Eve out of Her Ruins by Ananda Devi, translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman (Les Fugitives, ISBN 9781909585232)

First published in French in 2006, Ananda Devi’s powerful novella Eve out of Her Ruins is now available to English-speaking readers thanks to Jeffrey Zuckerman’s translation and a new London-based imprint, Les Fugitives. It tells the story of an unhappy group of adolescents in an impoverished district of the Mauritian capital, Port-Louis. Saadiq, a bookish Rimbaud obsessive and very much the odd one out in a posse of delinquent youths, is besotted with the eponymous Eve. She is locked in a cycle of abuse: promiscuity and prostitution on the streets and domestic violence – at the hands of her father – at home. When Eve’s closest friend, Savita, is brutally murdered in mysterious circumstances, the little gang is subjected to the attentions of a corrupt police force, and the scurrilous gossip of their local community.

Told in a sparse, economical prose with the narrative voice split across several perspectives – rotating between Eve, Saadiq, Savita and the neighbourhood tough, Clélio – Eve out of Her Ruins is a quietly harrowing portrait of the moral toxicity of groupthink, and the insidious banality of gendered violence. Headstrong and unapologetically wilful, Eve’s monologues are a bleak meditation on the contingent nature of personal sovereignty in a social world defined by deeply entrenched power relations: ‘We’re butterflies caught in a net,’ she observes, ‘even at our most exultant, even at our most resistant.’