I did end up writing something about the books, although it started with a lot of vitriol toward the Rochester Police Department, and included some things about myself that I don’t necessarily feel comfortable sharing in this space. I’m thinking that I’ll fix all the typos and post it on , which I rarely, ever use (but probably should?).

Anyway, if you’re a fan of these two books—or of Jordan Stump’s work as a whole—I think you’ll like this interview. And hopefully this week things will settle down enough to get back to posting more regularly again.

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How did you come to Igifu��and/or��That Time of Year?

I’ve been delightedly reading and teaching NDiaye’s books since the early nineties; it took me a while to begin translating her (in part because my early attempts were so unworthy of her beautiful writing that I simply gave up). I ended up translating several of her later books, but my mind kept going back to her earlier work, which is undertranslated and vastly underrated in this country; I thought particularly of That Time of Year, which I read when it first came out, way back in 1994 or thereabouts. I was utterly thrilled when Two Lines agreed to let me bring it, at last, to the American reader.

Why should people read these books?

Because they’re beautiful, in two very different ways (“beauty” being defined rather broadly here). There are of course many other reasons, but for me that’s always the only one that really matters.

What did you learn in the process of translating these books? (Or, how did you grow as a translator by working on them?)

Not so much a matter of learning as of confirmation, I guess: the glorious power of endless revision. Both Igifu and That Time of Year eluded me a bit in my first drafts; in both cases, once again, I saw that the way through obstacles in translation is long, drawn-out, constant rethinking and reconsideration. The more I translate, the more I’m amazed at what a translation can do as long as it’s given enough time and enough thought to develop.

What specific elements of style/structure/voice were the most challenging/rewarding about these projects?

In both cases, I think the challenge is not running roughshod over the delicate balance of the text. Both NDiaye and Mukasonga have understated voices, though they’re not understated in the same way—the kind of voices that can be disfigured by an overly “poetic” translation, but that can easily turn flat if they’re rendered too plainly. Letting the voice come through as itself, not as something I can turn it into: that’s always the challenge of translation, and with writers whose voices I particularly love it’s particularly urgent to get it right.

If someone loved Igifu/That Time of Year, what would you��recommend they read next?

I don’t mean this to be a facile answer: these are both writers whose work grows richer the more you read of it—so read more NDiaye and more Mukasonga!

Julia Sanches is a translator working from Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan into English. She has translated works by Susana Moreira Marques, Daniel Galera, Claudia Hernández, and Geovani Martins, among others, and is a founding member of Cedilla & Co.

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by Christos Ikonomou, translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich (Archipelago Books)

About halfway through Christos Ikonomou’s Good Will Come from the Sea, as the titular story wound to an end, I realized I hadn’t been breathing. My eyes were trained on the text, moving determinedly down the page, but my breath had caught somewhere between my lungs and the roof of my mouth. As Lazaros the Bow searched the island for his lost son—“If Petros went into the Dragon Cave that night,” the narrator muses, “and if the cave stretches, as they say, whole kilometers beneath the island, and if the island is, as they say, hollow in places, then at some point he’ll surely be able to hear him”—my breath remained shallow and my attention focused.

It feels odd to read a book positing the distant aftermath of an economic crisis that for years left Greece gasping for air right as we’re in the midst of another economic crisis whose lasting effects remain to be gauged. I wouldn’t say this book leaves me with a sense of hope. But it does leave me with an aftertaste of resilience. In an that framed Ikonomou as the “Accidental Prophet of a Country in Crisis,” the author claimed he wanted his work “to show what it means to be human in a world that rapidly changes in a not very human way.” Good Will Come from the Sea, the second collection of Ikonomou’s stories to come out in Karen Emmerich’s faultless translation, is populated by people fighting to maintain their livelihoods and dignity under circumstances beyond their small, human control. To say this is a book about the crisis would be too limiting. Rather, it is a book about people staring foggily into a future difficult to discern while trying to navigate an unmarked present.

Much of the tension across the collection is generated through repetition—the book echoes like a cave—and through a sort of temporal pulsion, a single moment stretched dangerously thin and then compressed in the second it takes for something to happen. The characters in each piece seem suspicious of the past, uneasy in the present, and understandably wary of putting too much stock in the future. The collection’s title—“good will come from the sea”—echoes across the book with a hint of despair but also of its sister feeling, hope, rolling the reader steadily toward the end.

The collection is composed of four rather long stories, all of them set in the same place, featuring Greeks from the mainland who have moved to one of the less-affected, myth-steeped islands of the Aegean Sea in search of refuge. Here history and myth are a very distant backdrop, and the locals refer to the newcomers as “foreigners” who in turn refer to them as “rats.” The conflict between both is set up in the opening piece, “I’ll Swallow Your Dreams,” which takes place over one night and follows a group of friends who have gone to a place called the Refuge to celebrate Easter. One of them, Tasos, is a sort of village philosopher and the man seemingly responsible for the adage that will tiptoe across these stories: good will come from the sea. Humiliated after a run-in with the rats, Tasos vanishes into one of the many caves that riddle the island, never to be seen again.

In “Kill the German,” one of the collection’s more demented stories, Chronis, a young wheelchair-bound man who reads voraciously, has an active imagination, a pet scorpion, and a rollicking, sometimes cringey, sense of humor—Karen Emmerich’s skill as a translator is particularly tickling in this description: “It’s a neologism. Or maybe a neoplasm. . . A psychic edema where I’d prefer some psychedelica”—stares out his window at the house across the way, plotting the rescue of the girl the old man locks in his room every night. “Don’t listen to the other foreigners,” Chronis says, “good will come from the sea not in a rowboat or on a ship, but in a floating wheelchair.” It’s a line that both explodes the notion of the mythical hero and positions him as the “good”. Unsurprisingly, the closing image of Chronis clawing his way up to the room of the old man is a sad one, and his motivations for rescuing the girl—“You don’t know her,” he tells us. “If you saw her you’d understand. Like a doll. Soft blond fuzz. A body that glows like a candle in church”—are at best suspect.

In “Kites in July,” Artemis and Stavros linger by the ashes of the ouzeri they had been renovating by the seaside in an old building owned and abandoned by Artemis’s uncle, who lives in Germany. (Germany, the real villain in this story.) As they envisage the ouzeri they will one day run, which they have decided to name Good Will Come from the Sea, their hopes for it extend beyond the restaurant itself and encompass the entire island, the entirety of the country, a brighter, fairer (read: less corrupt) world for them to live in. But there are rules, they are warned, and there are people who have been eyeing the location of their restaurant for years. Soon enough, their dream goes up in flames. Good Will Come from the Sea will never be any more than that—a dream.

