Category Archives: fiction reviews

IVORY PEARL, a novel by Jean-Patrick Manchette, reviewed by Ryan K. Strader

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Ivory Pearl cover photo. A grainy photo of palm trees and the ocean seen through half-opened window blinds

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IVORY PEARL
by Jean-Patrick Manchette
translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
New York Review Books, 170 pages

reviewed by Ryan K. Strader

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The young heiress of a black market arms dealer is kidnapped, a kidnapper is decapitated, there are two fiery explosions, one man has been shot through and is still roaming around, and there is a rescue attempt. The rescue might be an inside operation, or it might be another kidnapping. The young heiress has vanished with a violent man who might be good or might be bad, and there are some other people looking for her, who might be good or might be bad.

All this occurs on the first nine pages of Ivory Pearl. The bloody mayhem is dexterous and supple, perfectly choreographed and so cool. The cars are shiny and Italian, the weapons are exotic and expertly wielded.

Ivory Pearl is Jean-Patrick Manchette’s final and unfinished novel, now available in an English translation by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Manchette was known during his lifetime for his 1970s crime novels, noir that gained popular movie adaptations and made him a standard among French crime writers. This translation features endnotes on how Manchette envisioned the novel ending, and an introduction written by Manchette’s son, Doug Headline, which is as affectionate as it is informative. While Ivory Pearl certainly has many noir characteristics, it is more of a spy thriller than a crime novel. The main character, Ivory Pearl, is an interesting riff on the femme fatale. A photographer with an “alarming predilection for pictures of dead bodies,” Ivy can shoot a gun, build herself a table with a machete, and charm Malaysian guerillas into posing for pictures.

Like many noir antiheroes, Ivy has no family: an orphan who escaped a French orphanage at age 13 during World War II, she was adopted and protected by a group of British troops who dubbed her “Ivory Pearl,” “Ivy” for short. While loitering around with the troops, she meets Samuel Farakhan, a closeted gay officer who comes up with a clever plan: he will become Ivy’s patron, sending her off to a Swiss private school and giving her a life she could only dream of, if in return she will visit him and appear to enjoy his affection. Their relationship will provide cover for his homosexuality, and launch Ivy into a safer life, not to mention a higher social class.

This seems like a win/win, except the reader gets a sense that there’s more to Farakhan than meets the eye. His assessment of Ivy’s character is shrewd and utilitarian: the Swiss school will “enhance your talents,” he assures Ivy, but he is confident that they cannot change her personality. “I am fairly sure it is already formed,” he assures her. He has picked Ivy for some reason, but we’re not yet sure why.

Fast forward to Ivy’s mid-twenties. Her childhood familiarity with soldiers and war, married to her Swiss education and Farakhan’s wealth and connections, have paid off well. Ivy is a famous photographer, having been embedded with several militaries around the globe and selling pictures to Paris Match and Life. We’re not sure if anyone believes that Farakhan isn’t gay, but we do know that his career hasn’t suffered, so we can guess that developing a globe-trotting benefactress has worked for his military image. And in noirish fashion, if anyone wants to doubt his affection for Ivy, Farakhan has an impressive collection of semi-automatic handguns with which to silence them.

This is a clever premise for a thriller, but of course it’s only half of the story: Farakhan isn’t just any officer, and he didn’t just pick Ivy because she was pretty and homeless. Illicit motivations and machinations emerge through the story, and just when it seems that our main characters have some clarity on why they are in the predicament they’re in, new information turns the situation on its head.

Ivy tires of the spotlight and wants to retreat to do nature photography, and Farakhan suggests the perfect place for her to go: Cuba. While camping in the Sierra Maestra, Ivy meets a mysterious man sheltering a teenage girl…what a strange coincidence. Is this Alba Black, the kidnapped heiress of Aaron Black, a notorious American arms dealer? What is really motivating the girl’s protector, Maurer? Why was she kidnapped in the first place? And how did she and Ivy come to be on the same mountain in Cuba?

Jean-Patrick Manchette author photo

Jean-Patrick Manchette

I have heard noir described as the existentialist version of crime literature, and while that might not always hold true, it does for Ivory Pearl. Interestingly, the questions that Ivory Pearl grapples with seem to mirror her creator’s frustration with his own historical role. While the 1970s had been a prolific period for Manchette, he did not write an original novel during the 1980s. Manchette embraced “leftist” politics and had seen noir crime as a subversive genre, a niche style of writing that went against the cultural grain. His son, Headline, describes how Manchette felt that the crime novel had become big business, “a cultural commodity integrated into the order of things,” and no long able to make waves in any cultural or political discussion. Headline writes: “If one were to assign him (Manchette) a dominant character trait, it would have to be the moral rectitude exemplified by the intransigence he showed himself as much as others. He therefore felt obligated to search for a new form, and a new field, for fear of losing his soul.” In its admirable form, “intransigence” is resoluteness and unwillingness to compromise. In its less admirable moments, this is pigheadedness and unwillingness to understand others. Interestingly, Ivy struggles to figure out her place in history with some of the same character foibles: she is intransigent, resolute, and has difficulty with compromise.

This double-edged character trait greatly complicates questions of loyalty and moral consistency. Is Ivy morally consistent? She will join the British troops as they fight Communist guerillas, then switch to the guerrillas, then sell all of her pictures. She follows Farakhan’s suggestions about where to go and what to photograph, even when she knows that his role in politics is shadowy, and his goals are unclear. Is loyalty to him as a substitute father more important, or is there an ideal at stake? And what about the girl, who goes by “Negra,” and who becomes attached to Ivy? What kind of loyalty and fundamental values are at stake when, inevitably, a hit squad arrives for her?

Manchette is frequently quoted as having said that the mystery novel is “the great moral literature of our era,” and his son claims that despair at the genre’s loss of moral focus is what kept Manchette from writing for the better part of a decade.

Manchette is frequently quoted as having said that the mystery novel is “the great moral literature of our era,” and his son claims that despair at the genre’s loss of moral focus is what kept Manchette from writing for the better part of a decade. As intriguing as questions about Ivy’s personal beliefs and consistency are, the novel itself seems to be asking a larger moral question about how individuals participate in history. Ivy’s attempt to withdraw from her fame as a war photographer is also an attempt to withdraw from the events of her time. Manchette seems to ask us: Can we excise ourselves from our historical moment? Or are we all, whether we like it or not, actors in an unmitigated conflict, barely free to choose the side we fight for? If we cannot “withdraw” from history, is it then our obligation to try to make a historical difference? Judging from Doug Headline’s notes on how Manchette intended to conclude the novel, Manchette would say that no one can recuse themselves from history and that while Ivy is certainly a reluctant actor, her reluctance makes her easily manipulable by people like Farakhan, who believe they have historical agency. Maurer remains a bit of a mystery—we know very little about him except that he is a badass who can yield a parang (a Malaysian knife) with dangerous precision—it’s tempting to think of him as a mountain man, but he has some semi-courtly manners and a complex sense of justice that leads me to believe he would have helped to draw out Ivy’s (and perhaps Manchette’s) thoughts on what it might mean to work for what is “right” in whatever historical context we find ourselves living in.

Manchette began writing Ivory Pearl in 1989, the same year he was diagnosed with cancer. He died in 1995, leaving us 150 finished pages, minus the notes on the novel’s intended conclusion.

Through a few providential friendships with other noir authors and their work, Manchette had formulated Ivory Pearl as the beginning novel in a new series that would constitute a new genre. Influenced greatly by work that dealt with international espionage and covert forces, the new series would be a blend of noir fiction, spy thriller, and political history, and would span the period just after World War II to present. Headline writes that his father envisioned a series that “presented a sardonic view of a world governed by multiple antagonistic covert forces,” where main characters would reappear in other novels in secondary roles. It seems that Ivy was not meant to remain the main character of the entire series, although I suspect she would have become popular enough that cult audiences would have demanded future installments featuring her. Headline writes that Manchette described the theme of the new series as: “How the hell did it all come to this?” which emphasizes the political aspects of his new work and his vision of people as “manipulated pawns” in the forces of history.

Manchette began writing Ivory Pearl in 1989, the same year he was diagnosed with cancer. He died in 1995, leaving us 150 finished pages, minus the notes on the novel’s intended conclusion. Although Manchette was not well enough to work on the book continually, his son notes that writing about Ivy became a “grand sally” that “often acted as a rampart against illness for my father during his hard final years.” Ivy’s predicaments are high-stakes, and I can see how her multi-country escapades and fierce personality could become a grand sally against her writer’s physical immobility. The writing has the kind of vivid didacticism that feels like escaping into a movie: we know what kind of photographic equipment Ivy has in her hands, what kind of silk Farakhan’s scarf is made of, the brand of their cigarettes and vodka, which jazz record is playing, the name of the artist whose work is hanging on the wall. In the same way that Headline claims Ivy inspired Manchette and was “worth fighting for” through his illness, I think that she is a strong enough character to charm readers even in her unfinished state. I can see Ivy living on in graphic novels and further stories told by other writers, much like Lisbeth Salander (who was a rampart against memory for her creator, Steig Larson) far outlived her trilogy.

Ryan K. Strader author photoRyan K. Strader earned a B.A. in Russian Literature from George Mason University and an M.A.T. from Clayton State University. She is currently an instructional designer and researcher. Her most recent instructional design project is the development of a class in writing and qualitative research methods at Georgia State University, where she is also a doctoral student. Her most recent publication is an upcoming book chapter on populism in young adult novels. She lives and works in the Atlanta area.

THE JUNIPER TREE, a novel by Barbara Comyns, reviewed by Allegra Armstrong

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The Juniper Tree cover art. Abstract white butterflies in abstract white trees against a dark blue backgroundTHE JUNIPER TREE
by Barbara Comyns
NYRB Classics, 177 pages

reviewed by Allegra Armstrong

The Juniper Tree is a mid-twentieth-century retelling of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale of the same name, though Barbara Comyns has made the story all her own. Originally published in 1985, The Juniper Tree tells the story of Bella Winter, the unwed mother of a biracial daughter, through her quest to live life on her own terms in a world where she is patently disapproved of for being who she is.

Comyns wrote female characters who speak their minds in a world which discourages them from doing that.

Comyns, who died in 1992, is also the author of Our Spoons Come From Woolworths, and the protagonist in that novel is similar to Bella. Both women see and describe the world very plainly and openly, which feels unconventional and refreshing in the opening scenes of The Juniper Tree. Comyns wrote female characters who speak their minds in a world which discourages them from doing that.

What is most wonderful about the Juniper Tree’s narrator, Bella Winter, is her commitment to herself and her own personal happiness. Throughout the book, Bella frequently converses with her mother by phone. Bella’s mother wants Bella to live a more conventional life. She is extremely cruel to her, claiming that Bella should find a husband and then wondering openly what man would want her.

Bella Winter is so forthright a narrator it makes the world of the story feel hyperreal.

However, Bella, a buyer for an antique store with an exceptional eye for antiques and an artistic, dreamy way of thinking, never fails to put her personal feelings ahead of what society wants for her. The reader never doubts that Bella will be okay, because Bella is so set on making sure she and her daughter thrive no matter what, and Bella has the tenacity and know-how to make that happen.

Barbara Comyns author photo

Barbara Comyns

Bella Winter is so forthright a narrator it makes the world of the story feel hyperreal. In one passage, Bella describes her ex-boyfriend, Stephen. “So Stephen became my friend, not a trusted friend, but a friend. He used to arrive without warning, sometimes with a bottle of wine and sometimes without, but he always expected a meal.” In this scene, Stephen is closely observed to hilarious effect. Without Bella’s candor, this observation would fall flat. As The Juniper Tree goes on, Bella’s prosperous life with her daughter, Tommy, unfolds. The reader follows Bella as she falls in love with her recently widowed friend, Bernard, but balks at the idea of living with him because he might have some ownership over her. Though Bella does eventually end up living with him in his home, giving up her job at the antique store, it is refreshing to see Bella hold on to what is uniquely her about her even in the face of a man who cannot see her clearly for want of his dead wife.

In Bella’s marriage to Bernard, Comyns explicitly plays with the Brothers Grimm fairy tale. In the original story, the stepmother is very cruel. Comyns pulls a kind of substitution here, as Bella is very kind to her stepson. The wicked stepmother in The Juniper Tree is actually Bella’s biological mother, and Bernard, who is indifferent—preferring to spend his time dreaming about his deceased wife over caring for his existing marriage—assumes the role of the father. In the original Brothers Grimm tale, the father is so absent at home that he does not realize that he is eating a stew made out of his own son’s body.

Late in the book, Bella observes about Bernard’s son, Johnny: “He wasn’t a naturally difficult child; Bernard had made him so.” In that scene, Bernard can be seen privileging Johnny over Tommy, and it frustrates Bella. In some ways, Tommy is better off for what she has experienced; Johnny, who constantly gets his own way, is spoiled and difficult by the end of the book, much like his father.

Though reflecting mid-twentieth-century tensions, many of the questions of identity in the novel feel pertinent in 2018. Prejudice against Tommy, as seen through the eyes of her mother, feel familiar to a contemporary reader. At one point in the story, Bella and Bernard hire a nursemaid to care for Tommy and Johnny. Slowly and subtly she refuses to care for Tommy. Bella has to ask Bernard to notice the nurse’s neglect of the child, as he is so wrapped up in himself. Bernard himself favors his own son over Bella’s daughter, and Johnny is painted as being privileged in this way when he and Tommy argue, as well as being white and a boy.

Bernard, who lives alone in a giant house, marries Bella, who is financially solvent but not as wealthy as he is. Bernard proceeds to monitor closely what parts of the house Bella uses, and when she closes up her antique shop to care for Bernard’s estate and their children, asks Bella to keep her antiques quarantined to a tiny part of his basement. Meanwhile, possessions that belonged to Bernard’s now deceased previous wife take up large parts of his bedroom.

Still, in the world of The Juniper Tree, people who have money or status and misuse it suffer over and over. Bella, committed to personal integrity, and Tommy, brought up to prize love and art and self-knowledge above all else, thrive here. Watching Bella and Tommy navigate a world so set on the accumulation of money and status with such grace is the true joy of The Juniper Tree.

Allegra Armstrong author photoAllegra Armstrong is a Philadelphia-based writer and preschool teacher. She can bike very fast. She reads original poetry aloud at armstrongallegra.bandcamp.com.

THE KREMLIN BALL, a novel by Curzio Malaparte, reviewed by Ryan K. Strader

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The Kremlin Ball cover art. A painting of a woman driving into the square of a cityTHE KREMLIN BALL
by Curzio Malaparte
translated by Jenny McPhee
New York Review Books, 223 pages

reviewed by Ryan K. Strader

In his introductory comments for The Kremlin Ball, Curzio Malaparte claims that his novel is “a faithful portrait of the USSR’s Marxist nobility.” Such a thing should be anachronistic: a Marxist nobility? A communist high society?

But that is exactly what Malaparte, as the novel’s narrator, is describing. In the late 1920s, the years following the Bolshevik victory but prior to Stalin’s Great Terror, the “greedy, vicious […] profiteers of the Revolution” took up the old imperial aristocracy’s places as an haute société. Malaparte describes the actresses, ballerinas, writers, government officials, athletes, and diplomats, all busy with their “court intrigues” of infidelity, peculiar obsessions, jealousies, blackmail, and backstabbing. Far from being a class of revolutionaries that Malaparte had imagined when he traveled to Moscow, these are a class of people willing to exploit revolutionary ideals so that they can enact the same class disparities that existed under the Tsars.

Malaparte describes The Kremlin Ball as a “Proustian” novel, and it is in the sense that is largely an investigation of social class, with Malaparte as our “impartial” and critical observer. But the difference for this Marxist nobility is that they sense that their days are numbered. The Great Terror has not started but it is impending and seemingly inevitable as “Tsar Stalin” gathers power. These Marxist aristocrats enjoy a Kremlin ball the way escaped prisoners run from baying hounds.

While Malaparte was a prolific writer and journalist with many articles, books, and screenplays available in English, this is the first time that The Kremlin Ball has been translated for English readers. Translator Jenny McPhee describes Malaparte as a complex satirist who “foresaw our present political and cultural situation.” While I don’t know that Malaparte meant the novel to be predictive, it is certainly incisive and therefore rife with contemporary applications.

Curzio Malaparte author photo

Curzio Malaparte

Born in 1898 as Kurt Eric Suckert, Malaparte adopted the pseudonym “Malaparte,” which means “evil/wrong side.” He regularly published work that was critical of governments and revolutions, and seemed to frequently find himself on the “wrong side” in the sense that he had offended someone, whether it was in the Italian Army, the Bolshevik government, the National Fascist Party, or Mussolini. While he was a supporter of Mussolini’s Fascist movement, under Mussolini’s regime he was arrested several times and sent into internal exile for a number of years. “The time for laughter is well-nigh over for the free men of our times,” he claims in the introduction to The Kremlin Ball. By “free men” he seems to mean people that think independently and are critical of those in power.

In her introduction to The Kremlin Ball, McPhee acknowledges that Malaparte “displays a disturbing fascination with violence and extreme rule—fascism, Nazism, communism,” but he saw these phenomena as “inevitable aspects of our collective suicide.” On the one hand, Malaparte was invested in Marxist ideals as possible solutions to issues of inequality and corruption. On the other hand, he was not ideologically blinded: he could see that Russia’s Marxist nobility “would exterminate not only communism’s adversaries and enemies of the proletariat, but all free men.”

