Tag: historical fiction

A Brief History of Seven Killings

There is a lot of discussion about A Brief History of Seven Killings in the translation world because the first and biggest decision to make when translating it is: how do you render Jamaican Patois in other languages? It isn’t used incidentally, like in other Caribbean literature I’ve read before, for snippets of dialogue or occasional idiomatic expressions; Marlon James employs the dialect for the overwhelming majority of this 600+ page book. Putting aside the question of sheer weighty wordcount majority, the shifts between Patois and standard English are important pieces of characterization. Each perspective character has their own voice, of course, but even a single character will slip from one to the other depending on who they’re talking to and how they’re feeling. An educated middle-class character sometimes switches to Patois for her inner monologue under extreme emotional duress; others play it up as a racial performance in order to appeal to powerful white Americans and get what they want. These are deliberate choices by the author to convey…something…that falls flat if you were to make it literal or textual.

I don’t know to do it! I won’t pretend to know! But that makes A Brief History one of the rare books published since 2000 that I’m actually vaguely aware of, and so I was excited to see this book proposed for my international WhatsApp book club. I fell behind, however, and only finished this sometime in mid-June even though it was May’s book—probably because I was still making a heroic effort to finish Jag heter inte Miriam.

A Brief History of Seven Killings is a fictionalized account of the assassination attempt on Bob Marley, or maybe to put it more precisely, Marlon uses the assassination attempt on Bob Marley as a framing device for a story about Jamaica, Jamaicans, and their relationship to the United States that spans the course of fifteen years. Getting into any more plot than that would miss the point, because it’s less what happens and more how characters develop and inadvertently shape their destinies over the course of the book. In a way, plot is only incidental and is an excuse to bring together a particular ensemble cast that would otherwise have nothing to do with each other.

Jag heter inte Miriam

“The story is fiction, but it is true.” YuanTsung Chen’s remark in her introduction to The Dragon’s Village is also a perfect description of Majgull Axelsson’s Jag heter inte Miriam.

Looking back at my year of reading at the age of 39, there was great deal of history, especially World War II. Using the strictest possible definition of history or historical fiction, the list is:

*Still only currently reading, so I might not finish before I turn 40, or even at all.

Some of it was intentional, some of it (for example, book club picks or recommendations from friends) was pure happenstance. A year of reflection.

Jag heter inte Miriam is a kind of bildungsroman, following the titular Miriam (née Malika) from her childhood in Germany through the Holocaust and finally to land in Sweden. The name change arises when Malika takes on the uniform and identity of a dead Jewish girl, Miriam Goldberg, during her transport from Auschwitz to Ravensbrück. Malika is Romani and has already experienced life at the bottom rung of the prisoners’ self-determined hierarchy. The Nazis might have the most animosity for the Jews, but most of Miriam’s day is spent among prisoners, not Nazis. There was more foresight in this decision than Miriam could have realized, as she ends up on one of the white buses out of the camps and into Sweden—whose immigration policy at the time denied entry to Romani people. As a result, Miriam spends more of her life passing as Jewish than being authentically Romani.

Her entire life story is presented across 450 pages, through the narrative framing device of celebrating her 85th birthday with her stepson and his family: wife, daughter, grandson. The gift of a silver bracelet, engraved with her name and of what looks to be Romani craftsmanship, prompts her to remark “Jag heter inte Miriam” (“My name is not Miriam”), which naturally sends the family into a small uproar. Is this dementia? Alzheimer’s? A strange joke?

Granddaughter Camilla is the one to ask Miriam about it directly, and about her experience in the camps, which sets up the framing device for the rest of the story. In between long episodes of Miriam’s past, we come back to the present day setting and her lakeside walk with her granddaughter, where Camilla tries to come to grips with this history lesson.