Lazaros the Bow, the protagonist of the titular story, runs a taverna where his son Petros had worked until being hired away by a loud, monied man called Drakakis, under whose watch he disappears. Here, the good that will come from the sea is not some mythical hero or vague expectation, but a boy. Lazaros “closes his eyes for a moment and tries to imagine how it’ll be. How it’ll be to see Petros coming from the sea. He’ll come from the sea, that’s the only thing that’s certain. Good will come from the sea. . .” As each paragraph builds in tension and the thread of Lazaros’ hope that he will find his son grows tauter and tauter, the prose takes on a prayer-like cadence. When Lazaros yells “Peeetroooos! Petraaaakis!” it is followed three times by the statement “His mouth loves his son’s name,” and three times Lazaros wonders what a man is called once he loses his child: “What do they call you if you lose your child, what do they call you, what, what, what do that call you, what. . .” Emmerich handles these incantations seamlessly, delivering to us the speech of a man driven to the edge of reason by sorrow, the words with which he tries to summon his son back to life standing somewhere between the ravings of a lunatic and the disciplined prayer of a man of faith.

There is a story that I’ve failed to mention, because I am still trying to put my finger on it, that weaves itself through the collection. In it, a young woman ministers to an aging father with a tenuous grasp on reality who, in moments of frenzy, sees all around him signs of an impending end. “These are signs,” he says. “Just like back then, it’s the same way now, too. Only now it’ll be worse. Now the end is coming. The real, final end.” Some of the signs, echoes of stories past and presages of stories to come, are “people disappearing into caves and fish coming out onto dry land and paralytics getting up out of their wheelchairs.” A sense of disquiet is generated in the spaces between the text not unlike the disquiet we feel when we read about climate change, the pandemic, political corruption, unchecked capitalism, and economic collapse. The feeling that life is closing in on us. We are living through a present in which all around us are harbingers of the end times and yet we, much like Lazaros and Chronis and Artemis and Stavros, just keep trudging on.

Spencer Ruchti��is an intern at Tin House Books and formerly a bookseller at Harvard Book Store in Cambridge. His writing has appeared in The��Adroit Journal,��The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He lives in Portland, OR.

��by Juan Carlos Onetti, translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver (Archipelago Books)

Juan Carlos Onetti’s characters imagine pissing on one another’s faces, smoke cigarettes in funny ways, wear hats (donning hats, removing hats, tipping hats), run wild with euphoria through the frigid night, fall face-first in cornfields, suffer from happiness without warning. They are accused of being “ruined by Hamlet,” turn into dogs (or do they?), feel all at once “unworthy of so much hatred, so much love, so much willingness to cause suffering.” They are ridiculous men. They are mean and corrupt. They are serious men. (And yes, they are mostly men.)

Born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1909, Juan Carlos Onetti was the author of more than two dozen books, including A Brief Life, his most popular translated into English, and a recipient of the Cervantes Prize and the Uruguay National Literature Prize. Onetti’s novels and stories are often set in the fictional town of Santa María, a place that Katherine Silver calls “Onetti’s Macondo.” Silver also quotes Onetti when citing her guiding light in bringing these stories to English-language readers: “A poet is someone who writes things—not necessarily in verse—that arouse in me mysterious sensations, which I call poetic, for lack of a better word.”

Archipelago Books’ monumental collection of Onetti’s stories, A Dream Come True, spans over 54 years of the author’s dense and difficult to work. It takes a certain kind of foolishness to follow Onetti, let alone to enjoy him. The pleasure of reading him is often at the sentence level: take one of my favorites from “The Possible Baldi,” about a lawyer who invents multiple identities for himself. “Hysterical and literary, Baldi sighed.” What the hell does it mean? I care not; I feel designed to love it.

Edmund White has called these sentences “poetically correct but literally false,” à la the Modernists of Onetti’s lifetime (Joyce comes to mind, and many have cited Faulkner). Onetti is never satisfied with any singular meaning. If anything, his is a language that extends beyond comprehension, probably to the chagrin of his few readers. How fortunate, then, that Onetti has Katherine Silver rendering his absurd theatrics, a translator whose vocabulary and rhythm provide the engine of this collection. Here’s a passage from Onetti’s earliest story, “Avenida de Mayo – Diagonal – Avendia de Mayo”:

Owen rose and threw away his cigarette.

‘Y��.’

Suaid started walking, trembling with nervous happiness. Nobody on Calle Florida knew how oddly literary his feeling was. The tall women and the doorman at the Grand were equally oblivious to the polyfurcation Owen’s ya took on in his brain. Because ya, or ja, could be either Spanish or German; and from here there arose unforeseen paths, paths where Owen’s incomprehensible figure split into a thousand different shapes, many of them antagonistic.

What I love most here is Silver’s use of the word “polyfurcation,” a cognate of Onetti’s ��DZ����ڳܰ���������ó�� in the original, a word that in a strictly prescriptionist sense does not exist in English. Silver’s solution here is elegant and simple—a mashing together of “poly” and “bifurcate” in lieu of splinter, fork, subdivide, words that fail to fulfill the mathematical complexity of Onetti’s ��DZ����ڳܰ���������ó��. “Polyfurcate” here means to atomize, as if with the intent to obscure the meaning of the original thing—just as in the above passage, when Owen’s thoughts fragment into “unforeseen paths” and “incomprehensible figures.” And like Owen’s thoughts, A Dream Come True is a polyfurcating text, a collection at odds with itself, at odds with clarity in the name of aesthetic truths. A complex Onetti sentence may not make sense on the first read, but thanks to Katherine Silver, one can always feel joy in the vibrations of his prose.

Some have compared Onetti to Cortázar and Garcia Marquez. In his stories he pivots from modernist ambitions to playful noir (see the map at the end of “The Tragic End of Alfredo Plumet”) to the nightmare logic of David Lynch. The title piece, “A Dream Come True,” is a story about a struggling theater impresario, down on his luck after a lousy season, who agrees to stage a nearly impossible play for a mysterious woman. The woman hasn’t a word written down, and only has a vague vision of what must occur on stage—a scene, she later reveals, that came to her in a dream, and that she is willing to pay a considerable sum to reproduce. When the play is finally performed to perfection (to an empty theater, of course), the mysterious woman dies instantly, having, the reader assumes, reached some final equilibrium, though of what kind? We are never meant to know. “I understood that this was it, this was what the woman was searching for,” the director thinks. “I understood everything as clearly as if it were one of those things one learns forever as a child and words are later useless to explain.” Sleep and death are inextricable as Onetti (literally!) dramatizes the act of passing into the void. A line from Anne Carson’s Glass, Irony, and God comes to mind: “Who in a nightmare can help himself?”

