Changing places, politics, faces, identities
Beside Myself
Text Publishing, £9.90 Reviewed by Hester Abrams
IT IS rare that a contemporary European novel reaches wide public consciousness among UK readers if it’s not a blockbuster by an already famous author. This one, a debut novel translated from German, will stand comfortably on your book group “foreign reads” list —and it deserves to be read.
Sasha Marianna Salzmann was a shortlistee for the 2017 German Book Prize for Ausser Sich, which now appears in English as “Beside Myself”.
At first sight, it looks like a saga of four generations of a Soviet-RussianUkrainian-Jewish family. From when the Chepanovs took the chance of emigration to get pre-teen twins Alissa and Anton to West Berlin in the 1990s, forward and back through Soviet times, the story shuttles to the Gezi Park protests in 2013 Istanbul, a city “out of time”, where women become men.
It could be a memoir, so fondly and unabashedly drawn are the characters. Or it could all be fiction. Life is hard and personal freedom under Communism constrained. Women are hard-faced and toiling, the men delusional and violent. You lose your job — or worse — in
Stalin’s Doctor’s Plot, or your kids get beaten up for being Jewish. When drinker dad Konstantin dives off a balcony, it triggers crisis in his offspring. Anton disappears and narrator Ali sets off East to find him, shedding one identity for another. Is she “beside” herself because her beloved brother is lost? Or is she counting other family members as well, whose presence or memory weigh heavily? Or is this about her own identity fragmenting as she throws himself deeper into clubs and back alleys on the Bosporus? Beneath the panorama of parents and grandparents,
Sasha Marianna Salzmann Ali is searching for the roots of present predicaments. She left home for a squat, shaved her head, became a “dyke”. Was there a clue in her forbears’ circumstances to how she and other family members would turn out?
“They wished they could say more about themselves than the names of the places they’d left behind. They wished for ancestors like them: uncles who’d shaved their legs and squeezed their bellies into corsages and dresses at night, aunts… strolling through streets in suits. None of these stories ever found its way into the annals of family history, but they must have existed, so what was wrong with inventing them?”
A book which starts in family upheaval ends in mirror shards. If I had thought émigré Russian Jews went West and became bourgeois, this book gave me an alternative sequel. A crazy one but, today, completely plausible.
Hester Abrams is project leader of the Willesden Cemetery “House of Life” back — in
(Walker, £12.99), a collection of new and previously published stories set in locations from London to Afghanistan.
One can sense Horowitz’s glee as he writes Alex into the tightest corners for evermore inventive escapes. He has his hero squeezed into a ventilation pipe, facing off a venomous snake and digging into his backpack of Bond-style gadgets and the thrills don’t stop until the last daring escape from a sinister hospital. Age nine to 109.
Also returning is Francesca Simon’s irrepressible schoolboy. Horrid Henry Up, Up and Away (Orion, £5.99) sees Henry taking his first aeroplane trip. (“Maybe he could even fly the plane. How hard could it be? He could ride a bike.”) It will be burgers, sweets and films all the way. If, that is, he can infiltrate First Class. In this collection of four stories, Henry also brings calamity and craziness to a history lesson, school play and theme park trip. Age seven to 11.
When Ben goes to stay with his grandfather, he, too, takes a flight — by accidentally turning himself into a bee. The other bees are being destroyed by pesticides and when Ben returns to human form, he vows to do everything he can to reverse the damage. Bee Alert! by Barbara Rustin (£7.99) is beautifully designed and illustrated (by Josephine Birch), with flower and bee symbols directing readers to an index of bee facts. Age nine to 12.