In The Singularity, Swedish author Balsam Karam instills a startling and deeply profound gravity within the devastating fractures of life—mothers who lose children, migrants who lose countries, and the emotional maelstroms stirring at the precipice of disappearance. With an extraordinary style that exemplifies how poetics can search and unveil the most secret aspects of grief and longing, Karam’s fluid, genre-blurring prose is at once dreamlike and harrowingly vivid, with the remarkable sensitivity of translator Saskia Vogel carrying this richness through to the English translation. We were proud to select this novel as our January Book Club selection, and in this following interview, Vogel speaks to us about how Karam’s writing works to destabilize and shift majority presumptions, as well as how literature can echo, verify, and perhaps change the way we live.
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Rachel Stanyon (RS): How did you come to Balsam Karam’s work?
Saskia Vogel (SV): I first encountered Balsam’s work through Sara Abdollahi, one of my favorite literary critics in Sweden—she’s full of integrity, and really cares about literature and its transformative potential. She had done a podcast with Balsam, and their conversation really struck me, especially Balsam’s extraordinary representation of solidarity. This is exemplified in her first novel, Event Horizon, which, as I understand, is connected to The Singularity like a kind of diptych; they’re of the same world, and written with the same sorts of strategies—for example, a lot of the details of place, location, and identity are unstated. I find this aesthetic really compelling.
Balsam assumes that she’s writing into Sweden and a majority white culture, and she doesn’t want to give people an easy out where they can say, “I’ve been to Beirut. It’s not exactly like that.” She instead strips away detail and, in The Singularity, focuses on loss and the effects of war on individuals, as well as on migration and racism.
Another extraordinary feature of her prose is that the white gaze is decentered, which works to shift how the presumed audience reads and perceives some of the most pressing and potent human experiences of our time. She moves us away from the particularities of politics, and tries to make us understand what it feels like to be in a certain position. In that way, she really encourages and facilitates a deep growth and compassion—if you’re open to it, I guess.
RS: As much as the novel is stripped of particular politics, it does mention the krona, giving us a clue as to the location of the second mother. Could you provide any insight into the policies and politics of Sweden in this respect, and reflect on how this is portrayed in the novel, particularly addressing the second woman’s experience with Western society and the—quite scathing—commentary on what I assume to be Sweden’s reception of refugees and non-Swedish people?
SV: The last section of the book, titled “The Losses,” enumerates the many encounters with the majority Swedish culture, highlighting instances of everyday racism and the compromising of identity within a society that can be very rigid, very consensus-driven, and convinced of its own way of doing things. That section really resonated with me in terms of my experience of just trying to show up and be in the world, even as a white, middle-class girl moving to Sweden in the nineties.
Countries have certain ideas of themselves. Take the United States, for example: there’s the idea that we’re a melting pot; philosophically, it expresses that we’re coming together to shape and build something new. Boy, does that look different in practice, but it’s the idea that gets repeated in the public sphere. In Sweden, I don’t feel like that idea was present in the everyday; I was much more aware that I was entering a country in which I was a guest, someone passing through. There was a culture that I was not part of, and I could approach it, but not integrate.
I translated a sample of a book by a writer called Sonia Hussain. Her dad, who is also the dad in the book, had moved to Sweden to escape a war-torn country, which is also unnamed. He talks about the Swedish idea of lagom: an ideal state of perfection, a sense of the perfect amount, of “just enough.” The implication is that a Swede knows exactly what lagom is, and we strive for lagom at all times. This dad then explains how he never gets to participate in lagom; it’s always assumed that everything about him—from his skin color to his slight accent—is fundamentally excluded from it.
This comes up in Balsam’s book, and in so much Swedish literature, including works from more than a decade ago—it’s been so present for so long. I haven’t lived in Sweden for a long time, but it’s still such a prominent theme among a certain body of writers that it makes me wonder how much has actually shifted. I think Sweden might still be a bit stuck there, sadly. The politics have also become conservative, governmentally. I think this suggests the context for the third section of The Singularity.