There’s obviously a lot in here, and Axelsson includes a long list of references and books for further reading at the end, as well as a lengthy thank-you to fact checkers, historians, and interviewees. (I recognized Hans Caldaras‘ name among them, whose biography continues to live rent-free in my head even though I read it six years ago.) However, even if many of the events of the book actually happened—including the “tattarkravallerna” in Jönköping in 1948 or the Roma uprising in Auschwitz in May 1944—the character of Miriam Goldberg is still just that: a fictional character. There’s advantages and disadvantages to this approach to presenting history, and I don’t think there will ever be a conclusive answer to the question “Historical fiction: good or bad?”. It’s just something to be aware of.

Jag heter inte Miriam was another one for my annual reading goals, one that I’ve owned for more than a year. It took a painfully long time to read, not only because it’s 450 pages but also because it’s a goddamn Holocaust novel. Still, I’m glad I read it. By all accounts it seems like Axelsson tried to be as respectful and thoughtful as possible, and like she genuinely wanted to tackle history through the lens of fiction rather than crank out some tragedy porn.

It doesn’t seem like the book is out in English, but the fantastic Asymptote has an excerpt available, an excellent translation by Kathy Saranpa.

The Encyclopedia of the Dead

This was the other book I bought on vacation in Zagreb, along with Journey to Russia. Danilo Kiš was born in what is now Serbia, rather than Croatia, but nationstates are a fiction so why bother splitting that many hairs. I enjoyed Krleža’s journalism but still had an itch for something literary. The Encyclopedia of the Dead fit the bill perfectly. It might be a slim little collection, but it still packs a punch. Short stories are, in my opinion, the most difficult literary form. I’m probably more impressed by a really good short story than by a really good novel, at least from a technical perspective, because in my opinion they’re so much harder to write.

According to Wikipedia, The Encyclopedia of the Dead initially received mixed reviews, but to my mind the stories in here are all fantastic examples of the form: not a single word wasted or out of place. The only uninteresting one for me was “The Legend of the Sleepers”; as a retelling of an early Christian myth I’d never heard of before, it wasn’t anything I could delight in recognizing. Everything else covers a wide ground of social, historical, political impact: religious schisms, personal betrayals, conspiracy theories, doomed love affairs.

Easily a permanent addition to my library. A digital copy is available to borrow in the Internet Archive for the curious. If I had to pick just one story to recommend, it would be the title story, “The Encyclopedia of the Dead (A Whole Life).” It simultaneously has a spooky, dreamlike quality (an actual encyclopedia of the dead like the one in the story would be, of course, impossible to assemble in real life) and a laser-like focus on the small, tangible details that make up someone’s life. It’s the Serbian literary equivalent of a Twilight Zone episode. Beyond that, “Simon Magus” struck me immediately, perhaps because I saw so many parallels with Lagerkvist’s Barabbas (one of my all-time favorite novels). And finally, “The Book of Kings and Fools” is simultaneously of its time and timely, still speaking to our concerns about truth, factuality, scapegoating and authoritarianism.

The new Penguin edition that I bought is still the first English translation by rockstar in the community and founder of the PEN Translation Fund, Michael Henry Heim. Why mess with perfection?

The Safekeep

Yael van der Woulden’s The Safekeep was an International WhatsApp Book Club pick, and with a publication date of 2024 it’s probably the newest book I’ve read so far this year. It even came right on the heels of Filosofins tröst from 523 CE for a bit of chronological whiplash!

Set in the Netherlands in 1961, The Safekeep focuses on Isabel, who is living in a house her family happened to acquire during World War II. (“Happened to acquire” = yes, you can look at that timeline and probably guess the means by which they came into it.) Isabel’s situation is rather tenuous, however; the house is actually willed to her brother Louis in the event he ever decides to marry and start a family, and Isabel is understood to simply be the caretaker until then. While things look promising for Isabel on that front—to quote the immortal bards LMFAO, Louis is “running through these hos like Drano”—it’s still no guarantee.

A series of incidents leads to Eva staying at the house with Isabel while Louis goes abroad for work. The two women could not be more different: Isabel is aloof, distant, and proper, while Eva is gregarious and uninterested in following rules. Sparks fly, the tightly-wound Isabel finally lets her hair down, and the two women begin a passionate love affair.

