Illuminations by Eva Hoffman
(Harvill Secker, £16.99)
Eva Hoffman's memoir of migration, Lost in Translation, first published in 1989, begins aboard a ship leaving Poland 30 years earlier. "We can't be leaving all this behind," writes Hoffman in her dismay, "but we are." Looking ahead, she describes "an erasure, of the imagination, as if a camera eye has snapped shut." Her family is moving to Canada, a place of which Hoffman knows nothing more than "vague outlines, a sense of vast spaces and little habitation."
By contrast, Isabel, the protagonist of Hoffman's new novel, Illuminations, is heavily laden with the culture of other places. On arriving in Budapest, Isabel, a concert pianist and an Argentinian by birth, "walks along the grand avenues and the ordinary streets." It is her first visit, "yet the city corresponds to something she recognises." In many of the cities that she visits, Isabel has friends, access to cliques and exclusive knowledge. She is an excellent nomad, unlike the young Eva, who is baffled by the place where she arrives. On seeing her first suburban house, Eva observes: "This one-storey structure surrounded by a large garden… doesn't belong in a city—but neither can it be imagined in the country."
Between these two books lies almost 50 years of migration and technological change. When Hoffman left Poland, she felt there was a "crushing, definitive finality" about her departure. Far fewer migrants will experience that sensation now. Thanks to the internet and to modern telecommunications, migrants leave far less behind than they used to; the cost of travel has diminished and regular return trips are feasible. Many more migrants return in the fuller sense too—significant numbers of Hoffman's fellow Poles have returned home after initially moving to Britain following Poland's entry into the EU.
Writing about migration is popular and critically successful. By my count, half the Booker-winning novels since the prize's inception in 1969 contain stories of migration. But perhaps what we have enjoyed over the last few generations are the creative by-products of a temporary form of migration. Before this era began, there were very few long-distance migrants. Now migration has become a mass phenomenon but a less traumatic or transformative one. And so just as the new migration raises policy questions about border control and citizenship, it also has implications for literature. Hoffman's carefully observed books allow us to see how.
In Lost in Translation, as the reality of Canada supersedes Hoffman's imagined Canada, her imagination reaches instead into memories of Poland; her old country becomes unreal and fragmentary just as her new one acquires heft. These Polish memories are of trivial events: a dispute with kids from another village, an excursion to a waterfall in the hills. But that is part of the appeal of writing about migration from the last 50 years: the events are ones that any reader is able to recognise. The journeys of explorers from more than a century ago are interesting; the voyage of a schoolgirl is engrossing.
Monica Ali's celebrated novel Brick Lane is the equal of Hoffman's Lost in Translation as an attempt to describe the 20th-century experience of migration. Again, some of its most striking passages are not set amid the public life of the alien world, but in the enclosed private version of it. The climax of the book is provided by a decision to move back to Bangladesh from London. Yet the binary choice that Ali compels the central character Nazneen to make—stay or go—belies the reality of life in modern British Asian households, where the more nostalgic members of the family may spend several months a year at "home" and then return to Britain to avoid the summer heat.
This is perhaps a loss for literature; the imaginative and dramatic tensions that have characterised so much writing about migration are on the wane. That is maybe why Salman Rushdie set his most recent novel, The Enchantress of Florence, amid the 16th-century courts of the Medicis and the Mughals, when the experience of travel was still rare—his intent being to enjoy the old pleasures one last time. By contrast, Marina Lewycka's 2007 novel Two Caravans, the follow-up to the enormously successful A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, attempts a melange of the old and the new. Lewycka's subject is a group of workers of different nationalities hired to pick strawberries in Kent. Yet Lewycka's characters are oddly detached from the places that they have come from. They talk about them like refugees who never expect to go back. Phone calls are rare and expected to bear great dramatic weight. Most strangely, the workers in the novel seem to have come to Britain expecting wealth and comfort. But for better or worse, that is not what the actual migrants that Lewycka is writing about envisage; they know better. They have not been fooled by tales like those that Akbar heard in his Mughal court; instead they rely on the accounts of the "seasonal agricultural workers" from the year before. The bad luck for writers is that modern migration is driven by modest aspirations, not fantasies.
Hoffman returns several times in Illuminations to the theme of what the new global travellers know and don't know. Isabel falls in love with Anzor, a Chechen. And, like most of us, Isabel knows that what has been going on in Chechnya over the last several years is vaguely terrible. Isabel and her friends ask Anzor for more details from time to time; sometimes he denies them the knowledge; at other times, he wants them to know the most precise details: the assault on his father, for example, or the death of a friend.
Anzor's anger is persuasive, and it seems that Hoffman wants it to be. Isabel later encounters a young man who is going to travel to Egypt to work with Liberian refugees. When she asks him why he chose Egypt, he replies: "Because I googled it first." It's a ridiculous answer. But Isabel isn't sarcastic about the young man. She asks him and his girlfriend to come to her next concert, and he surprises her by talking earnestly about the music of Schnabel. Even if his knowledge of terrible things derives from the internet rather than from personal experience, this boy, like Anzor, does care. Yes, the world is smaller, Hoffman seems to be saying, but it doesn't have to be flatter.
Yet in both Lost in Translation and Illuminations, some of the most powerful moments of feeling occur outside of any sense of place. The final section of Lost in Translation, "The New World," begins with an account of an evening spent at a literary party in New York City. It hardly matters what people talk about, or the places that they talk about, as Hoffman, by that stage in her American exile, knows: "I fit, and my surroundings fit me." She returns home in a taxi and climbs into bed. "In my drowsiness," she observes, "I become an animal thing I've always known, only myself."
Isabel has a similar moment in a recording studio. As the sound engineer allows her to listen to what he has recorded, then manipulated, of her playing, "she sighs, in a release of tension… she is stirred as if it were anybody playing." The sense of relief in these moments in the books is overwhelming, as if the burden of being from somewhere and signifying something is being lifted. Perhaps this is what migrants long for most intensely: moments when they are not arriving, or leaving, or remembering at all.
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