Culture | No escape

A taut chronicle of the pain of exile

Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde’s novel offers a different view of Scandinavia

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What We Owe. By Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde. Translated by Elizabeth Clark Wessel. Mariner Books; 208 pages; $15.99. Fleet; £14.99.

OLD clichés die hard—and sell well. While Nordic artists profit abroad from lucrative stereotypes involving sweaters, saunas and snowdrifts, at home their societies are changing fast. Around one in 100 Swedes, for instance, has Iranian heritage, one component of a population with a “foreign background” (the state’s demographic term) that amounts to 24% of the total. Many Swedish writers strive to capture this complexity, even if publishers elsewhere still prefer morose blonde sleuths. The arrival, in translation, of a Swedish-Iranian novelist is a welcome chance to cross the bridge into another version of Scandinavia.

“What We Owe”, the second novel by Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde, an economist and social entrepreneur, is above all a family story. It knots the experiences of three generations of women into a taut and moving account of grief, a legacy handed down from mother to daughter “as sure as the raven-black hair”. Yet the ordeals of persecution and exile shape every scene in the family’s thwarted quest to find “both freedom and roots”. Public upheavals frame the private pain.

Shocked by a terminal cancer diagnosis in her early 50s, Nahid—the novel’s narrator—looks back on her childhood in Iran, her flight to Sweden, and her troubled relationships with her mother, violent husband Masood and alienated daughter Aram. “Such a beautiful place,” Nahid says of prosperous, placid Sweden, “and I have almost no good memories of it.” Her new starts never healed her old wounds.

One of seven daughters in “a family with no sons”, she won a place at medical school; then came the revolt against the shah, which “fell upon us like a rain of stars”. Soon the Islamic revolution becomes a tyranny that wrecks the dreams of Nahid and her secular comrades. Her beloved sister Noora dies as police crush a demonstration. Nahid and Masood flee; a half-life of regret and recrimination begins. “We didn’t escape,” Nahid laments, as she reckons the cost of their displacement.

“What We Owe” refuses sentimental consolations. Nahid becomes a nurse, but Aram protests that “we never got to have it good”. The “profound shame” of exile endures: “Fleeing sits in your blood…and like a tumour it grows inside you.” Worse, “everything is passed down” to the children. Terse, urgent prose—ably channelled by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, the translator—gives pace and heft to a novel of contagious trauma. Still, Ms Hashemzadeh Bonde lets in a closing ray of hope. The baby Aram is expecting may allow mother and daughter to “create something beautiful”. Perhaps another generation will, at last, enjoy that “Swedish peace”.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "No escape"

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