Like George Orwell, Malaparte is not necessarily rejecting collectivist ideals outright, but as a keen observer of people he sees that human beings tend to be self-destructive, no matter what kind of government ideals they claim to be working toward. No one is innocent or idealized for Malaparte. This kind of even-handed criticism, combined with Malaparte’s journalistic style and his interactions with the most important people in Russia’s government and arts scene of the late 1920s, give The Kremlin Ball the feel of a salacious, courtly tell-all. Malaparte does not let anyone off the hook, and it seems that everyone who is anyone gets mentioned. Stalin and Alexis Karakhan sit in the same theater to watch the ballerina Marina Semyonova. Malaparte strolls down the Arbat with the great writer and playwright Mikhail Bulgakov. He is friends with the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, and visits Mayakovsky’s apartment the day after the poet commits suicide. He dances in the Kremlin with ambassadors’ wives and attends a banquet at the Union of Soviet Writers.

At the same time that Malaparte presents himself as an impartial guide to the machinations of Soviet society, his descriptions at times veer toward magical realism. Frankly, I enjoyed these moments in the narrative more because they were connected to real people, and because they reveal a less than impartial narrator. Dmitry Florinsky, one of the more famous Soviet functionaries among the diplomats, rides around Moscow in an old worm-eaten carriage (one of the last left in Moscow after being outlawed by the Communist Party) that becomes ghostly in Malaparte’s description: the carriage is black with dirt, the driver “had an unkempt beard, dark liquidy eyes, and a toothless mouth” and Malaparte shouts “There’s a ghost inside!” as the carriage pulls up next to him. When meeting with Olga Kamenev, the sister of Leon Trotsky, Malaparte claims that she is so terrified of death that she smells of it, that she is in fact “already dead,” her body starting to swell like a corpse. Malaparte says hello to the ghost of Scriabin, and while standing in a graveyard, a flower starts to bleed.

The use of magical realism emphasizes the grotesque hellishness of Marxist society as Malaparte encountered it. While the philosophical questions of the novel revolve around human nature and whether there is any capacity/potential for real revolution, the reader also wonders exactly which elements of Malaparte’s narrative are “real” and which are hyperbole. A sweating Prince Lvov carries a gilded armchair from his palace to the flea market in the hopes of selling it. While there in the market, Malaparte sees another aristocratic woman trying to sell her last pair of satin underwear. Did this all happen just as described? Are these stories collected in journalist fashion, or are these morality tales that underscore Malaparte’s disillusionment, another aspect of the Soviet grotesquerie? In her introduction to the English version of Malaparte’s 1949 novel The Skin, Rachel Kushner describes Malaparte’s tendency to move between journalist and storyteller: “It’s not quite clear if this is the real Malaparte. This Malaparte is always in the right place at the right time to witness a scandal and deliver a biting retort [….] The reader can’t help but wonder if Malaparte is inventing or reporting, but the question misses the point of his performance, which is to render the question unanswerable. He is making a joke of the fictions that hold reality together.”

I am not convinced that Malaparte is always joking about those fictions, but his ability to see them all simultaneously in play is what makes his writing intriguing and historically convincing.

I am not convinced that Malaparte is always joking about those fictions, but his ability to see them all simultaneously in play is what makes his writing intriguing and historically convincing. One of the seriously debated fictions that shows up again and again in the text is God: “Christ is by now a useless character in Russia. It’s useless to be Christians in Russia. We don’t need Christ anymore,” says a frightened Mikhail Bulkagov to Malaparte. “You are all afraid of Christ,” observes Malaparte, to which Bulgakov whispers, “Christ hates us.”

To Malaparte, the fiction of Christ correlates with the fiction of the Revolution in the sense that, again, the ideals are not necessarily at fault for human failure; but nevertheless, humanity is not able to make social reality correlate with the ideal. Bulgakov sees the tension between the ideal and the real and he lives in fear because of it; he knows that to point out the spiritual poverty of the “revolutionaries” will earn him a death sentence. Malaparte on the other hand, as a “free man” is simply emboldened in his criticism. I couldn’t help but be reminded of Mikhail Bulgakov’s novella The Heart of a Dog, a satire on the idea of the “new Soviet man” in which a doctor implants human organs into a dog.

“A man who doesn’t feel God’s contempt, his abandonment, is not a free man, but a miserable slave,” comments Malaparte. In fact, he argues that Europe’s problem is that they are convinced God will save them, when in fact God is waiting for them to save themselves. In Russia it is the same, but the problem is described as one of suffering: the Russian people think they must suffer for someone, and therefore they exhibit a fatalistic apathy that allows for their continued abuse and misery.

Fittingly, when Malaparte is asked what has been most memorable about his time in Moscow, he says “Lenin’s mummy,” referring to Lenin’s embalmed corpse on display in Red Square. Lenin’s body has been displayed in Red Square since 1924, and it’s interesting to see what Malaparte writes of it at from his vantage point in history: “Lenin’s mummy, small and shrunken like the mummy of a child, was slowly rotting. Periodically, German specialists show up from Berlin to empty, scrape out, and disinfect the shell of that precious crustacean, that sacred mummy, the porcelain white face lit up by red freckles veiled by a greenish mold-like sweat.” For Malaparte, Lenin’s mummy epitomizes the strange paradox of the Revolution: that the communists who had deposed an out of touch tsar would give rise to “that new puritanical, cruel, hard, inflexible, monstrous class” and now, at a few years remove he notes that all of these “profiteers of the Revolution” would “succumb to the lead of firing squads in the courtyard of the Lubyanka,” the notorious KGB prison in Moscow. In the same way that the ideals of the revolution would rot and spoil under the weight of the incoming Soviet leaders, Lenin’s mummy “was decomposing, crumbling, becoming flaky, soft to the touch, damp and spoiled.”

Malaparte originally conceived of The Kremlin Ball to be part of The Skin, which describes the Allied army’s invasion of Italy. While several chapters devoted to the Marxist aristocracy might seem like they would have been out of place, in The Kremlin Ball Malaparte makes an argument that the fates of Europe and Russia are intertwined: “Since the Europe of tomorrow is to be found in the Russia of tomorrow, it is equally true that the Europe of today is to be found in the Russia of today,” he argues. The failure of the Russian Revolution was a mirror image of Europe’s failed revolutions and vice versa. The Kremlin Ball is told in flashback: Malaparte is describing his experiences in Soviet Russia of the late 1920s, but he is telling it from the perspective of the 1940s, post WWII. He knows that most of the people he met and describes were executed, and so the failures of the Russian Revolution to enact any real social revolution is already known. I could see how The Kremlin Ball would be meant as a complimentary set of observations to Malaparte’s other journalistic work in Europe.

Before publication, Malaparte decided that his reportage on Russia should be an autonomous work, so The Skin was published without its Kremlin Ball chapters. Malaparte died without completely finishing the work. The fact that the text is unfinished rarely detracts; in fact, I found it interesting to see where certain diatribes of Malaparte’s were repeating main ideas, because I felt I was seeing his process at working out his main themes in the text. In the finished product, some of these passages would probably have been streamlined or shortened, but I thought it was interesting to see where he was investing narrative weight during the writing process. Malaparte drops names, titles, and geography freely, and this version of the text has excellent notes that keep someone less familiar with Moscow and Soviet people well informed, while Jenny McPhee’s introduction helps to frame the book with Malaparte’s biography.

Malaparte claims that the greatest reason for the moral decline of the Soviets is that, instead of being lead to any “collective sentiment,” they have arrived at “a total dedication to fatality.” The fanatic belief and frenetic activity he encounters are, he believes, simply disguising this fatalism and lack of hope, a society that has become “indifferent to its own destiny.” I think that in this observation lies Malaparte’s greatest perspicuity, or the point most relevant to our contemporary cultural moment. Blind ideology has led the Soviet people to an unwillingness to acknowledge the failure of the Revolution. Malaparte claims that even non-Russian writers are failing to report accurately on the state of the “Marxist aristocracy”: “To read the writings of any one of them, it would seem that the USSR is an immense democratic and egalitarian society of workers.”

Blind ideology has led the Soviet people to an unwillingness to acknowledge the failure of the Revolution. Malaparte claims that even non-Russian writers are failing to report accurately on the state of the “Marxist aristocracy”: “To read the writings of any one of them, it would seem that the USSR is an immense democratic and egalitarian society of workers.”

Such blindness to the problems of a current government may well arrive out of hopelessness, out of the notion that there are not alternatives. While Malaparte himself seems to have a somewhat hopeless perspective on both the Soviets and humanity in general, arriving at “fatalistic” dead ends may also be the first impetus to ask questions about alternatives. In other words, perhaps the despair that Malaparte sees as having allowed for both the self-destruction of the Russian Revolutionaries and ushering in The Great Terror could also be a point of return: in moments of cultural destitution, the way out is hope in an alternative vision.

Ryan K. Strader author photoRyan Strader earned a B.A. in Russian Literature from George Mason University, and an M.A.T. from Clayton State University. She is currently an instructional designer and researcher. Her most recent instructional design project is the development of a class in writing and qualitative research methods at Georgia State University, where she is also a doctoral student. Her most recent publication is an upcoming book chapter on populism in young adult novels. She lives and works in the Atlanta area.

TRICK by Domenico Starnone, translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri, reviewed by Jeanne Bonner

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Trick cover art. Abstract art of a girl in a checkered dress standing inside of a white drawer

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TRICK
by Domenico Starnone
translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri
Europa Editions, 191 pages

reviewed by Jeanne Bonner

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What happens when something occurs to change the view you’ve had of your life? Of yourself? Something that decisively alters the perspective on a life rich in success and honors?

That’s one of the dilemmas facing Daniele Mallarico, a masterful illustrator who is the main character of Italian writer Domenico Starnone’s newest novel, Trick.

A powerful change of perspective happened to the book’s translator, the novelist Jhumpa Lahiri, who decamped to Rome in 2012 a dozen years after winning America’s highest prize for fiction, the Pulitzer, and immersed herself so deeply in Italian that she only wanted to write in that language. Indeed, a week after she arrived, she wrote her final sentences of English in her diary. Three years later, in that same diary, an excerpt of which was published in an Italian literary journal, Nuovi Argomenti, she faced the terrifying prospect of leaving Italy and a life immersed in Italian. “I think of the distance about to form between me and this place,” she wrote, “and I succumb to depression.” She held on to the language, however, and has published works of fiction and nonfiction in Italian. In her 2015 book In Other Words (which she wrote in Italian and which was translated into English by Ann Goldstein), Lahiri chronicles her romance with Italian, revealing “a sense of rapture” in Rome.

For Lahiri, her new perspective, having learned Italian, amplifies an already rich literary and creative life. That is not, however, the case for the narrator of Trick, who now sees the first such “act” of his life with suspicion.

Perhaps in another book review, all of this would be an unnecessary aside, given the literary pedigree of Starnone, the author of thirteen other works of fiction and a winner of Italy’s top fiction prize, the Strega. But here, one could argue Lahiri’s sense of rapture feeds her skills in translating the novel, the second Starnone work she’s brought into English. The first, Ties, which came out in 2017, was, as she told The New Yorker, her first foray working in English again, after “barricading [herself] behind Italian.”

Her sense of rapture, paired with her own profound ability to evoke fictional characters and situations, helps her fully inhabit the voice of the narrator, Daniele, the illustrator. Amidst a difficult work project for a new client, Daniele goes to watch his four-year-old grandson, Mario, in the Naples home where he himself grew up but has long since left behind. It’s the house his daughter has inherited and where she lives with her husband and Mario. The plot concerns the days Daniele spends with Mario—hours that, as any parent of a preschooler will tell you, are filled with small joys followed by moments of tension, not to mention showdowns of all kinds.

But that may be truer here not only because of the crossroads Daniele is about to face but also because Mario’s parents are fighting ceaselessly. They have asked Daniele to watch Mario so they can attend a work conference where the narrator presumes they will continue their arguing, unimpeded. Hence tension simmers just beneath the surface. Mario is by turns playful and adoring, willful and troublesome. While keeping Mario occupied, Daniele is trying to complete sketches for the work project, an illustration of a Henry James ghost story, “The Jolly Corner.”

Lahiri has expertly reproduced the voice of the narrator—and his pull on the reader, who feels the tug from the very first sentences of Starnone’s many-layered work, where one aspect of the novel echoes another.

Lahiri has expertly reproduced the voice of the narrator—and his pull on the reader, who feels the tug from the very first sentences of Starnone’s many-layered work, where one aspect of the novel echoes another. Starnone opens the novel in the voice of Daniele, “One evening Betta called, crankier than usual, wanting to know if I felt up to minding her son while she and her husband took part in a mathematics conference in Cagliari.” Daniele goes onto to say that after living in Milan for some time, “the thought of decamping to Naples” in fact “didn’t thrill me.”  Just as Daniele returns to his childhood home—a place filled with memories, which is to say ghosts—the character in the short story he’s been asked to illustrate is also experiencing a homecoming. In the 1908 story by James, a man named Spencer returns to his New York home after many years and finds himself haunted by a ghost. Specifically, the ghost of the person he would have been had he remained in New York and become a businessman.

Jhumpa Lahiri author photo

Jhumpa Lahiri

While ghosts in the form of memories figure prominently in the novel, Starnone has a light touch. With an intimate tone that almost evokes a diary, he informs us a handful of times that Daniele’s father gambled away the family’s money when he was a child. In one of the more emotionally-searing lines, Starnone writes, “I recalled how every second of life in that house, in that neighborhood, was signaled by my father’s fingers on playing cards, by his rapacious need for a thrill that drove him to jeopardize our very survival.” He adds, “I fought with all my might to separate myself […] to prove that I was different.” The effect of this information is chilling—it gives us a window into one of the signal events that shaped Daniele as an individual—but Starnone reveals it with subtlety.

There’s another detail revealed in an understated way that nonetheless has profound implications. Daniele is a widow, and his wife’s death he’s been coming to grips with how he engineered the isolation required of his art to shield him from other aspects of his life. It emerges, in fact, that his wife betrayed him—repeatedly, right from the early years of their marriage, but he was too preoccupied with work to catch on until after her death. Combined with the revelations about his father, this information, shared in a few deft strokes, allows Starnone to give us the pertinent parameters—of Daniele’s life, and of what’s really at stake in an otherwise prosaic visit to his grandson.

What was and what could have been. The novel’s action culminates with two mirror events: the grandson reproduces an illustration that’s strikingly—for Daniele, alarmingly—adept and then later he plays a trick on his grandfather that risks some significant consequences (one of several compelling ways that the title is employed in the book).

But we’re not talking about child’s play. With Starnone at the helm, we’re wandering among the thorniest of emotional thickets: the land of fathers and sons. We’re also talking about self-worth, about how we spend our time, which is to say, how we spend our lives. We’re talking about a moral reckoning with the choices we make as humans. As the author puts it in an interview released by the publisher, Europa Editions, “That which we have become or not become, while it may please us at first, can cause melancholy, soon revealing itself to be insidious, dangerous, terrifying.”

With Starnone’s narrative unfolding largely in Naples, a part of the city’s essential character is unpacked for us in the course of the novel. For example, Daniele speaks of the rage (“la raggia”) felt by many of the people surrounding him as a child, fellow Neapolitans who found themselves living in cramped, impoverished quarters and believing there to be no escape hatch. Daniele does escape—physically, at least—and he winds up leading a fulfilling life as a commercial artist that contrasts with his parents’ lives and with many of his childhood peers.

Yet back in Naples to watch his grandson, some of the old anger resurfaces. The book dwells heavily on disappointment and on the resentment that breeds when one feels mistreated—tricked, you could say. In Daniele’s case, he is seething with anger that the younger publisher of the Henry James work has rebuffed draft illustrations he sent before departing for Naples. As Starnone writes, Daniele imagines barging into the publisher’s office and spitting in his eye for criticizing not just “those illustrations, no, but the work of a lifetime. A pity that the season of rage had died. I’d smothered it long ago.”

Some of the novel’s most evocative passages reside in the author’s ruminations about Naples. At one point, for example, while Daniele and Mario are out for a stroll, they stop for a drink at a dark, dirty coffee bar. Starnone meditates on the way Neapolitans talk, often employing a savage tone that can undermine even the most innocuous comments. As Daniele muses, “Only in this city […] were people so genuinely inclined to come to your aid and so ready to slit your throat.” This is the Naples many American readers have come to know through Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series of novels that begins with My Brilliant Friend.

In this scene, Daniele chats with the proprietor of the bar who reveals at one point that he, too, had a talent for illustration as a young man but he notes it “passed,” which Starnone writes, makes it sound “like an illness.” As they prepare to leave, Daniele comments, “I felt that he was looking at me with hostility, as if, just when I was paying and leaving a tip, I was secretly robbing him of something.” The line reminded me of a Sicilian friend who once told me he hated to receive a compliment because it was simply a way for someone to take him for a fool. This is a world in which every gesture is suspect.

As these ruminations swirl in the air, grandfather and grandson get into a standoff that Daniele says snatches “the notion I’d had of myself.” To say more would reveal a critical plot turn but suffice it to say Starnone deals gracefully with the implications of something—or someone—snatching away the notion one has of himself.

