Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree, translated by Daisy Rockwell (Tilted Axis, £12)
“Think of a story as a living being,” writes Geetanjali Shree in her International Booker-winning novel, a 735-page epic whose stories twist, fold and intertwine with “no need for a single stream”. At its centre is Amma, “an old lady nearing eighty” in northern India who has lost her hold on life after her husband’s death, “as though Papa was her only reason for living”.
But this story wears its depression and despair lightly, told in a joyful flood of language (“This isn’t just hee hee ha ha it’s hoo ha, it’s brouhaha”) and with diversions aplenty. The main narrative, of Amma and her reaction to widowhood, comes in three parts. In the first, Amma refuses entreaties by her son Bade, daughter Beti and grandson Sid to get up and about again. Then she goes missing: “Poof, she’d disappeared into thin air.” When she reappears, seeming sick and changed, “devoid of connection”, the second part of the story begins as Amma moves in with Beti, who becomes the maternal figure to her own mother.
Amma and Beti are the centre of the story, but other characters come and go, including Rosie Bua, a hijra (transgender woman), who represents one aspect of the book’s interest in the fluidity of boundaries. Rosie looks after Amma when she has a fall and is taken into hospital. “It was nothing, my children forced me to go.” And a literal boundary is the setting for the final part of the story as Amma and Beti cross the border into Pakistan, where the pain of the partition from India in 1947 is still fresh. “A border, gentleman, is for crossing,” Amma says to government officials, but she ends up caught in political negotiations between the two countries.
A summary like this can’t encapsulate the boundless – and boundary-less – energy of Tomb of Sand. Even when it’s about death, it’s full of life, populous and garrulous, with as many diversions and tributaries as a river winding through the country: everyone gets a voice, including the local crows. That such an approach will not appeal to all readers is pre-empted by Shree (“Why waste the precious time of this story?”), and it’s true that when you’re hundreds of pages in with hundreds still to go, the assurance that “no tale is ever complete” and “the story will not end” can seem as much a warning as a promise.
However it’s impossible not to be charmed by the digressions, on everything from hiccuping cricketers to the likeness of the human brain to a jalebi (“the most regal of sweets”). One riff on time describes it as “the great one-upsman. Whatever you say, time insists on one-upping you. You could say, Oh, what a horrible time this is! and then it will go ahead and make things even more horrible.” Translator Daisy Rockwell deserves the equal billing the International Booker endows for translating the novel’s idiosyncratic style so fluently and energetically.
Families, we’re told, are like the great Indian epic the Mahabharata: “they contain all that exists in the world, and whatever they don’t contain doesn’t exist”. The same might be said for this capacious, breathtaking book.
Standing Heavy by GauZ’, translated by Frank Wynne (MacLehose, £12)
This inventive and very funny debut novel offers a whistle-stop, whizz-bang tour of Franco-African history through the perspective of undocumented workers from Ivory Coast, employed as security guards at a Parisian shopping centre. The title refers to “those professions that require the employee to remain standing to earn a pittance”. Via stories of a president suffering from “coup-d’étalgia” and the oil shock of the 70s, we meet generations of Black immigrants – André, Ferdinand, Ossiri, Kassoum – and hear their perspectives on capitalism and slavery, and the repeated urge to “send money back to the old country”. Between chapters runs a lively, cynical guide to consumer culture, including how the English and French pronounce Sephora differently, and the horrors of having to listen again and again to the same terrible songs on the shopping centre radio. “A curse on David Guetta and the Black Eyed Peas.”
Dogs of Summer by Andrea Abreu, translated by Julia Sanches (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £14.99)
Spanish novelist Andrea Abreu makes her English-translation debut with this story of teenage female friendship in 1990s Tenerife, narrated by the unforgettably named Shit. Her best friend is Isora, and it comes as no surprise that the tight affection Shit has for her, which shades into jealousy (“I liked her eyes and a bunch of other things too”), is concealing other feelings. Isora has her own issues to deal with: she “pukes up” a lot, “like a cat”, and wants to kill herself – as her mother did. When all this emotional unfinished business, as sultry as the summer weather, comes to a head, tragedy is inevitable. In playful language, Abreu beautifully evokes a land of “light stored for so many thousands of years”, and an era of telenovelas and the birth of the internet, in which Pokémon and Bratz dolls give way to sexual discovery.
Impossible by Erri De Luca, translated by NS Thompson (Mountain Leopard, £14.99)
Themes of betrayal and revenge are explored through an interrogation: the unnamed suspect has been arrested, accused of pushing a man to his death during a hike in the Dolomite mountains. His protests that his presence was a coincidence sound hollow when we learn that he has a past as a “full-time militant”, and that the dead man had once informed on him. Held in solitary confinement, he writes letters to his lover, but he remains alone: the letters are unsent and he trusts nobody, not even his lawyer. The magistrate and suspect go head to head, but some questions have no answers, and their exchange becomes increasingly political and reflective, taking in Pascal, Leonardo Sciascia and Pink Floyd, together with issues of criminals as celebrities and the “brotherhood” of Communism. But however philosophical he becomes, De Luca’s storytelling nous means he’s not above a twist – or two – in the tail.
