Month: March 2025

The woman on page eight: Azorno by Inger Christensen

Believe me, I know how dangerous it is to dream of Azorno. Believe me, I know how dangerous it is. I have known Azorno long enough to realize that it’s not dreams that come true.

Danish poet Inger Christensen, in her essay “It’s All Words,” insists that: “ . . . poems aren’t made out of experiences, or out of thoughts, ideas, or musings about anything. Poems are made out of words.” To some extent, the same may also apply to her fiction. Words are formed into sentences, and the accumulation of these sentences appears to describe a certain reality—the environment of the story—within which a character or characters exist. But the world into which the reader enters is not always what it seems. Consider the phenomenon of the unreliable narrator. Christensen’s Azorno might then be considered a novella with multiple unreliable narrators, one of whom, Sampel, is a famous author and one, Azorno, the main character in his latest novel, and five women—Katarina, Randi, Louise, Xenia, and Bet Sampel—each of whom insists, at some time or another, that they are the woman the main character meets on page eight. Oh, and did I mention that each of these women is pregnant, by the same man?

What makes this clever experimental novella so engaging—and disorienting—is Christensen’s exploration of the interaction between language, perception, and reality, the primary theme driving all her writing. It is unclear who is actually narrating (and presumably writing) the novel we are reading. Phrases, descriptions, settings and circumstances continually repeat, evolving as the story unfolds, echoing through the apparent voices of multiple characters, the accounts they give, the letters they write to one another, and the experiences they have. Just when you think you know where you are, reality shifts again and you are forced to reorient yourself. Even the mysterious narrator does not seem to have control of the narrative:

How in the world to take control over the progression of a story that from the beginning has simply contained a concealed desire to communicate something that would catch their attention, but then turned out to be to their liking, to such an extent that they swallowed it raw and later had to throw up the indigestible remains and, in the company  of friends and acquaintances, regard them as the consequences of an incomprehensible but harmless disease. In this way I quickly lost touch with my story, and what began on my part as a downright lie could easily slide toward something seriously close to the truth.

We have, then, a puzzle, a narrative nested within narratives, not exactly like a Russian doll but bound with a logic of its own. Although there is a conclusion reached at the end of this structured maze of mirrored, reflected, and misleading sentences, one would almost have to leave a trails of breadcrumbs and work back from end to beginning to sort out just how all the pieces, so scattered at the outset, eventually fall into place. The temptation at first reading is to attempt to keep  track of the letters, conversations and accounts that build, one upon another, making note of the dates, places, objects and motifs that are layered one on top of another to try to determine exactly who the narrator is and which one of the characters is actually the author, especially if, as is sometimes suggested, another character’s voice is openly adopted by the writer to carry the narrative. It’s a slippery terrain. It may be best, perhaps, to simply let go and follow the story as it leads you through its own strange world, one that is simultaneously real and unreal.

Azorno by Inger Christensen is translated from the Danish by Denise Newman and published by New Directions.

No, it’s not complicated at all: Recognizing the Stranger by Isabella Hammad and One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar Al Akkad

Nine days before October 7, 2023, British-Palestinian writer Isabella Hammad delivered the Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture at Columbia University. Eighteen days after October 7, on October 25, 2023, Egyptian-born Canadian-American novelist and journalist Omar Al Akkad sent a tweet out on Twitter (X) that read: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” Hammad’s lecture along with an Afterword penned in the early weeks of 2024 and Al Akkad’s “heartsick breakup letter with the West,” inspired, not by his social media post per se, but by his growing frustration and anger at the daily barrage of images of a people under siege, are two recent releases that present powerful, critical responses to the ongoing violence in Gaza and the West Bank. To genocide. Both address the failure of the West to respond to the humanity of the Palestinian people and the all too common tendency to look away, to plug one’s ears, or worse, to celebrate the destruction we’ve seen live streamed to the world.

