One of the first problems I had to solve when I set myself the madcap challenge of reading a book from every country in 2012 was to decide exactly how many countries my world contained (not something on which everybody agrees). Given the premise of the project, it was logical to order the quest by nation and, to this day, the titles on this blog are categorised by the UN-recognised state with which they are most closely aligned.

As the years have gone by, however, those country categories have begun to chafe. The perennial problem of what makes a book ‘from’ a particular nation – little to do with setting, and mostly to do with author heritage and perspective for me, though there are exceptions on the list – is just the start. There is the issue of the genrefication of national literatures – often a side effect of the marketing efforts of big western publishers, which, at its worst, means our ideas of the sort of writing that comes from particular regions is heavily skewed by a handful of breakout bestsellers. And there’s the problem that many territories fall under the umbrella of former colonial powers, meaning that their works can easily be overlooked.

My latest book of the month is a good example. Written by Guadeloupian theatre director, poet and novelist Gerty Dambury, and translated from the French by Judith G. Miller, The Restless will sit under ‘France’ on my list. Yet its authors and subject matter hail from the opposite side of the Atlantic Ocean.

Spanning the run up to an outbreak of violence when talks failed between management and a construction-workers union in May 1967, the novel centres around Émilienne as she waits for her father to come home and grows increasingly anxious that her schoolteacher, Madame Ladal, has disappeared. The narrative is directed by Émilienne’s eight siblings, who take on the role of callers in a Caribbean quadrille, ushering forward an increasingly rebellious gaggle of characters – living and dead – to present their versions of what is going on. As the story whirls faster and order breaks down, Dambury reveals the interconnectedness of events and the way that injustice echoes down the decades, loading seemingly inconsequential details with meaning.

Voices are at the heart of this narrative. With so many characters clamouring to have their say, it is testament to Dambury and Miller’s skill that it is usually easy to know who is narrating. Indeed, in the case of the irreverent Nono, a dead, nonagenarian who remains peeved that one of her legs was removed before she was put in her coffin and spends a lot of time looking for it, you often recognise the voice from the first few words.

Yet, though the text abounds with rulebreakers and even descends into near-anarchy at certain points, the writing is tightly controlled. Reticence has as much power here as eloquence, with the gaps left for the reader to infer cruelties in the margins revealing something of what it is like to live in the shadow of monstrous injustices that have never been acknowledged or addressed. This technique is neatly mirrored in Miller’s decision to explain some but not all of the Creole dialogue in the book – this is a text of half-heard whispers, of stories muffled in the telling.

When Dambury chooses to articulate something, the writing is astonishingly precise. Take this beautiful reframing of old people’s habit of repeating themselves as ‘work that starts when we turn sixty’:

‘We take apart the seams; we unroll the balls of yarn. Other people think we’re just repeating ourselves, rehashing and rambling, but the truth is, nature doesn’t give us a choice. It’s as though everything is hardwired in our genes; you have to travel back in time.’

Or this consideration of why many of the characters hold back from challenging the status quo until violence becomes their only option:

‘If you really dig into this story, you’ll see that everyone has a hell of a burden to carry, just getting up in the morning and continuing to live their lives[…] – and that impression of never quite getting on top of things, that blacks are damned for all eternity, from century to century.

‘They have to be clever, tricky, and act like a fox – but all that leaves scars on the spirit. You can’t forget the other side of the coin: hating yourself for what you’ve become, for constantly questioning your life. You can end up detesting yourself, imagining what others think of you, and then rebelling violently. You demand respect by brandishing a knife, consideration by carrying a revolver. You take revenge for slights you’ve only invented in your mind.’

With so much pain and injustice underlying this narrative – drawn from real-world events, many of the facts of which have only recently come to light – it would be easy for Dambury’s novel to leave us with anger. But Dambury is too large-hearted a writer for this. Although the outrage these events call forth is justified and necessary, her novel looks beyond this, to a time ‘when the fury started to abate, when people could start seeing each other again’.

The recognition of one another’s common humanity is the key to resolution, she suggests. And the secret to this recognition? Storytelling. ‘When you’re human, you just can’t stop yourself from telling your own story.’

If I had to sum up nearly ten years of international literary exploration and what I’ve learnt from the hundreds of books classified by country on this blog, that would be my conclusion too.

The Restless (Les rétifs) by Gerty Dambury, translated from the French by Judith G. Miller (Feminist Press, 2018)

Picture: Guadeloupe_Février_2018_157 by Michel Marie on flickr.com