RS: Thinking about the possibility of shifting, I felt that—despite it having so many heavy themes and devastating scenes—it didn’t feel hopeless. Do you think that the decentering of the Western gaze is a way in which it does offer hope, i.e. in the possibility that, if we can shift our perspective enough and think about other people and their experiences, what you describe as a relatively closed society like Sweden could change?
SV: I think there are many of us who look at the world as it is today and think that we can’t keep going the way we’ve always been going. There needs to be a fundamental shift. But where is that shift going to come from? Thinking about it in terms of literature and the shift in perspective, there are basic assumptions about how stories get told. Who gets to tell them? And to whom? For whom? I think this debate has been very present in literature in Sweden as well as the Anglosphere, and it’s been wonderful to see. Dialogue Books in the UK, for example, have been doing great work in this field.
I hadn’t really thought about hope in this novel, though. The fact that everyone keeps getting up each day and doing things, this repetition in the narrative, means different things to me on different readings. Sometimes, the repetition of the children playing their games in the alley is saying, “Today, I live. Today, we’re living. We’re eating today, we’re playing today, we’re finding joy in this situation.” Even if it is a space in a city that exists because the buildings have been bombed. And sometimes it strikes me purely as heart-wrenching. But I suppose there’s hope in the fact that there’s movement, like when the mom sends the other group of children to the alley. This refers back to what I said about Event Horizon: these representations of solidarity and communities caring for each other. Where else can you find hope but in that human gesture?
RS: That’s how I read it, too. It’s not a very happy hope, but it’s a version of it: resistance and persistence. On the topic of these children, I am curious about what they may be intended to represent. The prose almost always refers to them in the plural as “they”, even when they speak in the first person, and in this way remind me of a Greek chorus. Are they thus supposed to be the moral center of the novel? Or is this another comment on the Western gaze, and the assumption that refugees such as these are not individual and singular, but a mass?
SV: Those are such good questions, but I don’t have answers from my perspective as the translator; I just wanted to hold the text, and I haven’t reflected on the children as a moral center. On a really nitty-gritty level, though, we certainly had discussions about the pronoun.
There was a lot to figure out in terms of the text’s aesthetics, such as how to carry the unconventional choices in word order that Balsam used, and to do so without losing the reader. It needed to be its own grammar, but totally fluent. In the Swedish, you just get used to this rhythm; you have to shift and feel slightly uncomfortable to move through the text on its own terms. It couldn’t, for example, read like English that’s not being spoken by a native speaker. It needed to be its own, fully formed presentation of English.
We thought about it quite a lot in terms of the slight shifts between the collective and the singular, as you observed. Spontaneously, I think a collective is more representative of the emotional experience of trauma: the fact that they’ve gone through a similar trauma and are united by it. And in trauma, there is repetition: one of the strategies to work with people suffering from PTSD in talk therapy is to repeat the story again and again, but drawing in more and more details from the outside. There’s a traumatic incident that happened, but was it also a sunny day? Where were you? What did you have for breakfast that day? This, in a way, shifts the gravity of the trauma. So when I think about the repetition and the processing of trauma, the collective “they” makes a lot of sense to me. That’s more in line with how I’ve thought about this novel, in terms of what these characters are holding and processing and moving through.
RS: I’m glad that you’ve turned to some of the details of the language. First though, when you say “we,” was that you and your editor, or you and Karam? What was your interaction with these two parties in the translation process?