Hammad’s Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative is a smaller, more focused work, given the context of its origin. Her primary interest is in the telling of stories. She speaks of literary devices, especially the moment of recognition, in the character and/or the reader, in which a certain understanding arises. Drawing on literary sources, she explores this technique, then suggests that the same kind of recognition can shake firmly held beliefs about real life political realities too. Humanize the perceived enemy. Ideally, Palestinians writing about their history and circumstances should spark a chord in their audience, but, although they have been telling their stories through poetry, fiction and nonfiction for decades now, too many still refuse to acknowledge the conditions of the occupation or their right to their land and culture.

We are at a moment when elementary democratic values the world over have eroded and in some places almost completely disappeared. I feel it as a kind of fracturing of intention. The big emancipatory dreams of progressive and anti-colonial movements of the previous century seem to be in pieces, and some are trying to make something with these pieces, taking language from here and from there to keep our movements going.

There is a measure of optimism in Hammad’s lecture, a sense that “(o)pen declarations of racism and fascism by the Israeli government, while no means new, are becoming audible to Western ears.” Of course, as we read this, we know her hope that the plight of the Palestinians is reaching a wider receptive audience is about to be dramatically undone. She addresses the terrifying fallout in Gaza in her Afterword. This small volume, then, bridges the time before and after the Hamas attack, reminding those who need it, that the circumstances the Palestinians have suffered are long standing and long ignored. History did not begin on October 7.

Recognizing the Stranger is very much of the moment, especially in the sense that it records a lecture given at a pivotal time, but it is framed within the framework of literary critique with a political and historical background. Omar Al Akkad’s work is likewise immediate and direct, urged on by the atrocities that he sees every morning when he turns on his computer. But he is addressing not only the genocide in Gaza as it is happening, but viewing it within a broader personal, professional and global framework. He is writing as an Arab man, born in Egypt and raised in Qatar; as an immigrant, first to Canada and then to the US; as a journalist with a decade’s worth of reporting on acts of terrorism, war, and unlawful confinement; and, perhaps most powerfully, as the father of young children. He repeatedly returns to the endless stream of images of children torn to pieces which weighs on him as a heavy anchor of pain and disbelief.

But this is not an account of that carnage, though it must in its own way address it, if only to uphold the most pathetic, necessary function of this work: witness. This is an account of something else, something that, for an entire generation of not just Arabs or Muslims or Brown people but rather all manner of human beings from all parts of the world, fundamentally changed during this season of completely preventable horror. This is an account of a fracture, a breaking away from the notion that the polite, Western liberal ever stood for anything at all.

The tone which rings clear in this quote from early in Al Akkad’s text, carries through to the end. He is blunt, he is angry, but he is not surprised. As he talks about his childhood in Qatar under a regime that censored and controlled everything coming in from the West and his family’s move to Canada when he was sixteen, there is the promise and the disillusion, perhaps in equal measure, that accompanies such a journey. As he brings in the sobering experience of reporting from front lines, prisons and other points of confrontation, he calls attention to the dehumanization of those that West see as disposable, even when, as in the case of Afghan soldiers, for example, they are supposed to be fighting beside the American forces. Of course, governments and news media never address any of this directly, rather they employ passive language and unmake meanings and outright restrict the use of certain words and phrases in the determination of who are the real victims, who are the aggressors (the “terrorists”), and who are acceptable collateral damage. In such a linguistic landscape, calling a thing what it really is becomes something that is not only undesirable or inconvenient, but as we have seen very clearly over the last eighteen months, it can cost individuals opportunities, jobs, degrees, and even their right to live or study in a country where they have legal status.

Al Akkad is well aware of the consequences of speaking out. He knows that his own career is at risk if not already irrevocably damaged. But he is unable to remain silent and his book is, as he says above, primarily directed at the myth of Western liberal values. He claims that in a world invested in the unmaking of meaning, the writer cannot be expected to turn away from the political, to only focus on the sublime. That is a luxury he cannot afford and, although he acknowledges that for some the cost of speaking out may be too great, there are many established writers and artists and intellectuals who have remained silent. Or have claimed that it is all too complicated.

