And in her timeline, Amin was accompanied by his sister (who in the present-day world died as a child) and succeeded in his attack: In her time she was the daughter of two immigrants from Algeria.
Further radicalised by her experience, she then came to Sweden and quickly joined the terror group.īut as far as she is concerned, she is a Swede from 15 years in the future and this isn't even her body (and indeed the girl claims not to understand Flemish and mysteriously speaks fluent Swedish). She tells him a seemingly far-fetched story - she is actually from 15 years in a future, a future with a different past.Īs far as the authorities are concerned, the girl was born in Brussels, converted to Islam age 14 due to a boyfriend, was somehow caught up in fundamentalism and rendered to a camp in Jordan, where she suffered physical torture and neurological experiments. She is confined in a psychiatric facility, and, at her request, is visited by an author (who seems something of an avatar for Anyuru). The story then takes us forward two years. But something feels very wrong to her - she's literally seen the scene she is filming before, and she wasn't in it, and she makes a decision to intervene and end the attack. Another Amin is about to slit the cartoonist's throat. Three young Islamic fundamentalists stage an armed terrorist attack, which one, a teenage girl, our narrator, films and broadcasts live from her cellphone. The novel opens at a comic book store in Gotherburg, where a consciously inflammatory cartoonist is doing a reading.
The 2016 winner of the same prize was Lina Woolf's De polyglotta älskarna, also rendered into English (as The Polyglot Lovers) by Vogel. Johannes Anyuru's De kommer att drunkna i sina mödrars tårar won the 2017 August Prize in Sweden, and has now been translated into English by Saskia Vogel as They Will Drown In Their Mothers' Tears, and published by Two Lines Press. You’ll think I’m lying because you think you’re still Swedish. I am writing to those of you who won’t believe that what I’m saying can happen in Sweden.
0 kommentar(er)
