Vista Chinesa by Tatiana Salem Levy (translated by Alison Entrekin)

The difficult details of what happened in our parents' lives before we were born often remain secret. This short, startlingly impactful novel is composed in the form of a letter which Júlia writes to her twin children. She confides in them about a violent incident which occurred long before they were conceived during which she was raped. In 2014, Júlia went on a run in the forest of Rio de Janeiro before a planned meeting about her architectural project of constructing an Olympic village in the city. She was sexually violated and physically attacked at gunpoint. The perpetrator was never found. Though she is aware that “now when people look at me they no longer see the body of a woman destroyed”, the damage is always emotionally present even if it is no longer physically visible. “That was my despair. The world went on, and my body, too, my work, my relationship, the things I wasn't sure about, my issues. My life was still there, even though it was over.” In describing her experience of surviving the attack, the police case which followed and the excruciating difficulty of life afterward we gain a complex and vivid portrait of the damage which persists after such a horrific assault.

The author notes at the end of the book that it was created through long conversations and a collaborative effort with her friend who was raped. They could have written a nonfiction account of her experience but it's fitting that it was transformed into a fictional narrative to more adequately represent the psychological reality of the victim. The style of the novel cleverly represents Júlia's state of mind to give a visceral understanding of her experience. Memories are both clearly present and jumbled. She's asked to describe what her attacker looked like for a police sketch and identify suspects from line ups, but it's moving how she conveys the agonizing difficulty of recognizing her attacker when “Looking in the mirror... I don't even recognise myself.” Sometimes sentences in the novel extend at a rapid pace showing the confusion of thoughts, emotion and her sense of time. Sections move back and forth between details of the attack and her life afterward. Though clarity becomes ever more elusive, while with her therapist she desperately thinks “If I talked about nothing else, if I only repeated the same story every day I came here, putting all of my versions together, maybe I'd get there. At some point, I'd get it all out and free myself of this past.” Sadly, there can be no escape from what happened to her but this account does a great deal to instil understanding.

Tatiana Salem Levy has an artful way of presenting individual experience framed by issues to do with nationality as in her previous novel “The House in Smyrna”. In this new book she shows the disconnect between the protagonist's life after her assault and the authorities' agenda. Police are more focused on closing the case than finding the right suspect. At one point the female investigator suggests that Júlia was partly at fault for jogging in an unpopulated area at a certain time of day. There's a buoyant attitude in the country surrounding the World Cup and Olympics while issues of public safety are being swept under the rug. Factors such as this shows why some victims of rape choose to not report or pursue justice because the continuing emotional trauma and further damage is too difficult. It reminded me of the clearsighted way Kandasamy's “When I Hit You” shows why reporting domestic abuse often results in further punishment for the victim. Levy's novel is full of bravery and insight in how it conveys the painful reality of sexual assault.

Resistance by Julián Fuks (translated by Daniel Hahn)

I bought this book several weeks ago but after far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro was elected president of Brazil last week and I read author Julián Fuks’ powerful response in this Guardian article I felt prompted to prioritize reading his novel “Resistance”. It’s a very meditative story about the narrator’s reflections on his family history – in particular his adopted brother’s troubled life and his parents’ move from Argentina to Brazil after living under a tyrannical dictatorship. It felt ominously prescient when I came to the line “Dictatorships can come back, I know, and I also know that the arbitrariness, the oppressions, the suffering, exist in all kinds of ways, in all kinds of regimes, even when hordes of citizens march biennially to the ballot box”. But, of course, Fuks must have experienced and read about many shifts in leadership over the years to see how frighteningly quickly oppressive political leaderships can take control of a country. So yes, this is a novel about personal and political resistance to these tyrannical governments, but it’s more about a resistance to the categories and interpretations of history which diminish its reality.

The narrator struggles to describe his pressing concerns about his brother without stating this sibling was adopted. He’s anxious that just stating this fact will encourage all sorts of presumptions about why his brother grew into being a certain kind of man. This inner-conflict about giving details is echoed throughout the novel where the narrator questions both his memory and the meaning such information has in truly understanding the past and his family’s situation. It’s an anxiety I really understand and can relate to because of the way creating narratives necessarily means taking a certain slant on the past and it can impose limitations. This is especially true in families when a child or relative is defined in family stories as being a certain type of person. It perpetuates a certain understanding of them and can become a self-perpetuating thing which inhibits the freedom of an individual. The same is true when looking at the history of a country or a community of people who have lived through certain events. The narrator is just as reticent to define his parents’ political affiliations and the events which led to their defection from Argentina. This makes a compelling conflict that runs throughout the novel where the author not only questions the truth about the past, but about how it’s related.