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is an intensely personal essay, an exceptionally well-written plea for human compassion in a polarized and uncertain world. Al Akkad, although he is now an American citizen living and raising a family in Oregon, has a unique perspective to bring to this assessment of the current political dynamics, their development in a post-9/11 world, and what we, if anything, as individuals can do. It’s an empowering  if sadly realistic work that will speak loudly to those of us who have likewise been devastated by the brutal destruction of Gaza and the death and injury of so many children and their families. We need to hear articulate and passionate voices like his to know we are not alone, and trust that others who may have relied solely on Western mainstream media, if that, may also be inclined to listen.

At this moment in time, Hammad’s and Al Akkad’s books both stand in an unusual, disconcerting light. They address something that is still happening, that is not yet safely in that distant rear-view mirror if, in fact, it ever will be. And since they have been published, the tectonic plates that underlie the Western world have shifted in new and frightening ways that have not only exacerbated the ongoing  violence in the Middle East, but are rapidly revealing new fracture lines within former global alliances. New military concerns are emerging and censorship is more even more insidious, especially in the US. How it will play out is far from clear, but we cannot afford to let the new threats to peace and trade overshadow continuing genocide in Palestine, or, for that matter, in other ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and in the Global South. More than anything, we cannot afford to be silent.

Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative by Isabella Hammad is published by Alfred A. Knopf in Canada, Grove/Black Cat in the US and Fern Press in the UK. One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar Al Akkad is published by McClelland & Stewart in Canada and Alfred A. Knopf.

The space between who you are and the role you play: Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg

If one could paraphrase Tolstoy’s famed opening line of Anna Karenina within the context of just one aspect of the family dynamic, the bond between mothers and daughters, one might suggest that all happy mother-daughter relationships are alike, yet each unhappy mother-daughter relationship is unhappy in its own way. Or would the contrast be peaceful and conflicted? Or close and distant? For Karin, the protagonist of Norwegian writer Hanna Stoltenberg’s debut novella, Near Distance, the situation with her adult daughter would fit, as the title implies, into the latter set of contrasts. She and Helene are not close. They both live in Oslo but rarely see each other and, at least for Karin, this does not seem to be a problem. She is content working at a job that does not ask much of her and keeping her relationships of any kind casual:

The days have a regularity she enjoys. She rarely listens to music; she usually reads novels and online newspapers or chats with men from the dating website and fixes dates she either keeps or cancels, depending on how she feels on the day. Sometimes she sees friends, old colleagues, goes to the cinema or has dinner. She has no problem finding things to talk about and is a good listener, but afterwards she often feels distorted by her own words and wishes she had stayed at home. It doesn’t bother her to be alone. As long as your basic needs are covered – food, shelter, the possibility of intimacy – how much difference is there really between a good life and a bad life?

Yet, as much as she may tell herself otherwise,  one senses that there is a deep discontent within Karin, something she is aware of, but unwilling to address.

She had never really wanted to have children when she was growing up, so motherhood caught her off guard. When she found herself pregnant in her first year of university, she dropped out to devote herself to her new role, believing, at the insistence of Erik, the baby’s father, that they could make it work. And for a while it did. Gradually Karin began to drift away, restless and disconnected, ultimately falling into a loose affair that would trigger the dissolution of her relationship with Erik and strain her bond with Helene. Now that her daughter is grown and married with two children of her own, they rarely talk to one another. Until late one night when Helene calls to ask if she can drop by. She must talk. It can’t wait. Karin bows out on the man she’s just gone home with and meets her at the bar.

Helene is distraught. She has learned that her husband Endre is having an affair with the leader of a meditation retreat centre he has been frequenting and does not know what to do. Her daughter’s circumstances and her appeal for advice and assistance will lead Karin to reflect on her own past and revisit her fragmented memories of her relationship with Helene from her earliest years to the present. Questioning what she knows and what she doesn’t know. Soon an opportunity to explore this uneasy mother-daughter bond in a new light arises when Helene asks her mother to join her for a weekend away in London. She has already bought the tickets and made the hotel reservations, so Karin can hardly decline. This time together will reveal some things about both women, where they are in their lives, and how they got there.

