Indelible Marks

In “An Elegy,” the final entry in André Alexis’s latest collection of stories, an autofictional narrator traces the origins of his literary preoccupations. “I had, without realizing it, become obsessed with the unhomely, with the strange,” he admits, while contemplating how immigration to Canada informs his art. Writing about the loss of his childhood — of how slippery memories of “my Trinidad” manifest in his work — he arrives at unheimlich, which he explains is “a German word that is literally ‘un‑home-like’ and means ‘scary,’ ‘sinister,’ ‘weird.’ ”

Although “unhomely” and “unhomelike” are indeed accurate translations, the decorated novelist fails to mention that unheimlich is perhaps best rendered in English as “uncanny.” In his essay “Das Unheimliche,” from 1919, Sigmund Freud expounded on the complexity of this concept and its role in both literature and life. “The ‘uncanny,’ ” according to Alix Strachey’s translation, “is that class of the...