Translated fiction: Memory, history and the question of ‘sampling’ from other novels

All novels can be said to be in conversation with other novels. But while influences on the form and viewpoint of a novel are easily acknowledged, there are particular novels that more directly speak through borrowings. Notions of postmodernist intertextuality allow for all of this and in the novels of Kathy Acker, for example, unacknowledged quotations are seen as radical rather than robbery.

In 1968, when Bound to Violence by Yambo Ouologuem, translated from the French by Ralph Manheim (Penguin, 220pp, £9.99), was published in France, there was less tolerance of such appropriation. Born in Mali, Ouologeum was teaching in Paris by the time he began to write the novel. The initial reception for Le devoir de violence was so positive that he was awarded the Prix Renaudot.

After Manheim’s translation of the novel was published it was noticed that three pages of the novel were recognisably close to a section of Graham Greene’s It’s A Battlefield. Further close examination of the text revealed borrowings from a large number of sources, ranging from the Bible to Guy de Maupassant and André Schwarz-Bart (who, unlike Greene, was pleased to be used in the book). But these examples of “sampling” as it might be called, do not detract or distract from a novel that is unrelenting in its determination to locate the origins of what Chérif Keïta in his introduction calls “the spectre of politicians and their clans morphing into bloodsucking and kleptocratic dynasties”.

So, while colonialism exacerbated the brutalisation and suffering of ordinary people, the origins of slavery and poverty are seen to have existed long before the arrival of Europeans. Ouologuem’s method was to critique dynastic eras and countenance the effect on the population as a whole before particularising the suffering through the lives of a few individuals. This allows him to be withering about a German anthropologist’s romanticisation of the continent or to detail the adversities and transformations in the life of one of the few truly sympathetic characters in the novel, Raymond Kassoum, who among other unexpected developments, has an 18-month affair with a man he meets when he is impoverished in Paris.

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Novels continue to converse with novels: the Prix Goncourt-winning book The Most Secret Memory of Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr fictionalises a case similar to that of Ouologuem, a unique writer whose mixed fortunes should encourage, rather than deter, new readers for his complex and engrossing analysis of affliction and violence.

Another approach to history and memory is adopted in Forgottenness by Tanja Maljartschuk, translated from the Ukranian by Zenia Tompkins (Bullaun Press, 272pp, €16), in which the narrator’s panic attacks and possible OCD necessitate a source of absorption outside of herself.

“The end that I was experiencing, the end of all times within me, couldn’t be described the way I used to, the way I expected to. New words were needed, a new truth, and the search for them grabbed hold of my entire mind.” The subject of this need is Viacheslav Lypynski, a Ukrainian nationalist whose Polish origins lend extra fervour to his convictions.

Through a deep engagement with the political and familial life of this late 19th century figure, the narrator can displace the immediate discomfort and disappointments of her own life, though we still learn about her unsatisfactory relationships and increasing isolation. Lypynski too had an unsatisfactory emotional life and serious ill-health led to his early death, aged 49.

[ International Booker Prize 2024 longlist announced: 13 translated novels feature ]

By arguing for a conservative Ukraine whose population would be loyal to a royal figurehead he became increasingly at odds with his time and his one-time supporters. Some pronouncements have extra relevance now (although the novel was originally published before the Russian invasion of Ukraine) and discussions about what nationalism means are of interest more generally.

But this perceptive novel is often at its finest in considerations of time and beguiling observations of the countryside: “The usual fogs scattered to the solemn bellowing of the livestock, driven out to graze for the first time after long months of wintering.”

The melancholy that permeates Forgottenness is also fundamental to Among the Ruins by Balla, translated from the Slovak by David Short (Jantar, 228pp, £12.99), but while Maljartschuk’s writing might be described as sober, the characters in this novel are permanently drunk. Chief among them is the psychiatrist Dr Felešlegi (whose surname could be translated as “waste of space”, as David Short tells us), a practitioner of little assistance to his confounded patients and who still depends on his mother for “a petty-bourgeois Sunday lunch”.

A woman called Vargová – like the author, known only by her surname – writes ever more desperate letters to Felešlegi, mixing nostalgia for the communist years of Czechoslovakia with details of the shocking abuse inflicted on her by men. Her opinions are as coruscating as they are derogatory and are usually directed at minorities. The structure of the novel is fragmentary, with short chapters thematically linked rather than giving any sense of development. But while the characters are reprehensible and the direction of the novel becomes ever grimmer, the narrative retains a sardonic humour even at times of hopelessness: “In the empty ring, the loser fights on”.

The mental health difficulties of the characters in Balla’s novel are acute and incessant. The same can be said of the narrator of What Kingdom by Fine Gråbøl, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken (Archipelago Books, 146pp, $18), who is living in “assigned accommodation” with others who have serious psychiatric disorders.

A series of short chapters convey the delimited space in which she lives as she ascribes human characteristics to the furniture in the room. She is happy at meetings because “there’s a sense of security” but when they end “I’m released back into my incomplete individuality”. Episodes of self-harm are disturbing to read but much of the writing is wistfully beautiful that many of the short chapters – some just a few words – are worth reading more than once.

There is a feeling of authenticity about every word of the novel, whether it be the narrator’s joy in singing with a band or her sombre observation of “people tearing along the bike lanes on their way to work, immediately looking the other way if they happen to set eyes on you, the sad life you’ve obviously got”.

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The chief joy the narrator of What Kingdom experiences is the companionship of others. A similar bond exists between disparate groupings in Not A River by Selva Almada, translated from the Spanish by Annie McDermott (Charco Press, 100pp, £11.99), whether it’s between boyhood friends or teenage sisters.

The three boys once went on a fishing trip, which had an unfortunate outcome. Two of those boys return there as men with the son of the friend who can no longer join them. They catch and shoot a large ray for which, it transpires, they have no purpose. A group of local men are unimpressed by this wastefulness. The novel continues with fluid transitions between times and perspectives. Events occur before we learn the context for their outcome. A recurring and predictive nightmare is visited as is a healer who might help the dreamer. The girls explore the limits of their enrapturing power.

All the strands act like tributaries connecting in the river, flowing together smoothly until they don’t. Then, it is not a river. This allusive novel deserves its place on the 2024 International Booker shortlist.

Simpatía by Rodrigo Blanco Calderón, translated from the Spanish by Noel Hernández González and Daniel Hahn (Seven Stories Press UK, 238pp, £12.99), was included on the longlist for the same prize. The chief merit of this artful novel is the unalloyed enjoyment of a scenario that develops and diverts in unforeseen ways. Indeed, there is often an improvisatory feel to the novel, which centres on a man called Ulises Kan whose father-in-law – a general in the Venezuelan army – arranges for him, rather than Ulises’ estranged wife Paulina, to inherit an apartment, if he will help to establish a dog rescue centre within four months of the general’s death.

This need has arisen because many of those leaving the country after the election of Hugo Chávez as president have left their dogs behind. Although the political instability of the country is not directly addressed in the book, sudden changes within the plot reflect the prevailing atmosphere of uncertainty as do the blurred motivations of duplicitous characters once thought to be unwavering.

Calderón’s writing style has a casual, free-to-roam quality. He is happy to point out the absurdity of outcomes as much as their gravity when, as often is the case, it becomes apparent that only the ill-treated dogs are truly virtuous.