This spare novella is a closely observed, well composed character study, with a sharp focus on the kind of persistent internal unease that can drive someone into themselves and away from those they care about. Karin is extremely self-conscious. She is always aware of how she thinks she is being perceived, relying on what she calls her “external gaze” to regulate her behaviour in relation to others. Whether what she believes she is projecting (or hiding) is really being perceived as she imagines is difficult to tell, because her thoughts and experiences mediate the close third person narrative. Meanwhile, she tends to be hyper-observant of those around her, continually taking in and assessing other people—fellow patrons at the bar, passengers on the plane, strangers seen on a London street:

In the central reservation by a pedestrian crossing, two women are hugging each other. Karin watches them while the taxi waits at a red light. They are both wearing turquoise uniforms under puffa jackets; one has her dark hair pinned up with a clasp, and it looks like she’s the one being comforted. They have white slip-on shoes which makes Karin wonder if they’re maids, nannies maybe? She has the feeling of having intruded on a story more dignified, more authentic than her own.

Karin’s vigilant nature, isolated as she is in her own mid-life existence, allows for the creation of rich, intense—and yet spare—narrative. Stoltenberg’s cool, detached prose is translated to a perfect pitch by Wendy H. Gabrielsen. As the book progresses, the scenes which alternate between Karin’s past reflections and present circumstances become shorter and tighter, heightening the tension especially as she and Helene appear to be at risk of losing contact with one another in the middle of a London night. But this is not a book with a neat conclusion, nor is it certain how much either Karin or Helene have gained beyond a slightly closer connection. Are they too different in nature? Or perhaps too similar? An inescapable feeling of loneliness and distance lingers, but without judgement. For a young author, this is a very confident debut and it will be interesting to watch her develop in the years to come.

Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg is translated by Wendy H. Gabrielsen and published by Biblioasis.

Staying too literal is a dead end: Nevermore by Cécile Wajsbrot

It is the beginning of time. There was a before, of course, there was day, but everything begins, begins again at night. Genesis. The beginning of time. “Time Passes,” the second part of To the Lighthouse, can be read as a separate work, a text we can approach as we would an island from which, to be sure, the contours of the shoreline, of the mainland can be seen—but the only thing that counts is the exploration of the island. A creation story. Dividing light from darkness.

Only twenty pages long, the “Time Passes” section of Virginia Woolf’s novel is a bridge or passageway between the first and third, marking the passing of ten years during which a summer house on the coast of the Isle of Skye stands bereft of the human life that once filled it. It is empty, and yet it is not. The forces of nature observe, occupy, and lay claim to the house, its contents, and the grounds. Elsewhere war rages and several characters from the first section, including the central figure, Mrs. Ramsay, meet unfortunate fates, noted in brief, bracketed asides along the way. It is not until the end of this interlude that human life begins to reappear on the scene.

This poetic evocation of time and abandonment flows through Cécile Wajsbrot’s contemplative Nevermore, not unlike the Elbe to which her narrator returns regularly during her sojourn in Dresden. This intriguing, intelligent novel, follows an unnamed translator who has come to the German city to work on a translation of “Time Passes” from English into French. She is grieving the recent loss of a close friend and hopes that both the project and the unfamiliar location far from her home in Paris will help her heal:

I’m elsewhere, in another city, another country. The language of my internal thoughts is not the one spoken here. Are we ultimately impenetrable? Will I never know the internal life playing out here? Will I pass like a silhouette, a shade, without knowing anyone?

As someone who has valued her independence, her “untethered life” of freedom, she is seeking a temporary refuge within which she can disappear while she immerses herself in her work. Thus, “Time Passes” not only offers her purpose and direction, but exists as an incantatory exploration of the imperfect art of ferrying a piece of literature from one language to another. As she makes her way through phrases and passages that seem to echo the sense of absence that haunts her, she trials variations and fumbles with sound and meaning, attempting to sketch out a first draft.

