“You aren’t given power. You take it.” The Red Book of Farewells (Penguin International Writers, £14.99), in a sparkling translation by Mia Spangenburg, is the final volume in Pirkko Saisio’s hugely acclaimed Helsinki trilogy.
It continues, as with previous works Lowest Common Denominator (childhood) and Backlight (teenage years), the non-linear story of the coming of age of an artist and queer woman in oppressive 1970s Finland, a time when homosexuality was criminalised.
Now, the ultimate break into adulthood occurs as Saisio leaves home, shaves her head “her bald head is big and angular, free, and unmistakably modern” and begins theatre studies (despite its socialist ethos, Saisio and her “clown-eyed” girlfriend are bullied under officialdom at theatre school).
Saisio moves irrepressibly between first and third person, past and present in this auto-fiction, a careful construction of her manifesto of becoming. Appearing on the surface fairly spontaneous – the prose is dreamlike, delivered in short bursts – in its detail and immediacy the whole trilogy is exact and wrought. Most pertinently it is a joy to witness Saisio’s apprenticeship and progress as a writer.
In true auto-fiction style the book’s opening is simultaneously devastating and mischievous – it is 2002, on a summer boating trip to a remote island and Saisio makes a discovery of a dead seal. During a subsequent phone call from her publisher the writer casually reveals the loss of a manuscript entitled The Red Book of Farewells, which she now has to recreate.
“The book I’ll write all over again, will be different” she states, a poetic tribute to selfhood, personal reckoning and the many facets of a human life.
In his introduction to Felix Hartlaub’s Notes from Führer HQ (Pushkin Press, £10.99), translator Michael Hofmann describes the author’s life as “short and strangely weightless.” Hartlaub, a former humanities PhD student, who, following an unremarkable stint in combat, was assigned as a historian with the German army during the second World War, disappeared without trace in Berlin in May 1945 as part of the chaos and upheaval following the Allied victory in Europe. He was 32, and would officially be declared dead in 1955.
What remains of him are the scrupulous archival notes and journals he termed “word-etchings”. They certainly paint a vivid portrait. Pushkin has also published Clouds over Paris, in which Hartlaub depicted the Nazi occupation of the French capital, during 1941); now his attention is turned to the eastern front, to the fields and soldier camps of Ukraine, and then on to Hitler’s own command post, his eyrie Kehlsteinhaus (Eagle’s Nest) high in the Bavarian Alps.
Fiction in translation: How trauma interrupts the flow of a life, to devastating effect
Reading them now, Hartlaub’s extraordinary eyewitness observations place the writer centre stage, but in his own time he was purely incidental; one tiny unknown cog in the vast machine of war, recording war’s mundane brutality and eventual futility.
“Time here follows its own rules, it’s more like eternity than ordinary time … this day last year is no further away from us than yesterday, or, if you’d rather, they’re both equally remote. The dry leaves you tramp through on the way to lunch are a constant, the morning hoar frost on the lattices shimmering in blue and pink, the bitter smell of moonlight in the evenings and the smoke from the ashbox outside the sauna that’s a little addictive. And you still feel the grim silence of yore …”
“What do you do when you see your country disappearing?” Karim Kattan has followed up his debut novel, the beautiful and much-praised The Palace on Higher Hill, with Eden at Dawn (Foundry Editions, £13.99), translated from French by Jeffrey Zuckerman, a gay love story set in an almost mythical Jerusalem “a bombed out … city of the nation of humans”.
We follow his two young protagonists Isaac and Gabriel, through time and space, under the thrill and terror of a sandstorm biblical in its intensity and force. The whole is overseen by a narrator whose commentary is sagacious and expansive. “You will notice that they hail from an occupied people in an occupied country. They did not mention it because one does not harp on what makes the stuff of our lives.”
Time collapses under the weight of both men’s individual histories then comes sharply into focus again as the lovers experience not simply their own here and now, but many lifetimes and even forms – “as much as six or seven thousand years”.
Their last life together, which is the plot of the novel, and culminates in a dangerous journey to the West Bank, occurs at a centrifugal point: “in this place they never had any chance of escaping”. Kattan employs an intense lyricism undercut by a wincing brutality: he isn’t going to sacrifice reality for whimsicality, there’s no time for that, in a book that for all its urgent messaging of political and environmental catastrophe, seems utterly atemporal.
Hafni Says, by the wonderfully named Danish writer Helle Helle (Akoya Publishing, £12.99), in an exquisite translation by Martin Aitken, is, like They, its predecessor in English, slow fiction. Helle sets her deliberately unhurried novels (tantalisingly, about everything and not very much at all) in rural Denmark, where the author herself grew up.
They are conversational, acerbic, melancholy and also so full of everyday truths and observations that it is difficult to resist the urge to underline every phrase. Hafni, the protagonist, is on a road trip across Denmark in an attempt to discover parts of the country she has never seen. She also appears to be running away from or running towards something we can’t quite see. And, as is the case with wayward odysseys, she comes unstuck.
A month after her departure, she makes a call – to whom, we don’t know – explaining exactly what has gone wrong, why she is weeks over schedule and what has been happening. It is with this phone call that the novel itself begins. Helle works rather like an artist in miniature.
As with They (in which Hafni appears almost anecdotally, as a minor character), she begins abruptly, as if the reader is already fully cognisant of her people. There’s the title of the book and then the first chapter opens with the line: “that she’s getting divorced. She’s pulled into a lay-by not far from Ringe. There’s a field across the road, and an ancient burial mound. She might pay that burial mound a visit, if the field isn’t too claggy. The beech is well into leaf now, green is the hedge of spring. When was the last time we spoke? she says, it must be thirteen years ago. Just before the millennium.”
A stream of consciousness from one woman, travelling forward, but looking back on her life: “it’s such a long way from sixteen to twenty, from thirty to forty-eight.” Hafni Says is close to perfection.
Angélica Gorodischer (1928-2022) is finally getting her due as one of Argentina’s foremost writers of speculative fiction. Her fantastical novel from 1983, Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire That Never Was (£10.99) has now received the Penguin Classics treatment, with the added kudos of using the 2003 translation by Ursula K Le Guin, that late, great maker of alternative worlds.
Notably written at the time of right-wing dictatorship across Latin America, Gorodischer’s fabulist literature rewards the reader with a legion of storytellers, its 11 chapters relating tales of an empire built and lost and built again – each on the ruins of the last, mimicking the act of mythmaking itself. Borges and Calvino are the obvious comparisons here, but Gorodischer has an earthy humanity and philosophy all her own, self-contained though far removed from the constraints of icy logic.
“Many years have passed and many emperors have lived and reigned, but the mountain city is still the capital of the Empire … it’s a splendid capital, beautiful, mysterious, charming, old as the capital of an old Empire should be, solid, wealthy, built to last thousands and thousands of years. And yet, I wonder …”
The book’s epigraph, “the twentieth century oppresses me” is attributed to one Trafalgar Medrano – a name that happens to be the title of another work by Gorodischer, a satisfying touch ensuring this labyrinthine creation comes full circle.