Fans of the Italian writer Alba de Cespedes (1911-1997), the author of Forbidden Notebook, will love her first novel, There’s No Turning Back. It reminds me of Mary McCarthy’s The Group: both tell the stories of eight women who are friends in their university days. There’s No Turning Back was published in 1938 and The Group in 1963, but both are set in the 1930s, and they make good companion novels.
In There’s No Turning Back, a group of young women live in a Catholic residence run by nuns in Rome. Unlikely friendships are formed by proximity. Most of the characters are university students, but there are exceptions. The wealthy Emanuela is not a student, and she has a secret: her illegitimate child lives in an institution, and she has moved to Rome to be near her. Xenia, a mediocre literature student, is devastated when her thesis is rejected, and rather than go home to live with her parents, she pawns a stolen necklace and reinvents herself in another city. Bookish Silvia, who does some of her best research for her professor, thinks quickly on her feet: she saves his unhappy wife from a not very serious suicide attempt. (The professor knows nothing about it.) Then there’s Augusta, a lost soul who stays in her room and writes bad novels all day, but eventually turns her fiction into a feminist manifesto. All of the women have secrets of one kind or another.
De Cepesdes’s novels are addictive. Every sentence is graceful and lucid, and every detail is sentient. My favorite of her novels is Her Side of the Story, but No Turning Back is also a tour de force. She has become one of my favorite writers.
Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel, longlisted for the Women’s Prize, is a literary science fiction novel set in a future where internet data is collected to predict crime. Not only does the Algorithm analyze your data but it records and judges your dreams through a popular implant called Dreamscape. One day when Sara returns from London and is standing in the Customs line at the L.A. airport, she is taken out of the line to be questioned by the Risk Assessment Administration. The Algorithm says it is probable that she will murder her her husband, a conclusion based on data twisted out of context and dreams. And so she is sentenced to a retention center, which is like a prison, without criminals or crime.
The whole thing is terrifying, in light of the development of AI. (Not that I’ve read any of the articles on AI: it’s too like science fiction!) And of course Sara has no history of violence. That goes without saying. She lives quietly, an archivist with a husband and twin babies. It is nightmarish to be torn away from her family.
Lalami’s portrait of Sara, who is seemingly stuck forever in the retention center – her sentence keeps getting lengthened –vividly charts her routine and the changes in her character. From the daily nauseating watery oatmeal to the mindless work in a laundry and lack of soap during a pandemic, the routine is deadening and, during the pandemic, sickening. Sara’s intelligence helps her survive, and helps others survive, too. But clearly no one ever gets over living in a retention center.
Lalami’s muted, intelligent style bars the door to the hysteria of us readers. Yes, all of us should immediately become Luddites and destroy our electronic devices, as we’ve concluded many times before, but few of us do, nor does Sara, who uses an unreliable email system at the retention center to communicate.
Lalami, who won the American Book Award and the Arab-American Award for her novel The Moor’s Account, is a serious writer. This novel is quiet – possibly too quiet for true science fiction readers – but I see it as a dystopian classic.