Khalid Lyamlahy’s Venice Requiem, out with HopeRoad’s imprint Small Axes in four days’ time, impeccably translated by Ros Schwartz, is a novel based on the true story of Pateh Sabally, a twenty-two-year-old Gambian refugee. In January 2017, two years after arriving in Italy, Pateh travelled to Venice from Milan and threw himself into the Grand Canal, drowning as a crowd looked on. Around this central, tragic event, the author constructs a fictional account: the novel’s narrator, a writer living in Paris, decides to tell Pateh’s story.
Lyamlahy retraces Pateh’s steps through Venice and tries to resolve the unanswerable questions that surround his death. Pateh’s fate haunts the narrator as he attempts to understand the first world’s indifference to the plight of migrants and refugees. Woven through the text are snippets of the real stories of other deaths, of other drownings not in canals but in small boat crossings.
Migrant Literature
In the Small Axes list, Venice Requiem follows Vincent Delecroix’s searing novel Small Boat, translated from French by Helen Stevenson, also reviewed for Bookblast Diary. It is the subject of the Bookblast Translation Book Club’s next meeting on 9 February 2026.
Small Boat, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, presents a fictionalised account of the real sinking of a dinghy in the Channel in November 2021 which killed twenty-seven people. One of the key culprits in their deaths was an indifference bordering on hostility: the French coastguard, in answer to the frantic calls of the passengers, told them that they were in British jurisdiction and should direct their cries for help to British services instead.
Venice Requiem similarly describes the callous inaction of the tourists, boatmen and citizens watching from the bridges, the banks and the vaporettos: “According to some eyewitnesses, a lifeguard was about to dive in to try and rescue you but was dissuaded. After all, he wasn’t equipped. He didn’t have the protective black rubber wetsuit or the certainty that he could or should help you. Apparently, one or two tourists were also prepared to jump off the vaporetto to help. Others felt it would be too risky since the water temperature was five degrees. Insults started flying again. The nauseating words drummed out. People would rather see you die here, now, as fast as possible, so they can quickly turn the page of this unforeseen interruption and put an end to this misadventure. Let them fish your lifeless body out so that peace and tranquillity can be restored. As if nothing had happened.”
Signs and Symbols
In a French-language interview with France 24, Lyamlahy describes his writing as “a hand held out to Pateh Sabally and, through him, also to all refugees, to all displaced people”. †
In the book, Pateh’s story echoes and reflects those of other refugees who have died. Before leaping into the water, he sealed his train ticket from Milan and his residence card in a plastic wallet. In a heartbreaking paragraph, the narrator describes a fourteen-year-old from Mali who drowned with his school report sewn into the lining of his jacket. Pateh’s sole possession, a backpack, is compared to the belongings refugees cling to while making their journeys. And yet the narrator chooses to walk the thin line between using Pateh’s story to make a statement about the treatment of migrants and refugees in Europe (as Lyamlahy writes, “a cracked mirror in which the entire world can see its smugness reflected”) and avoiding the dehumanisation that would come with turning him into a symbol, rather than dealing with him as an individual. “I am wary of that word, which reeks of displacement, effacement, hastily and indecently reducing you to an abstraction. A symbol of what, exactly?”
The narrator’s use of ‘you’ to refer to Pateh is part of this effort to retain his humanity, as is the care the author takes not to give easy answers. The narrator is constantly questioning himself, his writing, his motives, keeping in view the fact “that no book will suffice to tell the full story, to do justice to your death”. Lyamlahy writes in fragments and mixes fiction with reality, inspired – as he says in the France 24 interview – by Aimé Césaire’s combination of “politics and poetry.” † The fragmented story, the cracked mirror reflecting the stories of other migrants, the architecture of Venice, the geography that connects and separates Africa from Europe, gives a truer picture of the situation than would a straight work of reportage. But there is another shadow over Pateh’s story which threatens to swallow him up – the city in which he ended his life.
Death in Venice
The Grand Canal with San Simeone Piccolo, Canaletto, 1740. (National Gallery, WikiCommons)Pateh’s journey began in Banjul, the capital of Gambia. From there, he crossed the ocean and found refuge in Pozzallo, Sicily, in 2015 before moving to Milan. It is unclear why he decided to travel to Venice, and the narrator comes to no conclusion. Within the framework of the novel, however, Venice becomes the symbol of historic Europe, long centuries of accumulated wealth and power threatening to crush the unwary newcomer.
Although Lyamlahy rejects comparisons to Mann’s novel, calling them an “easy shortcut”, other works of literature and art featuring Venice still weigh heavily on the novel (“How is it possible to write about Venice after Alfred de Musset and Madame de Staël, Balzac and Proust, Ruskin and Hemingway?”), and descriptions of the bridges, the churches, the gondolas, the tourists with their brochures are unavoidable. Where does a young refugee from Africa fit into this picture, into this wealthy city of myth and legend?
In one way, of course, he doesn’t. Pateh is insulted even as he dies by onlookers, following a trend of rejection and fear in his journey to residency in Europe. But in Lyamlahy’s multifaceted book, there are always more sides to the story. The Grand Canal becomes “a long, scaly, green reptile” eager to devour the memory of Pateh’s life and his death, even as the narrator hallucinates his shadow still passing through the streets. His memory is, in the end, not devoured. The city is now “no longer . . . only the Venice of Canaletto, but also the Venice where Pateh died one afternoon in January 2017”.
Fellow refugees who have found life and hope in Venice gather each January to throw a wreath into the waters of the canal. At the same time, the city becomes the symbol of Europe’s decline, of its inability to deal with a changing world. Venice is threatened by floods which rise higher every year, as the erosion of its foundations leave it at risk of sliding into the sea. The city becomes a place where the living and the dead are one, “an invitation to cross the porous frontier between the here and elsewhere”. Despite his fears of cliché and imitation, Lyamlahy’s Venice is unique, shaped around the story of Pateh’s passage through it.
Cruel Milestones
Lyamlahy writes: “In March 2020, the United Nations website announced that the migrant death toll in the Mediterranean had reached the milestone of 20,000. It took the umpteenth boat to capsize off the Libyan coast. I realised how cruel the word “milestone” is. The language of records and statistics that nothing seemed able to halt. The shocking numbers that haphazardly swallow up the individual faces, stories, journeys and fears, and the ordeal of those who leave and of those who stay behind.”
That number has only increased. An International Organization for Migration article puts the death toll for 2025 at 1,340 people, while hundreds were already missing in the first days of 2026 following a violent storm in the Mediterranean. “One day,” Lyamlahy writes, “someone should lift up the surface of the water and spell out the names of all the drowned.” He has done his best to spell out Pateh’s name in Venice Requiem, an attempt to push back against the dehumanisation of refugees and migrants while never losing sight of the fact that the majority of those lost on their journey to refuge will never have their stories told. Venice Requiem is a beautiful, heartfelt and heart-wrenching book which shows the utmost respect for its subject and for all African refugees who have lost their lives, to whom the book is dedicated.
† Reviewer’s own translation
Reviewed by Clem Clement for BookBlast®
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