8 Wastelands from World Literature

Enthusiastic readers of books from around the world often crow about how those stories transport them to exotic locales to experience a new culture, new people, and new adventures without the annoyance of lost luggage or language barriers. As a translator of prose and poetry from Central Asia, a place the vast majority of my English-language readers have never visited in person, I’m happy to help readers achieve that goal. But it wouldn’t be fair to the writers of the world to expect them only to portray places that we’d personally like to visit. Tourism aside, there is plenty to learn from unpleasant places, both in life and in literature.

The most unpleasant place of all is the wasteland—a landscape, either geographical or mental, where human visitors instantly find themselves unwelcome. It is a place where time stands still, hope is lost, and human beings cannot possibly thrive, even if they once did inhabit it or still, impossibly, do inhabit it.

In Sultan Raev’s novel Castigation, released this September in my translation by Syracuse University Press, a ragtag crew of seven people escapes a mental hospital and sets out across a post-Soviet desert to find redemption in the Holy Land. They don’t make much progress, but as they struggle across the inhospitable landscape, we readers learn each person’s backstory in two ways: from direct flashbacks of their lives (or past lives), and through their encounters with a surprisingly large number of other people and creatures who are living, working, or waging protests in the wasteland. This desert, then, paradoxically serves as fertile ground for revelation and understanding…up to a point. Spoiler: for most of them, it doesn’t end well.

To make your own pilgrimage through the wasteland, and see what it can reveal to you, I recommend exploring the barren reaches described in the novels and memoirs listed below. No two wastelands are the same, but here, in translation, they’re all open to exploration. The landscapes are harsh and unforgiving, but in each case, you can trust the translator to guide you safely to the other side.

Radiant Terminus by Antoine Volodine, translated by Jeffery Zuckerman

Much like Castigation, Volodine’s novel opens with a bedraggled, sick group of people wandering hopelessly through a wasteland that is slowly killing them. This particular wasteland is post-apocalyptic, the result of numerous nuclear disasters accompanying the fall of the fictional (so far!) Second Soviet Union.  The cows, the spiders, and most of the people have been killed off, but a few human specimens remain oddly unscathed, which is not to say unaltered. These travelers—quite human, sympathetic characters—make it through the wasteland to a settlement where a pair of unsympathetic survivors rule a tiny community through psychological terror and inexplicable rituals.

In a startling and effective contrast to its bleak landscape, Zuckerman’s language in Radiant Terminus is radiant itself, skillfully channeling Volodine’s imagination into English with hypnotic results. It’s even occasionally funny. Laughter can be powerful medicine in the wasteland.

Kolyma Diaries by Jacek Hugo-Bader, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Elsewhere in the former USSR, Polish author Hugo-Bader charts his travels around one of the most harsh and remote regions in the Russian Federation. Kolyma is a place that many write off as a wasteland due to its absolutely unforgiving climate and painful history as home to brutal Soviet prison camps, yet this foreign traveler finds it curiously full of survivors.

Determined to explore this wasteland, the author recounts his experiences in large part through his conversations with local residents. The population is dwindling as young people escape and old people die out. Many of those that remain have harrowing memories of persecution and imprisonment, and most drink far too much vodka. Yet they persist, content to tell their tales, and we discover that a land holding the bones of so many dead in fact radiates a strange “positive energy,” as the author puts it, an energy readers can sense through Lloyd-Jones’s sensitive translation. We may not understand why these survivors are so attached to their wasteland, but we are rooting for them.

Öræfi: The Wasteland by Ófeigur Sigurðsson, translated by Lytton Smith

This novel was a shoo-in for inclusion in this list just by virtue of its front cover, where its Icelandic title, Öræfi, appears just above its translated title, The Wasteland. Ófeigur Sigurðsson’s disorienting tale plunges us into another northern-climate wasteland, one where the deadliness of the landscape is a result of the sheer unreliability that erupting volcanoes and shifting glaciers constantly produce.

That landscape is the perfect environment for the novel’s equally unreliable narrator, a man who stumbles out of the wasteland (or does he?) mortally wounded and eager to talk about his adventures. But the truth keeps shifting, blinding us like a snowstorm, as the story is sifted through an interpreter who speaks to a doctor who writes a report from which the entirety of the story is transmitted to a friend in a letter. “I have no option but to believe you, what you’re saying, or else the ground beneath my feet will open up,” the helpless doctor tells her interpreter, according to the letter-writer, as reported by real-life translator Lytton Smith. This Icelandic wasteland is easily the most aggressive geographical environment on this list. Keep your eyes open as you plunge into its rambling sentences and diverging trails, because this journey is a perilous one, but worth every moment.

Not Even the Dead by Juan Gómez Bárcena, translated by Katie Whittemore 

Continuing west across the Atlantic and back several centuries, we join a hapless man named Juan on his reluctant quest across the jungles of the Spanish colony of Mexico to hunt down another man named Juan who is leaving death and ideological confusion in his wake. Juan’s pursuit of Juan runs north through the jungle, across the desert, and incidentally across many centuries to the present day.

