‘People say the happiest lives are the least eventful.” This is what Anne-Marie Mille thinks before she reflects on the kind of funeral urn she would like – a discreetly engraved elegant brass model.
Yasmina Reza's Anne-Marie the Beauty, translated by Alison L Strayer (Seven Stories Press UK, 55pp, £9.99), is the French writer's latest fiction to be published in English (after Babylon in 2018). The heroine is an ageing actor looking back
on the events of a life played out in a stubbornly minor key. Moving from the provinces to Paris, she achieves moderate success in lesser-known companies but is sheltered from bitterness by a ready wit and an unyielding sense of self.
The exotic foil to the discreet Anne-Marie is her longstanding friend and fellow actor Giselle (Gigi), who turns languor into an art form, staying in bed until noon: “It’s good for your career to look as if you don’t want anything.”
Anne-Marie has to contend with a husband who cannot bear the unforeseen and a son who is in thrall to billionaire fantasies of colonising other planets while keeping the heating bills down. She deftly works her way around the familiar traps of compliance and resigned obedience to find a place where she can be with her thoughts and try to make sense of what has happened and why. Why her mother took her own life and why ageing is a guessing game with one predictable outcome.
Reza, who is best known in the English-speaking world for plays such as Art and God of Carnage, has produced in Anne-Marie the Beauty a beguiling dramatic monologue in the form of a novella. The only problem is that after the book’s mere 55 pages, you want this dry, quirky, mischievous voice never to stop.
The voices that filter though the stories of After the Sun by Jonas Eika, translated by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg (Lolli Editions, 150pp, £12.99), are darker, more elliptical. The Danish author's collection, which comes garlanded with prizes – the Nordic Council Literature Prize, the Michael Strunge prize, the Montana Prize for Fiction and the Blixen Literary Award – is a compelling collection of texts that move teasingly between the real and the fantastical.
A computer analyst who gets caught up in the parallel universe of futures trading on his way to visit the collapsed headquarters of a bank in Copenhagen; beach boys in Cancún who change into shrimps; a singer in Nevada whose songs include “sparse lines about longing and loneliness, about not having anyone to share her thoughts with, about the pain of having to read Hegel on her own” – these are among the global soundings picked up by Eika’s rich, distinctive prose.
Whether it is young men caught up in the exploitative servility of the sun, sex and sand industry in Bad Mexican Dog, the self-intoxicating cynicism of the futures traders in Alvin, or the cosmic xenophobia of UFO enthusiasts in Rachel, Nevada, the writer is closely attuned to the ways in which only fiction can capture the strange fusion of sentimental fantasy and commercial brutality in our contemporary moment.
Eika’s gift is to make a young man turning into a shrimp, for example, seem utterly plausible in the dreamlike transitions of his prose without getting lost in the kitsch metaphysics of karmic consciousness. For Eike, the truly astonishing is right before our eyes, waiting to be summoned by a “choir of fingers on keyboards”, alert to all that happens not so much after as under the sun.
The sun as a source of inspiration and illumination was never far from the aesthetics of the writers who appear in A Bookshop in Algiers by Kaouther Adimi, translated by Chris Andrews (Serpent's Tail, 146pp, £12.99). In 1935, Edmond Charlot opened a bookshop in Algiers named Les Vraies Richesses after a text he particularly admired by the French writer Jean Giono. The bookshop and subscription library later doubled up as a publishing house when Charlot began to publish young Algerian authors such as Albert Camus and Emmanuel Roblès.
For Charlot, as noted in one of the diary entries in the novel, “this space is given over entirely to literature, art and friendship”. The bookshop would become an important meeting place for young Algerian writers and intellectuals working primarily in French who wanted to articulate a “Mediterranean” vision for literature, bringing together the cultures, languages and civilisations of countries bordering the Mediterranean and taking into account the elemental importance of sun, wind and sea.
Adimi uses Charlot’s bookshop as an extended metaphor to tell the story of colonial and post-colonial Algeria. The narrative shifts between the excitement of the early years of the bookshop, the wartime years, the outbreak of the Franco-Algerian war –notably told through Charlot’s notebook entries – and present-day Algiers, where Ryad, an Algerian living in France, comes to clear out the now derelict bookshop.
