Last month I had the honour of introducing the Indie Press Network’s spring showcases, two virtual events presenting some of the key titles coming out from small presses in the UK and Ireland in the next few months. As indie presses have long been the heartland of translated literature, I was only too pleased to have the opportunity to hear publishers present some of the books they’re most excited about. (The events were recorded, so if you’re curious, you should be able to watch them online soon.)
Among the many books that appealed to me was a forthcoming title from Moth Books: Clearing by Iris Wolff, translated from the German by Ruth Martin. Martin’s name was the thing that first piqued my interest – I often find that the involvement of certain translators can be a great measure of a project’s quality and I have long been an admirer of her work. I was also pleased to hear that this was the second title by Wolff to be published by Moth – the sort of publisher loyalty that makes a huge difference to an author’s reach, and is increasingly rare and precious among bigger houses. As Clearing only comes out next month, and as I prefer to review older books on this blog anyway, I decided to seek out the earlier novel.
Centring on a German community in rural Transylvania during Nicolae Ceaușescu’s rule, Blurred, also translated by Ruth Martin, is the sort of book big publishers in the UK are unlikely to touch. Because anglophone publishers have traditionally required that books from elsewhere declare their cultural identity clearly (usually set in the country in question and featuring tropes that complement readers’ preconceptions of what life in that place is like), this book’s focus on characters living in Romania rather than Germany would make it problematic to pigeonhole and market in the way that mainstream publishers favour.
The work’s distinctiveness doesn’t end there. The book opens with a note to the reader written directly in English by Wolff, setting out her motivations for writing the story, which draws on her own childhood in the Banat region, and some of her thinking on the purpose of fiction and the nature of time. ‘Writing is a rebellion against time and its greatest impertinence, transience,’ she tells us. ‘I see time not as a directional force but as juxtaposition, concurrence, as an organic web.’ This direct address intrigued me: in all my years of reading internationally, I can’t recall another comparable piece by an author who doesn’t normally write in English. Did the original contain a similar foreword? And if not, why had Wolff felt it necessary to preface her work in this way?
Because, really, the story needs no introduction. The writing is immediate and immersive, opening with Florence travelling through a snowy landscape to deliver her son, Samuel, in a forbidding labour ward beholden to the dictates of Ceaușescu’s ruthless pronatalist policies (which turn out to be the death of Florence’s friend Nika). Harsh and beautiful, ‘this landscape lets you be who you are’. Yet the life lived among the German community is a stripped-back, shrinking existence, in which an innocent visit from a stranger may invite interrogation and torture.
Through it all, Wolff’s humaneness shines through, evident in a deep care for her characters. Indeed, when the pastor Hannes reflects on the nature of empathy, we might be hearing Wolff speak through him: ‘how easy it was to define empathy: if someone is suffering, he feels what I do when I am suffering’. This book vibrates with compassion; Wolff feels with her characters just as the German word ‘Mitgefühl’ implies.
So it is that many of the novel’s most moving moments come when we see characters processing profound losses and shifts. The end of a relationship, the decision to abandon home and family in the hopes of a better life in the west, the reunion with a longlost love – all these things are experienced quietly and privately, with the reader given privileged access to those at the centre of events’ thoughts. ‘There were different kinds of loneliness,’ reflects one after his lover leaves him. ‘The loneliness of the mountain that had always been there. Of the wide-open plain where you felt lost. Of the city and its indifference. There was the loneliness of the staffroom, the overcrowded tram, the empty flat. The loneliness brought on by accusations, accompanied by words like “never” or “always”, no matter whether they came from other lips or your own.’
And yet, for all the loneliness depicted in its pages, the characters of Blurred are profoundly connected across time and space, even if they can’t always see it. This is where Wolff’s views on time make themselves felt. Although broadly chronological, the narrative seems more like a spiral than a straight line. Samuel’s decision to flee his homeland with his friend Oz comes relatively late, and once the pair arrive in the bewildering, capitalist west – where there was ‘so much of everything, two things had to be done at the same time: jogging and pushing a pram; watching TV and talking to guests’ – the past echoes through them. Events are diffused into their lives, features recur down the generations, patterns repeat.
The role of storytelling is also a theme, with narratives’ malleability and necessity for human survival considered by turn. Occasionally, I found myself wishing that Wolff had trusted her readers to infer a few of the technical insights she spells out, which can sometimes feel a little pointed and knowing. But this may simply reflect a difference in the appetite for this kind of exposition in the German readership, or simply my taste.
Overall, this is a great book: engrossing, moving and beautifully told. Credit is due to Ruth Martin for the line she has walked in infusing the narrative with a ‘subtle flavour’ of its varied language world, as she explains in her postscript. And credit to Moth Books for publishing this novel, and to all the indie houses who do so much to bring stories that take us further into English.
Blurred by Iris Wolff, translated from the German by Ruth Martin (Moth Books, 2025)
Picture: ‘Romania Regions Transylvania‘ by DietG on Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