Isabel’s erotic fixation on Eva is simultaneously very obviously telegraphed but also very in character. Right at their first meeting at an awkward family dinner, Isabel zeroes in on all of Eva’s physical failings: the roots that need a touch-up dye, the way the buttons on her dress gap, the shoddy hems, and so on. It’s clear to the reader that Isabel is hyperaware of Eva’s body and Eva’s looks, even if it’s not immediately clear to Isabel herself. Whether or not readers enjoy that kind of signaling is a matter of taste. Are you the kind of person who relishes the obvious ignorance of the protagonist to their own desires, or does it just try your patience?

The other plot twist, which is late enough in the book that I would consider it a spoiler, had similarly obvious telegraphing but that I found to be much less satisfying. It’s a delicate balance to strike for van der Wouden, trying to find the balance between too many hints and not enough. The difference between the two cases for me is that 1) Isabel’s disconnection from herself at the beginning of the novel is part of her characterization and 2) the love affair resolves much, much earlier on in the story. This is a pretty horny book at times.

In the end I wasn’t blown away by The Safekeep, but I was glad I read it. I appreciated the focus on post-war Netherlands, a particular piece of history I know very little about. There is a precision and an exactitude to van der Wouden’s prose that I enjoyed, plus the shift of perspective in the penultimate section proves that she’s quite versatile as well.

Small Things Like These

Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These was the latest pick for the Swedish book club I’ve recently (if intermittently) started attending, and yet again they’ve opted for a translation into Swedish. (Previous entries include The Blind Owl, The World of Yesterday, The New York Trilogy.) No complaints from me, exactly, but I suppose that means I need to find other ways of keeping abreast of contemporary Swedish literature.

It’s getting on to Christmas in 1985 in New Ross, Ireland and protagonist Bill Furlong is working hard to get coal deliveries out and payments in to support his wife and five daughters. A delivery to a convent brings him into unusually close contact with behind-the-scenes matters at the local Magdalene laundry and (spoiler, I guess) the story ends with Furlong helping one of the girls escape.

Points for brevity and, despite the subject matter, not being an absolute morass of despair. I was expecting the conflict to revolve around one of Furlong’s own daughters being sent to the institution and spent most of the story trying to guess which one it would be. Maybe that was deliberate misdirection by Keegan, who’s to say? A lesser writer would have gone that direction, I’m sure, and I appreciate that she didn’t.

Otherwise, I imagine that a lot of the staying power a story like this has depends on the emotional resonance the setting has for a reader. I’m not Irish; I have no immediate connection to that particular tragedy. In the same vein, I expect a novel like Beloved hits different if you’re not American.

Ormens väg på hälleberget

This was another move in my last-ditch effort to reach my yearly “books I’ve owned for over a year” goal. I doubt I’ll reach twelve (two more by the end of the year? unlikely), but reaching ten is good enough for me. That’s a nice round number.

Ormens väg på hälleberget has a whole cultural cachet that I was unaware of when my mother-in-law gave me a copy. I had no idea about the movie, about Torgny Lindgren, about anything. I put off reading it for years because I knew it would probably be bleak and unrelenting. Not only judging by the blurb on the back of the book but by the fact that my mother-in-law has a taste for the bleak and unrelenting. I think the same mechanism that allows David Lynch to be a relatively normal—even pleasant and cheerful—person while making incredibly disturbing movies is at play in her personality, too.

No surprise, Ormens väg på hälleberget is indeed bleak and unrelenting! But it was also good that I put off reading it for so long, because the novel is written almost entirely in a nineteenth century dialect that would have been incomprehensible to me when I first received it nine or ten years ago.

The story follows Johan Johansson, or often just Jani, as he bears witness to the exploitation of his mother, his sister, and eventually his wife under the insatiable lust of the local merchant family, first the patriarch Ol Karlsa and then his son Karl Orsa. It would be easy for this kind of story to descend into overwrought melodrama, but Jani is so disassociated from what’s happening around him that the tone stays firmly tragic.

