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Irish Times
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Fiction in translation: Figures in a landscape
Following the extraordinary success of Tomb of Sand , which won the 2022 International Booker Prize for Geetanjali Shree and her translator Daisy Rockwell, comes Our City That Year (Tilted Axis Press, £16.99), a haunting, harrowing vision of a society teetering on the brink of collapse. Shruti and her husband Hanif live in the rambling family home of Sharad. The three friends are all academics – Shruti is an aspiring writer, while the two men teach sociology at the nearby university. Shuffling about the house is Sharad's ageing father, Daddu, part mystic sage, part comic foil, a progressive thinker who clings to an idealised secular past exemplified by poets such as Nazrul Islam. Even before the violence erupts, it is clear this is a fractured city – the lone bridge does not connect, but divides 'them' from 'us' – Hindu from Muslim, secular from religious, liberal from reactionary. From the shelter of their calm university community, they are forced to witness the rising surge of Hindu fundamentalism, the destruction of the ashram next to their house, the bitter polarisation between communities, and the shattering of the tenuous peace that has existed since partition. While some incidents seem clearly inspired by the 1992 riots in Ayodhya that led to the demolition of the Babri Masjid mosque, Shree resolutely refuses to name the city or the year, thereby giving the fractured narrative a sense of timelessness and of universality. This dislocation is further enhanced by the decision to have the novel narrated, not by any of the principal characters, but by an anonymous 'I' who presents themself merely as a scribe or copier who is compelled to record even what they do not understand. READ MORE Rockwell's luminous translation magnificently captures the shifts of register, the half-completed sentences, the claustrophobic dread, and the moving effortlessly between poetic abstraction and visceral immediacy. There is no traditional story arc here, no resolution, only fragments that capture mundane incidents, heated conversations, bitter arguments and terrible tragedies. The narrator's insistence that they are merely a passive recorder mirrors the helplessness of the characters – Sharad and Hanif try to intellectualise the chaos, while Shruti tries to find some way to write about the bigotry and prejudice and the silencing of dissenting voices, but all of them are overwhelmed by the relentless fear and the endless cycle of violence. Their debates about secularism and resistance feel futile, their moral qualms and doubts impotent in the face of the brutal certainties of fundamentalism. Even Daddu, perhaps the moral linchpin of the novel, crumbles in the face of the mob. The city is also a living, breathing character in The Book of Sana'a: A City in Short Fiction , edited by Laura Kasinof (Comma Press, £10.99). Comma Press has published more than 20 books in its series Reading the City, but this is perhaps the most powerful – not only because Sana'a, the capital of Yemen , is both little-known and legendary, but because this ancient city that Ptolemy dubbed 'Happy Arabia', with its slender elegant buildings adorned with geometric friezes, long considered one of the great jewels of the Arab world, has been a brutal war zone for almost 15 years. It is poignant that this collection of short stories should be the first anthology of Yemeni writers published in English. But while war and death loom large in many of the stories, Kasinof has wisely chosen to include writers whose response to the unspeakable is satirical or surreal. [ Show Me Where It Hurts by Claire Gleeson: A multi-faceted and compelling story about the society we live in Opens in new window ] In the opening story, Rim Mugahed's The Ruse of Sana'a, we get our first glimpse of the city through the eyes of a mute errand boy sheltering by the city gates from a Houthi attack. But the boy is not what he seems: left penniless after the disappearance of her husband, a mother persuaded her teenage daughter to take on odd jobs to support the family. Only as a boy can she move around the ravaged city; only by remaining silent can she sustain the illusion. In The Road to Destiny, two sisters squabble over childhood games and who gets the window seat in the car that will prove fateful to one of them. In these stories, when death comes, what is shocking is how commonplace it is – on a quiet city street, on an outing to a family farm; mortality pervades everything. In Badr Ahmed's A Photo and a Half-Full Glass, Hasim has always dreamed of fighting – he planned to go to Libya, to Lebanon, to Iraq to fight, but ever the dutiful son was persuaded by his mother to stay and barely leaves the house. When, finally, he steps outside, he gets swept along in a protest march, and, without ever having thrown a rock or shouted a slogan, finds himself arrested and brutally tortured because he is wearing an amulet given to his mother by a Jew. In Wajdan Al-Shatali's The Jacket, three friends travel to Sana'a for a writer's workshop – a notion that in itself seems surreal – only for one of them to be caught in a Kafkaesque nightmare that is as frightening as it feels preposterous. The rare moments of joy that pepper these tales are exhilarating – in Gehad Garallah's Questions of Running and Trembling, a young woman longs to run through the streets and the alleys. 