Brothers

Clerson’s debut novel, brought into strong yet delicate English by Grubisic, is an exhilarating collision of genres, including fairy tales, magic realism, and classical, biblical, and indigenous mythologies. Two brothers (who are never named) live with their mother in semi-isolation near a marsh, subsisting on what they catch, and sometimes visiting local villagers to trade objects that drift ashore. The mother tells them about their “dog of a father” and explains how the younger brother was created from one of the older brother’s arms so that they could face the world together. When the brothers set off on a journey, it turns out to be not a typical quest but rather a journey of self-discovery, or perhaps a quest whose purpose and endpoint keep disappearing or being forgotten. The anchoring details are deliberately murky. Readers are left to wonder when and where the novel is set, whether the characters are even real, or whether the elder brother—the character from whose perspective the story is told—is simply dreaming them along with the fragmentary, surreal, often violent events. It won’t be to everyone’s taste, but this intelligent and urgently written tale is likely to earn a cult following. (Nov.)