SV: I have had great luck with editors, especially on a few of the more challenging texts that I’ve worked on—individuals who are very receptive to an open, generative translation process. These texts, including The Singularity, were so particular that I wanted to translate them almost literally, sticking extremely close to the Swedish, and then present that as more of a raw first draft to the editor and say: this is what you would be reading in Swedish. It’s unconventional, and feels a little bit uneasy; there’s a tension in the reading, but it needs to feel fluent in English. In Johanne Lykke Holm’s Strega, it was like working with an uncanny simplicity of language that resembles a chant and invocation. And here, with the word order shifting slightly, or the children being referred to in plural or singular terms, I wanted to just offer this to the editor and suggest that we figure out what such language would look like together. So the collaboration was pretty close. I was able to do this and get the feedback, and then go through the book and start the second decision-making process—the deep decision-making, which I think is where the technical part of translation shifts more into the art of translation.
And then, of course, Balsam came on board and her English is extraordinary. She had thoughts and edits, and would say, “No, this doesn’t need to be here in English, this is too much a feature of the Swedish.” It’s nice when that happens, because it has an effect on all of my translations and how free I feel in working with the text—leaving things out, expanding, how playful I can be while maintaining the integrity of the book, of course.
RS: You mention a shift in the stages of your translation process, and spoke previously about differences in how you think about a text when approaching it as a translator rather than a reader. What about the interaction between your craft as a translator and as a novelist: how do you see the two interacting and diverging?
SV: I’m working on my second book at the moment, and I really do feel that some aspects of the writing process are quite despairing, but I think it’s productive and generative to allow yourself to feel the full spectrum of emotions in how you relate to a text. I do that with translation as well, shifting from total disregard for the text to extreme reverence. For me, being extremely emotional about translating or writing is really useful because I think I’m then able to approach the text with a different sets of eyes. I think one of the most useful tools I have as a writer and a translator is being able to shift my perspective. Sometimes I hate my book. I hate it so much. And sometimes I love it so much, I think I’m so brilliant. It’s that waxing and waning between hubris and its opposite.
But the one thing I feel confident in because of my translation practice is that I know that I can write a good sentence. I know I can put words together, and in a beautiful way. I know that I can show up on the page as a stylist, and I think when plot or character become difficult, it’s nice to feel confident in something.
I also think that translating taught me about the shape of a book, and how, because they’re just human endeavors, they’re all flawed and could be shorter or longer, or a sentence could be gone, or other choices could have been made. It took a lot of pressure off the idea of perfection. I love that dissonance with the technology of the book being so fixed. There’s a concept of it being a paper thing that doesn’t change; you can soak it in the bath, but that doesn’t change the text. I think this is deceptive, because so many writers say you could just keep on working on a book forever. You just have to give it away at some point. I think translation brings that shifting and shaping up again, in a really delicious way.
RS: I certainly found the combination of what Karam created and what you did with it to be beautiful. It was such an interesting experiment with language and form. From the sentence level to the three movements of the book, it plays with the structures of English, and uses that to look at the structures of our society. I wonder if you could reflect any more on the interplay between the unique style and form of the novel, and the story that it’s telling.
SV: Absolutely, and thank you for what you said about the style in English. It felt like a really big risk, and I didn’t want to mess it up.
It builds on the idea of the collective with the children and the sense of shared trauma, as well as the structure of trauma and narrative, or the impact of trauma, and how a narrative gets told. I think it’s a really bold choice to build the fragmented nature of the story in these three parts that are each distinct, and I think reading this book is a very particular experience. I was just so taken with it. I love, for example, the third part, which we’ve already talked about, “The Losses.” I love that all the scenes are very short, so they’re not over-explained. It’s not hedged; it’s just what happens. I know this from personal experience as well: I’ll share some stories of my experience being a young person in Sweden encountering the culture, and a Swede of Nordic heritage will say, “Oh, that couldn’t possibly have happened.” I like how Balsam just says, “This stuff happens.” It’s certainly not the first time anyone has read such encounters, but I think it’s really bold that she’s just like, bam! Bam, bam, bam! Here are the losses. Just listen this time. That directness is so wonderful. This is my interpretation of why the third section is like that.
I also had my breath taken away by the section where she puts the two stories side by side, separated by a slash: how fluidly and fluently these two stories are woven together, and how she achieves the idea of holding two things in mind at the same time.
