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Summary
Summary
Lyrical and devastating, The Singularity is a breathtaking study of grief, migration, and motherhood from one of Sweden's most exciting new novelists.
In an unnamed coastal city filled with refugees, the mother of a displaced family calls out her daughter's name as she wanders the cliffside road where the child once worked. The mother searches and searches until, spent from grief, she throws herself into the sea, leaving her other children behind. Bearing witness to the suicide is another woman--on a business trip, with a swollen belly that later gives birth to a stillborn baby. In the wake of her pain, the second woman remembers other losses--of a language, a country, an identity--when once, her family fled a distant war. Balsam Karam weaves between both narratives in this formally ambitious novel and offers a fresh approach to language and aesthetic as she decenters a white European gaze. Her English-language debut, The Singularity is a powerful exploration of loss, history, and memory--an experience akin to "drinking directly from a flood of tears" ( Aftonbladet ).Author Notes
Balsam Karam (b. 1983) is of Kurdish ancestry and has lived in Sweden since she was a young child. She is an author, librarian, and university lecturer, and made her literary debut in 2018 with the critically acclaimed Event Horizon , which was shortlisted for the Katapult Prize. The Singularity was shortlisted for the August Prize and is her second novel, published in Sweden in 2021.
Saskia Vogel is the author of Permission and the translator of over twenty Swedish-language books. She was awarded the Berlin Senate Endowment for Non-German Literature and was a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize. She worked on The Singularity as part of her translation residency at Princeton University. From Los Angeles, she now lives in Berlin.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Karam's beautiful and harrowing English-language debut, a pregnant woman witnesses another woman plummet to her death from a promenade above the sea. Both women are unnamed, as is the cosmopolitan, tourist-friendly city where the action takes place. Karam repeatedly portrays the suicidal jump from both women's points of view, and in the process gradually reveals more about each character. The dead woman arrived in the city as a refugee from an unnamed war-torn country with her four children. She was becoming increasingly despondent in her search for her oldest daughter, 17, who worked at a nearby restaurant overlooking the water and has been missing for several weeks. The woman who bears witness to the mother's death is from the same country and has relocated to the city to take an unspecified job. She's pregnant, and Karam's account of her determination to leave her home country before giving birth overlaps thematically with the dead woman's story, especially after the witness's baby is stillborn. The slim, subtle, and somewhat abstract narrative gestures at grand tragedy in its depiction of the indifferent metropolis as "a hole between what came to be and what could have been," where tourists pay little mind to a refugee's for her missing daughter. This is powerful. (Jan.)
Guardian Review
At first glance this looks like a book that might have been put together by artificial intelligence to blend reliably successful elements. One of its subjects is the very timely topic of the plight of refugees; another is questions of motherhood, as featured in two of the shortlisted titles for last year's International Booker prize. And it comes from Fitzcarraldo Editions, the coolest publisher in town. But as it turns out, The Singularity, the second novel (and first to be published in English) by Balsam Karam, a Swedish author of Iranian-Kurdish descent, is evidence of the unique genius of human creativity. No machine could deliver the surprises, the tonal shifts and the blend of empathy and irony that make it so satisfying. And it is, not incidentally, evidence that Fitzcarraldo is fashionable because it continues to pursue its own vision through work as singular as this. The story is set everywhere and nowhere, in an unnamed coastal city divided into zones rich and poor, "half obscured by skyscrapers, and half left to the desert". The city is undergoing unevenly distributed redevelopment, and the chaotic structure of the place is reflected in a breathless style. The coastal road, or corniche, is all that holds the sea at bay; it is populated by refugees, many of them children. One mother of a displaced family has lost her daughter and spends her days wandering the corniche, looking for "the Missing One", obsessively tucking flyers under windscreen wipers. But while she searches for her daughter, the narrative spotlight turns increasingly to the other children she neglects. The strongest parts show the pain of assimilation into a new culture This is where the book takes its greatest risks of failure. The sections with the children are not subtle, hammering home the negativity of their lives: the foul nature of their surroundings, "where the palm trees droop and the earth corrodes green and brown"; how they count the cigarette burns on their mother's skin; and the narrative gives short shrift even to an aid agency "that says hello and how are you all then here you go and we'll be back soon, even if it's not true". Only a greengrocer who provides the children with food escapes authorial cynicism. But then comes the shift that AI would never predict and which insists upon the reader the importance of a writer who remains one step ahead. The viewpoint switches to another woman who has a link to the Missing One's mother. She is on a business trip to the prosperous part of the city, and the narrative switches rapidly - divided only by forward slashes - between her dealings with the mother and her own traumatic pregnancy. It forms an exceptionally effective, tumbling prose poem of juxtaposition between two experiences. And the best is still to come in the final part, which takes the second woman's childhood story - now she is a girl - and breaks it into short, sharp vignettes, one per page. We learn about her first job; her friend "found in the rubble after a bombing"; her move to a new country. The scenes are efficient, covering multitudes in a few words and leaving plenty of space for the reader to take an active part in the story's creation. The strongest parts show the pain of assimilation into a new culture, as the girl has school friends over to visit, and asks her grandmother to make pancakes instead of her traditional stew. Making a new life, she learns, means leaving the old one behind. One moving scene, just five lines long, shows the girl's mother going to bed as she struggles to understand her own children talking excitedly in their new language. Language is at the heart of The Singularity, moving as it does from chaos and cacophony to the simple purity of a single voice, which is one measure of its brilliance and its beauty.
Kirkus Review
Two women reckon with loss and displacement in a coastal town. This astringent, fuguelike novel by Kurdish-born Swedish author Karam opens with an unnamed woman who's long been on a desperate search for her missing daughter. She walks the streets of a beach town, haunting a corniche where "The Missing One" worked at a restaurant. When the mother's efforts prove too futile to bear, she leaps from the edge of the corniche. That incident has a witness, a pregnant tourist whose child will later die in utero. Karam interweaves the stories of the two women, connecting them almost to the point of blurring their lives together. The pregnant woman is a refugee from state violence, and the woman searching for her daughter leaves behind three children living in a nearby lot, surviving mainly on the goodwill of a greengrocer. (Karam draws a stark distinction between the well-off habitués of the shops along the corniche and the refugees who live near it.) The plot details here aren't as crucial, though, as the mood of oppression, particularly toward women, and Karam's various means of conjuring it. She bounces around timelines, plays with point of view (the pregnant woman is "you"), and interweaves the two women's voices within extended passages. The "singularity" of the title refers to the force in astrophysics that "pushes bodies together and renders the distance between them nil," a meaningful metaphor for two women similarly bereft. Translator Vogel deftly manages Karam's rhetorical shifts while preserving the mood of disorientation. The book doesn't resolve its central crisis so much as suggest that such crises are all-pervasive, and that migrants will continue to absorb abuses that are bigoted at best and fatal at worst. A knotty, sui generis evocation of mothers' feelings of fear and loss. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
