The front cover photo of And the Walls Became the World All Around (Granta, 316pp, £16.99) by Johanna Ekström and Sigrid Rausing (who also translated the book from Swedish) could not be more apt. Ekström, looking contemplative and composed, is framed by two trees. Beneath her is a river which blurs all the details of her reflection.
Throughout the book, which is edited by Rausing from 13 notebooks kept by Ekström, there are observations of trees, particularly one she can see from her Stockholm apartment. She notices the leaves changing and the birds that visit the tree until, after an ocular melanoma is discovered, her vision begins to distort all she sees. “It’s happening again. I look at the bare tree and believe it’s spring. It’s not just a mistake in my mind, it’s a mistake in my body.”
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In the entries written before her diagnosis, Ekström is already a deeply inquisitive, abstract thinker. She was particularly keen to record and analyse dreams. Rausing, having been a very close friend, contextualises the writing and sometimes features in the dreams. She is keen to find early intimations of an unconscious knowledge of changes within her friend’s body. The cancer that began in her eye spreads, through her blood to her liver. Yet, she is still keen to record her thoughts and dreams (in which her sight is perfect). A lifetime of acute deliberations has, it transpires, been the perfect preparation for elucidating the weight of her tragic burden.
In one of her notes, Rausing remembers advising her friend to “Let the readers in, allow them to understand the written sense.” It’s guidance that would have benefited Astrid Roemer when writing her novel, On a Woman’s Madness, translated by Lucy Scott (Tilted Axis Press, 230pp, £14.99). We first meet the narrator, Noneka, as she escapes from her marriage of nine days and runs to her parents’ house in heavy rain.
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From there, she reminisces about previous relationships in a jump-cut manner, often using a heightened style of language that too often shadows the characters by becoming unfocused. One relationship, with a man called Ramses, was especially significant but, angered by her decision to have an abortion, he left her. Eventually, Noneka finds comfort and love with another woman, Gabrielle, although the language used between them tends to be overly dramatic: “Since I heal you let me cure your worries too. Then your body will become as boundless as your awareness, and we’ll ride the clouds together toward the Holy Fire.”
Altogether more disconcerting is the attitude to rape in the novel. When another of Noneka’s lovers, Louis, sees two women embracing on a beach, we’re simply told that, “Revved up, he raped them both. Back at home, his injuries made him realise how fiercely they’d fought back.” Noneka expresses no disquiet or objection. By this point, it feels as if this novel is determined to alienate the reader.
While Roemer details ways in which colonialism has affected generations of lives in Suriname, where the novel is set, it is not a resolute aspect of the novel. A more thoroughgoing account of a historical era’s devastating impact on an overlooked society is explored in Samahani by Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin, translated by Mayada Ibrahim and Adil Babikir (Foundry Editions, 216pp, £12.99). Here, the wish for power, control and wealth – with all the allied abuse this necessitates – is passed from Portuguese colonisers to Omani invaders and British imperialists.
Central to the novel is the reign of Sultan Suleiman bin Salim who allied himself with the man nicknamed Tippu Tip, one of the most brutal of slave traders. The “skin-burning, flogging and solitary confinement” that they practise leads to a rebellion during which the sultan’s daughter is captured and brought to a village with her eunuch slave, Sondus. The surprising relationship that had already begun to develop between them flourishes in this setting. Presumptuous British forces are next to take over the territory, freeing slaves but creating new forms of exploitative structures. What is less expected is how the general mess of history becomes shockingly specific at the denouement of this finely structured, fascinating novel.
“Fight courageously and defeat the enemy, and you’ll inherit this paradise,” an Omani ship commander tells his men. Many years later, in Fragments of a Paradise by Jean Giono, translated from French by Paul Eprile (Archipelago, 208pp, $18), a group of men refute the idea that such an Arcadia exists anywhere in the “civilised” world. “We’re leaving so we won’t turn into beasts,” the captain records.
The nature and intention of their voyage is unclear for some time as the first, lengthy chapter details descriptions of the weather and its effect on the ship and the activities of the men on board. It eventually emerges that this voyage is being undertaken for scientific research and that Antarctica is the destination. We are on page 54 when the first instance of dialogue occurs, a rarefied, philosophical exchange that typifies a mission that is at once exalted but also, in the material sense, unpleasant, especially regarding sharks.
Throughout this unusually crafted, captivating novel there is a subtle sense of imminent menace that transmutes into near-mystical encounters with animals – inevitably bringing the greatest whale novel to mind – and the conclusion that true intention keeps us alive. “The most terrifying thing a man can imagine: to be inanimate.”
The same terrifying thought would fit neatly in Eurotrash by Christian Kracht, translated from German by Daniel Bowles (Serpent’s Tail, 188pp, £12.99). “Switzerland has always had a special relationship with death,” says the narrator. With excessive wealth too, he might have added. An obsession with both permeates a novel which quickly establishes a matter-of-fact unburdening of the narrator’s distaste for the inheritance of a father who sought all his life to accumulate affluence and influence. His was the familiar story of one who began in unassuming circumstances, accumulating money through dubious means and always anxious in societies which viewed him as an arriviste.
But it is the narrator’s mother who is central to the novel. Aware that her end is close, she asks to be taken from her nursing home on a trip to Africa, intending to give away large amounts of money to random strangers along the way. The mother’s ambiguous blend of insouciance and humiliation – emanating from the unfortunate combination of her alcoholism and colostomy bag – allows her son to consistently deceive her about their circumstances and location. The “reality” of what we, the readers, are being told is also undermined as the novel folds in on itself: ‘”Did you know that we are being described right now in a book, like in Cervantes?” she asked… “Yes. But they are imaginary characters. We’re real.”’ In a novel replete with literary references and often harshly hilarious about the Swiss, it is always clear that wealth allows for distinctions and options that are only available to a few.
Existence in the African country depicted in Oromay by Baalu Girma, translated from Amharic by David DeGusta and Mesfin Felleke Yirgu (MacLehose Press, 388pp, £20) offers no such whimsical choices. Set in Ethiopia at the time when the country was governed by the Soviet-backed Derg who had gained power through the military coup which deposed Haile Selassie in 1974. Eight years later, they launched the Eritrean Province Red Star Multi-Faceted Revolutionary Campaign to bring Eritrea – then a northern province of the country – into line by instigating a campaign against the militant opposition there.
We see the campaign unfold in a clear, linear narrative. Through the perceptive eyes of television reporter Tsegaye Hailemeryam we witness the preparations for the offensive, both militarily and through the propaganda for which he is largely responsible. At times he narrates directly, at others he is the main character of a third-person narration.
Adding another layer of complication and intrigue to his life is his relationship with two women, Roman, the fiancé he leaves behind in Addis Ababa, and Fiammetta, a woman he meets when she accompanies an apparent ex-insurgent leader called Silay Berahi. They sing of “the bright future of tomorrow”, that paradise that is always just out of sight.
What might appear to have the elements of a thriller is undoubtedly engrossing but the novel moves at a stately pace and includes lengthy speeches filled with Marxist rhetoric as well as detailed descriptions of moments of briefly glimpsed beauty. But the inevitable brutality leaves Tsegaye disillusioned: “The reality of what I saw… a constant deluge of suffering and death… makes me question the idea that humans are, by nature, good. Of late, I’ve seen little evidence of it.”
Such questioning of the Derg’s methodology – though expressed by a character in the novel – was enough for the author, like a key character, to become a victim of the crusade. On February 14th, 1984, six months after the publication of the book, Baalu Girma was, it is accepted, kidnapped and murdered by the regime.