The book includes an unusual appendix, a diary that contains Daniele’s thoughts and sketches for “The Jolly Corner.” And it reminds us of the narrator’s pull, which reflects Starnone’s skill at creating a completely believable character who seems to live and breathe.

Starnone’s prose is in good hands under Lahiri’s capable guidance. As someone who translates from Italian and who reads a lot of translations, I found myself immersed from the first sentence of Lahiri’s translation. Arguably that’s no surprise since Lahiri is a masterful English prose stylist. Yet it bears noting that her rendition is fluent and fluid and her grasp of idioms is enchantingly astute. To give a minor though typical example from an early section of the novel, Starnone writes that Daniele was “in difetto sia come padre che come nonno,” which Lahiri translates as his being “wanting as a father and a grandfather.” That use of the word “wanting” is an inspired choice, colloquial and yet striking some kind of high tone that reproduces the original cadence.

Lahiri does such an exquisite job of rendering Starnone’s prose and in particular his reflections on Naples that there’s almost nothing to snap the reader out of her reverie.

Lahiri does such an exquisite job of rendering Starnone’s prose and in particular his reflections on Naples that there’s almost nothing to snap the reader out of her reverie. Indeed, for me, the only time was when I encountered the name of the maid character: “Sally.” In Italian, the letter “y” rarely appears and in the original Italian text, the maid’s name is rendered as “Salli.” The appearance of the name “Sally” reminded me that the book I was reading was meant for English-speaking audiences, as opposed to a book in English about an Italian narrator named Daniele who talks about Naples. But that was about the only time I remembered.

The work of literary translators can be viewed as vital, especially given the forces of nationalism today, so it is no small matter that someone of Lahiri’s caliber has joined the ranks. For Starnone and his readers, it means his novel Trick arrives in English in mesmerizing form.

Jeanne Bonner author photoJeanne Bonner is a writer and journalist based in Connecticut. She is the 2018 winner of the PEN Grant for the English Translation of Italian Literature, given by PEN America. Her essays have been published by The New York Times, CNN Travel, Literary Hub and Catapult. She studied Italian literature at Wesleyan University and has an MFA in Creative Writing from Bennington College.

ADUA, a novel by Igiaba Scego, reviewed by Jodi Monster

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Adua cover art. Half of the face of a dark-skinned woman against a light blue backgroundADUA
by Igiaba Scego
translated from the Italian by Jamie Richards
New Vessel Press, 171 pages

reviewed by Jodi Monster

The title character of Igiaba Scego’s novel Adua is a Somali woman caught in history’s crosshairs. Born to an ambitious, mercurial man, a translator who sold his skills to the Italians during Mussolini’s pre-WWII push to expand his African empire, Adua’s life is shaped by choices she didn’t make and subject to forces she can’t control.

Scego, an accomplished writer and journalist who reports regularly on post-colonial migrant experiences, wants to shine a bright light on these forces. Born in Italy to Somali parents, her father having been ousted from his government post by Siad Barre’s 1969 coup, Scego has more than an academic interest in the relationship between these two countries, and in the aftereffects of Italy’s imperial violence in East Africa.

Born in Italy to Somali parents, her father having been ousted from his government post by Siad Barre’s 1969 coup, Scego has more than an academic interest in the relationship between these two countries, and in the aftereffects of Italy’s imperial violence in East Africa.

In the atmospheric novel she’s crafted, the circumstances of Adua’s early life are not entirely clear. Her mother died in childbirth and, for reasons the novel doesn’t explain, her youngest years were spent in the care of a nomadic couple she loved. She was terrified on the day her biological father, Mohamed Ali Zoppe, arrived to reclaim her, and she was heartbroken to leave the bush and the innocent joys she’d known there. “[It] was the end of a life, an ominous change in destiny,” Adua says when Zoppe takes her and her younger sister to his home in Magalo, a provincial city where he lives with his new wife. Here Zoppe sets his daughters at the mercy of his adolescent bride, “a girl with braids and her first period,” giving her broad authority to destroy the quality of two younger girls’ lives.

Igiaba Scego author photo

Igiaba Scego

Separated from the only family she’d ever known, ill at ease in an unfamiliar city, and because of her father’s political affiliations, something of an outcast at school, Adua finds herself fearful and alone. But there’s a movie theater in town, and soon the dreams offered up by the old movies shown there replace Adua’s fantasies of a return to her beloved bush. “I wanted to dream, dance, fly. I wanted to escape… Italy was kisses… Italy was freedom. And so I hoped it would become my future,” she says, bewitched by glamor and the tantalizing hope of romance.

Several years later, after her father is arrested and the few friends she’s managed to find desert her, Adua’s a sitting duck for the black market trader who promises to make her a star. She follows her naive dreams to Rome where she’s exploited before she’s tossed aside, left with only a Bernini statue in the Piazza della Minerva to listen as she counts her regrets.

“No one had ever told us colonialism was the problem. Even those who knew the truth said nothing,” Adua laments in a line that lays bare her situation, because it’s not just colonialism that has hijacked her life. She’s also up against racism, misogyny, and the intimate savagery of a father who’s unable to make peace with his own failures and misdeeds, and the extent to which he, too, has been the victim of colonialism’s brutal constraints. “Maybe I owe you an apology. But I can’t. I don’t know how to use certain words,” Adua imagines her father might say, because in as much as she’s been tortured by his shameful silence, she suspects that he has been too. Left unspoken is the idea that while an examination of the past would not wipe it away, an understanding of it might prevent its repeat; and this, in the end, is the hopeful call of this novel, the spirit that animates its every page.

Left unspoken is the idea that while an examination of the past would not wipe it away, an understanding of it might prevent its repeat; and this, in the end, is the hopeful call of this novel, the spirit that animates its every page.

It’s also the spirit that nearly undoes it, however, because Adua can sometimes read more like a catalogue of trials than a rich, well-told story of an ordinary woman’s extraordinary life. This is true right up until the end, when after many solitary years in Rome, Adua takes a husband, a much younger refugee displaced by the latest round of fighting in Somalia’s seemingly endless civil war. This union is not about love, however; rather it’s about rescue, for both of them, from loneliness and desperation. It’s also about the author’s desire to explore the power dynamics within migrant communities, wherein more established members will sometimes distance themselves from new arrivals, compounding their dislocation.

By novel’s end, when the fighting in Somalia subsides and Adua learns that her father has died, having left her his house, for the first time she contemplates a return to her homeland. And this, finally, is the moment she’s been waiting for—the chance to choose for herself the course her life will take.

Jodi Monster author photoJodi Monster is an aspiring novelist and founding member of Our Writers’ Circle, a thriving and diverse community of emerging authors. She lived and raised children in The Netherlands, Texas, and Singapore before returning to suburban Philadelphia, where she currently lives.

TOMB SONG, a novel by Julián Herbert, reviewed by Katharine Coldiron

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Tomb Song cover art. Light pink text against a blue backgroundTOMB SONG
by Julián Herbert
translated by Christina MacSweeney
Graywolf Press, 224 pages

reviewed by Katharine Coldiron

What an odd book Tomb Song is. It contains prose both beautiful and profane, extensive self-awareness and a troubling level of self-ignorance. Its author and its narrator blur together into an entity that is never quite one or the other, and it doesn’t distinguish between fiction and nonfiction with especial meticulousness. That is, the narrator and the author have the same name, the same wife and child, the same job, and the same literary accomplishments. It remains undefined whether, in what passages, and to what extent Herbert has fictionalized his life to write this book, which a reviewer in a Chilean newspaper called “an elegy to his mother.”

The book is, in fact, summarily about the narrator’s mother dying over the course of a year in and out of the hospital, but the reader will find the scope to be much wider. The narrator examines his childhood, his marriage, his perspective on Mexican politics, his drug use, and his struggle to make the world conform to his needs, or vice versa. Since this is Herbert’s first book translated into English, it’s difficult to determine whether the voice in Tomb Song—which most resembles a petulant, smart-alecky boy—is a gesture toward the filial relationship at the book’s center, or is the author’s usual tone. Off-putting though this voice may sometimes be, Herbert’s style, and his skill with the boundaries of genre and narrative distance, are singularly accomplished. Herbert, a poet and essayist, won the Jaén Prize for unedited novels and the Elena Poniatowska Prize for the original Spanish version of Tomb Song.

Julián Herbert author photo

Julián Herbert

Destabilization is a key texture that the reader must appreciate in order to enjoy Tomb Song. For instance, the narrator, in exploring the hospital where his mother lies dying, dreams or hallucinates or genuinely takes part in a conversation with a man in the basement whom he identifies as “Bobo Lafragua, the hero of the unfinished novel I’d attempted to write a couple of years before.” Thirty pages later, he meets “the conceptual artist Bobo Lafragua” in Cuba for a dissolute vacation, complete with hookers, opium, and existential conversations. It is unclear whether the section in Cuba is adapted from life, as so much of this novel seems to be, or lifts a passage from that previously mentioned novel. The name is the only indication that we may have moved genres from nonfiction to fiction, and its reappearance causes a fine little frisson.

The prose, particularly in the Cuba passages, recalls Kerouac in its freshness and enthusiasm, and indeed, the literary performance of Tomb Song is captivating. Translator Christina MacSweeney, in recreating such a performance in English, made a daunting task look easy.

The prose, particularly in the Cuba passages, recalls Kerouac in its freshness and enthusiasm, and indeed, the literary performance of Tomb Song is captivating. Translator Christina MacSweeney, in recreating such a performance in English, made a daunting task look easy. The author’s exposure of his inner weather is unsparing and precise, and his one-liners are without equal:

Every household runs aground at the feet of a domestic myth.

T]he main objective of true revolutions is to turn waiters into bad-mannered despots.

There’s no route to the absolute that doesn’t pass through a fever station.

Berlin is a civic graveyard project into which has been drained the best of its sacred art: dead bodies.

Herbert pulls no punches, exploring his narrator’s flaws and the desperate circumstances of his childhood mercilessly, as if writing about a character he doesn’t especially want to shield. The glitches in this objectivity appear during certain passages about the narrator’s—Herbert’s—mother, who was a prostitute. Herbert is capable of standing back enough to see the irony in insulting someone by calling them “son of a whore” when his narrator’s circumstances embody that insult. But the pointed self-awareness that characterizes the narrator’s relationship with his mother sometimes slips, and the prose reveals an unsettling mishmash of innocent devotion, sexual desire, and contempt. “Some days she’d tie her hair up in a ponytail,” he writes,

put on dark glasses, and lead me by the hand through the lackluster streets of Acapulco’s red-light district, the Zona de Tolerancia, to the market stalls on the avenue by the canal (this would have been eight or nine in the morning, when the last drunkards were leaving La Huerta or Pepe Carioca, and women wrapped in towels would lean out over the metal windowsills of tiny rooms and call me “pretty”). With the exquisite abandon and spleen of a whore who’s been up all night, she’d buy me a Choco Milk shake and two coloring books.

All the men watching her.

But she was with me.

At the age of five, I first experienced the masochistic pleasure of coveting something you own but can’t understand.

Later, as an adult:

Out of sheer perversity, out of sheer self-loathing, out of pure idleness, I scanned the leftover girls of the night, trying to decide which one reminded me most of my mother.

In passages like these, when Herbert’s self-awareness is missing, the reader notices. Particularly if the reader is female. Men’s experiences are front and center in Tomb Song, whether as sons, fathers, carousers, authors, or mourners. The novel is so subjective, so purposely claustrophobic, that the dearth of women who appear as autonomous creatures, rather than “sex on legs,” is not as egregious as it might be in other novels. But it’s there. “I wanted to settle accounts with the mother goddess of biology,” he writes, “shooting a pistol at her, ejaculating in her face.”

One of the words used in the promotional material regarding this novel is “incandescent.” This is true, inasmuch as the word has two meanings: the ordinary, meaning light-emitting, brilliant, exceptional; and the obscure, meaning furiously angry. Anger comes off this book in nearly visible waves.

One of the words used in the promotional material regarding this novel is “incandescent.” This is true, inasmuch as the word has two meanings: the ordinary, meaning light-emitting, brilliant, exceptional; and the obscure, meaning furiously angry. Anger comes off this book in nearly visible waves. Mexico eats its own heart, politically, and the narrator is angry. A boy grows up in grasping poverty, and the narrator is angry. A mother dies, and the narrator is angry. The narrator snorts liquefied opium continuously out of a sinus-medication bottle, and he is still angry. With this anger comes pointed critique, gleaming insight, and an entertaining method of ADD-like writing, but the reading experience toes the line between exhilarating and exhausting.

Tomb Song is not a continuous story as much as it is a patchwork, a coat of many colors made from memoir and imagination and scintillating intellectual reflection and political diatribe and self-excoriation. What seams it into a single garment is Herbert’s voice, his energetic, free-associative, sardonic, charismatic voice. This tone, in which Herbert paints being the middle child of five siblings by five fathers, approaches “rollicking,” but doesn’t quite make it. Is that a flaw, a miscalculation, or a demonstration of the situation’s tragic absurdity? The reader will have to determine for himself whether the voice of Julián, in its variations, attracts or repels.

Katharine Coldiron author photoKatharine Coldiron’s work has appeared in Ms., the Rumpus, Brevity, and elsewhere. She lives in California and blogs at the Fictator.

NOTHING and DOTING, two novels by Henry Green, reviewed by Melanie Erspamer

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Cover art for Doting and cover art for Nothing. For Doting, an abstract painting with yellows, black, and pinks. For Doting, an amorphous grey shape against a yellow striped background

NOTHING and DOTING
two novels by Henry Green
New York Review Books, 183 and 190 pages

reviewed by Melanie Erspamer

In Nothing, Henry Green is as self-aware as it gets, poking fun not only at his characters but at the premise of the book (knowing full well, I imagine, the delightful difficulty readers would encounter in explaining to their friends that they are reading “nothing”). “What did you do?” one character, Liz, demands of her older boyfriend, John Pomfret, as he discusses afternoons from his youth. “‘Why nothing of course,’ Mr. Pomfret crie[s]. ‘That is the whole beauty of us, we never can seem to do anything.’”

Precisely. In Henry Green’s two last novels, Nothing and Doting, the “doing” is severely limited in favor of a writing style built almost entirely on dialogue. The exposition seems to function largely as stage directions, basic information for the reader, though occasionally Green does display a bit of the modernist style he is most famous for:

It was wet then, did she remember he was saying, so unlike this he said, and turned his face to the dazzle of window, it had been dark with sad tears on the panes and streets of blue canals as he sat by her fire for Jane liked dusk, would not turn on the lights until she couldn’t see to move, while outside a single street lamp was yellow, reflected over a thousand raindrops on the glass, the fire was rose, and Penelope came in.

This sentence appears on the first page of Nothing, and there is hardly again, in either book, such an extended deviation from dialogue into narration. Green was an experimental modernist writer, and these “dialogue-novels” were his latest experiments: an attempt to remove the author from the work, to let the characters speak and the action develop with as little narrative interference as possible. Green was not unfamiliar with narrative techniques attempting at minimalizing what a novel can offer. In earlier works, such as, Living, one of his best-known novels, he utilizes very few prepositions. “Water dripped from tap on wall into basin and into water there. Sun. Water drops made rings in clear coloured water.” The effect is coarse, immediate. It seems to show how much rougher and real words become when not encased in their polite grammar.

Green was an experimental modernist writer, and these “dialogue-novels” were his latest experiments: an attempt to remove the author from the work, to let the characters speak and the action develop with as little narrative interference as possible.

Similarly, his dialogue-novels show how much a story can flow without much aid from the author—though, perhaps, this is not true of all stories. In fact, the most famous modernist works (think Virginia Woolf or James Joyce) seem resolutely opposed to Green’s form with their relentless focus on interiority. Green, instead, trials the opposite: a literary exteriority where almost all the words are ones that have actually been “expressed,” directly put out into the (fictional) world.

Henry Green author photo

Henry Green

Henry Green is the pen name of English writer Henry Vincent Yorke, a well-educated man from a wealthy business family who wrote novels from 1926 to 1952, when Doting, his last work, was published. His works are considered important contributions to modernist literature, and he was well-respected by several authors at his time, including W. H. Auden and Anthony Burgess. When Terry Southern wrote in an interview with Green in The Paris Review that “Green has been referred to as a ‘writer’s writer’s writer,’” he intended it as a compliment to Green’s highly developed modernist style.

It could also be taken, however, as a fair reflection of Green’s higher popularity among writers than among the general public, where none of his books sold more than 10,000 copies. After his death, all his books went out of print. I wonder if there isn’t something conceptual and formal to his style of literary experimentation that does not manage to find an equivalent sophistication in the representation of characters and relationships. However, there has been recently a rediscovery of Green, of sorts, with many of his books going back into print. This includes not only his most famous and well-respected books, namely Living, Party Going, and Loving, but the others as well, including Nothing and Doting.

These last two novels are very much alike, focusing on the lives and loves of the London bourgeoisie post-WWII. In both books the cast of characters is largely comprised of two generations of middle-class Londoners—those about 45, and their children, late teenagers. Part of what Green does is contrast the two generations, which, humorously, act in the opposite way from what you’d expect: the savvy older generation, having grown up in a time of greater prosperity, is accustomed to parties, drinking, decadence—including a tendency towards extra-marital affairs. The younger generation, instead, is naïve, but serious, coming to age in a time of greater financial difficulty, concerned with marriage and settling down.

