Two terrible realities of the western world recent histories yet each offering unexpected hope where one is unable to envisage one.

Came the Stranger is a study of human weakness and its distillation into hatred. It is set in Czechoslovakia a few years before the start of the World War II. Being born in Czechoslovakia and having the knowledge of the historical facts made me experience the novel as a heavy, dark and suffocating cloud hanging over the story and its protagonists. The impending dread is unavoidable and unstoppable and yet I wished for it to be dispelled, I wished for zur Mühlen to rewrite history.

It isn’t very often that my country is presented in the focus of an ‘outsider’. Zur Mühlen was an Austrian countess who re-married a Czechoslovak Jew and came to live in pre-war Czechoslovakia. I read Came the Stranger in an English translation from 1946 as I have been unable to find a Slovak or Czech translation of this work. I can think of a multitude of reasons why this book was not translated after the war but very few that would explain why it remains untranslated at this point in time.

The main character is Clarisse, the last in line of an impoverished aristocratic family, who seems to identify as Slovak and is neatly imbedded in the tapestry of the former Austro-Hungarian national and ethnic mix with relations in Austria, Germany, Hungary and Prague, as well as Jewish family members. This, and the fact that the story is taking place in a small village/town near Bratislava, offers the perfect microcosm for the turbulent unfurling of the colossal historical events.

Reading the story made me live through the shift, I went to sleep seeing faces of the local people distort with the hate their bodies became riddled with almost without their knowing. I felt their minds contort, heard their voices warp and smelt their hearts rot. The reading experience was visceral and immersive. I was one of the locals, one of the frightened, helpless and stunned – frozen in disbelief, waiting to wake up.

The novel ends on the brink of the division of Czechoslovakia as Hitler enters Prague and so we are spared the depiction of the horrors that we only know too well to expect. Nevertheless, somehow, without me being able to explain or even internally comprehend, there is a positive ending that does not feel fake or forced, let alone pathetic.

Benedict Kiely’s Proxopera addresses a more intimate trauma. A family is held hostage in their home by Northern Irish Republican terrorists in order to use one of the family members as a delivery driver of their bomb. In 66 pages Kiely plays out  a minute and acute snapshot of the human psyche in extreme circumstance. Granda Binchey does not miss a beat - he remains present and participating both externally and internally. He goes through physical motions – he talks, he walks, he drives; he also thinks, processes and plans, remembers and analyses. His world expands and focuses at the same time.

Each of the characters has depth and breadth, neither is schematic. They all have histories and personalities, yet how Kiely does that in such limited space eludes me. Still, I felt I would be able to recognise the three terrorists on a crowded street, despite the masks they are wearing.

Possible endings of the story kept taking turns in my mind. Even so, I ended up surprised and impressed.