However, the ongoing translation is but one thread in this wide ranging narrative. It is interwoven with historical, political, and artistic streams. Regular “Interludes” trace the history of the High Line in Manhattan, from its earliest days as an elevated freight rail line built to transport goods arriving at the Hudson River port and service the warehouses, factories, and slaughterhouses in the surrounding area. In use from 1934 through to 1980, the tracks lay abandoned and open to the ravages  of time and the elements until they were turned into an elevated park and promenade above the noise of the city nearly three decades later. As she repeatedly returns to this evolving space, she is interested in exploring the shifting economic, artistic and human forces that shape the environments we live in. Nothing is static.

Indeed, change is often catastrophic. Another theme that regularly resurfaces is the 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor near Pripyat, Ukraine. The town was evacuated and a new community was built just outside the so-called Exclusion Zone. But as scientists, and eventually film crews and tourists returned to the abandoned town, they found that nature—flora and fauna—had continued to thrive and even take over some of the empty buildings and structures. The persistence of life in the absence of human care or interference, mirrors the scenes evoked by Woolf decades earlier in her depiction of the elements, insects and animal and plant life working its way into the empty house in “Time Passes.”

Then, of course, there is the very city in which the narrator has taken up temporary residence—Dresden. The history of its destruction and subsequent reconstruction is evidenced and memorialized everywhere. As a backdrop to the translation of a work that spans the Frist World War, a presence even if it is off-scene, so to speak, a city with such an indelible war-time history makes sense. The narrator takes long walks at night, following the river, thinking of death. At times, she seems to encounter some kind of presence and wonders if it is a ghost or a briefly animated memory of her friend. As the messages her family and friends back in Paris leave on her phone go unanswered, she even contemplates the possibility of extending her stay a little longer. She is seeking something even if she doesn’t know what.

There are also other important themes and elements that occupy our narrator’s thoughts in between her translation sessions at her laptop. Michael Powell’s 1937 film, The Edge of the World, for example, based on the evacuation of the Scottish archipelago of Saint Kilda, echoes the common image of abandonment while music, including compositions by Arvo Pärt, Debussy, Felix Mendelsohn and more, forms a sort of narrative soundtrack (all the sources and resources are included at the end). As someone who is, by virtue of her profession, attuned to the rhythms and musicality of language—a particular challenge with the text she is working on—it is not surprising that music should play such a fundamental, even transformative role in her immediate journey. This is, then a rich novel of ideas, one that incorporates its many varied digressions seamlessly into the progressive translation of Virginia Woolf’s “Time Passes” at its core.

But what about this activity so central to this work? How is the potential translation of an English text into French within a French novel realized in an English translation? As the narrator tests out possible variations for each passage she encounters, she often starts with a literal version, then troubles the grammatical and lexical limitations of a language that cannot always do what the source language can to reach some kind of structure that will later be fine-tuned. This often necessitates shifts and small sacrifices to capture not only the meaning, but the lightness, flow, and qualities of repetition in Woolf’s unconventional original. Again and again, we are offered insight into the processes a translator employs to bring a text to life. English translator Tess Lewis’s ingenious approach to this translation-within-a-translation makes these passages accessible to all readers regardless of prior knowledge of French. Each time Wajbrot’s narrator returns another sentence or two from “Time Passes,” Woolf’s text is presented in italics, while a third font (Helvetica Neue Light) is used for the possible French variations under consideration, translated into English (in the primary font) if necessary to highlight nuances between them. Meanwhile, Lewis cuts some of the more literal or less complicated translations to, as she says, sharpen focus on those alternatives that shed light on the process of translation. Of course, the translator-narrator is not only dealing with words, their sounds, lengths and order, but also questions of meaning and intention. Fortunately, with Woolf, there are manuscripts, different edits, letters, and diary sources that she can consult. As the narrator admits, the art of translation is not an exact science,.

This is, then, an ideal book for anyone interested in the process of translation—readers of translated literature, presumably—who enjoy wise, lyrical meditations on a wide range of unexpectedly interlinked subjects. But it is also the story of one woman’s coming to terms with loss and grief through deep engagement with a remarkable piece of literature. Perhaps the only way to truly heal.

Nevermore by Cécile Wajsbrot is translated from the French by Tess Lewis and pulished by Seagull Books.