The novels take place in a series of splintered scenes in which a small cast of characters converses with each other in a handful of settings. The books at times seem to raise the question of why they weren’t written as plays. Yet it becomes clear to the reader that these novels simply wouldn’t work as plays, that part of the absence that Green was trying to create by limiting his narrative presence would be spoiled by giving these characters life and blood. The host of other details, in a theater, that would determine the content of these scenes—the stage setting, the movements of the actors, their tones—would remove the focus on pure discourse, although discourse seems too high and mighty a term for what in effect is banter. For never do the characters completely reveal themselves through their words. They are sly, witty, manipulative, and sometimes naïve, but the question of what exactly they mean with all these scenes of chatter has two opposite and yet coinciding answers: the words they say seem both to mean many things at once, and yet nothing at all. This would be difficult to convey with theater. Widow Jane Weatherby, Nothing’s female protagonist, characterizes this simultaneously empty and duplicitous character of their dialogue (as well as the polite, educated, and conniving style with which almost all of the dialogue is written): “‘But you know very well what I didn’t mean darling […] Good heavens I simply never mean anything yet all my life I’ve got into such frightful trouble with my tongue.’”

The plots of these novels would seem familiar to viewers of romantic comedies—they concern the overlapping love triangles and squares and all sorts of polygons that develop in small social circles, heedless of generation, marital status, or even (possibly) blood. In Nothing, the “action” revolves around the relationship between Jane Weatherby and another widow, John Pomfret, who once had a passionate affair, and the relationships that develop among Jane and John’s children. The novel’s gentle and uniform style makes it difficult to make many judgments on the characters, moral or otherwise. Ultimately, we are led to root for whoever can most deftly negotiate the upper hand. If on reflection it is clear that Jane and John are far from ideal parents, both using their children for personal gain, it hardly prevents us from appreciating their linguistic finesse in manipulating these children while maintaining their admiration: “Oh you’ve been wonderful,” Philip, Jane’s son, tells her with “conviction,” after unwittingly falling into her trap—”You always are.”

Doting deals with a very similar selection of characters in similar straits—here instead the focus is on middle-aged couple Arthur and Diana Middleton, who, not being widows, must create their drama and intricate triangles in more furtive ways. This drama includes two girls slightly older than the couple’s son, and a good friend of the couple, Charles. If the name Nothing was rather perfect for this type of superficial-but-not-completely middle-class dialogue comedy, Doting as a title seems to embrace an emotional stance toward someone who is strong and desiring but somehow still superficial, a perfect parallel to the book itself. Though we see the characters in a variety of settings—familial, friendly, public—we can hardly depart from a superficial understanding of them. For another fascinating aspect about the externalist dialogue-driven style of these novels is the way the dialogue is consistent, whether one is first-time acquaintances or a married couple of eighteen years. At no matter what stage, it seems people will use their words more to conceal than to reveal: either a fact about someone is available to everyone, spread by gossip in a manner of days, or to no one, the greater knowledge that would come with intimacy reduced to a heightened awareness of the other’s manipulative tactics. Arthur reveals to Annabel, the teenager he is fond of taking out to lunch, that “doting, to me, is not loving […] Loving goes deeper.” No more elucidation is made on that subject and thus we can only assume that if it indeed goes deeper, we can never be sure that someone is loving, and not merely doting; just as no amount of talk will really assure us of anything very “deep” in someone’s character. Postmodernists would take this idea further, denying the presence of any truth in language beneath, or outside of, language itself. Language is the superficial and yet only reality; and though Green was not a postmodernist, the way he shrouds (and defines) his characters in flawed and deceptive language approximates this idea.

Nothing and Doting are fun and light-hearted, easy-to-read works that are relatable on some levels. After all, we all must deal with other people and the way their desires cast webs around us as we cast our own. Yet I ultimately found the limited scope of these novels tiresome. There is only so much, it seems, I can enjoy of the manipulative, ambiguous, but fundamentally frivolous relationships of the 1950s bourgeoisie. Nothing was a fun read, pleasant, and with something of the structure of traditional comedies. But read right after Nothing, Doting seemed like a recycled composition, made up out of bits of the static characters from the previous novel, who, as in Nothing, all speak with the same generalized polite and detached voice of the English middle-class.

The last sentence of Doting is “the next day they all went on very much the same.” It may be an interesting stylistic comment, but hardly a tribute to enjoyment, to mention that this sentence could have occurred at almost any point in the book.

Melanie Erspamer author photoMelanie Erspamer studies English Literature and Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. She is half-Italian and half-American and has lived most of her life near Boston. Her work has been published in The Purple Breakfast Review, Nomad Magazine and Unknown Magazine, and her one-act play was performed at the University of Edinburgh. With her sister, she also has been running an anonymous literary magazine based in bathroom stalls, called Bathruminations.

NEST IN THE BONES: STORIES by Antonio Di Benedetto reviewed by Eric Andrew Newman

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Nest in the Bones cover art. An abstract painting of a red human figureNEST IN THE BONES: STORIES
by Antonio Di Benedetto
translated by Martina Broner
Archipelago Books, 275 pages

reviewed by Eric Andrew Newman

It would have been easy for the Argentinian writer Antonio Di Benedetto’s works to have slipped through the cracks of the world literary canon, as he didn’t belong to any of the three major movements of Latin American literature, the pre-boom of Borges, the boom of Cortazar, or the post-boom of Roberto Bolaño. The Spanish newspaper El Pais has said that Di Benedetto might as well have created his own anti-boom. Shunning the bombastic style of the boom generation, Di Benedetto employs a dry minimalism that underlines the regional foundation of the text. All these well-known literary men greatly admired Di Benedetto’s works. Yet he never achieved their level of success.

It took over 60 years for Di Benedetto’s first novel, Zama, which was published in Spanish in 1956, to make its debut in English language translation in 2016. This was Di Benedetto’s first book to be translated into English, even though he had been translated into several other languages, including German, French and Italian, decades before. Di Benedetto’s first book to be published in Spanish was his short story collection Animal World, which came out in 1953 when he was thirty years old. After Animal World, Di Benedetto went on to write and publish five novels, including Zama, and five more short story collections.

Animal World was given a literary prize by a jury headed by Borges and following that Zama was well reviewed by the Buenos Aires literary magazine Sur, run by Victoria Ocampo (a good friend of Borges). Yet neither of the books sold well. This was most likely due to Di Benedetto’s refusal to move to Buenos Aires, Argentina’s literary capital, from Mendoza, the regional province where he was born and raised, to promote his work. Di Benedetto worked as an editor of a Mendozan newspaper, Los Andes, a job he was hesitant to give up.

This new collection, Nest in the Bones, translated from the Spanish by Martina Broner, culls the best from Di Benedetto’s Collected Stories, a volume of over one hundred short stories from all six of his previous short story collections, starting with Animal World. In the earliest stories in this latest collection, more reminiscent of dreams and fables than of real life, Di Benedetto seems to draw purely from the imagination. But in both these early stories and his later ones, the themes of animals and refuge continually recur.

In this regard, Di Benedetto’s first two books, Animal Kingdom and Zama, set the templates for his work to come. Zama famously begins with a passage about a dead monkey that perfectly encapsulates the main character’s plight:

A dead monkey, still whole, still undecomposed, drifted back and forth with a certain precision upon those ripples and eddies without exit… The water that bore him up tried to bear him away, but he was caught among the posts of the decrepit wharf and there he was, ready to go and not going.

Antonio Di Bendetto author photo

Antonio Di Benedetto

Don Diego de Zama serves as a minor official in the Spanish colonies of the Americas. In the opening scene, he is waiting at the wharf for a boat to arrive, either bringing his wife and children, or word from the Governor that he is being transferred to a more prestigious post in Buenos Aires. But like the dead monkey drifting among the wharf’s posts, Zama waits eternally in vain, “ready to go and not going.”

Di Benedetto’s title story of the new collection, “Nest in the Bones,” also begins with a monkey, only this one is still living. “I’m not the monkey. My ideas are different, even if we did end up in the same position.” While the narrator claims not to be like his father’s pet monkey, he goes on to explain that as his father’s monkey takes refuge in an old palm tree, he takes his own kind of refuge in his room, and in friends, walks in nature, and books. Neither the monkey nor the man could ever successfully adapt to the narrator’s harsh father and his family.

The monkey’s hollow head inspires the narrator to fill up his own head with a flock of birds, the “nest in the bones” of the title. This flock of birds in the narrator’s head serves as a wonderful metaphor for the thoughts flying around a writer’s brain while composing a piece, whether the birds are the colorful canaries of a story, or the pecking vultures of self-doubt. Either way, the narrator seems to take great joy in giving refuge to his own odd, wayward thoughts deemed to be unacceptable by society at large. “I reveled in it, in the happiness of that sturdy, secure, and sheltering nest I was able to give them.”

This collection showcases a number of wonderfully imaginative stories whose fanciful imagery remains in the reader’s mind long after he’s finished reading. Di Benedetto’s concise, intelligent stories are surely still a source of complicit delight. Anyone who reads Zama and is hungry for more of Di Benedetto’s work will enjoy pecking at the writer’s brain in Nest in the Bones.

The image of a bird’s nest in the bones reappears later in the collection. The main character of “The Horse of the Salt Flats,” from Di Benedetto’s 1961 collection Foolish Love, is a horse. In the opening paragraph, the horse’s owner is struck dead by lightning and is incinerated on the spot. His horse is left on its own, still strapped to the man’s cart and pulling it behind him, like Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill. When the horse dies, a dove builds a nest under the horse’s skull, seeking refuge from the sun, and when the eggs hatch the nest in the bones soon becomes “a box of birdsong.”

Di Benedetto once said Dostoyevsky had such an outsized influence on him that the Russian “invented” him. Just as Dostoyevsky was once imprisoned in imperial Russia, Di Benedetto was incarcerated by the regime in Argentina from 1976 to 1977. He was finally released thanks to the involvement of fellow Argentinian novelist Ernesto Sabato and German Nobel-laureate Heinrich Boll. After his release, Di Benedetto left the country for Spain where he published his next book of stories, The Absurd Ones, in 1978. Several of the stories in the collection were written while he was in prison, but since he was banned from writing fiction, he smuggled them out in letters to friends.

Now translated into English, “Aballay” is one such story, about a man who refuses to dismount from the back of his horse. Much as St. Simeon of the Stylites takes refuge from the sins of the world on top of a column, Abally takes refuge from his own sins, which include murder, on top of his horse. While sitting in a self-made purgatory, Aballay soon begins to have dreams of sitting atop a column, like the Stylites, and having birds peck out his eyes. “They peck at his ears, his eyes, and his nose,” writes Di Benedetto. This return to the image of vultures pecking out the narrator’s brain in “Nest in the Bones” highlights the motifs running throughout Di Benedetto’s work.

“The Impossibility of Sleep,” from his next and final collection, Stories from Exile, published in 1983, is the only one in this new collection to address his time in prison. The narrator here discusses how the prison guards rob him of any refuge, even the brief escape of sleep. This idea brings the new collection full circle, as one of the first stories, “Reducido,” features a narrator debating whether or not to escape the numerous adversities in his real life by accompanying his dog Reducido in his dreams.

Despite that Roberto Bolaño and Di Benedetto both lived in Spain in the early 1980s, they never met in person. There has even been some doubt as to whether or not they corresponded. What is for sure, however, is that in 1997 Bolaño wrote a story, Sensini,” with a character based on Di Benedetto. In  “Sensini,” the protagonist comes across the name of one of his favorite Argentinian writers in a regional story competition and uses the opportunity to talk about a certain intermediate generation of Argentinian writers. He says of Sensini’s (Di Benedetto’s) generation that although “they didn’t have the stature of Borges and Cortazar, their concise, intelligent texts were a constant source of complicit delight.”

Though Zama is a better introduction to Di Benedetto’s writing, Nest in the Bones is still a worthwhile read. Di Benedetto’s plain, straight-forward prose better suits the narrator of an administrator writing reports in the colonies in Zama than it does the narrators of the dreams and fables in Nest in the Bones. However, this collection showcases a number of wonderfully imaginative stories whose fanciful imagery remains in the reader’s mind long after he’s finished reading. Di Benedetto’s concise, intelligent stories are surely still a source of complicit delight. Anyone who reads Zama and is hungry for more of Di Benedetto’s work will enjoy pecking at the writer’s brain in Nest in the Bones.

Eric Andrew Newman drinking from a water bottleEric Andrew Newman lives in Los Angeles and is from the Chicago area. He works as an archivist for a nonprofit foundation by day and as a writer of flash fiction by night. He has previously been named as a finalist for the Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Contest and Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Exposition Review, Gargoyle, Heavy Feather Review, Necessary Fiction, New Madrid, and Quarter After Eight.

NEAPOLITAN CHRONICLES, stories and essays, by Anna Maria Ortese reviewed by Jeanne Bonner

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Neapolitan Chronicles cover art. The view of a harbor from a bridgeNEAPOLITAN CHRONICLES
by Anna Maria Ortese
translated by Ann Goldstein and Jenny McPhee
New Vessel Press, 192 pages

reviewed by Jeanne Bonner

Any book that has a ringing endorsement on its cover from Elena Ferrante these days will merit a second look.

But there is another, potentially more important endorsement of Neapolitan Chronicles—a silent endorsement on the part of the translators of this Italian story collection by Anna Maria Ortese, originally published in Italy in 1953.

The translator is often hidden in publishing’s shadows (indeed, the series of events for translators at Italy’s biggest book fair is actually called “The Invisible Author.”) But many readers of Ortese may actually find their way to this book through the two translators that have brought her work to English-speaking readers: Ann Goldstein, Elena Ferrante’s translator, and Jenny McPhee, an accomplished novelist whose new translation last year of Natalia Ginzburg’s seminal work of nonfiction, Family Lexicon, was widely lauded (see the Cleaver review here.)

When it came out more than 60 years ago (under the title Il mare non bagna Napoli, or Naples Is Not Bathed by the Sea), Neapolitan Chronicles signaled to the Italian literary world that a new talent had arrived from the south, and the book won the important Viareggio Prize. Ortese, who was born in 1914 and died in 1998, would go on to win Italy’s most prestigious literary award, the Premio Strega. This new translation of what’s considered Ortese’s most important book signals something similar in the Ferrante era: here’s another female Italian writer (from southern Italy, no less) for English language readers to feast on.

The book is divided between fictional short stories and nonfiction sketches (three of the former, two of the latter). From the first short fiction piece in the collection, “A Pair of Eyeglasses,” it becomes clear Ortese is a keen cataloger of precious details and a diviner of people’s characters. A young girl, Eugenia, lives with her extended family in Naples. She desperately needs glasses. Ortese quickly teases out the contradictions in her Aunt Nunziata, who graciously ponies up the money for the young girl’s glasses but never fails to note the amount she spent (“a grand total of a good 8,000 Lira”). When Eugenia, whom the doctor deems practically blind, thanks her aunt for this kindness, Nunziata, who never married and has no children of her own, replies, in a kind of inoculating mantra of perpetually disappointed southern Italy, “My child, it’s better not to see the world than to see it.”

With a few, fast strokes, Ortese has sketched out the world of her characters. To paraphrase the Italian novelist Rossella Milone, who wrote an appreciation of the story in 2015, Ortese quickly produces the first miracle necessary for a story’s success: evoke a world.

And what a world it is. Here, poverty and powerlessness can embitter, even to the point of robbing a young girl of the natural joy of seeing. Indeed, one can well imagine the people Ortese knew who inspired the character of Aunt Nunziata, a nagging, melancholic, nothing-is-ever-good-enough curmudgeon for whom life is more or less over even as death remains years off. Which is not to say the aunt in this story doesn’t have a point. In the poverty-stricken, post-war Naples milieu so skillfully evoked by Ortese anything of value is in scarce supply. The poor stay poor. To wit, Eugenia, Nunziata and the rest of the family live in a basement apartment lorded over by aristocrat landlords who expect the poor tenants to be at their beck and call.

Headshot of Anna Maria Ortese

Anna Maria Ortese

It’s also a world in which bad luck and violence can seem so arbitrary and unavoidable. Eugenia—whose exquisite innocence is captured so expertly by Ortese and rendered equally as beatific in this fine translation—is at one point delayed while running an errand. As she returns, she daydreams about the new glasses, wondering if they will have gold frames and whether her mother will collect them that day for her from the eye doctor. But these beautifully girlish thoughts of hope are bluntly cut short by what Ortese describes as “a frenzy of blows.” Ortese writes, “It was Aunt Nunzia, of course, furious of her delay… ‘Bloodsucker! You ugly little blind girl!’” The words are as violent as the blows in Ortese’s prose. Such an abrupt turn should prepare the reader for the sad ending in which Eugenia is so overcome by the power of the glasses, she becomes sick to her stomach and doubles over, vomiting, while her aunt insists the money was a waste. That little bit of joy inherent in giving a young girl sight? Ortese stomps it out, as if to warn that there are no happy endings in her Naples.