The collection also includes “A Long Tale” and “The Face of Disgrace,” two pieces published sixteen years apart that present two version of the same story, with entire sentences or phrases shared between the two (the latter seems to be an expansion of the former). The narrator, Capurro, is staying at a resort of some kind where he might grieve his brother’s suicide. In both stories, Capurro becomes obsessed with a young woman he sees riding a bike along the shore. In “A Long Tale,” he is blamed for her murder, and the reader is never completely acquainted with the truth. In the “The Face of Disgrace,” Capurro tells a new version of the story, this time from the first person, and in it accounts for his intimate relationship with the woman, as well as an alibi for the time of her death—and in the end he’s still arrested for her gruesome death. “Don’t worry,” he says, “I’ll sign whatever you want, without reading it. The funny thing is, you’re wrong. But it doesn’t matter. Nothing, not even this, really matters at all.” Capurro ponders the “deceptive, perhaps deliberate, distortion” of his memories, and the garden of forking paths that—perhaps for the author, but certainly for the reader—allows both versions of the same story to coexist in Onetti’s literary universe.

Onetti can be cruel, Onetti can be a slog, but who wouldn’t be thrilled by a story like “Montaigne,” about a wealthy man who invites six of his closest friends to watch his suicide? “I don’t want to ruin your Sunday,” he notes in the invitation, “Whoever fails me will be cursed because he won’t have the opportunity to make amends. There will be abundant food and drink.” The suicide is mostly greeted with disbelief and boredom. Onetti’s tone is perfectly deadpan, skewering the malaise of the young and rich, their poverty of thought, and their total indifference to humanity.

Onetti’s late work is marked by brief vignettes and unpublished sketches, which give this collection a truly complete feeling. The reader sees the author at all stages of the writing process, and all the stages of his career. How fortunate we are to have this archive of stories preserved in English, in all of their mysterious sensations.

translated from the French by André Naffis-Sahely
220 pgs. | pb |9781935744603 |��$17.00��
Archipelago Books
Reviewed by Brendan Riley

For English language readers, like this reviewer, whose literary sense of North Africa is delimited by periodic forays into the stories and essays of Paul Bowles, the horror vacui of a sun-blanched Oran in Camus’s The Stranger and The Plague, Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo, the bygone world of The Travels of Ali Bey, or William S. Burroughs’s cutup interzone skew, then Abdellatif Laâbi’s autobiographical The Bottom of the Jar is an exquisite must-read.

Superbly translated from the French by André Naffis-Sahely, this novel mainly focuses on the seriocomic musings and peregrinations of the author’s alter-ego, Namouss, a young boy of Fez, seven or eight years old, as he starts to become aware of the complexities of life in his family and the surrounding city during Morocco’s struggle for independence from France in the mid-1950s.

If Europeans are obsessed with background music, Moroccans have invented the background image, and without skimping on decibels either. In our home, clamor and din seemed to be inextricably mixed with our joy at coming together as a family.

This, the novel’s second paragraph, indicates one of the operating principles that make The Bottom of the Jar so memorable as it leads readers through the clamor and din and confusion of a Morocco trying to establish a modern, national identity.

The narrative seamlessly blends three areas and levels of concern: the background of 1950s Morocco on the cusp of independence from France; the family’s basic interest and concern in these events––their desire for liberation from the French coupled with disputes and worries about the potential dangers involved in supporting various factions vying for the leadership of a new Morocco; and how these fears are manifest in the misadventures of the eldest son, Namouss’s brother Si Mohammed, a rising star in the family, and a supporter of Moroccan independence.

Employed as a postal clerk––thanks to serious study and good performance on government exams, and thus a step up from his father’s artisanal status but also, because of its governmental and colonial character, a position that brings both admiration and controversy to his family and neighborhood––Si Mohammed ends an altercation with a French lieutenant by punching the man in the face. As a consequence he is imprisoned and Laâbi, setting forth with the color, humor, and arch meditative quality that characterizes the novel, describes the sacrifice of money, time, labor, and reputation which Namouss’s father, Driss, and extended family must endure to save the brother from prison and restore the family’s good name.

Driss is a saddlemaker in Fez’s Sekkatine souk and, as Namouss says, “[my father] was a saint. It took me some time to understand this.” Saintly for tolerating his shrill harridan of a wife, Ghita, for providing a humble but stable life for his family, for his good faith, and for his unwillingness to condemn anyone.

The fear and humiliation caused by the oldest son’s brief imprisonment are also echoed later in the novel during an episode in which the family must frantically hide and destroy possessions that might compromise their safety during house-to-house searches amid the country’s turbulent clashes for independence.

Namouss’s reveries include memories of his loving but quarrelsome family, the focal point and highlight being his mother, the salty, thorny, colorful Ghita––the novel’s dramatic anchor and the central presence in Namouss’ his young life––and her endless stream of unsolicited, acid-tongued imprecations as she elbows her way through daily life in a changing Morocco. In stark contrast to the even-tempered Driss, Ghita is a vicious scold, an old-fashioned Moroccan wife; hardworking, demanding, petty, caring, profane, and righteously selfish when the situation warrants it.

The novel’s early chapters also present Si Mohammed’s arranged marriage, Ghita’s pitiless machinations to procure for him the ideal bride (and thus bolster the family’s reputation), and, amusingly, the gathered family’s hushed expectation as the newlyweds retire to their room together for the first time and everyone eavesdrops to hear their cries of consummation.

Atop the richly developed background of social and political turmoil, Laâbi constructs a wonderful human comedy of family life and growing up in and around Fez, and the great, memorable charm of The Bottom of the Jar comes from the minutiae of his richly textured sketches and portraits of daily life in and around the Spring of Horses neighborhood and the Sekkatine souk, presented as Namouss’s memories and what he and his family hear through “Radio Medina” his nickname for the local grapevine of gossip and intrigue.

One of the many memorable sequences follows Namouss’s introduction to a modern, secular French colonial school where he is, much to his astonishment, introduced to the French language and the mysteries of books and handwriting, things he had not been exposed to at his previous Qur’an school; his pride in learning a foreign tongue is a sweet contrast to the political menace overhanging parts of the novel due to the strains of independence and, in some cases outbreaks of violence; thus when Namouss returns home and tries out his new words on his mother:

“Bonjour madame.”

Ghita, who as soon as she steeped on a raisin could promptly feel its sweetness rise up into her mouth, or so she claimed, had understood.

