They Will Drown In Their Mothers' Tears

Johannes Anyuru's nominally science fictional work applies a critically reflexive lens to questions of race, violence, and nationalism. A poetry of terrorism is tempered only through the metaphorical use of the idea of 'time travel' that makes an alternate world, one in which a terroristic act was avoided, possible.  This possibility 'saves' the narrative from the implied barbarism of the writing of poetry after such an act (as from Adorno we know such barbarism to exist 'after Auschwitz').

This is not just a case of a literary novelist appropriating a science fictional trope in order to triangulate the SF back into the literary. The narrative not only would not work, literally and metaphorically, without time travel, but it would also be morally vacuous without the alternate and parallel timeline, in which a young 'Swede' comes to the crucial moment ready to disarm the man who recruited her into killing the author of comic books satirising Islam.

But I didn't read this book because it is science fiction. I did so in spite of its earning a place within that category. The cognitive estrangement of the novel proceeds from its subject matter, and from the poetry of its presentation. The dystopia it sketches gradually fills in through details of the city in which it is situated (Gothenburg), its architectures, seasons, and the family members of the perpetrators and victims of its violences.

My brother recommended this book to me. Its translation appears to be an equal partner in its success as a literary work, having been rendered into English by Saskia Vogel, and prose certainly does not in any way detract from the story's momentum, its impetus.  This, despite rapid shifts of point of view, in two main structures proceeding first from the young female protagonist's and her doppleganger from another timeline; the other 'I' being that of a young male journalist writing up the story of the attack on the comic book store. Images of this attack bookend beginning and ending sections of the structured story, and alternations of point of view are unmarked, but very easily worked out from context.

This is very skillful, controlled writing, but equally skillful is the masterful poetic imagery of the 'rabbit yard' and 'building T', incremental architectures of doom in a spectrum of structures designed in a dystopian future Sweden to separate and subjugate its Muslim populations.  The racial dynamics and clashes are very resonant for these times we are living through.