#TuesdayTales — 6 January

Venice is usually sold to us as a postcard: light on stone, gondolas, romance, theatre. Venice Requiem tears that postcard in half and asks what remains when a city’s beauty becomes the backdrop to a death — and when that death is quietly folded into the churn of “everyday tragedy.”

Khalid Lyamlahy’s novel (translated from French by Ros Schwartz) is rooted in a real event: on 22 January 2017, Pateh Sabally, a 22-year-old Gambian refugee living in Italy, fell into Venice’s Grand Canal and drowned as onlookers watched. Outrage followed — and then the familiar fade-out: the headline moves on; the name slips away.

What Lyamlahy attempts here is not reportage, and not consolation. It is a work of fiction written as a form of witness — refusing easy moral display, and instead pressing on the harder question: what does it mean to look, to narrate, to arrive late?

A novel built from fragments, not certainty

The book opens in the second person — “you” — and that choice matters. It addresses the dead as presence rather than case study, and it implicates the narrator in the act of speaking. From the start, the voice feels late, unsettled, and alert to its own limitations: writing after the fact, trying to find a form that can hold what happened without turning it into spectacle.

Lyamlahy’s method is structural. Instead of smoothing grief into a clean line, the work moves in fragments and returns — assembling attention from reports, gaps, and competing versions of a life flattened by the machinery of public narrative.

At moments, the novel’s thinking is linguistic as well as ethical: it dwells on the way words carry sound, accident, and meaning — how explanation and “reason” can fail in the presence of water, and how language itself can register that mismatch. (Read this as an invitation from the text rather than a solved puzzle.)

Venice as a system of looking

This Venice is not scenery. It is a system: a city written into myth for centuries, confronted with a death that stains the myth precisely because it cannot be absorbed as “atmosphere.”

The press materials describe the work as moving between Banjul and Venice, drawing a line between places that Europe often keeps conceptually separate — tourist Venice and migrant Europe; culture and border; postcard and waterline.

In the closing pages, the novel returns insistently to aftermath and repetition: the gestures that attempt to memorialise, the city’s need to normalise, the uneasy persistence of a name that keeps trying to disappear. Nothing is “resolved.” The force comes from recurrence — the refusal to let a life become merely “what happened.”

Translation that keeps the restraint

This English edition is translated by Ros Schwartz. In the sections provided, the translation’s strength is tonal discipline: the prose remains controlled even when the subject matter could easily tip into rhetoric. That restraint is part of the book’s ethics — it doesn’t demand tears; it demands attention.

Why we’re opening 2026 with this

We’re opening the year with Venice Requiem because it refuses the easy comforts of “awareness” and asks a harder question: what can writing do when it arrives late – and what does a city choose not to see?

Publication details
Venice Requiem (Khalid Lyamlahy; tr. Ros Schwartz). Small Axes / HopeRoad Publishing. 5 February 2026. £12.99 (UK paperback).

Litro Magazine

Diaspora writing Francophone literature Khalid Lyamlahy Literature in translation memory Migration Ros Schwartz Small Axes translation Venice Venice Requiem World Series