“Is that Freensh or is it Freentasia, as they say?”

And she erupted into a roar of laughter

 

Other episodes include family outings: a colorful, daylong picnic in a beautiful orchard on the edge of Fez, or a short vacation at the Sidi Harazem oasis out in the desert where Namouss learns to swim; Namouss’s first forays to the cinema (learning how to nab the best seats and, no less important, helping the unsophisticated Ghita to not confuse the cinematic illusion with reality) and soccer matches (too poor to get tickets, watching the game through the fence), a visit to the blacksmith in the El Haddadine souk, and getting caught up in a dangerous political demonstration, nearly trampled, and fainting from the crush of the crowd.

Chief among the novel’s many virtues is its wonderful, unflagging good humor. Like the best books rooted in cities, the atmospheric detail, the evocative power of setting is strong, flavorful, sensual. The novel provides many vibrant, interesting vignettes, which variously fade like dreams or linger like the scent or taste of a pungent spice. As he begins to know and understand, and be baffled by his city beyond the familiar confines of the family home, Namouss finds amusement, delight, and amazement scouring the bustling streets, and the narrative moves from the boy’s innocent errands in the marketplace to increasingly far-ranging and even dangerous excursions: “‘tramping and traipsing the streets,’ for which Ghita used to reproach him, or playing with the neighborhood kids right up to nightfall, mixing with the crowds in the Medina and taking in the flow of its sights,” and coming close to getting crushed by a heavily-laden donkey in the nearly deserted souk on one of the sleepy days of fasting during Ramadan. But Namouss’s innocence is also reflected in the pleasure he takes in simply seeing the city laid out before his eyes as he gazes at its panorama:

He loved looking out over the city whenever he climbed up to the rooftop terrace. From his promontory, he could see the minarets of all the important mosques . . . Wholly absorbed, he watched the clouds of steam dancing slowly above the grid of houses, and lent his ears to the noises made by workshops and street-sellers. Crowning this scene, the sky offered him another perspective on visual digressions, a canvas that an inspired hand was painting ceaselessly using colors that Fez held the secret to and had given the original names to: zebti (flesh color), quoqi (artichoke-mauve), fanidi (bubble gum), hammoussi (chickpea), ����â�ڰ����Ծ� (saffron), fakhiti ( azure), zrireq (violet).

 

Moving in closer, down to the ground, Laâbi’s mid-novel tour of the Sekkatine souk is a descriptive marvel that encapsulates the spirit and virtue of this book: “Namouss’s olfactory memory stored a variety of smells: goatskin, calfskin, hemp yarn, wax, natural or colored wool, bits and stirrup irons, wood, some flour-based adhesive, and of course snuff, which Driss, like the majority of the people in the Sekkatine, consumed vast quantities of.” And this fine description serves to set up deeper, more complex and impressive memories of the heart of social life in Fez, challenged by the changing times:

After the woolen carpets, the secondhand saddles, stirrups, and moukhala guns made the rounds. It got to the point that items completely unrelated to saddlery were peddled: samovars, copperware, engraved daggers . . . But eventually business slowed down and the souk would recover a little tranquility. The shopkeepers did their paperwork ad the craftsmen went back to work, albeit less energetically than before. The local café was flooded with orders, people asking Mrimou, the owner, for coffees or mint teas, which were served in chebri glasses. Out came the nuts or the snuffboxes and everyone gave themselves over to pleasure. This was also the time when passing visitors were welcomed and gossip was exchanged: weddings, divorces, deaths, houses that had gone on the market, inflation, new products, and—naturally—the arm wrestling between nationalists and the colonial authorities.

One of the most vivid recollections the reader might take away from The Bottom of the Jar is Laâbi’s cavalcade of portraits of the colorful local characters and relatives who inhabit their own moral and psychological realities, in moments that feel Dickensian, or perhaps, more appropriately, Mahfouzian, authentic pillars of a portrait of Fez in its turbulent fifties. This excellent series of sketches is anchored by Namouss’ eccentric Uncle Abdelkader who arrives from out of town and brings in the modern world with manufactured and imported goods and, after the right amount of kif, regales his relatives and neighbors with tales from the north; through him Laâbi presents Tangiers with its exotic international palette as an almost non-Moroccan sort of city, as opposed to Fez––by contrast a cradle of tensions. There is also Mikou, an itinerant poet who lives off neighborhood charity: “the scion of a large family, which he had left behind in favor of a free, wandering lifestyle that had in turn led to his family disowning him.” Then there’s Chiki Laqraâ, “the bald spook,” a Muslim woman who goes about unveiled, begging and haranguing the locals with her invective: “Who does that son of a bitch take me for? I am a woman, and the daughter of an honorable woman. My head is bare and I have nothing to hide. Let him come near me and I’ll show him which hole the fish piss out of.” We also meet Bou Tsabihate, the “rosary man,” who preaches harsh sermons but not for alms: “Faith and prayer are the only remedy. But what is it that I see? The mosques empty when it’s time to fill your stomachs. You are still snoring when the muezzin calls you to your duty. And what about the orphans, what do you do for them?” But the mosque can also be a perilous place for the boys because it’s there where they are likely to encounter Bou Souita, “Father Whip,” charged with preventing Namouss and the other boys from messing around. His namesake whip is:

A quince handle with a long leather lash attached to one end, which allowed him to strike the fugitives even in the farthest reaches of the square, dealing out blows in a most democratic fashion. Once the delinquents had been beaten and had dispersed, Bou Souita was free to attend to his other tasks, at which point the rabble-rousers would regroup, this time in a slightly more organized way.

Father Whip is offset by the kind Si Abdeltif, “one of the few adults in the neighborhood who didn’t look down on children and was always willing to exchange a few words with them.”

Other equally colorful residents include Bidous, the one legged beggar, Aâssala, the vagabond cat lady, a virtual mute, and Harrba the captivating storyteller who works hard for his money:

Harrba would jump and twirl and about. He would mimic the sound of waves, the wind, thunder, rain, animal calls, evoking sounds as varied as explosive farts to the silent ones weasels make, and would stop – all of a sudden and without warning – to allow the audience to give credit where credit was due.

“Would you like me to carry on?”

“Yes!” they would yell in unison.

“Very well then,” he would say, the show isn’t free. Dig deep into your pockets and let me hear those coins.”