'As a child, I used to run as if something was chasing me. Then running became a desperate attempt to escape from myself, an illusion in which a bird thinks that walls are part of the sky so it doesn't die of grief.' As she walks through the streets, she tries to persuade her stern, upstanding mother to run with her. Despite its setting, or perhaps because of it, this is a vital, vibrant anthology filled with hopes and dreams, with flickers of magic and scathing satire. At the heart of these eloquently translated tales is the shared humanity of squabbling siblings, overprotective mothers, all that it means to be family. [ Author Kit de Waal on storytelling: 'You've got to be as good as Martin Scorsese' Opens in new window ] Family is also the central theme of Guadelupe Nettel's The Accidentals (Fitzcarraldo Editions, £12.99), translated by Rosalind Harvey. In these eight mesmerising stories, threat comes not from without, but from within families that are flawed or fractured. In Imprinting, the simple joy of a young woman reconnecting with a dying uncle she has not seen in decades brings back forgotten trauma, a young orphan's determination to reunite a missing man with his mother proves sadly misgiven, a fractious family holiday almost ends in tragedy, while a man's longing to return to happier times in his marriage costs him dearly. Harvey, whose translation of Nettel's poignant Still Born was shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize , masterfully recreates the author's spare, evocative prose, and conjures the magic and the mundane in this electrifying collection from one of the most exciting contemporary Mexican writers. .
The National
28-03-2025
- Politics
- The National
'Caught between two fires': How Hassan Blasim's four-year odyssey from Iraq to Finland haunts his new book
When Helsinki-based writer Hassan Blasim follows the heated debated around migration, he is reminded of a journey he would rather forget. For more than four years, he trekked across the Iraqi-Kurdish mountains into Iran, then Turkey, working the black markets so that he could pay smugglers to make it across the next border and into Europe. "I've seen the road, how terrible it is and how savage it is. I see all the double standards in the West," Blasim told The National. He lost a finger on the way, and remembers the brutality of the border police when he reached Europe. 'You don't see how the Eastern European armies behave with people across the border,' he said. The treatment he received there, Blasim said, amounted to torture. He did not go into the details. Today, the policies to crack down on smuggling gangs and tighten Europe's borders revives memories of those perilous crossings he made 20 years ago. And growing hostility towards migrants in Helsinki, Finland – mirroring developments across Europe – is making the city in which he sought refuge feel less safe. 'The discrimination has always been there, it rises and falls depending on the politics,' Blasim said. These are themes the award-winning author addresses in his latest collection of short stories, Sololand, which will be published in English translation by Comma Press this month. The Law of Sololand tells the story of a refugee and his encounters with a Neo-Nazi ring in a remote Scandinavian town, while Elias in the Land of ISIS is told from the perspective of an ISIS prisoner in Mosul. The collection's last story, Bulbul, which means nightingale in Arabic, addresses the Tishreen movement in Iraq, where young people took to the streets demanding better job opportunities and services. The demonstrations also called for an end to the sectarian power-sharing arrangement that emerged in the post-Saddam era. 'Before ISIS I wrote about violence in Iraq, I wrote about violence from the dictator. I want to stop writing about violence, but the violence does not stop in Iraq,' Blasim said. He has not been back to Baghdad since leaving in 1998, but when the protests broke out in 2019, he travelled to Sulaymaniya in Iraqi-Kurdistan to join a group of people who were supporting the movement happening in the capital and Iraq's southern cities. 