IXELLES

A multilayered novel blending mystery, SF, and politics in an uneasily multicultural Europe.

“A departure hall for travelers with no destination.” Thus a banlieue of Antwerp where Ruth, a consultant in a shadowy enterprise, has deep connections she’d sooner forget. Twenty-Seventy, nicknamed Baghdad—as in, says Ruth’s late beloved, activist/writer Mio, the Baghdad that the Mongols sacked—is grim, depressed, dangerous. But it’s also a place of life, full of people whom Ruth’s firm is working to dispossess so that the place can be colonized by “a different segment of the population than the people who live there today: people with real spending power and professional careers.” Mio is not among the to-be-displaced: He is dead, either killed in a car wreck or stabbed, the choices offered to Ruth and Mio’s young son, Em, who, Telemachus-like, seeks his father’s ghost if not his father—for a mysterious CD has turned up with Mio’s voice on it, leading Ruth to think that he’s faked his death to lead a revolution from underground. “It was easy to disappear,” some emanation of Mio recounts. “As though I’d never really existed.” In a tale part Borges, part Stieg Larsson, and part the P.D. James of The Children of Men, Anyuru explores the nonexistence of the underclass: a famous novelist in his home country who, unrecognized, works as a custodian; a young man murdered, “as though he wasn’t really here.” Poet/novelist Anyuru, of Ugandan and Swedish parentage, populates his pages with multiethnic figures who resist erasure and amnesia in an unwelcoming Europe. If the mystery he poses never quite resolves, he presents arresting episodes that add pages to “a library of the memories and hopes of the poor.”

Memorably inventive: the work of a writer, well established in Sweden, whom American readers will want to know.