But of all these characters it is, once again, Ghita who is the narrative touchstone, poison punchline, and earthy, unexpected guide to local custom and occult rituals, best displayed when she allows Namouss to tag along to a meeting of a religious sect to which she’s devoted, a cult dedicated to Lalla Mira, which translator Naffis-Sahely’s helpful endnotes define thus: “The ‘yellow spirit,’ a jinni that loves perfume, music, and dance and leaves laughter and happiness in her wake. When she takes possession of an individual, she sharpens their wit.” Indeed, Ghita seems to be a sort of coarse embodiment of this spirit. And when Namouss confuses his mother’s patron spirit with a demon he’s quickly corrected:

“Who is Lalla Mira? Some sort of ghoul like Aïcha Kandisha?”

“May your lips go numb! I never want to hear you mention that scrap of carrion again, otherwise she will come and eat you and pick her teeth clean with your bones. Lalla Mira is a real Muslim. She is the spirit that dwells within us and who watches over us. Oh Lalla Mira, taslim, I surrender to you. Here I am, just as you like, wearing your color on my head. Keep evil away from me and my children, and may the evil eye go blind before it manages to reach us.”

The curious boy insists on accompanying his mother but gets more than he bargained for, and Laâbi’s description of the rite, with its clouds of cloying incense, frenzied music and dancing, which overwhelm Namouss and cause him to faint, provides one of the most vivid and intense set pieces in a novel that is rich with them:

[Namouss’s] gaze is then drawn to a group of women dancing in the middle of the room. Dancing is not quite the word for it. Their agitation has nothing to do with swaying arms and hips or quivering bellies and shoulders, movements Namouss associated with dance as he knew it, the sort that women threw themselves into with a coquettish air at fêtes and festivities. Instead, the only movement these women are making is snapping their heads back and forth in an increasingly staccato rhythm the rest of their bodies remain immobile, except for when one of them sinks to her knees and begins shaking her torso back and forth with extraordinary strength. Freed from her head scarf, her hair would fall free and toss back and forth, then it began to fly around like a giant eagle experiencing turbulence in flight. Inspired by this ecstasy, the Gnaoua musicians play faster and faster, shouting hoarse sounds to egg the women on. The women reply by ululating in unison. At its climax, the ceremony takes an unexpected turn: A young female spectator leaps into the middle of the ring, and as if she’s been bitten by a scorpion, collapses on to the ground. Gripped by convulsions, she starts rolling and wriggling every which way on the floor. At this sight, a few dancers who haven’t yet lost all sense of reason run over to her, but instead of calming her down, they merely restrict her freedom of movement by surrounding her in a tighter circle. In doing so, these women look not only delighted but even envious of this ‘poor epileptic.’

 

Finally, beyond its alluring, kaleidoscopic mise en scène, this novel is also about the author’s birth as a writer, evidenced explicitly––by passages about his fascination for and growing love of books which bring foreign lands to his awareness:

Not only could he understand what he was reading but he was even beginning to forge a connection between the written words and the images associated with them: images shrouded in mystery and which seemed to come from another world – houses unlike any he’d ever seen, with plenty of space between them, topped by chimneys where smoke rose like a snake into the air, and surrounded by gardens where blond, chubby-cheeked children played on a seesaw.

 

––and implicitly by the resultant masterly compositions which paint glorious pictures of life in Fez, The Bottom of the Jar itself, replete with comedy and well-timed, properly proportioned injections of pathos, constructed on vivid, detailed, imagistic descriptions festooned with lively similes and finely wrought extended metaphors. It’s a novel that patiently elaborates a fascinating coming of age story, masterfully buffering its more sharp-edged historical concerns with Namouss’s naïveté and Laâbi’s deep love of life.

A classic novel of modern Moroccan literature, The Bottom of the Jar is an endless wellspring, a bottomless jar of riches, humane, hilarious, spicy and ribald, deeply captivating, always charming, never offensive––a serious, meticulously crafted memoir of revelatory erudition that superbly blends and balances the political, philosophical, and picturesque.

by Antonio Tabucchi, translated from the Italian by Elizabeth Harris (Italy, Archipelago Books)

The photographer shifted positions and lit another cigarette in his long ivory holder. He seemed uneasy. Silent, he eyed me from head to toe. And then he said: are you a journalist? I allowed myself a chuckle. Though I didn’t want to be sarcastic, his question somehow invited sarcasm, and so I told him: you couldn’t be further from the truth, Mr. Thiago, I assure you, your guess is completely off-track, death is a curve in the road, to die is simply not to be seen. Then why? he asked, even more perplexed, to what end? To make concentric circles, I said, to finally reach the centre. I don’t understand, he said. I’m working with colored dust, I answered, a yellow ring, a blue ring, like the Tibetan practice, and meanwhile, the circle is tightening toward the centre, and I’m trying to reach that centre. To what end? He asked. I lit a cigarette as well. It’s simple, I answered, to reach consciousness, you photograph reality: you must know what consciousness is.

Antonio Tabucchi was an Italian writer and with his wife, Maria Jose de Lancastre, a translator himself, from Portuguese. He won France’s “Médicis étranger” for Notturno indiano and the premio Campiello and the Aristeion Prize for Sostiene Pereira. He’s one of the many authors who, if they lived a little longer, may have won the Nobel.

Private obsession; personal regrets eroded but not transformed by time, like pebbles soothed down by the current of the river; incongruous fantasies and the inadequacy of reality: these are the driving principles behind this book.

For Isabel: A Mandala, translated by Elizabeth Harris, follows the narrator, Tadeus, sometimes introduced as Slowacki, as he travels on a metaphysical journey from Lisbon to Macao to Switzerland and to the Italian Riviera, looking for Isabel, the love he lost during the dark days of Salazar’s Portugal. Rumored to have been pregnant, not only did Isabel disappear, but so did any trace of a child. As he travels from place to place, eyewitness to eyewitness, Tadeus assembles the pieces of the puzzle. He also arrives at a clearer understanding of writing, photography, and of the impermanence of life.

The novel is divided into nine circles, the mandala. A mandala is a circular figure in Hindu or Buddhism symbolism and represents the universe. It’s a spiritual tool to focus attention and aid mediation.

Reading For Isabel: A Mandala you get a detective story, a fable of sorts, a poem, a tour of European cities, and a series of wild and eccentric characters. By the end you will want to read it again, then you just won’t be able to stop thinking about it. Elizabeth Harris’s translation is outstanding. This book should win because not only will it stand the test of time, it is one of the most fascinating and unique books I’ve read all year.

The people Slowacki converses with become more removed from Isabel’s origins the book goes on, yet closer to what he needs to find. One, conversation, with a woman named Lise, is over dinner in the Swiss Alps.

