Aednan
Linnea Axelsson, translated by Saskia Vogel, Pushkin
This award-winning novel set in northern Sweden (the title means both “the land” and “my mother”) is subtitled “An Epic”, but its form – spare, haiku-like verse – means the pages breathe freely. The impressionistic style is matched by the structure, which shifts back and forward, covering a century from 1913 to 2015 in the lives of two indigenous Sámi families. They face the arrival of Swedish settlers and the destruction of their culture, including the building of a dam on Sámi land. One woman regrets her own failure to resist – “The Swedish / language grew / along my thoughts // The Sámi since long / asleep in the body / of shame // obedience overlaid” – and wonders of her children, “How am I to / explain to them // that the ruin / is in my voice.” The result is indeed epic, but also intimate and powerful.
Hungry for What
María Bastarós, translated by Kevin Gerry Dunn, Daunt
We’re never far from danger bursting out in this brisk collection of stories, the first to appear in English from Spanish writer Bastarós. A young girl, who believes her mother was “split in two” after her father’s death, tries to be grown-up by making dinner (Chipsticks and garlic are on the menu) but is powerless to change her mother’s eccentric whims. A woman who is stuck between her husband and her father, each worse than the other, finds that things turn nasty when they insist she declares which of them she loves best. There is ugliness here, given and received (“She wishes she’d inherited her mother’s knack for violence but the genetics didn’t pan out”), but it’s the freshness of the details and relentlessness of Bastarós’s vision that make this such an enthralling read.