“Family Interior,” another short work of fiction in the book, is likewise a gem. Here the momentum builds slowly but once Ortese reveals the central premise the reader turns the pages as if sprinting through a mystery. Much of the book doubles as insightful social commentary, with Ortese punctuating her prose with stunning, pointed asides about the interactions among Naples’ various social classes. And in the case of “Family Interior,” Ortese also slyly inserts gender politics (the phrase didn’t exist in 1953 but the condition of life did). She uses the story of a shopkeeper to zero in on the carefully proscribed roles a woman was allowed to inhabit in post-war Naples (and arguably many other places, until quite recently). With a successful dress shop, Anastasia Finizio is her family’s breadwinner. But she has never married, choosing instead to live the life of a shrewd, well-clad merchant, what she terms “a man’s life.” She’s satisfied, or so she thinks, until she learns from a chance comment from an acquaintance that a long-lost love is returning to Naples and has sent her a special greeting.

What’s stunning is the fiction Anastasia invents based on this thinnest of premises. Even before she can meet with the lost lover, Antonio Laurano, she imagines selling her shop and moving to a house him, where she would take care of him for the rest of her life “the way a true man serves a man.” Ortese turns a simple short story into a work of suspense as the reader, especially the female reader, desperately reads along to learn if anything comes of this fantasy.

The story also provides a canvas for Ortese’s world-defining asides; she dresses down one character with “his air of a studious cockroach.” She describes Anastasia as resigned to a “servile and silent life in the house of the married sister.” But perhaps her sharpest observations come in the form of descriptions of Anastasia’s mother as someone “who in her meager existence drew obscure consolation from the misfortunes of others.” Indeed, Sra. Finizio doesn’t exactly feel sympathy for Anastasia as the question of the long-lost love hangs in the air. That’s because Anastasia chose a different path—or chance conspired to give her a different path in life. Ortese writes of the mother, “Her youth had quickly run its course and she didn’t forgive anyone who wished to avoid the law that she had been subjected to.” Woe to any women—including her daughter—who doesn’t quietly accept the strait-jacket that 1950s Naples society aims to slap on them.

The Ortese collection was first translated in 1955 in Britain in an abridged edition but according to the publisher of this new translation, New Vessel Press, it has been out of print in English for decades. This is the first time the whole work has been published in English by a U.S. publisher.

Such descriptions are not only exhilarating, as literature goes, but they also hint at the complexity of the characters in Ortese’s fiction: a mother who would resent her own daughter because she attempted to evade the arbitrary, punishing mores of her society.

Put another way, people in Ortese’s world, and especially women born to poor, lower class families, should be “unconsciously prepared for a life without joy,” as Ortese describes Eugenia in “A Pair of Eyeglasses.”

These small observations distinguish her fiction. Similarly, in a nonfiction piece midway through the book, “The Involuntary City,” Ortese describes southern Italy as “dead to the progress of time” (One faintly hears Don Fabrizio ruminating on Sicily of the nineteenth century.) And given the fantastical nature of Naples—even among Italians it has a reputation as a city where anything can happen—one often finds the people mentioned in the nonfiction accounts are as memorable as the characters in the short works of fiction. Later on in “The Involuntary City,” which concerns a temporary homeless shelter, Ortese describes a woman she meets there as “queen of the house of the dead.” Ortese goes on to say the woman is “a crushed figure, bloated, horrendous, the fruit, in her turn, of profoundly defective creatures, and yet something regal remained in her.” It paints a picture of Naples as a city that harbors a bit of heaven and a lot of hell.

In some ways, the plots in the fictional works are beside the point and the premises of some of the nonfiction pieces may appear dated and of passing interest to modern readers (the dynamics of the relationship among Italian writers living in the midcentury, for example, which is the backdrop of several of the chapters, will appeal only to a select group of readers). Indeed, some of the nonfiction reflects a return visit Ortese made to Naples after living for a time in other parts of Italy, and they include reminiscences and personal observations that sound almost as though they have sprung from her diary. At times, the observations and the exchanges with old friends are of such a personal nature, and also pertaining to a bygone era scarcely imaginable in some ways today, that they detract from the overall volume. Moreover, given the quality of stories like “A Pair of Eyeglasses,” the reader may sometimes wish there were more fiction in the collection. The chapter “Evening Descends Upon the Hills,” for example, is a piece about a piece: Ortese had been commissioned to write about up-and-coming writers living in Naples and in this essay, she relays a journey she took by tram to the house of a writer. It may be of interest to a literary scholar who specializes in Italian writers of that era, however, the significance is somewhat muted with the passage of time and the trip over the ocean.

But Ortese’s descriptions of people, places, and states of mind are masterful. It can also be said that some of the nonfiction reads like fiction (which is a credit to Ortese and Goldstein and McPhee, her translators). In one of the nonfiction pieces, in fact, she tells us she sat by “a woman without a nose, who had an enormous plant on her lap.” Such passages make the reader glad to be along for the ride.

The Ortese translation comes as book buyers in America and Britain continue to gobble up the works of Ferrante, which are set partly in Naples. And that’s an important milestone in the spread of Italian literature beyond Italy’s borders because Naples, as a travel destination or a fount of literature, even in the Ferrante era, remains scarcely known to Americans. Ortese’s stories remedy this gap in many ways.

Moreover, there is growing awareness of the scarcity of works translated into English specifically by Italian women. According to statistics gathered by Open Letter Press at the University of Rochester, the overwhelming majority of the Italian works translated into English in 2017 were written by men (and in 2016, and 2015, etc.). One could say there’s a backlog of works by female authors not translated, including some who won Italy’s most prestigious literary prizes. To wit: the Ortese collection was first translated in 1955 in Britain in an abridged edition but according to the publisher of this new translation, New Vessel Press, it has been out of print in English for decades. This is the first time the whole work has been published in English by a U.S. publisher.

Ortese is an important touchstone for contemporary Italian authors, particularly women authors such as Ferrante. There’s been much debate over Ferrante’s identity and also her literary value. (One Italian critic has even asserted that her prose is better in English thanks, of course, to Ann Goldstein). But if Ferrante’s only lasting legacy is to secure a place for Italian women writers in the English-speaking world, lovers of literary fiction should be feeling awfully optimistic.

Author Photo of Jeanne BonnerJeanne Bonner is a writer and journalist based in Connecticut. She is the 2018 winner of the PEN Grant for the English Translation of Italian Literature, given by PEN America. Her essays have been published by The New York Times, CNN Travel, Literary Hub and Catapult. She studied Italian literature at Wesleyan University and has an MFA in Creative Writing from Bennington College.

 

The Memoirs of Two Young Wives, a novel by Honoré de Balzac, translated by Jordan Stump, reviewed by Ashlee Paxton-Turner

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The Memoirs of Two Young Wives cover art. A painting of two women looking at each other

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THE MEMOIRS OF TWO YOUNG WIVES
 by Honoré de Balzac
translated by Jordan Stump
New York Review Classics, 242 pages

reviewed by Ashlee Paxton-Turner

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The classic coming-of-age novel tells the story of a young boy coming to terms with the man he is about to become. Over 175 years ago, the great French literary seer Honoré de Balzac composed a rather untraditional version: in his novel, The Memoirs of Two Young Wives, Balzac applies the traditional arc of the bildungsroman to two female protagonists in order to present two ways of life—the passionate life and the tranquil life. In doing so, Balzac reminds readers of the elusive nature of happiness, regardless of one’s way of life, and what it means to love and be loved.

Balzac was expert at capturing the French society of his time. He wrote over ninety novels, but The Memoirs of Two Young Wives never received the attention as a beloved work like Pere Goriot. Additionally, unlike his more famous plays and novels, The Memoirs of Two Young Wives has a small cast of characters and follows the epistolary form. Commentators and scholars have theorized that this novel presents the tensions between pleasure and duty that Balzac himself faced. Moreover, much of what the two protagonists, Louise and Renee, struggle within their 19th-century world resonates in 2018. For example, are we happier seeking out the hustle and bustle of society or the peace of the countryside? At a certain age do we feel it is simply time to grow up and get married, or are we truly in love? Do we follow our own ambitions or do we put them to the side? What will make us happy?

The novel begins with Louise excitedly writing to Renee, her closest confidant, that she, too, is now leaving the Carmelite convent where both of them had lived and formed their bond of friendship. Louise and Renee then each vow to write each other and describe every detail of their lives.

Painting of Honoré de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac

In these letters, Balzac describes two ways of living, though he leaves it up to the reader to make the final judgment about which, if either, is necessarily “better.” Louise is full of passion while Renee resigns herself to what she sees as her womanly duties—marriage and motherhood. At different points in the novel, each succumbs to jealousy of the other’s way of life. Louise initially is frustrated that the men of Paris do not take more of an interest in her. What must she do to get their attention? How should she balance her intellect and beauty? How can she be loved? She is frantic to be adored. To Renee, she writes that “[w]hat [she] has read of modern literature is centered on love . . . since [their] destiny is shaped wholly by men and for men . . . .” Her introduction into Parisian society my make a 21st-century reader blush at how gendered Louise insists her role in society must be, no matter how cunning and clever she is and how much she recognizes her own intellect. Louise writes to Renee that “[a] young woman counts for nothing at the ball: she is a dancing machine.” But Louise is not impressed with a man of “great talent,” whom she finds “so deeply occupied with himself . . . that [she] concluded that . . . women must be mere things, and not people . . . ” She wants a passionate love and to be adored, though she is not willing to be a mere “thing” for any man, and she is frustrated that in society “[w]omen count for very little . . . .” Will the adoration of a man make Louise happy? Perhaps, temporarily it will.

Renee, on the other hand, agrees to an arranged marriage to a man she eventually grows fond of, especially after he makes her a mother. Louise sharply criticizes Renee’s decision to lock herself into such a life, insisting that she is “simply leaving one convent for another!” But Louise later idealizes Renee’s prosaic, country life and three children. Renee’s husband moves through the ranks of government office with help from Louise and her family, and Renee is content to help move her husband’s political career along but never overshadow him. Will children make Renee happy? In many ways, they do, but she also experiences great anxiety and fear when her oldest becomes ill, though he eventually recovers.

Louise takes two lovers, each of whom she eventually marries in turn. The first man, Felipe, is a former Baron in exile from Spain. He adores Louise and respects her intellect. Felipe loves her much more than she loves him, but this is what she thinks she wants. Renee is quick to tell her that she does not think Louise truly loves him, and in the end, Renee is right. Felipe dies, and Louise insists it was her fault. Later, Louise marries a man four years her junior. The marriage is a secret, and they live in isolation. Louise becomes jealous, believing her husband to be having an affair, and ultimately makes herself ill with consumption by staying outside overnight. When Louise dies Renee feels even more desperately that she wants her children around her. They have become her life—the life she described to Louise in as much as detail as possible.

In the back-and-forth of Louise and Renee’s letters, Balzac reveals how happiness can feel artificial and how dependent it is on others. Louise writes to Renee that “what society least forgives . . . is happiness, and so it must be concealed.” But whatever happiness the two women feel at different moments in their lives, along with their frustrations, they are free to express in their correspondence. Indeed, their correspondence and friendship become a type of happiness that does not need to be concealed.

Near the novel’s beginning, Louise writes to Renee that she was told that “good taste means knowing what mustn’t be said as much as what may be.” Such good taste does not need to be heeded in the women’s correspondence. In these letters, Renee and Louise do not need to shy away from certain subjects just as they do not need to hide their happiness (or unhappiness) from one another. When the rules of etiquette fall away and the women can be honest with themselves and each other, perhaps that is when and how they find their happiness.

After Louise dies, Renee writes her husband that her “heart is broken.” It seems fitting that the novel should end with a broken heart that is not caused by any romantic attachment. Rather, Renee’s heart breaks because her confidant, the source of her true happiness, dies. By the end of the novel, it seems as though the elusive happiness and love that both women craved was there all along in their correspondence and friendship. Through their correspondence, the women achieved a balance between pleasure and duty, fantasy and reality, passion and tranquility. Perhaps that balance is why their friendship was tied up with their happiness. Perhaps Balzac’s point is that these tensions between pleasure and duty, fantasy and reality, passion and tranquility are necessary for happiness.

Ashlee Paxton Turner in front of a bookshelf

Ashlee Paxton-Turner is a native of Williamsburg, Virginia, and graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where she was an English major with a creative writing concentration. A former Teach For America corps member in rural North Carolina, Ashlee is now a lawyer and graduate of Duke University School of Law.

[m]otherhood, stories by Anna Lea Jancewicz, reviewed by KC Mead-Brewer

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[m]otherhood[m]otherhood cover art. Abstract art of a woman carrying a young girl
by Anna Lea Jancewicz
Widow + Orphan, 170 pages

reviewed by KC Mead-Brewer

Anna Lea Jancewicz built up her editorial chops on magical flash fiction and fairytale non-fiction journals, like Cease, Cows and Tiny Donkey, before becoming Editor-in-Chief of Rabble Lit, a magazine dedicated to working-class literature. Some might consider this a strange artistic road, but it makes sense. Using the magic in the everyday to challenge and undermine the power of oppressors, magical realism emerges from anti-colonialism and protest. Similarly, the classic fairytale often elevates working-class heroines like Cindergirl and Vasilisa. Jancewicz’s debut collection builds on these traditions of artistic protest, offering a mix of flash and short stories steeped in both the brutal realities and dreamy magic of women’s lives. The combination of flash and short stories creates a heady ebb and flow throughout the collection, almost like a heartbeat ba-boom, ba-boom, a place where prayers, stories, and spells live side-by-side.

As the title [m]otherhood suggests, the book is laced with countless unexpected births and creations, from the endless beastly offspring of “The Female of the Species” to the uncanny rabbit nosing its way up from a garden grave in “Rosemary & Ghostmilk.”

It’s no wonder that “Rosemary & Ghostmilk” is nestled at the heart of this collection. Miranda, its protagonist, wakes in the first line just after the preceding story’s heroines have both gone to bed, unable to put her own pain to rest. Miranda mourns what would’ve been her third child, the miscarried remnants of whom she’s buried in her backyard beneath the rosemary bushes. The dark beauty of this story embodies so much of Jancewicz’s simultaneously tender and ruthless style, the luscious marriage of the physical to the phantasmal. “Rosemary is for the dead, rosemary is for remembrance,” she writes.

[Miranda had] known that when she chose the place in her garden for the burial. And yet, she had remembered only to forget. There’d been no token to hold in hand, no lock of fine blonde hair or curled cord stump to place in a box. It had been too early for that. Too early for any substance to remain. Too early for condolences. Too early for anyone to understand the grief that weighted her emptied body, so Miranda had buried that, too.

Buried, or planted. In Jancewicz’s stories, ghosts are born from the unlikeliest of seeds: whispered names, dark soil, breastmilk, the rabbit in the moon. Because here, to be pregnant, to be a mother, is to be haunted.

Anna Lea Jancewicz author photo

Anna Lea Jancewicz

Jancewicz builds on this sense of being haunted throughout the collection. In “Off the Map,” a woman is haunted by her own death (among other things). In “Funny How Tender Can Mean Two Things,” a woman simultaneously haunts and is haunted by her twin sister’s life, the life she could’ve had. In “Sheitel,” a woman is eerily self-aware of her own endlessly repeating hero’s journey.

Like the classic hero’s journey, “Sheitel” is layered with concentric circles, the protagonist as their common center: a woman who wrestles with God and returns to Him; who dutifully marks each menses with a mikvah; who becomes pregnant (again); who cannot stop hearing the same song over and over, Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” (itself a cyclical myth); who dedicates herself to providing her family with a seamless loop of blessed, properly prepared evenings for making Shabbos. She who is destined to wrestle with God again and again, accruing small badges (such as a faint, almost invisible tattoo) to mark each resurrection. She who repeats the repeating stories:

Our sages say that when Ya’akov saw the angels, the messengers, ascending and descending the ladder on the banks of the Yabbok, they were ascending first because they are always here, always among us. The man he wrestled with, the man who wrenched his hipbone from its socket, the man he wrestled with when he was alone, was already there.

When Ya’akov was alone, the man was already there. The world is full of hauntings, Jancewicz reminds us, whether by ghosts, gods, or humans. We haunt ourselves with stories.

Jancewicz’s dedication to Jewish characters and communities is a welcome change in a genre that’s often colored by a Christian lens. She spotlights heroes who are mindful of their history and traditions even as they subvert them. In “Chana Finkelstein Made a Golem Baby,” the working class, middle-aged Chana does exactly as the title suggests: she looks her desire in the eye and goes to work making it come true, seeking the proper prayer and name of God necessary to bring her golem baby to life. The local rabbis deride her (italics in the original):

Mrs. Finkelstein, [Rabbi Kleinman] said, his eyes horrified. You know these stories are fairy tales, right?

Mrs. Finkelstein, [said Rabbi Schechter,] with all due respect, this is the sort of study done by very learned scholars, very learned men…

Yet Chana searches tirelessly through every book and class she can find. But it isn’t until she turns to the prayers and devotions of women, to the local mikvah attendant Miriam Leibowitz, that she finds the wisdom she needs. “You’ve been asking for help in the wrong places,” Miriam tells her.

That [Rabbi] Kleinman thinks you’re as demented as Rochel Nudelman, bless her poor fercockt heart, and that [Rabbi] Schechter, even if he does know something, he’s not going to whisper a word of it unless you’ve got a schmeckie between your legs. Anyway, why ask a man how a woman should make a baby? Their golems are all brutes, what would you want with that? Now let me see your Bubbe’s tkhines.

Through Miriam, Chana’s golem baby becomes more than a fairytale, more than a “study.” At last, her baby is called a baby. She’s found the right name of God to use.

