LITERARY FICTION
THE TRAITOR'S NICHE by Ismail Kadare (Harvill Secker £16.99)
THE TRAITOR'S NICHE
by Ismail Kadare (Harvill Secker £16.99)
Ismail Kadare won the inaugural Man Booker International Prize in 2005 for a body of work that has often disguised outright condemnation of his country’s totalitarian history with oblique, playful satire.
This latest novel is set around the 1800s, when Albania was an outpost of the Ottoman Empire and in Constantinople, a favoured recreation is to gawp at the head of whatever new traitor has been placed in the main square.
But the square needs a new head and only one will do — that of Black Ali, pasha of Albania, who is promising to lead the country to independence, but has fatally misread his people. You can read all sorts of allegories into Kadare’s riffs on ideas of the body politic, while the deluded Black Ali is a swipe at Albania’s notorious post-war autocrat Enver Hoxha.
Mainly, the novel is a hymn to language, something that, as Ottoman bureaucrats intent on obliterating it instinctively know, and as Kadare’s novels prove, is not easily silenced.
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THE GOLDEN LEGEND by Nadeem Aslam (Faber £16.99)
THE GOLDEN LEGEND
by Nadeem Aslam (Faber £16.99)
There may be angrier, more despairing novels published this year — after all, there is a lot to despair over — but few are likely to be as beautiful.
Anglo-Pakistani novelist Nadeem Aslam has a rare ability to write intimate novels with a global reach and in his fifth turns his limpid gaze to Pakistan and the havoc being wreaked on the lives of its people by blasphemy laws.
Nargis is an architect who has concealed her Christian roots from everyone, including her recently murdered husband; Helen is her young Christian friend under investigation for a series of supposedly blasphemous articles.
Against a savage backdrop of escalating anti-Western feeling they, and a young Muslim who has escaped from a border camp, go on the run after Nargis refuses to forgive her husband’s high-profile American killer and Helen’s father incites a mob by falling in love with a Muslim.
Occasionally a more peaceful, tolerant Pakistan can be glimpsed behind the implacable, fanatical one depicted here, but mainly this brutal, gorgeous novel feels like an elegy to a lost ideal.
SWALLOWING MERCURY by Wioletta Greg (Granta £12.99)
SWALLOWING MERCURY
by Wioletta Greg (Granta £12.99)
Reading this autobiographical novella about a rural Eighties Polish childhood feels like picking through the fragments of a broken mirror, where glinting, jagged truths lie without ever quite fitting together.
The young Wioletta lives with her parents in eccentric chaos in a village where Catholic tradition sits side by side with superstition and sinister things occur in the most peculiar ways.
Wioletta obsessively collects matchboxes, glimpses her dressmaker making love to a dummy, is reprimanded after apparently mocking Moscow with a painting submitted to a local art competition and plays spin the bottle with randy boys in the haunted house of a sleeping old woman.
Greg, a poet, has an eye — and taste — for everyday detail, and this disorientating novel is bursting with sensual images, from asphalt that glistens ‘like the skin of an aubergine’ to a curtain billowing ‘like the belly of a whale’.
She tends to finish her brief chapters on a dismissive, anti-climatic note that compounds suspicions the whole is less than the sum of its parts. All the same, I can’t think of another novel like it.
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