What do you mean by losing the boundaries? I asked, excuse me, Lise, I’d like to know. She smiled her distant smile. It means the universe has no boundaries, she answered, that’s what it means, and that’s why I’m here, because I too have lost my boundaries. She sipped her tea that the waitress had brought. I sipped mine as well. It was green tea, very fragrant, jasmine-scented. And so? I said. She looked at me with her vague smile and asked: do you know how many stars there are in our galaxy? I have an idea, I said, do you know? About four-hundred billion, Lise answered, but in the universe we know, there are hundreds of billions of galaxies, the universe has no boundaries. Excuse me, Lise, I said, but how do you know all these things? She stared into empty space, and said: I’m an astrophysicist, or at least I was.

The entry below is by Gwen Dawson, a long-time reader of international fiction who has contributed to Three Percent in the past, and used to run a book review blog.

by Maja Haderlap, translated from the German by Tess Lewis (Austria, Archipelago Books)

Chad’s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Making the Shortlist: 61%

Chad’s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Winning the BTBA: 9%

I came to Angel of Oblivion without any understanding of the larger context surrounding the story. The phrase “Carinthian Slovenes” was meaningless to me, and I resisted the urge to resort to Google. Instead, I immersed myself in Maja Haderlap’s novel and paid close attention to the details, exactly the kind of reading this novel rewards.

The first-person narrative is told from the perspective of an unnamed girl, a girl who appears to be a close reflection of young Haderlap herself. Grandmother, Father, and Mother—relationships rather than names are emphasized here—play key supporting roles. Gradually, by slipping in details throughout the early chapters, Haderlap situates her story in the far south of Austria in the Province of Carinthia, bordering Italy and Yugoslavia (now present-day Slovenia). The girl and her family belong to the Slovene-speaking ethnic minority in the province. Since the founding of the First Austrian Republic in 1919, the Carinthian Slovenes have suffered prejudice and discrimination, and they were one of the non-Jewish groups sent to Nazi concentration camps during WWII.

Angel of Oblivion is part history lesson, part memoir, and part coming of age novel. As Haderlap mentioned in an interview a few years ago, this is “the forgotten story of the Slovene minority of Carinthia.” For most American readers, this book will fill a regrettable gap in their WWII knowledge. Far from a dry recitation of facts, though, Haderlap tells this history through the personal stories of her characters, many of which are based on real life events and family members.

The narrator is born into a community she describes as “confined by politics to history’s cellar, where they are besieged and poisoned by their own memories.” Indeed, almost all of the novel’s action takes place in the past, forming the basis of stories and memories. Grandmother survived a concentration camp, and Father joined the partisans, a resistance group that fought the Nazis on both sides of the Carinthia-Yugoslavia border. The most harrowing episodes in the novel involve these past experiences, and the girl’s childhood is spent steeped in her relatives’ recollections.

So pervasive is the past in this story that it takes on the force of an active character. The past menaces and knocks on doors and is dragged behind the girl “like a rickety wooden horse on wheels.” This is a past with violent intentions:

As I listen [to family stories], something collapses in my chest, as if a stack of logs were rolling away behind me, into the time before my time, and that time reaches out to grab me and I start to give in out of fascination and fear. It’s got hold of me, I think, now it’s here with me.

This sounds like something out of a horror story: A young girl pitted against a dark and evil force, her very survival hanging in the balance. This struggle and its outcome for the girl—i.e. Haderlap herself—is the focal point of the novel, which manages to be both exciting and suspenseful even though nothing much actually happens. The past fights against the future, the Slovenian language against the German, the traditional farming life against a more modern and educated city existence. I will not reveal the outcome of this epic battle here except to say that the language in which Haderlap chose to write her story is a good clue.

I cannot end this piece without also mentioning Haderlap’s lyrical prose and Tess Lewis’s gorgeous translation. Haderlap has written three books of poetry, and that gift for language helps to brighten and elevate this novel’s grim reality. This is a community decimated by the Nazi concentration camps and haunted by memories. Yet it is also a world where the girl and her mother “sit for hours in meadows of language and speak in the rhythm of rhymes” and where “the summer days have a glittering golden border and more of the color rubs off onto [the girl’s] skin every day.” Lewis’s translation preserves the poetry and honors the cadence of Haderlap’s prose.

If you need any more reasons to read this book, consider that it already won the prestigious Ingeborg Bachman Prize in Germany as well as the Prix du Premier Roman in France. For her translation, Tess Lewis won the Austrian Cultural Forum’s translation prize and the PEN Translation Prize. Add to that its place on this year’s long list for the Best Translated Book Award, and it is difficult to find another book as worthy of your close attention as Angel of Oblivion.

by José Eduardo Agualusa, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn (Angola, Archipelago Books)

In Why Geography Matters, Harm de Blij writes that Americans have a dangerous geographic ignorance of other countries, particularly China. And if we’re iffy on China, we’re totally clueless about Africa, and worse, we don’t care.

So it’s satisfying that two of my favorite books on the BTBA longlist are set in sub-Saharan Africa—Tram 83 (Fiston Mwanza Mujila / Roland Glasser / Deep Vellum) and A General Theory of Oblivion (Jose Eduardo Agualusa / Daniel Hahn / Archipelago Books)—Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola, respectively. Both books are also on the Man Booker International Prize—you know, the other translation prize.

The basic plot of A General Theory of Oblivion is that a light-sensitive agoraphobic walls herself and her white German Shepherd in her Luandan apartment for 30 years, eventually living off roof garden fruits and vegetables and the pigeons she traps, using diamonds as bait.

Outside her building, Angola is approaching the tail end of the War of Independence.
Dark and brutal when it needs to be, sensitive and thoughtful when it should be, the book is a bit of a riffle shuffle. It’s the callbacks,¹ for a lack of a better word that I loved most in A General Theory of Oblivion. Characters who seem like one-offs or throwaways re-enter the book as major characters. It all leads to a denouement, minus all of the chuckles of, say, Comedy of Errors.

If the book title isn’t enough to entice you, the chapter titles should be:
Our Sky is Your Floor
The Substance of Death
On the Slippages of Reason
The Subtle Architecture of Chance
About God and Other Tiny Follies

Daniel Hahn’s translation is up with the best of his work. Is there anyone as consistently good as Hahn?

The reason A General Theory of Oblivion should win the Best Translated Book Award, or at least advance to the shortlist, is that the number one seed, the other book translated from the Portuguese shouldn’t be a shoe-in. Seriously—Villanova beat North Carolina. Leicester City could win the Premier League.

¹ My favorite part of the television series Arrested Development was the callbacks. Well, second to the classic lines:

Michael (to GOB): Get rid of The Seaward.

