New books in translation: from autofiction to ingenious invention

“I think of this book, and of writing, as a path, a road I follow through myself towards others,” says the narrator of Wound by Oksana Vasyakina, translated from the Russian by Elina Alter (MacLehose Press, 304pp, £16.99). This sense of an emotional representation of those about whom she writes is characteristic of this autofictional novel that is frank in its presentation of the narrator’s “difficult mother” and the relationships they engage in.

Of greatest importance is the narrator’s conflicted feelings about her capricious mother who, though largely unaffectionate, was also capable of being kind. Her concern is returned and doubled by the narrator as her mother approaches death and later when her ashes are transported to be buried. Through all this, Oksana begins to accept the intensity of her desire for other women, progressing from guilelessness to exploration and tenderness.

A seriousness of purpose is explored through prose, poetry and an essay on the links between weaving and writing with some comparative thoughts on the difficulties of mother/daughter relationships as scrutinised in the art of Louise Bourgeois. Only an author of great skill could hold such disparate material together while also questioning her own method throughout the process. But Vasyakina successfully folds the untidy past into the unsettled present, demonstrating how inseparable they are to the person she is, like the tiny piece of the umbilical cord that remains inside her navel.

There is a comparable level of self-scrutiny in another work of autofiction, My Work by Olga Ravn, translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell (Lolli Editions, 398pp, £16.99). In this instance, however, it is birth rather than death that is central to the novel. With unflinching frankness the narrator details the emotional vulnerabilities and turmoil brought to the fore by the pain of childbirth and the inescapable responsibilities that follow. For those who have never given birth, this book offers remarkable detail into what is involved. Like Vasyakina, Ravn uses both prose and poetry to communicate the struggles she endures; both physical (breastfeeding presents acute problems) and mental (thoughts of self-harm and a troubling wish to be childless).

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The narrator attempts an objective distance between herself and her experiences by attributing them to “Anna” – a device borrowed from Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook – that allows her to understand how confined her existence has become and how distrustful Anna has become of her partner Aksel. Only writing allows for escape: “did I forget/that writing could/make me live again.” But even so, the confines and frustrations remain: “This book will be a container, a vessel for what a mother is not allowed to be: torn, in doubt, distraught, unhappy.” This novel is an incisive acknowledgment of our inability to escape our contradictory selves.

While both of the above books are examples of autofiction at its finest, neither wholly escapes the limitations of a form that requires fealty to lived experience. By contrast, the limitless possibilities of fiction are brilliantly utilised in José Eduardo Agualusa’s novel The Living and The Rest, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn (MacLehose Press, 222pp, £12). At a literary festival on Ilha de Moçambique, a novelist is asked if his main character is autobiographical. He denies it and says: “I like exploring the possibility of being someone else, someone unlike me, while still being myself. I like confusing readers too.”

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While the writers hold discussions about readers’ limiting expectations of African novelists, the island becomes increasingly isolated. The internet has stopped working. Nobody has crossed to the island for days. Characters from the author’s novels begin to be observed, including the protagonist of a novel in which “a cockroach wakes up in a small hotel in Lagos, Nigeria, transformed into a woman”. Can a writer, thus, create the reality they require? As one of the writers says: “Reality is an accidental byproduct of fiction.” A point demonstrated repeatedly in this ingenious, manifold novel.

The sense that reality can be transformed by belief or self-delusion forms a large part of Kibogo by Scholastique Mukasonga, translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti (Daunt, 156pp, £9.99). Throughout a novel of shrewd and subtle observation, the character’s reasoning is presented as being in conflict with the impositions of missionaries or the representatives of the Rwandan state. For the people, every happening is a sign attributable to a cause. The rural people are reluctant to abandon their traditional superstitions in favour of new ones, especially those that might aid their crucial crop production. The people’s puzzlement and inventiveness increase when an anthropologist questions them about the disappearance of revered mystics that occurred on a sacred mountain. But even though they perform to satisfy his expectations, his promises prove to be as worthless as those of all the other impostors.

There is further endorsement of fiction’s ability for revelation in Beyond the Door of No Return by David Diop, translated from the French by Sam Taylor (Pushkin Press, 244pp, £16.99), when Aglaé, the daughter of Michael Adanson, reads the notebooks her father bequeathed to her. “It seems to me fair to think now,” he writes, “that only fiction, the novel of a life, can give a genuine glimpse of its profound reality, its complexity; only fiction can illuminate its darkest corners, which are often indiscernible even to the person whose life it was.” He is keen for his daughter to know about the woman he fell in love with in Senegal and the guilt he feels about the consequences of his enmeshment in her already confounded life.

There is suspense, adversity and tension in a novel that generally favours plot over style although some well-worked parallels are developed towards the conclusion of the novel between the central love story and Gluck’s opera Orpheus and Eurydice. But it is perplexing that – having described many aspects of Aglaé's circumstances – the author abandons her once she finds the notebooks. Hers is a life that remains indiscernible.

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A boy who can remember the circumstances of his birth narrates My Life As Edgar by Dominique Fabre, translated from the French by Anna Lahmann (Archipelago Books, 198pp, $18). As in My Work, his mother finds her responsibilities almost beyond endurance. Because of the sensitivity of his extra-large ears, he becomes aware of the way people regard him: “I could hear people around me say He’s not all there, is he in soft voices, secretively.” Eventually, he is sent to relatives in the countryside, rarely seeing his mother – who prefers to escape into the novels of Françoise Sagan – from then until the age of 11 when he is sent away again, this time to a boarding school.

As a narrator Edgar is as compelling as he is frank in his self-revelations. His thoughts follow no logic and range quickly between topics about which he assumes the addressee – the psychiatrist who first assessed him at the age of three – has full understanding. Equally, sudden flashes of information unintentionally disclose the poignancy of his life, especially regarding the identity of his father. However, this striking, original novel never plays Edgar’s plight for pathos. Instead, through the resourceful use of fiction’s possibilities, we discover a bitter form of truth.