Publishers Weekly
★ 01/08/2024
In Karam’s beautiful and harrowing English-language debut, a pregnant woman witnesses another woman plummet to her death from a promenade above the sea. Both women are unnamed, as is the cosmopolitan, tourist-friendly city where the action takes place. Karam repeatedly portrays the suicidal jump from both women’s points of view, and in the process gradually reveals more about each character. The dead woman arrived in the city as a refugee from an unnamed war-torn country with her four children. She was becoming increasingly despondent in her search for her oldest daughter, 17, who worked at a nearby restaurant overlooking the water and has been missing for several weeks. The woman who bears witness to the mother’s death is from the same country and has relocated to the city to take an unspecified job. She’s pregnant, and Karam’s account of her determination to leave her home country before giving birth overlaps thematically with the dead woman’s story, especially after the witness’s baby is stillborn. The slim, subtle, and somewhat abstract narrative gestures at grand tragedy in its depiction of the indifferent metropolis as “a hole between what came to be and what could have been,” where tourists pay little mind to a refugee’s for her missing daughter. This is powerful. (Jan.)
From the Publisher
A beautiful and harrowing English-language debut… This is powerful.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Astringent, fuguelike. . . . A knotty, sui generis evocation of mothers’ feelings of fear and loss.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Mesmerizing and harrowing, The Singularity is a novel of personal and cultural loss and anguished remembrance.” —Foreword Reviews
“Two narratives refract and then come together in a poetic convergence… there is a haunting, hushed tone to the novel, neatly evoked by Saskia Vogel’s translation from the Swedish, that probes the disorienting effects of exile.” —The New York Times
"This understated, hypnotic novel hummed in my blood.” —Hudson Review
“Transformative… Karam’s writing is sharp, piercing, and full of chasms.” —Words Without Borders
“The Singularity is a sweeping look at the generational grief of migration, narrated in a poetic rhythm that moves like an elegy.” —Asian Review of Books
“I don’t know anyone who writes like Balsam Karam. She blows me away. Truly one of the most original and extraordinary voices to come out of Scandinavia in. . . forever. You’ll realize twenty minutes after you’ve finished The Singularity that you’re still sitting there, holding on to it.” —Fredrik Backman, author of A Man Called Ove
"The Singularity by Balsam Karam is a novel about loss and longing—a mother who misses her child, children who miss their mother, and all of those who miss their country as they try to feel the new earth in their new land. A deeply moving work of fiction from a true voice of Scandinavia." —Shahrnush Parsipur, author of Women Without Men: A Novel of Modern Iran
“Balsam Karam writes at the limits of narrative, limning the boundary of loss where ‘no space remains between bodies in the singularity.’ With a lucid intimacy, Karam braids a story of witness and motherhood that fractures from within only to rebuild memory and home on its own terms. The Singularity is a book of conviction, where those who have been made to disappear find light and keep their secrets too.” —Shazia Hafiz Ramji, author of Port of Being
“Lyrical, devastating, and completely original, The Singularity is a work of extraordinary vision and heart. Balsam Karam’s writing is formally inventive and stylistically breathtaking, and Saskia Vogel’s translation does shining justice to its poetic precision and depths.” —Preti Taneja, author of Aftermath
“Balsam Karam’s new novel is enormously powerful. . . . To read The Singularity is like drinking directly from a flood of tears.” —Aftonbladet (Sweden)
“A novel that appears to have been created from dark matter, elusive, giddying and with an enormous linguistic and narrative density.” —Expressen (Sweden)
“Balsam Karam’s language is entirely her own. It is poetic and suggestive. Sometimes like one big stream-of-consciousness, where two different scenarios are portrayed in parallel. To be here and now and at the same time in the past. To carry one’s losses, engraved on one’s body like deep wounds. Because who can rank traumas, as the novel suggests. The loss of a child, a language, a country, an identity. . . . The Singularity is a journey into a black hole. A point of no return.” —Jönköpings-Posten (Sweden)
Kirkus Reviews
2023-10-20
Two women reckon with loss and displacement in a coastal town.
This astringent, fuguelike novel by Kurdish-born Swedish author Karam opens with an unnamed woman who’s long been on a desperate search for her missing daughter. She walks the streets of a beach town, haunting a corniche where “The Missing One” worked at a restaurant. When the mother’s efforts prove too futile to bear, she leaps from the edge of the corniche. That incident has a witness, a pregnant tourist whose child will later die in utero. Karam interweaves the stories of the two women, connecting them almost to the point of blurring their lives together. The pregnant woman is a refugee from state violence, and the woman searching for her daughter leaves behind three children living in a nearby lot, surviving mainly on the goodwill of a greengrocer. (Karam draws a stark distinction between the well-off habitués of the shops along the corniche and the refugees who live near it.) The plot details here aren’t as crucial, though, as the mood of oppression, particularly toward women, and Karam’s various means of conjuring it. She bounces around timelines, plays with point of view (the pregnant woman is “you”), and interweaves the two women’s voices within extended passages. The “singularity” of the title refers to the force in astrophysics that “pushes bodies together and renders the distance between them nil,” a meaningful metaphor for two women similarly bereft. Translator Vogel deftly manages Karam’s rhetorical shifts while preserving the mood of disorientation. The book doesn’t resolve its central crisis so much as suggest that such crises are all-pervasive, and that migrants will continue to absorb abuses that are bigoted at best and fatal at worst.
A knotty, sui generis evocation of mothers’ feelings of fear and loss.
