The Singularity
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Lyrical and devastating, The Singularity is a breathtaking study of grief, migration, and motherhood from one of Sweden’s most exciting new novelists.
In an unnamed coastal city filled with refugees, the mother of a displaced family calls out her daughter’s name as she wanders the cliffside road where the child once worked. The mother searches and searches until, spent from grief, she throws herself into the sea, leaving her other children behind. Bearing witness to the suicide is another woman—on a business trip, with a swollen belly that later gives birth to a stillborn baby. In the wake of her pain, the second woman remembers other losses—of a language, a country, an identity—when once, her family fled a distant war.
Balsam Karam weaves between both narratives in this formally ambitious novel and offers a fresh approach to language and aesthetic as she decenters a white European gaze. Her English-language debut, The Singularity is a powerful exploration of loss, history, and memory—an experience akin to “drinking directly from a flood of tears” (Aftonbladet).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
