In a world of violence and clamored voices, what is authentic? Johannes Anyuru explores just that in Ixelles, his newest novel, translated from Swedish by Nichola Smalley. A mother named Ruth works for a secret agency that crafts fake voices, people, and influence to manipulate the public. She grew up in the troubled neighborhood of Twenty-Seventy, but left as a pregnant single mother after her boyfriend Mio was stabbed. She’s spent her son Em’s childhood lying to him about the past, but he’s asking more questions, and her newest assignment requires her to go back to her former hood and try to quell protests against upcoming razing and redevelopment.
In an age of misinformation and fake news, Anyuru (with Smalley’s excellent translation) suggests that a secret agency being paid good money by companies, political parties, and other powers-that-be could easily pull the strings on public opinion in ways that appear organic and authentic by creating and using fake voices and people. It’s a blistering critique of the idea that social media allows for authentic activism and dialogue.
But it also presents an interesting counterpoint. A golden, old-fashioned CD is circulating around the neighborhood, on which a man claiming to be Mio says that he isn’t dead, but instead in the Nothingness Section, a place created for young troubled youth to escape to. A place where the trauma they’re certain they’ll inherit will be left behind them, and they can heal in a community of people like them. Ruth herself is half-convinced, half-furious by the CD. If Mio is still alive, why wouldn’t he have come back to her and Em? But if he isn’t, who is initiating his voice, and are they doing this to get to her? Or to make some kind of change in the neighborhood?
At one point, Ruth’s boss, Lucien, argues that once upon a time, we used large narratives and tales to agree on a framework to figure out what was correct and real. But post-globalization, every person makes their own truth. It’s not a coincidence that Ruth works in an office space that was once a church, or that the protestors gather in the local mosque less solely because it’s the only place the landlords don’t own. Places of spirituality have been drained, it seems—the grand stories of religion don’t appeal to the young people anymore. Even the library, where Ruth and Mio found their own refuge, has been warped by a recent incident with police that left a teenager in a coma.
Instead, the characters try to seek and write their own stories. “Rain falls because it wants to be the sea,” the imam tells Em at one point. “Everything wants to be something else. Something more than it is. So did your dad.” Mio collects feathers. Ruth seeks something in the sound of the waves. Em becomes a D&D gamemaster, literally able to write the stories himself.
Ruth argues that one final thing continues to be universal: “when a victim of society’s violence bears witness.” She thinks she can replicate this with a fake voice, but that false persona can’t compare to that of the Mio on the golden CD. That voice promises something to the youth of the community and they listen, because it is speaking from where they are. Mio is a new mythology, a story bigger than they are, a mural. Whether it’s him or not, perhaps, doesn’t matter.
In a conversation Ruth has with Lucien, he says that he knew his mother, ultimately, better than his father, even though she was never around. He saw his father everyday, saw his life exactly as it was. But, he only knew his mother by the stories she told him—stories of who she wanted to be. It’s intriguing to think that we might all be defined by who we want to be, and who we tell others we are. There is something true in everything Ruth tells her son, even when it’s a lie. The truth rests in who she wants to be, and what she wants for him.
Perhaps this ambiguity is what inspired Anyuru to leave so much open at the end of this novel. Possibly too much—some of the book’s loose ends challenge the limits of credibility. Still, it’s a novel less about answers and more about questions, for better and for worse, and readers will find it hard to put down because of how tense and rich Anyuru’s prose—translated so clearly by Smalley—comes across. It’s a rich, strange novel that cuts at something deeply human in us—the urge to tell stories, to mythologize, to rewrite—and masterfully explores the pain and hurt of being human.
FICTION
Ixelles
By Johannes Anyuru
Translated by Nichola Smalley
Two Lines Press
Published October 8, 2024
