The Singularity by Balsam Karam, trans. Saskia Vogel

In a coastal city, a displaced woman, having searched for her missing daughter in vain for weeks, throws herself into the ocean. Another woman, pregnant with her first child, witnesses the suicide. In the first part of the book, a spiral-like structure with the disappearance at its center documents the weeks before and after the mother’s suicide. Her own mother and her three surviving children, living in an alley, try to make the best of their reduced circumstances; the grandmother educates the children, and the children pass the time by making up games. The children primarily exist as a collective, three young lives sharing the same agony and telling each other the same stories of their lost home. In the second part, the other woman, who left her war-torn country as a child, receives the news that her baby has died in utero. She begins to experience this loss simultaneously with the trauma of witnessing the suicide, and then to relive her childhood displacement and the inherited traumas of her family. All of these pains become a single, indistinguishable wound, and Karam deftly uses form and structure to portray her sense of disorientation and pervasive, singular misery.

The Singularity bears a pervasive heaviness, saturated as it is by grief and trauma, and it refuses narrative closure. Yet there is beauty in the novel, as well, in the moments of identification and solidarity, in the originality of the writing, and in the intimacy of these intertwined narratives.

Though short, this novel packs a punch in its exploration of the experiences of refugees. The family of the missing girl come into contact with tourists at the seaside, with their lives contrasting heavily with the leisure and frivolity of the tourists’. The tourists feel that they have a better claim to the beach than the people who live there, and the locals are discouraged from entering their world unless in a service role. On the other hand, the pregnant woman’s childhood is marked by constant discrimination in the Nordic country her family moves to. Although by adulthood she has found some tentative acceptance, the other woman’s suicide returns her to her origins; she is the only person who can bear to acknowledge this spectacular display of pain, which she feels as her own. Each section of the novel is distinct in its structure; Karam confidently stretches the form of the novel to accommodate her themes of displacement, motherhood, witness, and grief. Saskia Vogel’s seamless translation deserves commendation here, as well. The Singularity bears a pervasive heaviness, saturated as it is by grief and trauma, and it refuses narrative closure. Yet there is beauty in the novel, as well, in the moments of identification and solidarity, in the originality of the writing, and in the intimacy of these intertwined narratives.

BALSAM KARAM is of Kurdish ancestry and has lived in Sweden since she was a young child. She is an author and librarian and made her literary debut in 2018 with the critically acclaimed novel, Event Horizon, which was shortlisted for the Katapult Prize and won the Smaland Literature Festival’s Migrant Prize. Her second novel, The Singularity, originally published in Sweden in 2021, was shortlisted for the European Union Prize for Literature, the August Prize, and Svenska Dagbladet’s Literature Prize.

SASKIA VOGEL is the author of the novel Permission and a translator of more than 20 Swedish-language books. Her writing has been awarded the Berlin Senate Endowment for Non-German Literature. Her translations have won the CLMP Firecracker Award for Fiction (Johannes Anyuru’s They Will Drown in Their Mothers’ Tears), have been shortlisted for the PEN Translation Prize (Jessica Schiefauer’s Girls Lost), and supported by grants from the Swedish Arts Council, the Swedish Authors’ Fund, and English PEN. She was Princeton’s Translator in Residence in fall 2022 and lives in Berlin.

Publisher: Book*hug Press (January 24, 2024)
Language: English
Paperback 5″ x 8″ | 208 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-7716-6889-7

Clementine Oberst

Clementine Oberst is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in television studies. Born and raised in Toronto, she has lived in Montreal and Glasgow and now calls Hamilton home. When she isn't writing her dissertation, Clementine can be found knitting, trying to cultivate a green thumb, and playing with her cats. She loves nothing more than losing herself in a good book. You can connect with her on Instagram @clementinereads.