Barely any names are used throughout the book and I think the narrator abstains from using them because of this same reason of not wanting to limit or define his family members. However, one character who is named is Martha Brea, a colleague of his mother's who is abruptly taken away in a car, executed and her body isn’t found until many years later. The narrator describes how “her absence lived in our house, and her absence lives in infinite circles around other unknown houses – the absences of many Marthas, different in their unrecovered remains, in their distorted features, in their silent ruins.” The novel describes the way many families experienced personal loss because of people who were “disappeared” for political reasons and the development of the famous movement by the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo to recover children stolen under Argentine dictatorship. It’s powerful how the narrator considers the way his parents would have undoubtably been lost as well if they hadn’t taken the step to flee the country.

“Resistance” was a very different novel from what I was expecting but I was glad to be surprised by its deep thoughtfulness and philosophical quest to question the way we define family and history. Although the circumstances described are quite specific, Fuks’ unique methodology means the story takes on a much more universal meaning as the reader reflects on their own family and country. It certainly prompted me to rethink how I consider my own. In the coming years we’ll hopefully see many more strong Brazilian voices like Julián Fuks being heard and published as the country lives through this difficult period of time.

The House in Smyrna by Tatiana Salem Levy (translated by Alison Entrekin)

How do you reconcile the national identity of your ancestors with the person you are today? The children of recent immigrants will most likely have a stronger sense of duality because they are exposed to their parents’ culture which was brought from somewhere else and that of the society which they’ve been raised in. The main characters in “The House in Smyrna” have an even more blended sense of self because their family has strong roots in Portugal, recent ties with Turkey and eventually moved to settle in Brazil. Rather than tell the story of how a child of immigrants embraces or rejects her various cultural influences, Tatiana Salem Levy does something radically new with her narrative by moving between characters and periods of time in brief image-driven sections. This creates an emotionally-charged story which blends disparate elements together to show how there can be no true cohesive sense of self.

The primary drive of this tale is a key left to a character whose grandfather tells her it is for the house he left in Smyrna, Turkey. Alongside her journey (which might be real or imagined) to seek out this ancestral home there are the stories of a man caring for his dying mother, a heated and tempestuous lovers’ relationship, the incarceration and abuse of a political dissident and a writer whose body is breaking down. This may sound like a lot to include in such a short novel. At first it can prove a bit confusing between these strands of narrative because few names are used. However, they quickly take on the characteristic of a unified voice searching and seeking out a place to call home. The narrator declares: “I was born in exile, and that’s why I am the way I am, without a homeland, without a name… I was born away from myself, away from my land – but, when it comes down to it, who am I? What land is mine?” This narrative embodies this sense of anonymity as a strategy for contemplating these insolvable dilemmas. Imagery is repeated throughout different sections making the experiences of the characters feel unified. Strong sensations of pleasure or pain are carried between one part and the next fusing them together. The line of time is subverted through these methods to suggest subtleties not available in traditional ways of storytelling.

Inevitably, this sometimes gave the disappointing effect of making me want to know more about the specifics of certain characters and their dilemmas. In particular, the sections about the brutality of the Brazilian military during the dictatorship feel like they deserve a wider space to deal with the complexities of the situation. However, the pointedly strong imagery which appears in some sections makes up for this consciously shortened style of storytelling. Scenes of grief, isolation, discovery, pleasure are rendered with impeccably-crafted prose making them strongly resonant. There are instances of sexual power play, the sense of exploration in a foreign country and the bitter sting of mourning which are depicted in a way that really transported me. The novel also includes some plot twists which give these tales a strikingly charged quality making the piles of detail you’d get in more traditional narratives feel superfluous.

“The House in Smyrna” is an emotional, startling novel that makes every sentence earn its place. As a narrator in the novel passionately declares: “If my writing doesn’t bleed, it doesn’t exist.” The intensity of writing here does feel as if the writer has shed her life into it. This is a book written by someone who is deeply concerned about the meaning of identity and finding a way to express the full complexity of it. It’s what makes this such a noble and intense novel.

Read an excellent interview with the author here: https://scribepublications.co.uk/explore/insights/tatiana-salem-levy-q-a/