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The Guardian
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The best recent translated fiction
The Propagandist by Cécile Desprairies, translated by Natasha Lehrer (Swift, £14.99) This clever and vivid book by a historian of Vichy France falls somewhere between autobiographical novel and fictionalised memoir. It opens as a colourful story based on the author's family: her grandmother's morphine addiction, her aunt Zizi's vanity (she 'boasted that all she kept in her refrigerator were beauty products'), and her mother's reluctance to talk about the past. But what were grandmother and Zizi doing in the pages of Nazi propaganda magazine Signal? The narrator learns her family were 'Nazi sympathisers', though the phrase hardly captures the zeal of her mother Lucie's support. The details are shocking: to Lucie and her lover, 'mice, rats and Jews were basically the same', and she has no regrets after the war. 'If all the French had been on the right side, Germany would have won.' Their blinkered support has lessons for today, too. 'What does it matter if something is true or false,' asks one character, 'if you believe it to be true?' Lovers of Franz K by Burhan Sönmez, translated by Sami Hêzil (Open Borders, £12.99) Nazi-supporting parents feature in this novel too, set in West Berlin in 1968, the year of revolutionary protests around the world. A young man of Turkish descent faces off against a police commissioner. Ferdy Kaplan is under investigation for killing a student – but his intended target was Max Brod, the executor of Franz Kafka's estate who published Kafka's work against his wishes. Police suspect Ferdy had an antisemitic motive against the Jewish Brod, 'influenced by [his parents'] ideas'. There's a Kafkaesque quality to the interrogation – 'It is our job to assume the opposite of what you tell us,' the police say – but Kurdish author Sönmez is really interested in the question of who owns literature. Was Brod right to publish? Would Kafka be unknown if he hadn't? The dialogue-led approach makes the book punchy and fast-moving, and brings some surprising twists before the end. Back in the Day by Oliver Lovrenski, translated by Nichola Smalley (Hamish Hamilton, £14.99) Sixteen-year-old Ivor is a typical schoolboy in Norway: 'every day sitting in the same classroom, getting smart, creating chaos' and torn between 'the side of me that wanted to do good things, and the other side saying, chill man, no stress'. That other side tends to win, as he and his friends Marco, Jonas and Arjan get up to antics that may need further translation for middle-aged readers: 'bunn a zoot', 'we blazed some lemon haze', 'we rocked up like we was about to harvest some bamboo'. But amid the intensity of young male friendship, there's love, family loyalty and vulnerability. 'Sometimes you hang the biggest towel you can find over the mirror [cos] you wanna smash the face of the brother staring back at you.' The energy and richness of this novel would be impressive, even if Lovrenski hadn't been only 19 years old when he wrote it. Waist Deep by Linea Maja Ernst, translated by Sherilyn Hellberg (Jonathan Cape, £14.99) Five friends, one week, a summerhouse: sounds like a dream – which could become a nightmare. 'It'll be like our own clever talk show, fabulous and never-ending,' says one character. Danish debut novelist Ernst delineates her characters snappily, from Esben, an experimental poet who went commercial with a novel about his mother, to Gry, who 'hasn't eaten any carbohydrates in three weeks'. But what brings the friends together and drives them apart is sex. Central to this is 'confused' Sylvia, who enjoys being dominated by her 'dreamboat' girlfriend Charlie: 'She has been a jug full of dark, heavy liquid, and now the jug is broken', is her description of being brought to orgasm. But Sylvia also gets angry at the 'vanilla hetero-banality' of the other happily settled couples. The novel is operatic in its emotional intensity and its surprise pairings, but ultimately a lament for lost youth. 'Weren't they true radicals just a second ago?' wonders Sylvia. Weren't we all?
Telegraph
01-05-2025
- Telegraph
Pro-Nazi parents, anti-Jew hatred – this French story is astounding
All innocent families are alike; each guilty family is guilty in its own way. When The Propagandist, the debut novel by historian Cécile Desprairies, opens, we hear a French mother muttering about the 'bastards' who killed Nazi collaborator Philippe Henriot – and we may immediately suspect we're dealing with the latter kind. Henriot, known in Allied circles as 'the French Goebbels', in reality fathered the Vichy regime's propaganda campaign. He was assassinated by the members of the Résistance on June 28 1944, two months before the liberation of Paris. His death came as the propaganda machines of Vichy France – pro-Axis broadcasts on the Radiodiffusion Nationale; the anti-Semitic periodical Le Cahier Jaune – were being thrown onto the scrap heap. But in their prime, these machines had been fierce. Two weeks after Paris witnessed a callous round-up of its Jewish inhabitants in September 1941, the German military administration opened an exhibition titled Le Juif et la France. Visitors were met with cartoonishly sinister portraits of Jewish faces, fit with anti-Semitic exaggerations. These vile images were meant to be proof that the Holocaust was a gallant attempt to protect the French public. And in The Propagandist, Lucie, the fictional mother we meet in the opening scene, is behind their selection. The Propagandist's narrator is Lucie's daughter, a historian born after the war, and its plot is her putting her family on retrospective trial. She tells of a childhood in which mystery is part of the furniture. Why, for example, does her mother talk in riddles when asked why Jewish family acquaintances have no parents? Lucie's answer is maddeningly euphemistic: 'This was the way things were for Jews.' We watch as these childhood questions gestate into horrified understanding: 'Obviously no one ever mentioned genocide or the Holocaust, words I later learned from books.' For Desprairies, writing this novel – which was longlisted for the Prix Goncourt on its French publication – is an act of personal reckoning. The fictional family in the novel is modelled on her real-life own. Just as the novel's narrator enforces a degree of distance that borders on vertiginous – in one sentence she speaks of 'Lucie', in the next 'my mother' – so is Desprairies delicate with admissions of proximity. This is not a straightforward family biography, though Desprairies has said in interviews that her mother was a propagandist, and was involved in many of the projects that Lucie undertakes in the novel. Despite its fictionality, however, The Propagandist is rooted in historical precision: in references to letters, to photographs. Lucie's exhibition curation is not the only instance in which she engages with events that actually took place. The novel tells of her close connection to the real-life Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose anti-Semitic pamphlet Bagatelles for a Massacre lay on her bedside table till her death. The narrator, we learn, was named 'Coline' in his honour, her mother 'not daring' to leave the name entirely unchanged. One can't help but notice that 'Cécile', Desprairies's own first name, does not sound dissimilar. This deft blend of fact and fiction is The Propagandist's genius. The characters, though fictional, are tightly woven into some of Vichy France's most chilling historical scenes. Lucie's first husband Friedrich, for example, is written into the genetic research team led by Otmar von Verschür and Josef Mengele, who eventually went on to carry out sadistic experiments on twins held in Auschwitz. Her sisters, the narrator writes, were featured in the society pages of the Nazi propaganda magazine Signal, decked out in organdie and haughty smiles at the Reich Embassy. Towards the close, our narrator recalls a moment from her childhood when she asked her mother's friends who Henriot was. 'No one spoke. A shiver ran through the group. They had better not be betrayed by a child!' This mighty novel is the work of a woman with her own family's shivers fresh in her mind. With its poised prose, stylishly translated by Natasha Lehrer, it does precisely what the fictional family fears: exposes guilt of all scales.