RS: These different moments are held in parallel so effectively—it really feels like they’re happening at the same time, which is so hard to capture in the written word.
SV: It’s the structure of memory, or could also be used for the structure of daydream.
Sheila Heti does this so beautifully when she’s describing how desires can overlap and intersect. It’s as if all the desire lines are happening at the same time, and it gets really jumbled and confused. It was a beautiful and really accurate depiction of the layers that go into experiencing desire. And in The Singularity, it’s the layers of experiencing memory: how the mind does hold all these things at once. Yet, as a human, it can be really difficult to think about all these things in one, to hold both memory and the present.
RS: The novel is almost entirely devoid of men—there’s a male doctor, and a shopkeeper, and the soldiers are presumably men. I find myself wondering if I only notice this because so much of our art and media features many men and few women, but then again, some of the main themes of this book are obviously very much specifically about women: motherhood, and the loss that can accompany it. Do you think it was a conscious choice to strip men away from the story?
SV: I’m sure it was a choice. Balsam is brilliant and I think she knows exactly what she’s doing. She’s one of the best writers writing today. It’s also really interesting to think about who war affects, and how. It makes sense that the men would be soldiers. We’ve heard so many stories of families separating, of who goes where. There are so many situations where this gender division occurs for various reasons, such as men going away in the drafts. Even looking at the United States during the Second World War, when women entered the workforce because so many of the men were gone, there was a shift that you could point to: men were soldiers, and women were in the community in a different way from before, for example.
RS: I’d like to touch on the figure of the grandmother: she seems to have an important function in showing how the traumas in the novel, and in this case the disappearance of a loved one, keep repeating. She shows one possible reaction to this: retreat from the world. I don’t think the novel criticizes her choice, but it certainly doesn’t privilege her perspective, either. How do you see her position and function in the novel?
SV: Going back to your idea about hope—what must it feel like to have moved through your entire life, and then to come to this point? I think it must be true that there is always a hope of reimagining or restarting, of reconnecting with your sense of life and place in the world at any time; but I’m also aware that throwing yourself into life in a brand new way changes with age, and I think that’s how I thought about the grandma. The children are repeating their games, and we’re assuming they have much life ahead of them. But how much life does the grandmother have ahead of her? Does she have the energy to shift out of the situation again? Burdened by all the losses, trauma, and her circumstances, who wouldn’t want to sit in the shadowiest corner of that alley? I think it’s a different manifestation of the same kind of stuckness that the children are in. And there will be a shift, I’m sure. Something will happen, and they’ll have to leave the alley, and life will change. New things will happen. In the moment that’s being depicted, what we’re seeing is the logic of trauma on daily life.
RS: It’s amazing how the novel captures emotion, enabling us to feel what those people might feel, as much as is possible, giving us an echo of their trauma.
SV: I’m really glad you feel that. This is one of the driving reasons why I believed that this book and this author had to make the jump into English. Karam’s ability to convey this felt really vital.
One of the general things that we were discussing with this novel is precisely the work it does to open up space for compassion, for different ways of seeing and understanding what our fellow humans are going through. Balsam did a really great introduction where she talks about the loss of her own child and its impact on her writing. It’s heartbreaking, but I’m really happy that she’s talking about that specifically, because we don’t discuss enough the everyday things that shift, and how we arrive on the page.
Saskia Vogel is the author of Permission (2019) and the translator of over twenty Swedish-language books. She was awarded the Berlin Senate grant for non-German literature and was a finalist for the PEN Translation Award. She worked on The Singularity as part of her translation residency at Princeton University. From Los Angeles, she now lives in Berlin.
Rachel Stanyon is a translator from German into English and a senior copyeditor with Asymptote. She holds a master’s in translation and in 2016 won a place in the New Books in German Emerging Translators Programme. Her first full-length non-fiction translation has recently been published with Scribe.
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