When Rabbi Kleinman tells Chana that her golem baby is nothing but a story, a fiction, she responds simply with,

Who are you to say? Who am I to say? Can’t you just help me find the right words?

The words are already there, Chana knows, it’s only a matter of finding them, remembering them, tucking them into the proper mouth to bring forth fresh life. It’s a matter of parsing out the prayers from within the fairytales, recognizing the spells and sacred threads that stitch the everyday together. Jancewicz’s collection is an act of doing just this: a search for the magical in the quotidian, a recognition of the power tangled in the roots of a rosemary bush, woven through a woman’s sheitel, or beneath a pair of chickpea-eyes pressed lovingly into a golem baby’s yet-born face.

K.C. Mead Brewer in front of a bookshelf

K.C. Mead-Brewer lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Carve Magazine, Strange Horizons, Hobart, and elsewhere. As a reader, she loves everything weird—surrealism, sci-fi, horror, all the good stuff that shows change is not only possible, but inevitable. For more information, visit kcmeadbrewer.com and follow her @meadwriter.

 

Buckskin Cocaine, stories by Erika T. Wurth, reviewed by Jordan A. Rothacker

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Buckskin Cocaine cover art. A brick wall half purple and half white, behind a drawing of a woman looking at her phoneBuckskin Cocaine
by Erika T. Wurth
Astrophil Press, 111 pages

reviewed by Jordan A. Rothacker

Sometimes we read fiction to escape, to experience the art of writing, or to lose ourselves in plot. Non-fiction is often imagined the territory of learning, absorbing direct information on a topic. We often forget that fiction still has this power, to take you somewhere real you’ve never been, to introduce you to people you might not have otherwise met. Fiction can convey social realities and erode the “otherness” of others. Sometimes even when we set out to read to escape, to read for fun, we are confronted with truths about our world. But of course, true art about the human experience never eludes the social and the political.

I find myself in this dual mindset with Erika T. Wurth’s recent collection of short stories, Buckskin Cocaine. This collection of eight different first-person-voiced stories covers a lot of terrain over 111 pages all the while exploring the distinctive world of “buckskin” filmmaking, a once exploitative Hollywood Western subgenre that nowadays signals a world of Native directors, actors, and film festivals. The story titles bear the names of the protagonists, among them “Barry Four Voices,” “Candy Francois,” “Gary Hollywood,” “Lucy Bigboca,” “Mark Wishewas,” and “Olivia James.” Buckskin Cocaine explores this particular corner of Native America and in doing so illuminates so many of the universal issues facing Native Americans. Wurth is particularly interested in themes of authenticity and compromise. She asks, Where lies creativity when Native filmmakers feel pigeonholed into only making Native films? Where lies integrity when non-Native filmmakers care only about stereotypes and revisionist history, but work is hard to come by for a Native actor and a paycheck is needed?

What makes this emotionally satisfying reading is how well the prose brings to life the various voices all within this same small world. George Bull is a director who makes Native films that show at buckskin film festivals. He constantly denies any social obligation to justice or fairness. Rather, he says he’s in it for the money (of course, how could that be true, his work speaks for his commitment to his people). There’s Lucy Bigboca, who boasts about how traditional she is and yet shouts in text-speak full of LOLs and LMAOs jolted by exclamation points. With all her boasting and shouting, she truly has a big boca.

Gary Hollywood’s voice is the most distant and distinct from the others’. He revels in the buckskin roles that let him be “so terrifying that it is utterly beautiful.” He says, “And I feel like someone should be proud. Look at me up there, my hair so black, my naked chest so brown, my eyes filled with stones. I look like a warrior. I dance, I sing, I fight. I am so beautiful in the dark.” These roles reconfirm for him that he was “born for blood” and make him feel connected to an aspect of his heritage. He speaks as if out of a dream and takes us through his childhood in Oklahoma and his time killing in the jungle (most likely Vietnam, though he never says), but now he drinks too much and regrets past acts that sound like domestic violence. He cherishes his dreams though, and the dreamy nature of acting.

Erika T. Wurth author photo

Erika T. Wurth

The penultimate story is narrated by the book’s biggest wannabe, a scenester and hanger-on, who we feel for as he waits in the wings, always on hand, trying to impress the cool, connected people at the film festivals and hip watering holes. In a turn Joycean-Pynchonian, the character is named Mark Wishewas, and oh how he “wish he was” making real serious films with people like George Bull and Robert Two-Stories. For the reader, Wishewas is also a revealing critic of the Native film. At one point he laments that the buckskin films his fellow Natives direct are all about the past. He says, “I mean, Jesus, what about talking about how we are now? That’s what I was always thinking about when I was thinking about writing a short story collection though I never had time to write it. I mean, I work in a library and that takes up a lot of my time. Plus the writing world is completely full of crap. I’m totally done with it. At least film has an audience. Plus, the writers I meet are always total jerks.” His story is both sweet and tragic.

The final story is the longest, with the widest character arc and most complicated tricks of narrative-time-play. Olivia James is a ballet dancer with a life separate from most of the characters we’ve met before. She leaves her home and her father in Denver for a career in New York and ultimately Europe, experiencing success. After reading the other stories in the collection we understand a greater depth to her journey, the pressures, the temptations, and the politics. Her path might be separate from the others we have met but it shares themes of authenticity and identity. Olivia worries about retaining her heritage while also embracing a European art form. She wants to be seen as a dancer, not a Native American dancer, while still never losing who she is. We relate to her and feel for her as we watch her grow, but there is a tragic tone beneath the surface. We have met her before, an older version of herself, in George Bull’s story. She’s there at the Native American Film Festival in Santa Fe, New Mexico, aged out of dancing; she’s a teacher and academic, but in George’s eyes she’s another scenester, drinking, partying, rubbing elbows, part of this Native film world yet just as uncertain as to who she is as everybody else.

Buckskin Cocaine doesn’t build into a novel (there is no overarching plot) but through theme and connected characters, it gives way to a particular view of a much-hidden world. With its pettiness, infighting, beauty, inspiration, leaders, followers, wannabes, and has-beens the buckskin scene seems at first just like any other. Yet this is a kind of Hollywood illusion. Just beneath the surface, Wurth’s characters wrestle with dual and triple identities. A people who have survived a legacy of genocide and marginalization face obstacles from within and from outside their own communities, whether they choose to face them or not. Wurth’s point may be that the best film sets make it almost impossible to tell what is actually real.

Jordan A. Rothacker in front of a bookshelfJordan A. Rothacker is a poet, essayist, and novelist who lives in Athens, GA where he received an MA in Religion and a PhD in Comparative Literature. His books are The Pit, and No Other Stories (Black Hill Press, 2015), And Wind Will Wash Away (Deeds, 2016), and the meta-text My Shadow Book by Maawaam (Spaceboy Books, 2017).

AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE, a novel by Tayari Jones, reviewed by Brandon Stanwyck

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An American Marriage cover art. Black writing against a light blue background with a golden treeAN AMERICAN MARRIAGE
by Tayari Jones
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 306 pages

reviewed by Brandon Stanwyck

Do Roy and Celestial have an ordinary American marriage? The title of Tayari Jones’ fourth novel implies that perhaps they do in fact have a quintessential American life, and in many ways they do…

Roy and Celestial are newlyweds. He grew up in Louisiana, to a blue-collar family. He worked hard, studied harder, earned his way into Morehouse College in Georgia, and went on to become a business executive. She, a talented visionary born and raised in the Peach State, grew up in a comfortable family. She excelled at a neighboring liberal arts college for women and now makes her income as a successful artisan. Together, they exemplify the Dream–thriving and very much in love. Early on, Jones paints a picture for the reader, through Roy:

…we kissed like teenagers, making out under the bridge. It was a wonderful feeling to be grown and yet young. To be married but not settled. To be tied down yet free.

About a year after their wedding day, the couple decides to drive across the South to visit Roy’s family in Louisiana. In the dead of night, a horde of rapacious police officers charge through their motel room door, drag Roy outside, and violently arrest him for a heinous crime that he did not commit. Despite the lack of any concrete evidence, the court finds him guilty and sentences him to twelve years in prison—largely because the judge and jury choose to believe the testimony of Roy’s white accuser over Roy, a black man. Wanton declarations of guilt such as this are not mere fiction. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, one in three black men will be locked up in their lifetime—and receive ten percent longer sentences than white defendants for the same charge.

Tayari Jones author photo

Tayari Jones

Up to the point of his conviction, Jones tells the story in a standard prose form, with Celestial and Roy taking turns as narrator with each new chapter. Once Roy is wrongfully incarcerated and sent to prison, the form shifts into an epistolary style: The two protagonists continue to alternate as storyteller via handwritten letters that illustrate, in vivid and frank detail, their pain as they combat their mutual and separate tribulations. This letter-writing technique, on Jones’ part, works to incarnate the distance growing between husband and wife throughout their forced estrangement. In an especially tender letter, Celestial confesses, “just because I’m not in the same agony as you are, I’m in pain,” and then, “marriage is more than your heart, it’s your life.” And after a considerable amount of time, Roy writes back: “Everything I do is a love letter addressed to you.” But as the days go on, the time between correspondences grows and the letters themselves shrink.

Imprisonment, in the story as well as in real life, takes an emotional and fiscal toll on everyone close to the matter, not just on the persons behind the bars. Over time, Celestial and Roy’s once-picturesque union slowly crumbles. She, “the kind of woman who will never belong to anyone,” finds herself adrift, robbed of her marital bliss—they had been preparing to put down roots and begin a family prior to his unlawful arrest. And while he combats the penal system from the inside, she must fight her own punitive battles on the outside. She struggles to stay afloat spiritually and financially on her own, as countless women of color throughout history have and continue to do. But as months become years, times get really tough and Celestial discovers a place of solace in the company of her longtime friend Andre, who had been Roy’s best man at their wedding.

Five years into his sentence, Roy’s conviction gets overturned, and as soon as his “hostage of the state” era ends, the letters cease, and the novel returns to its initial form. Roy and Celestial, still legally wed, pass the narrative baton back and forth as he tries to reclaim his life. But a third first-person point of view enters the picture and stays for the remainder of the story: Andre, now more than just a friend, offers his perspective and cements his impact on the titular marriage.

Tayari Jones calls An American Marriage “a love story.” And it is. Roy and Celestial’s love for one another is continually tried and warped by a broken justice system that values white lives—and dooms black lives at an exponential rate. Throughout the story, their love takes on different shapes, but never withers, as it faces its own trial and struggles through its own internment period—while refusing to give in. In a sense, Celestial and Roy’s love, represented by the resoluteness of their marriage, is a character unto itself—a character tested not only by Roy’s unjust incarceration but also by Celestial’s budding feelings for Andre.

An American Marriage is not a novel about who really committed the crime that sent Roy away. It never even for a second moves it in that direction because that doesn’t matter; that is the theme of another book—a safer book. An American Marriage is about our twisted judicial system that unremittingly turns “standard-issue American Negro” men like Roy into “a victim of America”—and how those two concepts are all too often one and the same.

So do Roy and Celestial have an ordinary American marriage? Well, according to Jones herself, “it depends on who you ask.” Of course, not all couples are ripped apart so ruthlessly, no, but, for a lot of folks of color, the potential for it to happen is always present, since we live in a society of skewed courtrooms and a prison-industrial complex that views black convicts as easy wins and dollars. So, in a very brutal sense…yes, Roy and Celestial do have an ordinary (black) American marriage.

Brandon Stanwyck author photoBrandon Stanwyck studied film, literature, and theatre at Cleveland State University. While there, he led a student-run theatre company. He currently lives in Ohio, where he divides his time between working on independent movies and writing fiction. His words have appeared in The Fiction Pool, Corvus Review, and elsewhere. Twitter: @BrandonStanwyck.

MIRROR, SHOULDER, SIGNAL, a novel by Dorthe Nors, reviewed by Brendan McCourt

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Mirror Should Signal cover art. The shadow of a woman inside an orange car, with a corner of her yellow stress sticking out from the doorMIRROR, SHOULDER, SIGNAL
by Dorthe Nors
translated by Misha Hoekstra
Pushkin Press, 188 pages

reviewed by Brendan McCourt

Although I am not a middle-aged Danish woman who translates Swedish crime novels known for their graphic mutilation of women and who in her spare time flees from nature retreats to eat cake and sit in the rain, I relate to Sonja, the protagonist of Dorthe Nors’s 2017 Man Booker International Prize shortlisted novel. Unassuming, if spiritually and sometimes even physically lost, Sonja can’t drive, let alone shift gears for herself, and her sister won’t answer her calls.

Such is Sonja’s state at the beginning of the novel. Cooped up in a small car with her driving instructor, Jytte, an often coarse and unapologetically racist woman from Jutland, Sonja narrowly dodges bicyclists, Jytte’s chronic insults, and—in a scene that brims with comedic angst—a hot dog vendor. It is Jytte who shifts gears for Sonja, an act that becomes the novel’s main metaphor for Sonja’s inability to move forward in her life. This opening chapter ends, like most of the chapters do, with Sonja’s reflections on the moment. Here, Sonja blocks out Jytte’s confrontation with a delivery van in the middle of an intersection to reflect on a brief yet poetic moment of clarity when she looks out her window to see a graveyard: “Sonja thinks about the dead prime ministers in the cemetery. It’s lovely to take a blanket there. […] The dead make no noise, and if she’s lucky a bird of prey might soar overhead. Then she’ll lie there, and escape.”

Fiction, like an automobile, is a mode of transportation. It allows one to traverse landscapes of the mind, escape into other spaces, other minds, where even the most fantastical elements pang with a sense of familiarity. Opening a cover is like opening a car door, turning a page like turning the key: escape is imminent. It is a metaphor which extends to life itself, where fiction is as much an exploration of life as it is an escape from it, and Sonja finds herself struggling with acquiring the means to move forward in life, the means which inevitably entail her to leave something meaningful behind.

One’s ability to escape, this novel proposes, is limited if you can’t drive. Like others who got a late start to driving, I share in Sonja’s sense of enclosure induced by the inability to drive. And what’s more, I always felt the freedom afforded to those who can drive comes at a cost of empathy. On occasion I have seen well-meaning, levelheaded people become angry misanthropes in the blink of an eye (or is it signal?). Behind the wheel of a car, a person becomes susceptible to easy rage, and Nors’s Jytte seems to confirm this suspicion.

As a child growing up in the farmlands of Denmark, Sonja was able to escape her reality by hiding in a little enclosure she made for herself in a rye field. But in the din and clamor that is Copenhagen, there are no rye fields, and Sonja must adapt. Here we see Sonja retreat into the inner recesses of her mind, finding intellectual solace when a physical form can’t be found. Nors’s prose braids past and present, interior and exterior action to mimic the turmoil embedded in Sonja. In a scene toward the end of the novel, Sonja has dumped Jytte for Folke, the head driving instructor himself, and confrontation with Jytte ensues. Sonja rebukes Jytte’s accusations of betrayal by returning to an imaginative heather filled with whooper swans and deer, her substitute for the rye field of her childhood. Then, after leaving the confrontation without a single goodbye—“Not saying goodbye,” we are told, “isn’t something Sonja learned at home”—she walks away into the streets of Copenhagen and back into her heather.

Dorthe Nors author photo

Dorthe Nors

None of this is new territory for Nors who, in addition to six book-length works of fiction, holds the accolade of the first Danish writer published by the New Yorker. She is certainly in company with the greats of Continental literature—Kafka, Beckett, Kundera—for the dark humor woven into the fabric of her fiction. In an interview with The Paris Review’s Dwyer Murphy, Nors comments on this aspect within her short story collection Karate Chop, which extends itself across her oeuvre, as “Danish irony.” “We don’t like to read a book,” Nors says, “about how bleedingly easy things are. We like the complicated stuff.”

In a novel that doesn’t extend itself beyond daily life, “the complicated stuff” entails menial tasks, chance encounters, and, most importantly, interpersonal relationships. Sonja’s relationship with her sister Kate haunts most of the novel. Multiple times Sonja writes to her sister, either on postcards or computer paper, but never bothers to send the letters: her thoughts are scattered and insubstantial, and her inability to communicate honestly is disrupted by thoughts of an old boyfriend, Bacon Bjarne. When she calls, Kate either hands off the phone to her husband or makes the excuse that she is in line at the supermarket. Sonja knows her lie, but lets it go.

Above all else, Mirror, Shoulder, Signal is a novelist’s novel. Literary-minded readers will revel in the novel’s allegorical framework extending anywhere from cautionary tale to failed bildungsroman to a metaphor of novel reading itself. For example, early in the novel Sonja is getting a message from her friend Ellen in Ellen’s apartment and, in an almost Cartesian meditation, Sonja ruminates:

There’s something in Ellen’s way of parsing other people’s bodies that reminds her of her university classes in textual analysis. Everything’s supposed to mean something else, everything’s supposed to be rising, tearing itself free of its wrappings, climbing up to some higher meaning; it’s supposed to get away from where it’s been. Reality will not suffice.

Mirror, Shoulder, Signal attempts to rectify this observation by showing that, while transcendent meaning is possible in reality, the meaning we get is often fractured, unfulfilling. In this way, Sonja transmutes quotidian minutiae into an absurdist metaphor with a decidedly Danish twist. But it’s all Sonja has, and in fact, reality will have to suffice.

