The Singularity is a hypnotically powerful novel about the strength of a mother’s love for her missing teenage daughter. But it’s also a compelling story about what it is like to be displaced and to lose your language, country and identity.

The author, Balsam Karam, is of Kurdish ancestry and has lived in Sweden since she was a child.

The story is set in an unnamed country, somewhere hot, framed between the mountains, “half desert” and the sea, where tourists come to enjoy the food and the weather, but where many locals live in impoverished conditions.

Most of the action occurs on the corniche, a coastal road in a tourist hot spot, home to cafes, restaurants and a bustling food market. There are glistening skyscrapers and shiny new hotels built next to old buildings covered in bullet holes, evidence that the city was once ravished by war.

In the opening pages, an unnamed woman wanders up and down the corniche, pressing a flyer — “Has anyone seen my daughter? 17 years old, missing since dawn on 1 May. Help me find her, help me get justice” — under the windshield wipers of parked cars.

Later, a woman on a business trip, witnesses the desperate mother throw herself off a cliff and into the water below, making orphans out of her three younger children.

The tale of these two women — the mother who dies by suicide and the woman in town on business — are intertwined. Their backstories echo one another. Both are displaced; both have lost children.

The Singularity is told in a refreshing style, employing different techniques to tell the story of what it is like to be a refugee, to lose loved ones and to endure racism, poverty and violence on an everyday basis.

It treads some distressing territory — including self-harm, stillbirth and a litany of girls and young women going missing — but it does so in a matter-of-fact way.

The author uses the mother’s three surviving children as a singular chorus to explain the events leading up to their sister’s disappearance. They are fully aware that it is simply history repeating: years earlier a cousin disappeared who has never been found, a loss that reverberates across the generations.

The grim subject matter is made bearable by the delicacy of the prose and the compelling voices. It’s a deeply human story set everywhere and nowhere, and because of that it strikes a universal tone: these losses and disappearances play out all across the world, every day, causing immeasurable heartache and trauma.

Admirers of Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail will find much to like here.

This is the author’s first novel to be translated into English; let’s hope her debut novel, Event Horizon, published in 2018, gets translated soon.

The Singularity was nominated for Sweden’s prestigious August Prize and shortlisted for the 2021 European Union Prize for Literature. It has been published in the UK by Fitzcarraldo Editions.

This is quite an emotional read. Dispossession, loss, motherhood, separation, immigration, and so much more . The writing while beautiful was a little distancing for me but still moving.

••• I wanted to savour and take my time with this. It also turned out to be one of those books that I found best inhaled in one or two sittings. A tricky piece of work to define but one that has got under my skin. I’m still mulling over my thoughts on this one and suspect I will be for some time.

THE SINGULARITY is by Kurdish author Balsam Karam who writes in Swedish. It’s been recently translated to English by Saskia Vogel.

Split into three quite distinct sections, the novel is held together by themes of loss, grief and migration with an unnamed conflict-ravaged city trying to recover at its centre. In the first section we first meet two women, each a mother, unknown to one another, who share an encounter of profound sadness in this city. The first is visiting, pregnant with their first child. The second is desperately searching for her 17 year-old daughter, an undocumented worker, who has gone missing in the city (an all too common occurrence).

What follows in the remaining sections is a fragmented narrative that moves back and forth in time sharing with the reader what comes before and after. While very different to one another, both women have suffered a loss of identity, country and language, dealing with displacement, oppression and micro aggressions as they endure one trauma after another in their respective worlds. Despite their vastly different lives, I found myself asking of each of them - how much can one person suffer?

This was by no means an easy read with respect to both form and substance, but it was an extremely well-crafted and important story. Written with a matter-of-fact yet lyrical quality, it really challenged me. But memorable, timely books will tend to do this. I can’t wait to see what others make of it.

Huge thanks to @text_publishing for sharing a review copy with me via @netgalley.

Balsam Karam’s The Singularity (translated by Saskia Vogel) is a quietly devastating book about displacement and loss, and the tribulations faced by refugees. It revolved around two main stories of two very different mothers. In doing so, Karam is able to range across a range of experiences of people displaced from their homes.
In what is a framing story, a mother searches the corniche of a tourist town for her oldest daughter, known only a the Missing One. The Missing One had been working at one of the tourist restaurants on the corniche and is not the only young woman to have disappeared. On her final night of searching the mother is observed by a pregnant woman in town on business. Her narrative is delivered in second person. As the mother’s tale rewinds and deepens, readers meet her mother and her three other children who live in a half constructed building in an alleyway and live on handouts and what they can make selling recycled washcloths. Later the focus of the story switches to the pregnant woman and readers learn that she too was a refugee. Her family story is different in that they found themselves a home in Sweden but still suffered discrimination and abuse.
The Singularity is deliberately told in an ambiguous way. While Sweden is identifiable, the country that the main characters have fled from and the country in which the woman and her children have ended up are not identified. The idea here is not to reflect on any particular situation but rather on the plight of refugees generally and both the diversity and commonality of their experiences. Karam uses a number of different techniques to bring her characters to life including, in a one section, a poetic stream of consciousness that flips between the present and scenes and events from the character’s past.
Through her use of language and imagery, Karam effectively puts readers in the lives of the dispossessed and provides an insight into their lives. The Singularity is a short novel that can be easily read in a single sitting but in that brevity it packs a punch.