The difficulty in Adimi’s work is that the metaphor is asked to do too much. Dealing with everything from the French colonial massacre of Algerians in Sétif in May 1945 to the brutal killings of demonstrators by the French police in Paris in October 1961 to the bloody confrontation between Islamists and the Algerian military in the 1990s, the relatively slight text (fewer than 150 pages) buckles under the explanatory pressure.
The young Algerian novelist is ultimately at her most convincing when she describes the lives of Ryad and Abdallah, Algerians from two very different generations, adrift in the improvised chaos of the modern nation’s capital.
Joanna, the Jewish mother of the narrator, in Things I Didn't Throw Out by Marcin Wicha, translated by Marta Dziurosz (Daunt, 202pp, £9.99), knows all about improvisation in the face of chaos, having lived through the long Polish 20th century. Wicha is Poland's answer to David Sedaris, devastatingly funny about the minutiae of family life and the foibles of the elders but animated by a deep ethical sense of how injustice damages and contaminates.
The book is divided into three sections – My Mother’s Kitchen, Dictionary and Laughing at the Right Moments – containing short texts of varying length that trace the lives of the narrator’s parents, particularly his mother, and his own. The first section is particularly attentive to the lives of objects in his parents’ lives, the second is taken up primarily by words and language, and the third recounts the final months and eventual death of Joanna.
Wicha notes his father’s passion for “useless” stones, especially pebbles, and that “he was one of those people who would watch where they’re walking, incapable of indifference towards a perfect form”. The father’s concern translates for the narrator and his mother into an obsessive concern with the proper use of language, the avoidance of the routine consolation of cliche or the soft-soaped euphemisms of manipulation:
“She knew what was what. She knew that when newspapers start writing about freezies, and on TV guys in suits and cassocks get maudlin about cellsies drowned in nitrogen, when they talk about those ickle embryos which open their tiny mouths to plead ‘Give birth to me’ – for sure they wanted to ban IVF.”
Sensing the burden of silence that afflicts the survivors of the Shoah, Joanna refuses to be quiet. She is fluent, combative, argumentative. Wicha notes that “[A]n anecdote is a single point. Our history consisted of dispersed points which were impossible to join into lines.”
In this profoundly engaging work, Wicha has constructed his own richly resonant lines out of those single points, reminding his readers that derision too, as he says elsewhere in the book, is its own form of justice.
Justice, speaking out, not allowing words to be treated carelessly, equally concern the narrator of Falling Is Like Flying by Manon Uphoff, translated by Sam Garrett (Pushkin Press, 182pp, £12.99). In this remarkable book, a bestseller in her native Netherlands, Uphoff describes living with a manipulative and sexually abusive father whose actions have devastating consequences for his children.
The graphic nature of the abuse will disturb many readers, but the extraordinary nature of Uphoff’s achievement is to find a language that does justice to all the complex dimensions of these terrible experiences. Using a language drawn partly from mythology and partly from the world of the fairytale, Uphoff describes the labyrinthine nightworld of the Minotaur, preying on his own offspring.
She looks for clues to the hidden lives of women in public icons: “Had I, at that age, seen on the silver screen the temperamental movie stars of Italian neo-realism, like Sophia Loren, I would certainly have recognized my mother and sisters in the lives they portrayed. Lives like those lived by countless other marginalized women in our seemingly staid bishopric.”
Uphoff’s mesmerising, incantatory language teases out the queasy identification with the abuser, the self-hatred of the victim, the awareness that to know is not enough – escape is infinitely more difficult.
Falling Is Like Flying ends with a Witches Sabbath (Grand Guignol). In this section, the narrator and her sisters imagine the detailed and spectacular destruction of the malign presence that has shadowed their lives. Their coven of creative destruction over food and wine is both exorcism and celebration.
In all five titles, in radically different circumstances, it is story and language that ultimately point a way through the tortuous labyrinth of private and public history.
Michael Cronin is director of the Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation
