‘The Singularity’: This Swedish novel in translation is a looping narrative of unbearable loss

“Meanwhile elsewhere” – that is how The Singularity by Balsam Karam starts. First published as Singulariteten (2021) in Swedish, it has now been magnificently translated into English by Saskia Vogel. The first page does not feel like a beginning. It is as if you have just interrupted an ongoing conversation, come midway into a story that began some while ago. It is accentuated by the use of present and future tenses that give the narrative both immediacy and the practised ease of routine. As if, this is the way of the world. At the centre of the novel are two women and their unbearable grief over losing their children: one gone missing as a teen and the other dying in the womb before it could even be born.

The architecture of grief

Karam’s novel is stylistically and formally inventive. The prologue introduces us to the setting, an unnamed coastal city, and the characters. The woman with a missing daughter has been searching for weeks before finally giving up and jumping off a corniche onto rocks below. A pregnant woman on a business trip from a distant country who sees the mother fall to her death finds out after a few days that her baby has no heartbeat. The...

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