who barely knew the father who died in 2011 when she was 24, turns investigative reporter, interviewing disparate figures from his past, including the mother who brought her up alone. Flitting gracefully and movingly back and forth from the present day to the turbulent years of Italy’s late 20th century convulsions, the backdrop either Milan, Turin or Rome, Barone provides a deeply fascinating insight into the recent history not simply of one family but of an entire country.

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Memory is the enemy that must be, if not defeated, then somehow tolerated in Damiela Eltit's Never Did The Fire (Charco Press, £9.99, translated by Daniel Hahn.) A fierce, Beckettian two-parter reminiscent of some aspects of his one-act play Endgame, or of the narration of the elderly couple in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant, the novel examines the legacy of the Pinochet regime through the aching, ageing bodies of two former revolutionaries and lovers, a woman and her male partner – and of the unendurable loss of one missing person, their small son. Abandonment and fervour rebound off each other, obsessive flashbacks of torture and paranoia, the peculiar camaraderie of imprisonment by a totalitarian regime, the violence of a "terror unleashed that is not altogether blameless".

The pair effectively remains in prison, reluctant to go out into the outside world, poor, cold, bickering, remonstrating, wrapped around each other, scarcely moving from their bed, with its “mattress recycled through enormous industrial waste”. Their need for each other is no longer sexual but is one of mere survival and deep disillusionment. Eltit, who first published after Chile’s 1973 military coup and has won multiple literary awards, is, astonishingly, little known to English-language readers. Never Did the Fire, in a bold, burning translation by Daniel Hahn (Charco also publishes Catching Fire, Hahn’s diary of the translation process), should rectify this.

Isolation, fear and intergenerational prejudice are confronted in Kim Hye-Jin's subtle, brief novel Concerning My Daughter (Picador, £12.99, translated by Jamie Chang). A 70-year-old woman, a widow consumed and exhausted by her job as a care-home worker, decides to allow her only child, thirtysomething lecturer Green, who has been unfairly and probably illegally let go by her university, to share her apartment. According to the mother, Green's future should have been mapped out: a husband, children. After all, so much had been sacrificed by her parents on her education! Yet when Green turns up with her girlfriend, Lane, ("that girl") her mother's bitter and endlessly enumerated anxieties over growing old find its target, as the two wrangle over what, exactly, constitutes a family.

At the care home dementia patient Jen, once a successful diplomat, influential in the Korean government, has no one to advocate for her; little by little, a thawing takes place as the woman discovers renewed agency in standing up for Jen and finding peace with her daughter and Lane. This might not be what she hoped for – an “uneventful, easy life that doesn’t require any effort to be understood and accepted” instead “maybe what lies ahead is a life of endless fights and tolerance” . An acerbic and wise book.

It is not until the 15th (short) chapter is reached in Concita de Gregorio's intense, compelling novella The Missing Word (Europa Editions, £12.99, translated with terrific energy by Clarissa Botsford) that the facts of this story, based on a true, horrific event in January 2011 of probable murder-suicide, are starkly laid out. "The facts are simple," explains Irina, the narrator, an Italian-Swiss lawyer. She is the mother to twin six-year-old girls, Alessia and Livia, who, while on a weekend with their father, her estranged husband Mathias, disappear. Mathias throws himself in front of a train five days later. "At some point during those five days he wrote a message to you. 'The girls didn't suffer, you'll never see them again.'" The book comprises a narrative of letters from Irina to her Nonna (grandmother) who shares the same birthday as Irina's lost twins, to her brother, friends, father, tardy investigators, a judge who dismisses her as irrelevant and wanton, a teacher who refuses to relinquish her daughters' recent pictures and schoolwork. Added to this are lists: of happiness, dreams, a new relationship with a man met in Indonesia. Slithering throughout like a dark serpent is the chill of Irina's marriage to Mathias – one of coercive control.

This is also a book of etymology, for, as its title indicates, there is no appropriate or definite word for a parent who has lost a child. It is also, most wonderfully and strangely, a book about making an accommodation with something unbearable: “I need to pass the border from shadow into light, you say distractedly while you’re washing a glass.” The real-life Irina set up the foundation Missing Children Switzerland in the wake of her tragedy; Alessia and Livia remain unfound.

The experience of reading We Had To Remove this Post (Picador, £12.99) is akin to being subjected to a harsh, interrogative overhead light. It is the seventh novel by Dutch author Hanna Bervoets, and the first to be translated into English, with appropriate jitteriness and jarriness, by Emma Rault. A brave enterprise for both writer and translator, as the chilling, dystopic world of Kayleigh and her colleagues comes across as uncomfortably real: gruelling shift work for an anonymous social media company with an evolving downward spiral of guidelines for the offensive postings, video nasties and alt-right conspiracy theories which Kayleigh and the rest have to watch and decide which meet the criteria for removal. A peculiar sort of hostage solidarity and pathology is forged between the young workers, whose only relief from their daily diet of awfulness – to which many become too quickly inured – is the local sports bar where they drink themselves senseless.

Kayleigh is more than competent at her job and quickly finds a girlfriend among her cohorts called Sigrid, with whom she is soon living. Sigrid, however, does not so easily blur the ethical line between right and wrong, unlike Kayleigh and the others. Haunted by recurring images of a young girl who self-harms, Sigrid becomes depressed and obstructive at work. Her relationship with Kayleigh deteriorates, with shocking results. Relayed as a retrospective account by Kayleigh, Bervoets has fashioned a neat dissection of human morality as taut as a thriller, as sharp as a slug of ice-cold vodka.