Brendan McCourt author photoBrendan McCourt is a student of English and Philosophy at Arcadia University in Glenside, Pennsylvania. A Philadelphia native, Brendan primarily writes in short forms, including poetry, flash fiction, and prose poetry. Brendan is also the editor-in-chief for his university’s undergraduate literary magazine Quiddity.

HER BODIES AND OTHER PARTIES, stories by Carmen Maria Machado, reviewed by Rosie Huf

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Her Body and Other Parties cover art. A winding green ribbon against an abstract red drawing of a human neckHER BODIES AND OTHER PARTIES
by Carmen Maria Machado
Graywolf Press, 245 pages
reviewed by Rosie Huf

For those of us still traumatized by the 2016 Presidential election, the debut novel Her Body and Other Parties, by Carmen Maria Machado, is the emotional and intellectual release for which we have been waiting. It is electric with the #Resist spirit. It underscores the importance of the #MeToo movement. And, it tackles issues such as gender, language, and human interaction through a fresh, folkloric perspective. Winner of the Bard Fiction Prize and finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, the Kirkus Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, this collection of ten short stories is timeless, yet also a necessary way to transition from 2017 to 2018.

A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop with an MFA in fiction, and current Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, Carmen Maria Machado has a deft hand at spinning culturally relative, purpose-driven narrative. Into each short story she’s woven elements of pop culture, feminist social criticism, literary fiction, and magical realism, varying each in measure. Threads of influence from authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Woolf, Zora Neale Hurston, even a little Andrea Dworkin strengthen Machado’s overarching theme, which is a clear call for renewed efforts toward female liberation: Liberation for women to genuinely desire and enjoy sexual gratification without fear or stigma; liberation to be an individual with thoughts and actions and intimate moments separate from her spouse or lover; and liberation to exist creatively outside the stereotypical confines of the male perspective.

Three stories in particular exemplify Machado’s literary skill as well as her commitment to furthering discussion on feminist and social issues: “The Husband Stitch,” “Especially Heinous,” and “Real Women Have Bodies.”

“The Husband Stitch” paints the portrait of a woman whose head is being held to her body by the grace of a single green ribbon. She is nameless and frequently recounts folktales she heard as a girl that run parallel to her own life’s journey. The paradox of her situation is that although she fulfills every wifely duty expected of her by her husband, society, and cultural tradition—from performing as the insatiable, sexual nymph most men desire to bearing a son her body could barely hold—it is still not enough for him. Everything that belongs to her belongs to him.

That night, after my son is in bed, my husband reaches his hand across the couch and slides it up my leg.

“Come to me,” he says, and I twinge with pleasure. I slide off the couch, smoothing my skirt very prettily as I shuffle over to him on my knees. I kiss his leg, running my hand up to his belt, tugging him from his bonds before swallowing him whole. He runs his hands through my hair, stroking my head, groaning and pressing into me. And I don’t realize that his hand is sliding down the back of my neck until he is trying to loop his fingers through the ribbon. I gasp and pull away quickly, falling back and frantically checking my bow […]

He is silent for a long minute, then “A wife should have no secrets.”

My nose grows hot. I do not want to cry. “I’ve given you everything you have ever asked for,” I say. “Am I not allowed this one thing?”

For him to feel loved, as if she is truly bound to him, he must possess all aspects of her being. This is the tale told by grandmothers to granddaughters over boiling pots in a kitchen: beware of people who take pleasure in the complete consumption of others.

In “Especially Heinous,” basically a collection within a collection, Machado has strategically crafted micro-narratives from the ascending episode titles of Law and Order: SUV. There is one story for every episode of SUV’s first twelve seasons. This piece is laden with pop-culture allusions and nods to feminist theory. It is particularly reminiscent, tangentially, of Dworkin’s essay, “I Want a Twenty-Four Hour Truce During Which There is No Rape.” In truth, many parts of this collection seem like a nod to Dworkin’s essay. Machado describes the episode “Vulnerable”:

For three days in a row, there is not a single victim in the entire precinct. No rapes. No murders. No kidnappings. No child pornography made, bought, or sold. No molestations. No sexual assaults. No sexual harassments. No forced prostitution. No human trafficking. No subway gropings. No incest. No indecent exposures. No stalking. Not even an unwanted dirty phone call. Then, in the gloaming of a Wednesday, a man wolf-whistles at a woman on her way to an AA meeting. The whole city releases its long-held breath, and everything returns to normal.

And then, describing the episode “Screwed”:

The DA calls in sick, again. “The sixty-fifth story,” Benson whispers into her ear, “is about a world that watches you and me and everyone. Watches our suffering like it’s a game. Can’t stop. Can’t tear themselves away. If they could stop, we could stop, but they won’t, so we can’t.”

The story speaks to the thesis that were viewers not consumed with violent content, not conditioned to accept violence and aggression as bi-products of humanity’s existence, we would possibly have a better chance at eradicating rape, murder, human trafficking, etc. We should be cognizant, Machado warns through her micro-narratives, of our actions, or lack thereof, which cultivate and sustain the suffering of others.

Later in the collection, with visions of disappearing women, “Real Women have Bodies” touches on the detrimental effects of miseducation on female existence.

Carmen Maria Machado author photo

Carmen Maria Machado

The narrator, again nameless, works at Glam, a special occasion dress shop owned by an older woman named Gizzy. The store sells all types gowns, ranging in price and design, but the most popular ones come with a secret. Folded into the fabric of highly sought after dresses, unseen by the unobservant patrons, are remains of the disappearing women. “The women started showing up a few years ago—they just fold themselves into the needlework, like it was what they wanted,” Petra, the daughter of the seamstress tells Machado’s narrator.

The narrator asks, “Did you try to tell Gizzy?”

To which Petra responds, “Of Course. But she said that as long as they sought us out, it was all right. And those dresses do so well—they sell more than any my mother has ever made before. It’s like people want them like that, even if they don’t realize it.”

While later contemplating the problem of these disappearing women, the narrator watches a mother admonish her young daughter for wanting a pretzel because “Pretzels are junk food. They will make you fat.” Another night she watches the evening news, where “pundits point fingers at each other, screaming as the cohost between them shimmers and wavers under studio lights. They are talking about how [they] can’t trust faded women […then] the woman blinks away mid-broadcast, a microphone tumbling to the floor. The camera scrambles to look away.” By the end of this story, the narrator concludes, “None of us will make it to the end.”

Outside the pages of this collection, young girls, well under the age of 18, take to the internet daily asking strangers to rank their hotness. Teens commit suicide because of shaming. The fashion industry Photoshops models and suffocates readers with unattainable beauty standards; they propagate mindsets that excuse fatal eating habits. And powerful men silence women because our voices are not conducive to their happy endings. Fiction mirrors reality, and this piece of fiction questions, “What are we doing to our women?”

Through ten separate yet tangentially themed stories, Machado’s female protagonists struggle to fill internal voids that inevitably lead to their self-destruction. By the end of each piece, the reader is left questioning to what extent the narrator lives by her own sense of agency; and, to what extent is she merely acting in reaction to the experiences put upon her by family, friends, acquaintances, and social expectation.

Over the course of several centuries, women have been speaking plainly and boldly about the treatment of their gender by society. Yet even through the clearest, most succinct rhetoric, their points were only half heard. So Carmen Maria Machado has, it would seem, chosen to continue their efforts via a more inventive, striking method of narrative. Her Body and Other Parties leaves readers raw from self-reflection and spikes of unexpected but due emotion. Yet it is a relief to respond so sharply to Machado’s collection, rather than misguided presidential tweets, or discussions of our failing, democratic system.

Rosie Huf in front of mountainsRosie Huf is the Senior Editor of Cleaver Magazine’s Life As Activism feature and manages the Editors’ Blog. Recently, she received her Master of Liberal Studies degree from Arizona State University, the concentration in Nonfiction and Publishing. She has had several interviews published in Superstition Review and has a forthcoming nonfiction piece in Sundog Lit.

SCHLUMP, a novel by Hans Herbert Grimm, reviewed by Kelly Doyle

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Schlump cover at. An abstract black-and-white drawing of humans and buildingsSCHLUMP
by Hans Herbert Grimm
translated by Jamie Bulloch
NYRB, 263 pages

reviewed by Kelly Doyle

When Hans Herbert Grimm’s semi-autobiographical novel Schlump was published in 1928 alongside All Quiet on the Western Front, it was advertised as a “truthful depiction” of World War I. It is no surprise that Grimm took on the the pseudonym Schlump, just as his protagonist does, to hide his identity. As explained by Volker Weidermann in the afterward, Grimm “describe[s] the German soldiers of the Great War as less than heroic,” and “the entire war as a cruel, bad joke.” While this caused the Nazis to burn his book in 1933, today it gives the text, translated by Jamie Bulloch, a feeling of authenticity.

The novel opens in Germany to a sixteen-year-old troublemaker, Emil Schulz also known as Schlump, who can “think of nothing but girls and the war.” It is 1915 and, picturing himself in a flashy military uniform, he defies his parents and volunteers to join the German army in WWI for nothing more than honor and sex. His romanticised idea of war is strikingly unrealistic; Grimm describes it like a painting, without the sounds and smells and feelings of real war. He imagines that as soldiers they will “lean on the muzzles of their rifles, dreaming of home and being reunited with loved ones. In the morning they’[ll] break camp and march singing into battle, where some [will] fall and others [will] be wounded. Eventually, the war [will] be won and they’[ll] return home victorious. Girls [will] throw flowers from windows and the celebrations [will] never end.” He does not delve into the true meaning of his commitment or the gravity of his sacrifice. The novel follows Schlump’s time in the army, but is interspersed with other stories, which take the form of long monologues by an array of characters. The stories are scattered, leaving the reader with not much to grasp onto except a flurry of people and places and ideas, with occasional moments of powerful emotion and dark humor.

Schlump is first stationed in a French town where he receives the respect and female attention he desires. It is hard not to be struck negatively by the depictions of women in the novel. Grimm sets the tone with the very first description of Schlump’s mother at the start of the novel. “When her tiny breasts began to swell beneath her blouse and she realized that she was a girl, she stayed quietly at home, dreaming of pretty clothes and beautiful shoes,” he writes. “Back then all the boys would give anything to get a good gawp at her.” In France, Schlump’s romantic hopes for women and war, modeled after this standard, come to be. Everything seems to go just as he imagined and his innocence remains precariously intact. He meets countless caregiving women who jump at the opportunity to feed him, sleep with him, and ask for nothing in return. He never considers his cause or his nationality or that he is in a position of authority over the women who give themselves to him. The sounds of cannons in the distance are adopted as part of the landscape. While Schlump does not think about death or danger, the reader can feel them looming in the distance, highlighted by his exaggerated naivete. When Schlump is finally sent to the front lines, he is entirely unprepared and his transition into adulthood occurs in a matter of moments. “It was as if he’d awoken from a deep sleep; for the first time in his life he was thinking seriously about himself and the world.”

Hans Herbert Grimm author photo

Hans Herbert Grimm

Grimm’s narration of the story produces an odd sort of disconnect. In close third person, sometimes the reader receives great insight into Schlump’s thoughts, but other times none at all. Perhaps Schlump himself could not even narrate his own feelings amid the barbarity of the front line. His outward emotional state varies between utter boredom, long days filled with dirt, lice, and aching feet, and extreme highs of adrenaline that cause him to laugh and howl on the battlefield like a madman. He never dwells long on the suffering and death of others and describes these atrocities matter of factly, but his compassion is revealed through his dreams of fallen comrades happy and in love.

Eventually, Schlump begins to think that the only way that the war can become what he imagined, the only way that he can overcome the military hierarchy and achieve the respect that is denied footsoldiers, is by becoming a hero. He waits for an opportunity to act heroically and, after a long time, one presents itself. The narrator explains that, retreating from an attack on the other side, a “young fellow, became stuck in the barbed wire” outside of the trenches “and couldn’t go forwards or backwards.” The boy is shot and injured gruesomely. Schlump, in the hopes of becoming a hero, runs into the open, “untangle[s] the boy…and carrie[s] him in such a way as to shield him from enemy fire.” By the time Schlump returns to the trenches with his burden, the boy is dead. This signifies the beginning of Schlump’s true change. Not only is he aware of the danger of war, but he is aware of his own position within it. He realizes that there is no honor to be had for him. This is soon followed by another realization. “We’ve lost the war,” he says. There is nothing glamorous or beautiful about nitty-gritty, day to day war, only the romanticised broader story that incorporates a cause. Grimm uses this contrast to meditate on the differences between an individual’s war and a nation’s.

“Are you trying to tell me the individual counts for anything?” asks one particularly interesting character, another soldier who Schlump refers to as “the philosopher.” “The individual is nothing,” the philosopher says, “he has no intrinsic value, he is just part of a much larger totality, a nation. The individual has no soul, but a nation does. And the individual only has value when he is of use to his people […] Indeed, it would be better if we forgot the names of these men altogether.” The reader does, in fact, begin to forget Schlump’s true name, Emil. And, amid the constant cameos of one character after another, it becomes hard to remember anyone’s name. Even the author was nameless at the time of publication. The war on this micro level is confusing and chaotic, nothing like the macro level story commonly told that Schlump himself had once believed. But the characters who remain at home and out of the trenches remind the reader that these individual tragedies are significant and far-reaching.

A young woman, Johanna, makes this clear when she writes to Schlump from the homefront. “You’ll wonder who is writing you this letter, and yet you know who I am, because it’s me you kissed beneath the chestnut trees when the war broke out,” she writes. “You said you’d dance with me in the Reichsadler, but you didn’t come. But I haven’t been able to forget you.” Poor Joanna is tormented by the thought of her beloved in war. “I’ve had no peace,” she writes. “You can do what you want, just let me know you’re alive.” The words of mourning from Johanna, Schlump, and all the other soldiers he meets along the way solidify the philosopher’s theory as insane. It proves to be an unsustainable mentality. No one can truly adopt the perspective of the nation without completely losing the sense of himself.

Wars are often reported as if there is one winner and one loser. Each battle is a single event, each loss, a single loss. But when put under a microscope, as Grimm does, it becomes clear that a war produces thousands of personal tragedies on both sides. Perhaps that is why Grimm wrote the novel as a patchwork of random lives, tiny story after tiny story, beginning each portrait before abruptly moving on to the next, simply to overwhelm the reader with the sheer scale of lives interrupted. From this outlook, Schlump’s moments of humor and optimism and his uncanny ability to survive make him a hero in a way he never anticipated simply by providing the story that rarely exists, even in newspaper reports.

Kelly Doyle author photoKelly Doyle studies English, creative writing, and psychology at Emory University. Her fiction has appeared in Firewords Quarterly, Stories Through the Ages College Edition, and others. She is the editor-in-chief of Emory’s literary magazine, Alloy, and she works in a developmental memory lab on campus. She loves to read and travel, and she plans to pursue a career in writing.

A WORKING WOMAN, a novel by Elvira Navarro, reviewed by Melanie Erspamer

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A Working Woman cover art. A black figurine of a faceless womanA WORKING WOMAN
by Elvira Navarro
translated by Christina MacSweeney
Two Lines Press, 189 pages

reviewed by Melanie Erspamer

“She wanted […] the location of her madness to be now the location of her art.”

This is how the narrator of The Working Woman analyzes her roommate, but the same can be said of the narrator herself, and perhaps as well of the only figure in this postmodernist novel who actually “speaks:” the author, Elvira Navarro. The text becomes the conjunction of madness and art, which share one abstract and yet delineated “location,” madness needing expression through art, or art uniquely poised to express madness.

I may have gotten ahead of myself; I haven’t introduced the novel properly. The work itself forfeits any loyalty to structure or linearity in favor of a narrative that prioritizes aesthetic backways and internality. It is a quiet, decisively not flashy postmodernist masterpiece, a book packed with subtlety and originality that still manages to give insight into contemporary society.

Navarro has received various honors in Spain and around the world, including the IV Premia Tormenta for best new author and inclusion on Granta’s list of the 22 best writers in the Spanish language under 35-years-old. She is praised both for her original, avant-garde writing style and her dealing with important issues in contemporary Spain. In fact, her mixing of the two distinguishes her and makes this novel such a multi-faceted pleasure.

Elvira Navarro author photo

Elvira Navarro

There is a sense in which postmodernism is associated with the deconstruction of fixed meaning, the absence of a recognizable truth. Although Navarro’s writing style certainly embraces this element, the topics she explores also craft a narrative of structural problems—job insecurity, mental health, the abandonment of urban peripheries—that need to be addressed. Navarro’s Madrid, a crucial presence in the novel, is a city of many cities formed internally and externally by each person’s experience, an apt metaphor then for the possibility of deconstructing what seems stable while not denying the presence of a certain overriding construct(ion) we must all live with.

In this case, the translator of the novel, Christina MacSweeney, also deserves praise. The English version of this precious novel flows easily and is packed with such original, creative, and insightful uses of language; I can hardly imagine the Spanish version being superior. Here is just one example of the informal, poetic, and pleasantly surprising prose that never falls into cliché or background noise:

Neither had I taken my medication, and that did matter, although not enough for me to abandon my observation post over the wasteland where pale yellow hedge mustard grew in spring, and which allowed me a Tetris-scale view of the Palacio Real, the ugly Almudena Cathedral, the dome of the Basílica San Francisco el Grande, the Moncloa transmission tower with its restaurant that no one patronized on the observation deck, the unimpressive buildings of the University City. I went on unconsciously interrogating the cityscape, just as it manifested itself to me from the balcony in some way that was impossible to gauge. From there everything fit in the palm of my hand, extended toward an illusory sky.