Beyond that I don’t think Lindgren needs a review from me. Ormens väg på halleberget is a modern classic, Lindgren was a member of the Swedish Academy, who am I to have anything interesting to say about his work. But if anyone is in the mood for something bleak and unrelenting, it’s available in English as The Way of the Serpent.

Merry Christmas!

Summer

I have a vague memory of being recommended Ali Smith’s Summer last year by a friend of a friend who teaches English at the university level, but my memory of his recommendation (“It’s like the book version of what we’re doing right now, people having conversations just like this”) so misaligns with what happens in the book that I wonder if I missed something. Or maybe Summer ended up on my TBR for other reasons and the English professor’s recommendation was something else entirely. I also learned, long after I finished it, that Summer is the last of a quartet and that several of the characters had appeared in the previous installments.

Basically, I came in to this book all wrong, so this is going to be an extremely…unfair? confused? unhelpful?…review for anyone who actually has the full context for the book. Sorry.

A pair of siblings—teenage environmental activist Sacha and her proto-edgelord younger brother Robert—end up befriending a pair of adults and, along with their mother, make a quick trip in a post-Brexit, mid-Covid England to return a lost/stolen item to its rightful owner. Based on what I’ve read in other reviews, most of what happens in Summer builds on stories and characters established in the previous three books and maybe? maybe not? ties up some loose ends.

Despite my clearly misguided expectations, I really liked Summer. Smith balances a relatively large cast of characters well, keeping their internal monologues consistent with how they’ve behaved from other character’s perspectives.

Mostly.

There is a missed opportunity with Sacha and Robert’s mother, the sole Leave voter in the group: when the book comes around to her perspective, Smith doesn’t really bother to speculate her motivations or feelings about Brexit and that feels like a cheap out. Its absence is made even more noticeable when you consider how much time we spend with Robert, who is currently acting out through extremely anti-social behavior.

On the whole, though, the different perspective characters feel distinct. Sometimes authors love the sound of their own voice a little too much and when they attempt an ensemble cast, characters lose all personality when it’s their turn to pilot the ship. Even if everyone has more or less similar politics (Brexit aside), Smith avoids that particular trap.

People who had read the previous three note in their reviews that Covid seems shoehorned in based on everything else, but I didn’t really walk away thinking “wow those lockdown bits were a bit tacked-on and weird,” so perhaps that’s an advantage of coming at the book from the completely wrong angle.

My only criticism, which is perhaps more of a reflection on me and the kind of person I am, is that I felt a bit manipulated by the inclusion of Vietnamese refugee Anh Kiệt. The parallels to the internment of “enemy aliens” in the UK during World War II are enlightening and fair to make, and I don’t begrudge Smith that point at all. However, Anh Kiệt himself gets pretty limited time in the story. Sacha writes to him twice throughout the book (and we see both pieces of correspondence) and we get to read his single reply to her, full of enthusiasm and optimism and hope, in the somewhat limited and uneven language you would expect from someone who acquired English informally and later in life. As far as character development goes, it’s not much, and it comes off as romanticized and idealized. His reply to Sacha is the last chapter of the book, which on the one hands lends it some gravitas, but that doesn’t make it any less flat. For comparison’s sake, the flashbacks to the World War II internments are longer (probably, though I didn’t go back and count up the pages, but they feel longer) and through the perspective of a character with fluent command of English, so his depiction is a bit more detailed and multifaceted. Never mind that this character apparently is the central figure in one of the previous books.

My initial reaction to finishing Summer, with Anh Kiệt’s optimism and nearly Pollyanna spirit, was to get a bit choked up at the goodness of the world and the undaunted spirit of hope etc. etc. Then I got annoyed at myself for getting choked up, because in a book full of research this is still fiction and who’s to say if Anh Kiệt ever existed. It’s the same “too good for this world” characterization of Ali from Där vinden vilar, but the book situates Ali so thoroughly in his community that it’s easy to read this idealized teenager as the hopes and desires of a family, of a village, of a country. Anh Kiệt doesn’t have much of a pre-refugee identity or status, so he feels like a narrative device cynically designed to elicit a reaction out of me, and I hate that in a book.

