Writing Slowly

The Mulai, Munir Hachemi, tr. Julia Sanches (Fitzcarraldo Editions 978-1804272732, June 2026; Coach House Books 978-1-55245-519-7, July 2026).

I came across The Mulai by Spanish author Munir Hachemi because it was the pick for August’s Indieweb Book Club, and I’m happy I did.

This is the kind of intellectual science fiction that intrigues me: lost or unknown ‘alien’ civilisations, or the remnants of failed attempts at planetary colonisation, clinging on to what they remember of ‘civilisation’, or perhaps abandoning it for something stranger and more adaptive.

Familiar tropes are hard at work here. The mysterious nearly-human culture with its almost-but-not-quite-indecipherable language. The unreliable anthropologist, who reports on their observations and is both repelled and strangely attracted to what they encounter. The sudden reversals of expectation and the uncomfortable presentiment of doom.

I’ve enjoyed several books that work with and extend these ideas. Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time asks whether it’s possible to work for a better future without succumbing to Utopian fantasies. China Miéville’s Embassytown addresses the near impossibilities of translation across incommensurable cultures and physiologies, as does Ted Chiang’s novella, “Story of Your Life”. Chris Beckett’s Dark Eden explores the travails of the descendants of human colonists, abandoned on an inhospitable planet. Bird Deity by John Morrissey depicts the stark brutality of planetary colonisation that exploits everything it touches while understanding almost nothing of the indigenous inhabitants it depends on (Here’s a review). And hovering behind all these works is Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, that “ambiguous utopia.”

I make this litany to mark out the familiar territory, but as Chris Beckett said of his novel, “it’s what you do with these themes that’s important, not whether they’re new or not.”

And indeed these recurring themes remain vital. How are we to encounter the strange, the radically different, the inexplicably other? It’s something people seem to be terrible at. In her review of Embassytown for The Guardian, Ursula K. Le Guin observed:

“There are men right now who have never learned how to talk to women. How will we talk to somebody really different – aliens?”

The eponymous Mulai of Hachemi’s novel are definitely not familiar. They aren’t aliens, but for Dr. Nahum Cordovero, the “archaeologist” who comes to study them in their 159th year of isolation, they might as well be. They are the survivors of a failed attempt at planetary colonisation, terraforming pioneers, abandoned when their distant sponsors became preoccupied with a war.

After generations of abandonment the Mulai have forgotten almost everything about the advanced technology that still keeps them alive. They have long sublimated their hope of rescue into a more abstract eschatology: “The tree comes.” This mantra comforts them, perhaps especially due to its lack of any connection to reality.

Since arriving on this barely inhabitable planet they have rapidly and comprehensively transformed almost every aspect of their previous way of life. To Dr. Cordovero, everything about them is tantalisingly hard to understand.

As he comes to terms with the language of the Mulai, it both clarifies the culture and renders it harder to interpret. His status as an outsider is tested to breaking point. By learning the language, the culture it represents begins to interpret him.

Meanwhile, Faida, one of the Mulai, is also finding it hard to understand life. Having embarked on a quite different quest, she has encountered a book hidden by one of the original colonists. The reader may recognise it almost at once as Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, but to Faida it’s a deep enigma. She resolves to attempt the impossible: to break with taboos in order to translate this strange artifact into the Mulai language.

From these different angles, then, questions of language, culture, and interpretation are problematised rather than reaching a clear resolution.

Hachemi’s previous novel, Living Things, observed that nuances and misunderstandings “are not the collateral damage of language but the conditions of its existence”.

The reader is deeply implicated in this process. How to make sense of this fragmented narrative? What do these strange words mean? What is the actual purpose of Cordovero’s mission and what are the implications of his heavily censored conclusions (censorship presumably being a condition of their existence)?

“El árbol viene” — “The Tree Comes” — is the original Spanish title of the novel. This is the meaning of mu lai, 木来 in Chinese. It’s part of a sign at the entrance to the dome under which the Mulai live, which, if it wasn’t for the weathering of the planet’s fierce seasons, would still read 未来, wei lai. The now missing extra stroke would signify, “Future”, the official, long-forgotten name of the original mission.

This is a sign that we’re firmly in the territory of metafiction. It is also a reference to one of the works quoted in the epigraph to the novel, Argentinian author Héctor Libertella’s El árbol de Saussure: Una utopía. This work declares “the future is over” at the same time as it pulls apart the famous claims of the Swiss linguist of the tenuous relationship between the word “tree” and the living tree it signifies.

The metafiction deepens as the reader is led to wonder about the importance of de Saussure’s linguistic theories and their appropriation by Jacques Lacan via Libertella’s satire. The same applies to Calvino’s Invisible Cities, along with two fictional works repeatedly alluded to as the narrative progresses: the Libertarian Codex, and its “first amendment”, the Teachings of Flukeh.

All is puzzling fragments in this tale told through a multi-authored collection of papers, disjointed in time and of often dubious perspective. This sense of spatial, cultural and literary estrangement is surely appropriate for a novel fundamentally about estrangement. I found it deeply compelling and finished the book in two intense sittings. No sooner had I read the last page than I found myself turning straight back to the first page to re-read with a new, if still very incomplete understanding. “The future is over,” begins Dr. Cordovero. But that’s just the start.

There’s a great review of The Mulai by Xiao Yue Shan in Asymptote Journal. It’s worth reading even if you don’t read the novel.

And from an interview with the author (in Spanish) I discovered he seems to have a Mulai glyph tattooed on his forearm. Now that’s commitment to your art.

See more on the IndieWeb Book Club

Now read:

César Aira on the constant flight forward

Thoughts on Piranesi, a novel by Susanna Clarke

I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, available now.

References

• Beckett, Chris. Dark Eden. Corvus, 2012.
• Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. Translated by William Weaver, Harvest Book / Harcourt Brace & Company, 1974.
• Chiang, Ted. “Story of Your Life.” Stories of Your Life and Others, Small Beer Press, 2002, pp. 91-140.
• Hachemi, Munir. Living Things. Translated by Julai Sanches. Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2024.
• Hachemi, Munir. The Mulai. Translated by Julia Sanches, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2026.
• Le Guin, Ursula K. The Dispossessed. Harper Voyager, 2014.
• Libertella, Héctor. El árbol de Saussure: Una utopía. Adriana Hidalgo Editora, 2000.
• Miéville, China. Embassytown. Del Rey, 2012.
• Morrissey, John. Bird Deity. Text Publishing, 2026.
• Piercy, Marge. Woman on the Edge of Time. Fawcett Crest, 1985.