'I thought something might change, now, with a young generation leading, maybe there is going to be free speech,' he said. Among Blasim's roles was to put out statements and announcements, particularly in moments of internet blackouts. But he is bitterly disappointed by the crackdown that ensued, with hundreds of young activists killed by Iranian-backed militias who were given free rein. Blasim became the first Arabic writer to win The Independent's Foreign Fiction Prize in 2014, for his collection of short stories, The Iraqi Christ. His first collection, The Madman of Freedom Square, appeared in English translation in 2009. He continues to write and publish in Arabic but he laments what he sees as the decline in Arabic fiction – for which he blames the states and publishing houses. With writers being constrained by what they can say, fiction was limited and readers were turning elsewhere. 'Most Arabic people will read books in translation because they find more freedom inside the novel, or they watch Netflix,' he said. "There is nothing [political] in Arabic literature. Our language is empty. It's not fighting. It's a literature that has surrendered." Blasim was born in Baghdad in 1973 but moved to Kirkuk during the Iran-Iraq war, where his father worked with the army to protect oilfields. "We lived under the atmosphere of war and the militarisation of society imposed by the dictator's regime," he recalled. War was everywhere, with the perpetual ringing of air raid sirens from Iranian air strikes, and what felt like daily runs to the nearest bomb shelter. "At school, we used to chant songs glorifying Saddam and the war, and we would draw tanks and soldiers in our notebooks," he said. "The regime also carried out public executions of army deserters in front of crowds, and I personally witnessed executions while still in elementary school." Despite the war, living conditions in Iraq were still high from the economic boom of the 1970s, he recalled. His love of writing came from the large library he had at home, and he and his brother's subscriptions to literary magazines. During the summer holidays, he would go to the city's science centre, where he learnt about electronics, physics aviation, and crucially, cinema projectors. Blasim's father passed away at the end of the war in 1988, and the family returned to Baghdad two years later. He enrolled at Baghdad's Academy of Fine Arts to study cinema, after a friend of his, a poet, advised it would be a the best way for Blasim to pursue his love of writing. "It would enhance my knowledge and expand my imagination … he was right." While a film student in Baghdad during Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, Blasim was repeatedly harassed by his professors and the Baath regime's sprawling security services. His brother had been detained without charge or trial for political reasons, which made Blasim a natural target for persecution. His student film about the life of a poor man in Baghdad sparked their ire. 'It was just a student film,' he said of it, dismissively. The family spent two years without knowing the brother's whereabouts, and when he was finally released he told them he had been transferred from prison to prison across Iraq, and repeatedly tortured. Like many young men of his generation, he fled to the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, which had achieved autonomy in the 1990s after Saddam's horrific massacres and chemical attacks on the Kurds. The region was then harbouring Iraqi dissidents from across southern Iraq seeking refuge. He gave himself a Kurdish name, Ouazad Othman, which means 'free man' in Kurdish, concealing his identity to protect his family back in Baghdad from Saddam's informants. His feature film The Wounded Camera was about the Kurdish uprisings against Saddam. It was shot using VHS home video tapes, owing to an embargo on Iraq that had drained resources. Although he speaks with great pride about the film, he has not seen it since it was made, and he believes it is still being held in an archive in Sulaymaniya. When civil war gripped the Kurdistan region, he fled once again, into the mountains to Europe. He arrived in Finland in 2004, where he now lives with his partner and son. Blasim insists he does not want the book to "teach" readers anything. "I don't I write to make people learn. I write to enjoy it [the process of writing]. Literature is a kind of knowledge but literature is not a lesson," he said. He worries that Iraqi refugees today have no good options. 'You are between two fires. You run away from ISIS and you come here to racism,' he said. But he is also shocked by the declining living standards closer to home in Helsinki. In the city's poorest districts, people will have little time for books, theatre or cinema. "When people try to survive day by day, they don't think about books. Even in Finland where you have the best education, in the poor areas, they don't read," Blasim said. The speech from Europe's growing far-right has worrying reminders of life under autocratic rule. "They talk about immigrants, immigrants, immigrants. When you make people scared and worried all the time, it's easy to control them." he said. While he says he still "trusts in European society", the divisive forces of politics are so overwhelming that he is left feeling powerless. "You can't do anything. You just wait," he said.
