Worlds Not Their Own

As she works on her Turkish lessons, an unnamed French writer gets “stuck on the chapter about indirect speech.” Although she has been in Istanbul for a few years, she still struggles with the language that surrounds her, which is also the mother tongue of her lover. “Everything gets complicated — who’s talking to whom, who’s there, who’s not there,” she says. With fleeting insight, Valerie Manteau describes the very framework for The Furrow, which was first published in French in 2018.

This is a story of reportage without signposts or direction. Sentences slip between inner and outer dialogue. Time shifts and changes quickly, as do speakers, listeners, settings. Translated into English by the Toronto bookseller Claire Foster, the slim autobiographical novel — if it can be called that — evades any sense of certainty. The result is a vibrant meditation on grasping at a place — its people, its politics — through the words of a writer. With little regard for...