On the other hand, I read L’elegance du herisson and cried at the end all three times, so I like to think I’m not entirely heartless. What makes it effective there but cynical in Summer? I guess the answer is: the time I spent with the characters in question. We spend a lot of time with Renée in L’elegance du herisson since she’s one of the point of view characters. The same, even, with Ali in Där vinden vilar. But Anh Kiệt only gets his single chapter at the very end.

Or maybe the problem is me.

Frère d’âme

I added David Diop’s Frère d’âme to my TBR by way of a review in the Karavan literary magazine, and to be honest I was a bit leery of it going in. The review was positive, but it gave the impression that the book was a gritty, grim, hyper-realistic portrayal of war, which is not a thing I’m usually into. I approached the book the same way I might approach eating a strange new vegetable: accepting that it might not be an enjoyable experience, but that it would at least be good for my (reading) health.

Frère d’âme is a wartime bildungsroman centered on the young Alfa Ndiaye, a Senegalese soldier in the French trenches of WWI. The book opens with the gruesome death of his best friend, adoptive brother, and “plus que frère” Modemba Diop in the battlefield, and from there on we follow Ndiaye through grief, trauma and regret.

That’s an incredibly pretentious way to describe the story but it’s the best I can do, I suppose.

Let’s get the content warning stuff out of the way first: there is plenty of frank description of gruesome wartime (and otherwise) acts. People are disemboweled, heads are blown off, and as a narrator Ndiaye doesn’t hesitate to describe all of this in detail, often repeating or lingering on the images.

But somehow the book is more dreamlike (if sometimes nightmarish) than gritty realism. The first-person narration keeps the reader in Ndiaye’s head rather than out in the action, and Ndiaye himself is so apparently unbothered by it that his descriptions of violence and gore become more surreal than anything else. Ndiaye’s language is also highly repetitive, not in a way to suggest that he lacks ideas or words but rather in a way that creates rhythm, like all of those iterations of “rosy-fingered Dawn” in The Odyssey. That rhythm also made it easy for me and my mediocre French to immediately get lost in Diop’s writing. There’s a certain musicality to it that draws you in. I bet the audiobook is a work of art.

I say “apparently” unbothered because the subtext is of course that Ndiaye is deeply traumatized by the death of his friend and by the brutality of war in general. The conversant tone in his language, along with the repetition and verbal tics (“je sais, j’ai compris” and variations thereof; “par la vérité de Dieu”), create speech patterns you might expect from someone talking to themselves; the deliberate attempt to shift the mind’s focus away from something painful.

I won’t spoil the ending, except to say that I’m of two minds about it. I’m not thrilled with the choice Diop made for the actual events, but I deeply appreciate the ambiguity he allows the reader for interpreting them. Are we watching Ndiaye have a mental breakdown, or is he genuinely possessed by the spirit of his dead friend? Why can’t it be both?

As with most of the French books I read, once I finished Frère d’âme I immediately picked up the Swedish translation (Om natten är allt blod svart). So far I’ve been pretty well satisfied with them, but this time around less so. Om natten isn’t a hatchet job on par with Stick or anything, but the rhythm is still…different. Here are the first three sentences:

“…je sais, j’ai compris, je n’aurais pas dû. Moi, Alfa Ndiaye, fils du très vieil homme, j’ai compris, je n’aurais pas dû. Par la vérité de Dieu, maintenant je sais.”

“…jag vet, jag förstår att jag inte borde ha gjort det. Jag, Alfa Ndiaye, son till den gamle, gamle mannen, förstår att jag inte borde ha gjort det. Vid Guds sanning vet jag det nu.”

I have my own opinions about how I would translate the French into Swedish, but I’m not about to pop off here and potentially make a fool of myself. I couldn’t grab a hold of the English translation before sitting down to write this post, so I have no idea how that fared, either (except to note that it won the International Booker Prize). Hopefully at some point an ebook version will appear in one of my US library apps.

