by Amir Tag Elsir, translated from the Arabic by Chris Bredin and Emily Danby (Sudan, Darf Publishers)

Sudanese writer (and doctor) Amir Tag Elsir’s short novel Ebola 76, translated from the Arabic by Chris Bredin and Emily Danby, is a beguiling piece of fiction. As its title suggests, the narrative traces the initial spread of the Ebola virus in central Africa, from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (then known as Zaire) to southern Sudan and beyond. But it’s nothing like the other outbreak narratives offered to the world, whether in books or movies. There are no heroes. There are antiheroes. Lots of them. There is a somewhat anthropomorphized virus, eager to sow wreck and ruin, having fun along the way. There’s plenty of misery and suffering, but it already existed, had existed for decades and maybe even centuries before the virus showed up. The virus simply piles on, bringing unhappy lives to quicker ends. There’s no camaraderie. No banding together in the face of overwhelming, inconceivable carnage. No putting aside of differences or petty squabbles in order to cooperate. Instead there’s blame, rumor-mongering, self-interest, and isolationism, with a dash of casual disregard for consequences.

All of which is to say that this is perhaps the most genuine portrait of a viral outbreak ever conceived. Empathy and selflessness are wonderful traits to aspire to, especially in times of crisis such as this, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they kick in the second a tragedy strikes. And certainly that urge is made more difficult to catalyze when the crisis-stricken society has been taking a beating for so long that hope and optimism in everyday life are almost non-existent, never mind during a crisis.

Colonialism started it all off for these people, that much is obvious, even if this fact is never overtly expressed in the book. And post-colonial Africa was of course riddled with corruption, internal wars, and economic ruin. Education was a privilege for most and the vast majority of citizens had no chance of upward mobility through honest means. Life expectancies were horrifyingly short and infant mortality rates horrifyingly high. To get all of this across, to imbue it in the story without recounting it in history-textbook-style, Elsir employs a masterful ability to color his character’s thoughts with the subtle influences of history, distant and recent. It reads as black humor (which, for the record, is really, really well done and really funny in its own dark way) and widespread pessimism, a coping mechanism for these people in the face of their suffering, old and new, but upon closer examination it reveals these characters’ unshakeable distrust of the world they live in. It’s sad. Beyond sad, it’s also an honest account of an undeniably tragic time and place.

Has any of the preceding convinced you that this is the book that deserves to win this year’s Best Translated Book Award? I suspect no, so I’ll close with an assertion that this book doesn’t exist to be praised for its narrative flights of fancy or stylistic flair or its translation. It’s not that it doesn’t do these things astonishingly well, it’s that they are used in service of pointing to something important and intriguing beyond the pages of the book itself. This is not a book about the life of the mind, this is a book about the diseased blood coursing through our hearts.

by Amir Tag Elsir, translated from the Arabic by William M. Hutchins (Sudan, Antibookclub)

It may be only through humor that one can willingly enter the haze of Amir Tag Elsir’s French Perfume. The text—translated from Arabic by the renowned William M. Hutchins, and published by ANTIBOOKCLUB—tugs at the insides of anticipation until they are strewn across a table, staring back at you like doctored images of a woman you have never met but have just married.

The image is of Katia, a Frenchwoman, but mostly a name, who embodies promise and release for Ali Jarjar, a man who “from an early age [. . .] toughened himself by training his bladder’s urinary control, his lungs’ resistance to coughing, and his memory’s avoidance of vagaries.” A man with pride knotted in self-restraint. A man who incessantly dangles himself before the local women “who sold tea to the poor, women who were maids, and women who were immigrants.” Women he abandons, “enveloped in a warm dream and in the fantasy of a happy life.” Jilted, because like the cracks in the town walls of Gha’ib (or, “Nonexistent”) they are easy to overlook yet undeniably there. Women who, much like the ever-present squeaky doors of the neighborhood, denounce intimacy because “a door that opened quietly and smoothly was respected by no one.”

But Katia is a promise so intoxicating that men die writing poetry for her:

Beautiful Katia: where are you?
Where is desire for this melancholy flow
And where is the pure river of letters that will course through
your blood with love and affection?

Katia is the exception, who oils the doors of Gha’ib with the anticipation of her arrival:

She will make us famous in the whole world by documenting us in a video, she will send us the money necessary to develop the neighborhood and to bury its sewers and fill its potholes, she will care for our stray dogs and cats, she will ask some of us to migrate and live with her in Paris, and perhaps she will fall madly in love with one of us and ask him to marry her.

Katia is the Angel, who renames the stores and paints houses blue.

Katia Cadolet—the image and the undoing.

Hutchins’s translation of Elsir’s French Perfume elicits sense from absurdity. It is a book dominated by fragrance of passion so annihilating because of its very absence. Its scent becomes the promise for the physical, but ultimately lacks the body—leaving only notes of overpowering delusion and heady expectation. It inflames a slow burn of want for the need to touch the intangible. This is a text that deforms the mind as it pulls one into the rituals of preparing for passion—for there is nothing closer to skin than scent, and only at the loss of restraint does reason unravel.

Why should this book win? Because “it was the desperate hope of a man without any hopes.” And because, once, you too must have loved the image of a ghost.