The Singularity

by Balsam Karam, Saskia Vogel (Translator), Mara Wilson (Read by)

Overview

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).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798874743901
Publisher:	Dreamscape
Publication date:	03/26/2024
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 5.70(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Balsam Karam (b. 1983) is of Kurdish ancestry and has lived in Sweden since she was a young child. She is an author, librarian, and university lecturer, and made her literary debut in 2018 with the critically acclaimed Event Horizon, which was shortlisted for the Katapult Prize. The Singularity was shortlisted for the August Prize and is her second novel, published in Sweden in 2021.

Saskia Vogel is the author of Permission and the translator of over twenty Swedish-language books. She was awarded the Berlin Senate Endowment for Non-German Literature and was a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize. She worked on The Singularity as part of her translation residency at Princeton University. From Los Angeles, she now lives in Berlin.

Mara Wilson is a writer, playwright, actor, and storyteller perhaps best known as the little girl from Mrs. Doubtfire, Miracle on 34th Street, and Matilda. A graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, she regularly appears at live storytelling and comedy shows, including her own, What Are You Afraid Of?. Her writing can be found on Jezebel, The Toast, McSweeney’s, the Daily Beast, and Cracked.com, and on her blog, MaraWilsonWritesStuff.com. A voice actor on the podcast Welcome to Night Vale, she will guest star on upcoming episodes of Broad City and BoJack Horseman. She lives in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for The Singularity

“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)

From the Publisher

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.

Kirkus Reviews