In Farthest Seas by Lalla Romano (Pushkin Press Classics, £10.99, 182pp) is autofiction at its most elegant.
The book gathers Romano’s reflections on her life with her late husband, Innocenzo Monti, focusing on the final four months of his illness and the early years of their relationship. Monti is depicted as refined, intelligent, understated and very much loved: “I had always been alone, in the sense of free. But with him all moments, sensations, smells, contact, words, silences, were imbued with love.”
The prose is confident yet delivered lightly. One anecdote concludes, “There were consequences I don’t recall,” the reader having been handed the ingredients of a good story they must cook for themselves. This casual tone, however, is never careless – it leaves the reader feeling confided in, trusted. The writing is also precise: “His style, that is his language, was similar to mine in writing: concrete for sensations, reticent with facts, secretive but not duplicitous in feelings.”
It’s a sign of the quality of the writing, and power of Brian Robert Moore’s beautiful translation, that even when reading analytically as a reviewer, I often found myself putting the book down still in a dream of its voice.
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Set in rural Transylvania, Blurred by Iris Wolff (Moth Books, €12.50, 182pp) is translated from German by Ruth Martin and tracks the life of Samuel, beginning with his pregnant mother’s hurried flight from harm on a fish cart.
Samuel is a quiet child but forms a close bond with Stana, who later becomes his lover. The depiction of family relationships in a small community broadens, dramatically, as Samuel escapes in order to chose his own destiny. The themes of flight and movement – as well as abandonment – recur throughout the novel.
The writer uses Samuel’s life to constellate disparate stories, like that of Karlina, Samuel’s grandmother who once held the hand of King Michael, or Oz, his friend, a prison guard who is haunted by a dragon of black depression. These lives are delicately and intimately drawn; sometimes tragic, though never melodramatic. The quiet despair of those living under Ceausescu – or exiled to escape his regime – anchors the novel across time.
Blurred is elliptical and allusive, yet limpid. It engages the reader using brushstroke moments of clarity and feeling, in a style that reminded me at times of Norwegian writer Roy Jacobsen. The translation by Ruth Martin handles these nuances skilfully and makes sensitive judgments about dialect.
Cécé by Emmelie Prophète (Archipelago Books, £16.99, 217pp) is translated from French by Irish translator Aidan Rooney. The title character is a young Haitian woman living in the slums of Port-au-Prince in a neighbourhood ruled by gangs. Gunfire rings out through the night and decapitated bodies of yesterday’s gang lords are found dumped in the streets.
Cécé’s mother died of Aids aged 20, when Cécé was just two years old. Cécé never knew her father, so she is raised by her Grand Ma. For all their poverty and precariousness, Grand Ma brings a stability to Cécé’s life.
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The novel shifts direction as Cécé develops a large online following through her pictures of gang violence. This leads to her gaining access to the gangland inner circle and being offered lucrative commissions as an online beauty influencer. The equivalence between these two aspects is part of the novel’s core point about the online commodification of violence.
Though this is a story about a young woman’s resilience and reinvention, there is melancholy at its heart. Cécé adapts so well that we are left wondering whether her true self has survived at all.
The grey space between reality and the online worlds is also important in Diablo’s Boys by Dublin-based Chinese author Yang Hao (Balestier Press, 242 pp, £15.99), translated by Nicky Harman and Michael Day.
Suwei is a gifted former ballet prodigy. Now 18, he has retreated into a cloistered existence, playing video games obsessively under the close supervision of his ambitious and protective mother, a delightfully scheming and layered character. Suwei’s tutor is Li Wen, a former second-rate athlete whose underachievements on the track and in the classroom were the focus of his devoted mother’s ambitions, much to her cost.
From the outset, there is a tinge of mystery and strangeness about this winding, unreliable narrative, as it skips time, drops clues and springs surprises. Like a video game, it sets multiple possibilities in motion, leaving the reader to react and interact using their wits.
Very much a contemporary narrative, the themes here include social mobility, the fragility of young male confidence, vicarious female ambition, and the pressure to achieve. None of the characters fits the mould society has shaped for them, so they warp themselves and the space around them to survive.
Yang Hao is an exciting new voice in Chinese literature and, we can proudly say, the Irish literature scene too.
Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide by Batool Abu Akleen, Sondos Sabra, Nahil Mohana and Ala’a Obaid (Comma Press, £11.99, 209pp) is translated by Basma Ghalayini and Respond Crisis Translation. This is a real-time real-world account from four Gazan women writers living and writing as Israeli missiles and bombs rain down on them.
Batool Abu Akleen writes from a tent about editing a poetry magazine while studying for her English literature and translation exams. The bios for the poets contributing to the magazine will state, she hopes, “Survivors of the genocide.” She has seen the suffering up close and writes of neighbours who have collected their loved ones’ remains in plastic bags. Her main thoughts are of survival, of not being unlucky enough to be killed in the final minutes before the January 2025 truce.
The diary of Sondos Sabra shows the exhaustion of constant terror and the strain on families of profound loses – her sister loses four children and a grandchild in a bombing. However, Sabra is determined not to be overcome: “I refuse for our name, as Palestinians, to be synonymous with only misery and despair.”
Nahil Mohana, describes the “devious clown” of the internet that allows essential connections, but also adds to the relentlessness of bad news. She is exhausted from multiple displacements but perseveres with her teaching job. In a lighter anecdote, she loses a hundred copies of her new novel in a bombing and despairs; however, she meets a bookseller who still has five copies – never has a writer been so happy to have unsold books.
Ala’a Obaid describes the panic of her family’s flight from danger and her concern for the baby she is carrying. When Ala’s arrives at the hospital to give birth, there are no beds and she is told to walk around for hours. In the end, she gives birth to a health boy while standing up in the toilet. And yet, there are moments of beauty in her story, like the kindness of a man who gives her his last egg so she can make a birthday cake for her daughter.
What good is literature during such atrocities? These accounts show that it becomes a sustaining life force for the writers concerned and that it retains enormous power in bearing witness, so that what is experienced can be understood around the world and never forgotten.
