#RivetingReviews: Sarah Escritt reviews CLEARING by Iris Wolff, translated by Ruth Martin

Reading Iris Wolff’s writing is like immersing oneself in the pages of a beautifully composed picture book. Clearing shows us the forests, mountains and plains of Romania where Wolff spent her childhood. Each scene, vividly realised, resonates with others – in this book and in her earlier works.

Like Blurred, also published by Moth Books in an insightful translation by Ruth Martin, Clearing opens with a journey into the future which leaves tracks that stretch into the past. In Blurred a horse-drawn sledge left lines in the snow of 1970s Romania. In Clearing the central character, Lev, is travelling with his childhood love, Kato, on a windblown, noisy and diesel-fumed ferry; the boat leaves a trail of foam in its wake. This push/pull, forwards and backwards, is a current that runs through the text. It is also expressed in the pendulum-like sentences, which swing between present and past. We are reminded that the present is a threshold to a future that we cannot foresee but in which the past will resonate; however, Wolff also shows us that her characters need to find ways to let go of the past if they are to shape their lives into the future. 

Clearing is book-ended by two short chapters, and it’s in the second chapter, in Zurich, that Lev’s story really begins. His disorientation, far from home in this busy city where German is spoken with a new accent, coincides with our initial search for navigation points within the book and the rhythm of its language. We look for clues to try to locate the characters, just as Lev, after years apart from Kato, has to learn the new reference points in her life. The story that we discover in this book is the only one that is available when we meet someone for the first time: it is the story of Lev’s past. As we read forwards through the chapters, we follow his life backwards to early childhood. It is a process of growing understanding; half-understood conversations start to make sense, and names mentioned in passing are contextualised. We learn too to recognise the courage it has taken for Lev to leave Romania to join Kato on her travels; for some, by contrast, the urge to escape was overwhelming.

Spooling back through the distillations of memory, or clearings, in Lev’s life takes us deep into the complexities of the country and family in which he grew up. As the quotations at the beginning of each chapter indicate, Lev’s world straddled different nationalities, languages, systems of belief and story-telling traditions. Ruling over it all, for the first decades of his life, was Ceauşescu’s dictatorship, under which hidden danger might lurk in a summer’s day, people could disappear without explanation, and reading the subtext of words and actions was a survival strategy. 

As Lev looks forwards into a future that we will see only in retrospect, the question hovers: do we progress or are we, as Lev’s mother says despairingly, doomed to re-enact again and again what is fundamentally the same story? This is a novel of beauty and profundity. In its pictures lurk sobering depths.

Reviewed by Sarah Escritt

CLEARING

Written by Iris Wolff

Translated by Ruth Martin

Published by Moth Books (2026)

June 2026 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.

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Sarah Escritt was the runner-up in the 2025 Goethe-Institut Award for New Translation.

Read Sarah Escritt’s #‎RivetingReview of BAD SHEEP by Katja Lange-Müller, translated by Simon Pare