She Who Remains - Rene Karabash
Leaf & Lens | A Reader's Review
★★★★ 4 / 5 stars
Some books you read. Some books you hear. She Who Remains is the second kind. From the very first page, Rene Karabash writes in a rhythm that sounds like chanting, like grief being recited aloud in a room where the walls remember everything. This is not a book you settle into comfortably. It is a book that grabs you by the collar and refuses to let go, even after you have put it down and walked away and tried to think about something else.
The World It Lives In
It is 2017 in a rural Albanian village, though you would never guess the year unless you noticed the letters scattered through the text. Everything here operates under the Kanun of Leke Dukagjini, a medieval code of customary law built on blood feuds, honour, and the total subordination of women. The village does not feel like the 21st century. It does not want to. The Kanun is the air here, the architecture, the verdict before any crime has been committed.
At the centre of everything is Bekija, a young woman who, rather than marry a man she does not love, chooses to become a sworn virgin, taking the masculine name Matija, renouncing her womanhood in exchange for the rights of a man. She can drink at the pub, stand with the men, smoke, move freely. What she cannot do is love the woman she loves. And the choice she makes to protect herself sets off a chain of consequences that tears her family apart and leaves blood on every page that follows.
The Form Is the Feeling
Karabash writes in a stream of consciousness that fractures and loops, switching perspective mid-sentence, circling back to scenes from different angles, letting voices bleed into one another without clear borders. It sounds like it should be exhausting. Occasionally it is. But mostly it works because the form is doing exactly what the story needs: it puts you inside a mind that cannot think in straight lines because the grief is too large and the truth too layered to unspool cleanly.
There is also deliberate repetition throughout, phrases and images that return again and again, each time with a slightly different weight. I found this one of the most effective things in the book. A sentence that seemed plain on first encounter becomes devastating by its fourth appearance, once you understand what it is actually about. That slow accretion of meaning is something only this particular style can achieve. A conventional novel would have told you the meaning directly. Karabash makes you earn it.
Bekija and the Question of Identity
What makes this novel genuinely interesting rather than simply bleak is how carefully and generously Karabash handles Bekija's identity. This is not a book about a woman trapped between genders in the way that contemporary Western discourse would frame it, though those resonances are there and they are real. It is a book about a woman making an impossible choice inside an impossible system, and about what that choice costs her in the most intimate places, in her body, her desire, her relationship to the person she loves most.
Karabash gives even the most difficult characters, people who do genuinely harmful things, a kind of interior logic that makes them human without excusing them. That moral seriousness is rare and it makes the tragedy land harder than it would if the novel simply sorted everyone into victims and villains.
What I Struggled With
The style, which is the novel's greatest strength, is also where it asks the most of you. The fragmentation and repetition, for all their effectiveness, do occasionally tip into something that feels more like texture than propulsion. There were passages, particularly in the second half, where I felt the momentum stall. The emotional intensity never flags, but the sense of forward movement does, and there is a difference between being held in stillness purposefully and being held in stillness past the point where it continues to yield something new.
The lack of chronological anchoring also takes adjustment. Karabash withholds context deliberately and reveals the full truth late. Most of the time this works beautifully. Occasionally it creates a fog where I wanted clarity, not as a shortcut but because the fog was beginning to distance me from the very characters I wanted to feel most deeply.
Izidora Angel's Translation
I would be doing this book a disservice if I did not spend a moment on the translation, because Izidora Angel's work here is extraordinary. Preserving the hypnotic, shifting, almost spoken quality of Karabash's prose across two languages and two very different literary cultures is no small thing. The English text hums with the same restless, urgent energy that readers describe in the Bulgarian original. Angel won the Gulf Coast Prize in Translation for this work and it is entirely deserved.
Final Thoughts
She Who Remains is a fierce, formally daring debut that takes an ancient subject, the annihilation of women under patriarchal law, and refuses to render it in a language that is safe or distant or easily digestible. It demands a particular kind of reading patience, the willingness to sit inside discomfort without reaching for resolution. If you can offer that, it will give you something back that most novels simply cannot.
It is not a perfect book. The style pushes right up to the edge of its own limitations. But it is a singular one, the kind that makes you feel the specific texture of a life and a world you would otherwise never have access to, and that is not a small thing at all.
Rating: ★★★★ 4 / 5 stars
For readers who love: Border Districts by Gerald Murnane, The Vegetarian by Han Kang, Sworn Virgin by Elvira Dones, and anyone drawn to novels that live in the space between grief and transformation.