Jordan Kisner

‘The defining feature of a tragedy is that we know how it will end,’ a character tells us towards the end of Clean, Alia Trabucco Zerán’s latest novel. ‘And yet, for some reason, we carry on reading.’ The book begins with a sense of brutal inevitability. An unknown voice speaks flatly in a silent room: ‘The end of this story – are you sure you...

As in a fairy tale​, a girl is running through a dark wood. She owns nothing in her own right: her boots were stolen off the corpse of a smallpox victim; her leather gloves were taken from her mistress. She doesn’t even have a proper name. In the poorhouse where she once lived, she was called Lamentations. The aristocratic mistress to whom she was later sent as a pet called her Zed,...

Let’s​ start with her life, which is as operatically strange as the fiction. Susan Taubes was born Judit Zsuzánna Feldmann in Budapest in 1928. Her father was one of Freud’s disciples; his father was chief rabbi of Budapest. At the age of eleven, she and her father left Hungary for the United States (her mother stayed behind to marry someone else) and watched from afar as...