Lucille: I’ll leave when I’m good and ready

I made a fool of myself with one of the series writers, now novelist Maria Semple at a book tradeshow. Rather than tell her I that was excited/interested in her book Where’d You Go, Bernadette, I asked her a raft of questions about how they writers built callbacks into the episodes

When a novel states a fact that ties into another fact and another and another, as the chain goes on the events begin to seem more and more extraordinary, and the characters take on a chiaroscuro effect without grays, and the melodrama builds, most people reading the novel will think it’s a bunch of lies, and that such things are impossible in real life. And the truth is exactly the opposite: if you just write down the characters and the “permutations” you can find in a city like ours – right here in Barcelona . . . Believe me, there’s no need to wait for a dark, sensational crime, the kind that scare concierges stiff when they read about them in the newspapers. These splashy, absurd crimes and criminals are not at all important, you see. But, if you could look within high society gentlemen and ladies who appear to live perfectly gray and proper lives, whom no one would ever suspect of anything, who appear incapable of a violent gesture or of any slightly spectacular and interesting act . . . If you could follow in their hideous footsteps, you would have more plots than you could ever know what to do with.

The irony of this quote is that the speaker is one of these “high-society gentlemen” who happens to be partially responsible for a shocking event involving an acquaintance. While this gentleman has been involved in some sketchy business in the past, people would never suspect that he would have anything to do with the events that transpired that very night. Even though he may not have legally done anything wrong, his actions earlier in the novel began a chain of events resulting in the death of this acquaintance.

In Private Life, Sagarra follows the footsteps of the speaker and his associates, and he certainly does find more plots that one could ever know what to do with. In fact, after spending most of the first half of the book focusing on the Lloberola family, Sagarra introduces a bevy of characters just as questionable as the speaker before returning to them. Instead of interrupting the main storyline, though, Sagarra actually manages to weave the different plot strands into a rich tapestry equivalent to the one that the family’s patriarch, Don Tomàs de Lloberola, was forced to sell.

Don Tomàs is not the only one with money problems, though: His oldest son, Frederic, is always trying to get himself out of financial trouble. An acquaintance of Frederic’s, Antoni Mates, also known as the Baron Falset, is willing to give him a loan to help him pay some debts, but only if he can get a co-signer. Frederic tries to get his father to help, but Don Tomàs refuses. As if things weren’t bad enough for Frederic, he and his wife are on the brink of a divorce, and his children don’t care too much for him either. Instead of trying to improve matters, however, he just prefers to ignore them until things come to a head.

Meanwhile, Don Tomàs’s younger son, Guillem, is involved in some shady business with the Baron, his wife, and a seamstress who brings them together. When Guillem learns that the Baron can help Frederic with his financial problems, he interferes despite that fact he “certainly didn’t have any feelings for his brother” and “kept his distance from him, just as he kept his distance from his parents.” After a while, though, Guillem takes things too far. Eventually, his interference in Frederic’s affair leads to consequences that are both tragic and ironic.

But as mentioned before, Private Life isn’t just a story about the Lloberolas and their problems and schemes: It’s about a society dealing with the changes that come during the end of the Restoration and the beginning of the Second Spanish Republic. Toward the end of the book’s first half, the older Lloberolas find themselves even more estranged from the city’s aristocracy and begin to recede into the novel’s background. In their place, socialite Hortènsia Portell puts together an “eclectic crew,” a crew that worships Josephine Baker over the Virgin of Montserrat and includes one of the dictator’s generals. Later, characters with minor roles start to become more prominent; these include Conxa Pujol, the Baron’s widow who ends up in a kind of power struggle with Guillem, and Níobe Casas, the gypsy dancer who is a “powerful magnet for devotees of communism and transcendental nonsense.” Also, as Frederic’s children, Maria Luïsa and Ferran, become adults, they connect with some of their father’s old associates, including Rosa Trènor, Frederic’s on-again, off-again lover; and Robert “Bobby” Xuclà, his former friend whom he had a falling out with. As a result, Rosa and Bobby find themselves tangled in the lives of the next generation of Lloberolas.

As intriguing as the lives of these characters and their connections to each other are, though, what really makes Private Life a compelling read are Sagarra’s vivid details of this crumbling society and his keen observations about it. Sure, they’re not always pretty, especially since many of characters have a tendency to neglect not only their dilapidating properties, but their physical appearances and moral upbringings. Then again, any novelist who begins with scene where a man wakes up to the sight of a stuffed dog isn’t going to marvel about how beautiful life can be. Still, thanks to Mary Ann Newman and her sparkling translation, Sagarra’s masterpiece is finally available in English.

Here’s the beginning of Patrick’s review:

Karel Schoeman’s Afrikaans novel, This Life, translated by Else Silke, falls into a genre maybe only noticed by the type of reader who tends toward Wittgenstein-type family resemblances. The essential resemblance is an elderly narrator, usually alone—or with one other unnamed, usually voiceless, person—recollecting their life, stitching together what is remembered with the forgotten, as much as they can, from beginning to end, though not necessarily in order. Archipelago is a fitting publisher for This Life, given that two of their other books, Stone upon Stone and Treatise on Shelling Beans are masterpieces of the genre. This Life doesn’t reach the heights that those works do, but contributes its own perspective to the genre.

Sussie relates not just her life, but the history of her family, from well before the Boer Wars, then through them, and into the uncertain dates of her apparent deathbed. Her family lives out their lives on a farm in the Karoo, a “[b]itter land where I was born, meager shaly soil where they will dig my grave.” For Sussie, the world outside her family’s farm, and the small village that grows around it in her later years, simply does not exist, is not glimpsed or imagined. The family members, a brother and a nephew, who do leave are burdened with the destiny of returning, silent about their time away. More than anything else, this is a novel about insular, isolated people, in an unrelenting way.

On their farm, far from neighbors, the mother resistant to visitors, the family—father, mother, two brothers, and Sussie—is not just secluded from outsiders, but from each other. They are, as she tells it, “inextricably connected in our isolation, and nonetheless irrevocably divided, with no hope that the rift would ever be healed.” No matter what changes, nothing changes. When Sofie, little older than a child, marries Sussie’s oldest brother, Jakob, she briefly brings relief, even pleasure, to Sussie, but before long the “monotony and isolation of her life with us” overwhelms her.