There are dual wastelands at work in Not Even the Dead. The first is a wild landscape inhabited by a plague, sullen and possibly dangerous natives (they have their reasons, of course), and deranged missionaries (same). But as Juan crosses this geographical or cultural wasteland, our hero also finds himself wandering a historical and chronological wasteland, always two weeks behind his goal, moving in a trance through the ruins of one empire and the beginnings of another one to the north. Given that this history is also a wasteland, no improvement or progress is possible. Instead, what readers gain is a mesmerizing story told in beautiful prose, intricately styled, by our translator and guide Katie Whittemore.

Lojman by Ebru Ojen, translated by Aron Aji and Selin Gökçesu 

Ojen’s terrifying, short novel, in contrast, refuses to let us wander. Here, the wasteland is not traversable, but rather all-encompassing and immobilizing. Selma, the woman at the heart of the story, already feels stranded in the countryside with nothing to do thanks to her husband’s job. She sinks deeper into depression when her spouse vanishes during a snowstorm, leaving her trapped in their government-issued lodgings with two children and a third very much on the way.

Having nowhere to go and nobody she is willing to turn to for help, Selma brings another life into the wilderness, translated in this book into the most stunningly, viscerally accurate scenes of childbirth and breastfeeding I have ever read in English. But the baby does not signify hope, because they are all in an emotional wasteland. Gradually, the members of this abandoned family—even the newborn—turn on each other as madness descends in a quite palpable form. 

Suddenly by Isabelle Autissier, translated by Gretchen Schmid

The collapse of human relationships is also key in this novel, which features an Antarctic polar wasteland. Two adventurers and lovers, careful Louise and brash Ludovic, leave a comfortable life in Paris to sail around the world. They stop on a currently-uninhabited island for a hike, but their ship is destroyed in a storm, along with their radio and most of their supplies.

When the two of them run out of penguins to eat, and life in the abandoned research station they find becomes increasingly untenable, they must decide whether to stay stranded or set off across the hostile, frozen island in hopes that a better-equipped, and maybe even populated, research station might provide their salvation. Their troubles have changed their personalities, they can’t agree about what to do, and Louise ends up wandering this wasteland alone. Her desperate voyage occurs only halfway through the book. The second half of this page-turner finds her navigating another wasteland, one of guilt and recovery.

Seeing Further by Esther Kinsky, translated by Caroline Schmidt 

The memoir by this noted writer provides a much-needed rest on our journey through unforgiving wildernesses. Kinsky’s book is a calm meditation on the wastelands of memory, as seen through the alternate universe of the movie screen. Kinsky becomes increasingly interested in a small village in rural Hungary that boasts an endlessly flat landscape, shrinking population, and abandoned movie theater. Though the town seems stuck in time, refusing to change, she recruits an ally or two to bring the cinema back to life, positing that the camera’s eye, and the universe on the big screen, could be a positive alternative to the bleak physical landscape and historical moment  in which the local community has been stranded.

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This is the only landscape in our list where violence plays merely a distant, background role, present in people’s memories of Jewish residents who fled or disappeared during the Holocaust and occasional references to life in the Soviet bloc. But Kinsky is also aware that the cinematic landscape she is trying to resurrect is gone, left in the twentieth century, when people didn’t have the option of exploring alternative universes on their own tiny, individual screens. Her efforts to purchase and refurbish the theater building, and then to draw an audience for the films she shows, produce results only slowly, and she has difficulty explaining her determination to herself or her friends back home in the city. But when a wasteland isn’t actively trying to kill us, and when it’s described with such insight, it can be a very alluring place to spend some time.

The Dead Wander in the Desert by Rollan Seisenbayev, translated by John Farndon and Olga Nakston

Moving back to Central Asia to wrap up our list, Seisenbayev’s epic work of historical fiction charts the gradual degradation of culture and community in late Soviet Kazakhstan through the individual stories of people struggling to either adapt or resist to changes dictated from on high. Seisenbayev’s large cast of fishermen, teachers, and local political leaders do not seek the wasteland, but look on in horror as it comes to them, until they are finally stranded inside it like the iconic ship on the book’s cover.

Today’s Kazakhstani wasteland was born of two Soviet-era projects resulting in environmental catastrophe: the draining of the Aral Sea for irrigation and the nuclear tests conducted at Semipalatinsk. Both activities poisoned the air and water, caused skyrocketing rates of cancer and birth defects, and slowly tore communities apart throughout the region. That means this novel is also set in a bureaucratic wasteland, where rigid Soviet hierarchies and ideologies prevent problems from being acknowledged or addressed, with devastating results. Farndon and Nakston’s patience with the text and careful handling of all its poetry, folk legends, and human emotions allow readers a glimpse into what existed and thrived before the wasteland claimed its victory.

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