Overall, Frère d’âme is a great example of why I think the checklist approach of my reading goals is at least a good start. It’s not a book I would have encountered if I weren’t making a deliberate effort to seek out different things, and my bookish life is that much richer for having read it.

Hundraåringen som klev ut genom fönstret och försvann

Jonas Jonasson’s novels are hard to miss in Sweden, with their striking and consistent titles and cover designs. Yet at the same time they’re nearly invisible, fading into the background, precisely because they’re everywhere: the books that everyone’s read, to the point where it feels not at all urgent because at this point you’ll pick it up via cultural osmosis. So I never gave much thought to Hundraåringen beyond rescuing it from the junk pile at a friend’s apartment just to have it around—just in case—but promptly forgot about it, except to periodically confuse it with A Man Called Ove. What finally got me to pick it up was 1) a personal recommendation from a friend and 2) its appearance as Sweden’s entry in the EuroVision book contest.

“Finally, we’re releasing more than Nordic noir into the world,” I thought.

An SFI classmate years ago described Hundraåringen to me as “a Swedish Forrest Gump” and that just about covers it: 100-year-old Allan, as the title suggests, climbs out the window of his room at the senior home on the morning of his birthday because he’s just utterly fed up with living there. (If I’m reading later subtext correctly, it’s more an act of depression than adventure.) Things start happening as soon as he encounters a young man with a suitcase at the nearest bus station, and the adventure afterwards is interspersed with his life story, which is filled with some of the most significant events and people of the twentieth century. There Allan is in the margins of the Spanish civil war, the development of the atomic bomb, the downfall of the Soviet Union, and on and on it goes. Throughout all of this, Allan is phlegmatic and unflappable, escaping from political prisons and dispatching would-be criminals with fatalistic indifference.

Jonasson is careful—or thorough, maybe, is the better word?—to make use of every detail so that simple gags become essential plot elements. These moments would fall flat in a more serious or melodramatic story, and feel like deus ex machina, but because the whole story is farcical from beginning to end it instead becomes just a more elaborate joke, elevated from physical comedy to long-form setup and payoff.

From a translation perspective there are a couple words and jokes that I’m curious to see handled in English, so of course now I have to read it again in English. But by all accounts it seems to land well with English speaking readers.

The Dwarf (and Alexandra Dick)

Revisited a book from last year in translation, purely for the fact that a work friend brought it up in conversation on two different occasions.

“It’s like…amazing. That translator found solutions that weren’t even there to be found.”

Dvärgen came out in 1944, and appeared in English in 1945 in a translation by Alexandra Dick. A year is not a long time to translate a whole novel, especially before the era of word processors and CAT tools and the Internet. Even more astonishing, then, that the translation is good. Or maybe not so astonishing? I suppose I don’t have the ideal frame of reference to make that call. Over seventy years later and this seems to be the only English translation in town. Why mess with perfection?

What struck my coworker was that Dick didn’t really have any other substantial translation career he could uncover beyond that one really good translation, leading him to wonder if it was “some genius on drugs.”

Fortunately, Steve Holland at Bear Alley Books did some fantastic detective work so I don’t have to! Turns out that Dick wasn’t entirely a flash in the pan. (I’d argue she was some kind of genius, and who knows about the drugs.) Her translation career was, indeed, fairly limited, with just Dvärgen and Birger Dahlerus’s autobiography, Sista försöket, to her name (the combination of which invites speculation on her personal anxieties about war and Nazism). Her literary career, on the other hand, was prolific. She put out some two dozen novels from 1937 to 1964—including three in 1944 and one in 1945, coinciding with when she would have presumably been working on Dvärgen. Then, for whatever reason, her writing career ended in 1964, maybe because she was living in Florence and why would you stay shut up indoors to write all day when you live in Florence?

Any review of this, like with the original, is superfluous. Good book, good translation, have at.