For the rest of the review, go here

Sussie relates not just her life, but the history of her family, from well before the Boer Wars, then through them, and into the uncertain dates of her apparent deathbed. Her family lives out their lives on a farm in the Karoo, a “[b]itter land where I was born, meager shaly soil where they will dig my grave.” For Sussie, the world outside her family’s farm, and the small village that grows around it in her later years, simply does not exist, is not glimpsed or imagined. The family members, a brother and a nephew, who do leave are burdened with the destiny of returning, silent about their time away. More than anything else, this is a novel about insular, isolated people, in an unrelenting way.

On their farm, far from neighbors, the mother resistant to visitors, the family—father, mother, two brothers, and Sussie—is not just secluded from outsiders, but from each other. They are, as she tells it, “inextricably connected in our isolation, and nonetheless irrevocably divided, with no hope that the rift would ever be healed.” No matter what changes, nothing changes. When Sofie, little older than a child, marries Sussie’s oldest brother, Jakob, she briefly brings relief, even pleasure, to Sussie, but before long the “monotony and isolation of her life with us” overwhelms her.

Any moment like that is soon lost in the drudgery. By the time Sussie writes, “What had been my life thus far? Grim, austere, sparse, even, without much tenderness, not to mention love,” the novel is too much like her life: repetitive, meaningless. The greater novelistic sin than repetition that This Life commits is occasionally sliding into blunt explanation of meaning. By page twenty-seven, I was already frustrated with Schoeman’s authorial insertions, having Sussie tell us again that she has “only the fragments of [her] memories from which I now have to try and recover the form and pattern of the past.” The lapses into telling are unnecessary and bog the book down.

These flaws are disappointing, taking away from what Schoeman and translator Silke do well. This Life is a landscape novel, beautifully written in fine sentences that are aesthetic pleasures in the midst of despairing lives. The land of the Karoo may be a harsh one, creating harsh people, but it is Sussie’s homeland, and so a comfort, too, a mental and emotional part of her that she must evoke in order to be understood at all:

I remember the spekbos radiant-white like a snowfall along the rocky ridges, large patches of yellow katstert, blazing like candles, and the fields of kraiitulpe like fire, the gous-blomme and botterblomme and perdeuintjies, and when the scattered clouds swept past the sun, the entire bright veld creased and furrowed like water, and the people moving across it were like swimmers on the surface of a dam, rolling on the waves of shadow and light.

Leaving words, nearly all words of place, in Afrikaans is a successful gamble by Silke. It’s simple, unobtrusive, and ensures that the novel feels South African without imposing stiffness onto English sentences.

Though years pass on this South-African landscape, This Life scarcely touches on the history of South Africa. Sussie tells us all that happens to her mother and father, their slow declines, and confesses all she knows of her oldest brother’s mysterious death, the younger brother’s, Pieter’s, relationship with his sister-in-law, her own efforts in raising her nephew and then onto his own marriage. Multiple decades pass, with Sussie rarely pinpointing any recollection in time, moving from year to year as she needs to in order to tell her tale, and time becomes strange, so much so that personalities can shift without much reason and, when a specific age is given for a character, it’s often jarring. During all of this, South Africa undergoes changes, but it hardly touches on her or her family, even as the war comes and the English establish camps on their land. When a herdsman is executed by the English, Sussie says “there was nothing I could do for them, and Maans was equally helpless,” but by now we know that if they could have done anything, they would not have.

This lack of reflection is part of Sussie’s isolation. She is oblivious to outside society, blind to the existence of cultural complexities. Take Dulsie, a woman who is a former slave who helped raise Sussie’s father and stays with him when freed. Dulsie outlives him, nearly outlives them all, an unfailing presence, a keeper of secrets who Sussie never tried to open, even as dementia overtakes Dulsie. Other former slaves do the same: stay in the lonely expanse of the Karoo with the people who previously owned them. Sussie doesn’t even imagine considering if this is attachment out of loyalty, or desperation. By making such things an absence in Sussie’s consciousness, Schoeman not only depicts the character’s solitary existence, but subtly brings them to attention.
Sussie is not the only figure of silence; her family is too, and not only in regard to the world outside, but also their own affairs. This Life is as much about actions taken, what is spoken, and what is remembered, as it is about what does not happen, what is passed over in silence, and what is forgotten. To say this balance is equal would be inaccurate. If anything is at the center of the book, it is two dramatic acts, wholly enveloped in silence, that create the most significant absence in the work: the mysterious death of Jacob, and Pieter’s flight from their land with Sofie . . .

Jakob falls and dies out on the veld while separated from Pieter and one of the men working the farm. After the body is found, it’s determined an accident, but suspicions abound and half-remembered accusations are made. Some time after, in the middle of the night, Pieter and Sofie run away, and disappear for years. When Pieter returns alone, he is a nearly silent man, broken. No one in the family speaks of the years he was gone, where he went, what happened to Sofie. It’s a gaping hole in their familial timeline, papered over, easily torn by a word from a neighbor, a worker, or Dulsie. As Sussie puts it, “I did not understand, or perhaps I simply chose not to understand, just as I always did when a choice was possible for me; but in the end understanding was inevitable as the stories did the rounds.”

This part of her life is not the only thing that Sussie doesn’t understand. Not understanding, not trying to, is her protection. It ensures the deepest insulation in a place safe from knowledge or clarity. She shuts down curiosity, involvement, becomes a non-being, so much so that people accidentally talk about her in her presence, not noticing her. When she does act on the lives around her—raising her nephew, writing letters for those who can’t—people don’t recognize that this work comes from an active person, rather treating it as manifesting from nowhere, with no source to show gratitude to. She is scarcely a being in her own life: “I would just sit there, not moving or having the least desire to speak, silently occupied with thoughts I was unable to express.” Sussie is the ignored, passed over woman, but that invisibility begins with her, rather than as a cultural force. Though the latter seals her state, the origins don’t leave much room for empathizing with her.

Even as narrator, Sussie is absent, a tool to be put to work. If This Life is meant to give voice to the unacknowledged woman of the veld, then Schoeman fails her by overpowering her agency, dominating with his authorial ambitions. This Life recovers lost memories, and encloses the absences that cannot be recovered, but the drive for this does not come from her. Sussie claims that she “must get up and journey back into the past, through the dark, alone across the years,” but the unavoidable necessity is never explained, and again and again she wishes she didn’t have to remember these things. This, that she has no choice but to revisit the memories, and that she does not want to, is repeatedly stated, and it reveals the entire book as authorial device. The recollection is forced by Schoeman himself and Sussie is rendered a vessel: non-existent as a person in her life, and as a narrator nothing more than a ventriloquist’s dummy. It’s a disappointing result when a book that rides on the strength of its prose much of the time, and that crafts a landscape, falls short because, more than dwelling on absence, it becomes one itself.