The Singularity

Balsam Karam, translated by Saskia Vogel 

Fitzcarraldo Editions (2024)

Review by Lulu Alison

‘Meanwhile elsewhere –‘ 

These are the opening words of The Singularity. ‘Elsewhere’, in this instance, is right now; it is the corniche, on the seafront of a burgeoning tourist city once ravaged by war. It is where the book begins and ends. But ‘elsewhere’ is also memories of other places; homes destroyed and turned to rubble, scenes of terrible loss, all that has been left behind. The characters, immigrants and refugees, have been forced to find safety in places where their presence is barely tolerated, and where they remain subject to endless challenge and change. ‘Elsewhere’ permeates the book. Jumping, interwoven timelines add to the sense of impermanence, highlighting the need for characters to maintain vigilance as newcomers, and to carry the confusing burden of what is lost and the threats that remain. A sense of exhaustion, the slippage of time, is present throughout: 

The children no longer know whether it is today or tomorrow that their mother will return holding their sister’s hand in hers, nor whether it was yesterday or a year ago that they were driven here with what little they were allowed to keep wrapped in blankets and sheets.

The first of two main characters is a woman living on the edge of this seaside city, with her children and mother. She is searching for her eldest daughter who went missing after working in a tourist restaurant on the corniche.

she says do you remember when the homes were demolished? as if addressing someone by her side and then I thought that was the worst thing I’d ever have to experience. Stuffed into trucks like cattle and scattered across different part of the country so as never to be able to build a common home again. I didn’t think it could get any worse.

[…]

Can traumas be ranked? the woman then screams out loud, not knowing why she is screaming.

We do not learn the name of the mother or her missing daughter, referred to as the Missing One, but we are drawn into the bond between them, the unbearable stretch and break of it, the unendurable pain of loss. In the aftermath of her suicidal jump, lying injured and bleeding on the rocks below the cliff, the mother thinks of her other children, names them, rescuing them from the otherness created by the terrible absence of the Missing One.

She is observed in this last desperate act by a younger woman, a visitor to the city, who finds a photo of the missing daughter in an abandoned bag. She keeps it, tucking it into her notebook. It stays with her. When her own child later dies in the womb, she finds herself relentlessly circling back to the woman whose life ended at the corniche, that singular moment connecting the two of them. She recalls her own memories of war and loss, her own experience as a refugee, the challenges of arriving in an uncaring, ignorant new place.

None of your white friends have wanted to hear any of your memories from the war. It hits you one day as you’re sitting with one of them, listening to him talk about how he used to pick berries with his grandmother as a child. He goes into minute detail, pulling out pictures from when he was in the bilberry patch in the woods, one where he is sticking out his tongue, pulling a face. Yes, but my friend Rozia was found in the rubble after a bombing, what do you think about that? you say and wait for him to respond.

All that these two women have in common, their past trauma, the love of their lost children, is consumed and merged by the enormity of that brief connection on the corniche. The Singularity is about what they share. It portrays the relationship between mothers and daughters in all its breathtaking, battling tenderness, in all its perils and unbreakable bonds. It describes the burden of being an immigrant in a place that has not the care or patience to welcome those forced by war to seek refuge. Devastating and brilliant.

Lulu Allison

Lulu Allison is a novelist.