The book’s plot is, however, harder to trace. Navarro divides her story into three uneven parts, each written from a slightly different perspective, though all three are also literally “written” by the same narrator: Elisa Nuñez, a young writer in Madrid barely scraping by financially as an independent contractor in a publishing company. Her sharing of initials with Navarro is a sneaky move revealed halfway through the novel the single time her full name appears. This not wholly original maneuver only increases the desire to see the entire book as a smokescreen for Navarro’s exploration of herself, the ultimate postmodernist gesture the narrator Elisa admits to doing as a way of achieving catharsis. But it also reminds us of the futility of these conjectures; while Navarro may purposefully be trying to lead us to think about her backstage role with this use of initials and narrative framing, as readers we can see only the text and not the person beneath it (and Barthes has already told us we shouldn’t care about the author anyway). Thus we are left with a text that proudly asserts its rejection of fact or knowledge—a “flimsy construction,” Elisa announces—and an embrace of madness.

The first part of the book is told from the perspective of Elisa’s roommate, Susana, though it becomes clear during the second part that in actuality Elisa has written it based on stories Susana had told her about her old life in Madrid, specifically, about the time when she focused her “desire [on] finding someone to suck [her] pussy while [she] was having [her] period,” and ended up having as lover a dwarf called Fabio with exceptional olfactory powers. Occasional italic segments—Elisa’s reflections on Susana’s stories—interrupt the otherwise fluid, semi-stream of consciousness, first-person narrative. It all does sound a bit absurd. And the fact that Susana reveals she was taking various medications for mental illness increases the reader’s skepticism. Elisa also admits to her doubt in the italicized interruptions but ultimately she wonders why she shouldn’t just “accept [Susana] did whatever she liked with the story of her life, that she reinvented herself whatever way she felt sounded best?”

The second (and longest) part is from Elisa’s own perspective. She talks about her job insecurity, her long nocturnal walks through Madrid, her own struggles with mental health, and her relationship with and curiosity about Susana. Elisa’s story is not as absurd or as unbelievable as Susana’s, but it seems similarly difficult to trust the account of someone who, like Susana, is searching catharsis, and who does this not through constant reinvention but through writing. The third and final part, a mere three pages, is entirely set in a dialogue, and functions to cast a shadow of doubt over the last almost 200 pages. Writing, Navarro suggests in typical postmodern fashion, is an unreliable speech act often expressed, not to impart truth to a reader, but out of a writer’s own desire for structure and release. The reader, however, can take such a speech act and recast it for herself, as Elisa herself does with Susana’s speech act, which she rewrites with her interjections in the first part of the novel.

There were times while reading the text that I was reminded of écriture feminine, the idea, introduced in the 1970s largely by French feminists, that there is a certain stylistic quality that determines whether writing should be considered women’s writing, i.e. the gender of the author is irrelevant. James Joyce, for instance, is often given as an example of écriture feminine. This women’s writing is characterized by an opposition to traditional plot structures and linear narratives, which are seen as representing hegemony and patriarchy. It involves tying “femaleness” with “otherness” in our patriarchal culture; so that writing that is proudly “other” becomes a way of inscribing the female onto language—this includes writing focused on interiority, stream-of-consciousness, illogical narratives. A Working Woman seems often to fit the paradigm of écriture feminine, with its rejection of literature as a way of gaining that flimsy construction that is knowledge, its meandering narrative voice. The novel, however, produces two ways in which to understand that term: there is its avant-garde, “other” writing style, but there is also the fact that it is a female-populated novel, written by a female writer and about a female writer and her roommate, who also deals with the stresses of life through art (in her case, miniature reorganized maps of cities). It is also about madness; Susana’s desire for oral sex on her period and during the full moon seems a nod to the kind of metaphors that adorn descriptions of écriture feminine as lunar, tapping into feminine hysteria and madness. Yet the novel is not so simple as a display of écriture feminine and female craziness. Writing becomes also a way to structure life and improve mental health; art more generally becomes a way to order and curb unwanted madness.

The need for some kind of structure to heal and deal with life is necessary because of the very real topics the novel discusses. The structure of the narration is not taken as an excuse to deal exclusively with interiority and characterization at the expense of making social points. Primarily, what she portrays are the difficulties of a demographic that is not, by far, one in dire distress—her two protagonists are Western and relatively privileged. Yet what she depicts is also a reality that is increasing in Spain and in other Western countries: the loss of security that comes when young people leave the relative security of family or education and enter the job market. In a certain sense Navarro is taking issue with the very structure of Western society—neoliberalism—although in a subtle roundabout way. The book’s title in Spanish is La Trabajadora, which translates to “The Working Woman,” but the word is more essential than that. “La trabajadora” is like a feminized version of “worker,” so the emphasis is more squarely on an entity defined by being a worker. The irony is apparent; although often the worth of someone in Western societies is determined in part by their job, jobs themselves are slipping away, people going, like Elisa, from part-time to independent contractor, to eventually, perhaps, unemployment. This is not just a stressful period of youth—as the novel shows through Susana, who is in roughly the same position as Elisa but about twenty years older, financial insecurity is becoming more and more of a permanent state-of-being, even among those who started off privileged. Mental health seems inextricably bound with this mode of existence. The idea, as some suppose, that mental health can be extricated from social and economic causes and blamed simply on genetics becomes an excuse not to deal with those problems.

The setting here—and simultaneously a focus of the novel—is the sprawling city of Madrid, but not the Madrid of the Prado or the Royal Palace, which appears only in the distance: this is a Madrid of back-alleys and endless peripheries. It is no surprise that Navarro herself ran a blog called Madrid is periphery. In one way this is a continuation of Navarro’s preoccupation with insecurity and instability of contemporary life: she sets her novel on the fringe. Elisa, appropriately, is a walker. She enjoys walking through these peripheries, observing abandonment or the sneaking of a fat cat that indicates a squat among the ruin. She walks almost every night, searching for squats and signs “to confirm [her] theory of the existence of another city.” But perhaps Elisa is overthinking it: there are plenty of clues in the novel to suggest that the city is hardly a uniform entity, that each person’s experience of it—each person’s journey through it by bus and foot and metro—creates a different version of it. Would it be too much to say that there are as many Madrids as there are people in Madrid? In “Walking in the City,” a chapter in The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau compares walking to a speech act that “speaks” the city into being. Cities become, therefore, a series of discourses in which different citizens take part. Susana seems to intuit something of this kind with her devotion to miniature clippings. She sits in her room or the living room cutting out all the shapes—trees, cars, buildings—from maps of Madrid until only the street grid is left. She wants “to relocate the buildings. Her aim [is] for the map to be just the same in terms of structure, but with all the various elements transposed.”

Of course, the city is also a deep and recurring metaphor for the psyche. Elisa and Susana live in the peripheries of Madrid and they also have to wrestle with the peripheries of their own minds, their repressed desires and fears, the parts of them that are falling apart. Elisa, like Madrid, may not be one consistent uniform entity either: she writes from Susana’s perspective, she writes from her own, she feels a kinship to Susana, she wants her out. There is certainly an underlying structure to all her moods—even she admits the “similarity between [her] voice […] and Susana’s” when she writes from Susana’s perspective—and yet the complexities of the mind, like those of the city, seem to shrug away from a simple bounded characterization like that found in canonical literature.

But this all speaks to the beauty of the novel—writing, walking, these become ways to organize and come to terms with oneself and the world around one. Art and exploration become not simple cures to madness but ways to make that madness productive, ways to channel it for beauty and surprise, for healing.

Melanie Erspamer author photoMelanie Erspamer studies English Literature and Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. She is half-Italian and half-American and has lived most of her life near Boston. Her work has been published in The Purple Breakfast Review, Nomad Magazine and Unknown Magazine, and her one-act play was performed at the University of Edinburgh. With her sister, she also has been running an anonymous literary magazine based in bathroom stalls, called Bathruminations.

 

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DAUGHTERS OF THE AIR, a novel by Anca L. Szilágyi, reviewed by Leena Soman

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Daughters of the Air cover art. An abstract drawing of a creature in a dress with a bird's head and beakDAUGHTERS OF THE AIR
by Anca L. Szilágyi
Lanternfish Press, 184 pages

reviewed by Leena Soman

Tatiana is supposed to spend the summer before her junior year in high school in Vermont with her only friend while her mother summers in Rome. Instead, she hitches a ride from her boarding school’s Connecticut campus to Brooklyn. It’s 1980, and Tatiana renames herself Pluta, an alter ego she has long cultivated to meet the demands of this adventure. So begins Anca L. Szilágyi’s debut novel Daughters of the Air.

It’s worth pausing a moment to admire the book’s unique cover. Szilágyi selected an image by artist Nichole Dement who is interested in contemporary myth, a fitting synergy with the author. The image, called Bird Moon, is one of several haunting pieces in the artist’s Oracle series, and the frenzy of human form and nature in muted tones is nothing short of striking. This beautiful cover art demonstrates a thoughtfulness and sophistication that carries through to the story.

The book’s chapters alternate between Pluta’s present circumstances as a runaway in New York, and the previous two years leading to her arrival in the United States from Argentina. In 1978, Pluta’s father, Daniel, a sociology professor in Buenos Aires, leaves for work at the university and never returns. Many novelists, Argentine and otherwise, have revisited this awful period of recent history known as the Dirty War. Szilágyi, whose family arrived in the United States as immigrants and refugees from Romania, began developing the novel when she noticed some alarming similarities between the rhetoric of the U.S.’s War on Terror in the early 2000s and Argentina’s Dirty War. She doesn’t investigate the specific political movements and cultural complexities in Argentina during that era as much as she homes in on Pluta’s coming of age in the context of this turmoil and the personal isolation that can result from ceaseless questions that defy answers.

Pluta’s mother, Isabel, tries to find her husband, but it is relatively soon after the guerrillas have been defeated and the worst of state repression has begun. To ask too many questions, to publicly make too much of what has happened, would be unwise. Isabel and Pluta flee to Isabel’s estranged older sister, Lolo, who lives in Manaus, Brazil, and then to the United States, where Pluta will attend boarding school. But her father’s disappearance weighs on her, and after two years without solace, she decides to start a new life with a new identity. Szilágyi writes,

Now there was only the specter of that other certainty. Not yet proven but lurking, a lugubrious hobglobin crouching heavy and low upon her insides, seeping dark juices, ready at any moment to spring: he wasn’t ever coming back […] There could be anywhere. There was away. She needed there; here was closed in, too falsely safe, too hiding of truth. For now, there was New York, sprawling and alive, big as Buenos Aires—bigger—a place to run and burst and be, unenclosed.

In Pluta, Szilágyi has created a character with ample charisma and contradiction to carry the story. She is naïve, thoughtful, and daring. While we have access to her internal landscape through rich, lyrical description of what she’s thinking and feeling, she is active, constantly on the move, and her actions, as she wanders Gowanus mostly, often have consequences she can’t anticipate. Though bright, Pluta isn’t endowed with trope-like precociousness, which is refreshing. “‘What’s that?’” Pluta asks when her ride into the city tells her he’s an entrepreneur. Szilágyi writes, “She knew the word, but sometimes she liked to play dumb; it seemed like a tricky thing to do. Some people liked to explain things. This saved her from talking. Her father liked to explain things, but he wouldn’t have liked her to play dumb.” This moment, like so many others, perfectly establishes her intelligence and inexperience, as well as the degree to which her father’s absence is fully present in her life.

Anca L. Szilágyi author photo

Anca L. Szilágyi

In telling this story, Szilágyi grapples with the challenge of dramatizing loneliness. Pluta and Isabel spend a great deal of time alone. For most of the novel, they are in exile, and Szilágyi has to reconcile presenting the unspeakable pain of this experience with the literary craft of creating dramatic tension between and among characters. Pluta had been closer to her father and, even before his disappearance Isabel struggled to connect with her awkward, moody daughter. Once he’s gone, mother and daughter each cope with Daniel’s vanishing in isolation. Pluta’s aunt Lolo is the novel’s most compelling character, and the story is at its most stirring when Isabel and Pluta are with her, partly because the characters’ interactions reverberate with tension and conflict. Lolo is eleven years older than Isabel and her foil, a warm, maternal presence. She communes with the spirit world, especially her dead husband, forty-four years her senior and many decades gone. Isabel, conservative and preoccupied with appearances, disdains her sister’s eccentricity, but cannot deny Lolo’s affection for her daughter. With the rich family history Szilágyi has developed for her characters, and her nuanced rendering of varied communities across Argentina and Brazil, this trio of women has greater potential than the novel allows them.

In New York, Szilágyi focuses on Pluta’s encounters with three men: Bobby, the young man who initially provides her with a ride out of Connecticut and a place to stay in Brooklyn, an older man named Leonard, and an unnamed man with red hair and freckles. Szilágyi creates suspense as Pluta pinballs among them, and it is gripping to read about a young girl in 1980s New York, no smartphone in hand, and how a clever and reckless child might find herself making do.

Indeed, one of the most fascinating parts of the story is Szilágyi’s inclusion of fairytale elements to magnify and probe the surreal quality of Pluta’s young life. In Manaus, Lolo takes Pluta to the opera where she sees the story of Orpheus performed on stage. The author was born in Queens and raised in Brooklyn, and extends the notion of a secret underworld in describing early 1980s Gowanus. If anything, this impulse for contemporary mythmaking could have been mined for even greater effect and might have helped to solve the problem of building organic relationships between characters in a story about silences and isolation. For instance, one of the first things Pluta does with her independence in New York is get a tattoo. She does not have enough money to get the full ink she’d like, and the artist would prefer to stage the process out given the scale of the drawing she wants anyway, so he starts with only an outline of the image she requests. “The needle frightened her, but she wanted to defy that fright,” Szilágyi writes. “In some sense she saw it as training. She was becoming courageous, sometimes even scaring herself with this business of courage and defiance, which made her laugh. Following rules had stopped working. She would do whatever she wanted. That’s what felt right.” This arc proves to be pivotal, and later, when something remarkable happens with the tattoo, it never occurs to Pluta to return to the artist as someone who might be able to offer her counsel or at least recognize her in a city of strangers. It seems a missed opportunity to establish more grounding relationships and create the type of character interactions that enrich a story and propel it forward organically. Pluta does reconnect with Bobby, thankfully, but it is by chance, and his presence in her life begins as arbitrarily as the others she encounters.

At the book’s climax, Pluta commits a crime. For some reason, Szilágyi chooses to not resolve this subplot, a decision I found frustrating considering the severity of the incident. The author could have easily disposed of the inconvenience of working through a crime investigation and the emotional impacts of the act on Pluta if she didn’t want to address it outright by referring to how a police investigation might have ended differently in early 1980s New York or given it a supernatural treatment in keeping with the magical realism in Daughters of the Air, but doesn’t bother. This decision amplifies the theme of unresolved endings, of having to somehow reconcile with unyielding uncertainty, but feels unsatisfying. Other aspects of the book’s conclusion are harrowing, but certainly more satisfying, demonstrating the author’s skillful control.

Toward the end of the novel, we see Isabel in the story’s present, but like Pluta, she is lonely and mainly alone. The only people she interacts with are a shoe salesman in Rome, the principal of the boarding school, and a private detective and his assistant. By making Isabel closed off to talking about what has happened to her family, we too are closed off from a layered understanding of her relationship with her husband and from feeling the loss of Daniel from her perspective. This is the bind of the novel—as a reader we need more, but part of the ambition of the story is that we must do without it.

Isabel and Pluta’s isolation get to the heart of what’s driving this novel: the many shames of political violence and the trauma of uncertainty. It’s easy to see the injustice of Argentina’s Dirty War in all its terrible dimension in hindsight, but what Szilágyi reveals is the sheer torment of experiencing it while it was happening without the benefit of perspective or reflection. While we may long for details regarding the particulars of Daniel’s sociological research and scenes of him at the university to understand what exactly might have gotten him into trouble, Szilágyi withholds this information, even when a curious girl like Pluta would want to know about her father’s work, how he spent the hours he was away from her. The point seems to be that it doesn’t matter what he studied, what he has done or not done, for the government to disappear him. Innocence or guilt is a false question with a regime steeped in arbitrary power. Just before his disappearance, Daniel, Isabel, and Pluta attend a fair, and Daniel suspects he is being followed.

In the pit of his stomach, that irksome twinge sharpened: at some point, he’d grumbled to the wrong person. He didn’t even know who; perhaps he’d grumbled to a few of the wrong people. When he shouldn’t have grumbled at all. It wasn’t even the content of the grumbling that was an issue anymore; the fact itself seemed worrisome enough. An offhand remark in the office? Perhaps after a lecture? A darkened face. He recalled a darkened face in the lecture hall. How long can this go on? Was that all he’d said? Had the darkened expression in the audience registered its answer: as long as it takes? He’d been upset about the students—the one and then the other. Was his question ‘suspicious’ enough? Radios everywhere implored citizens to report ‘suspicious activity.’ Everything suspicious threatened ‘national security.’ How many people used those hotlines? A wave of nausea surged.

Isabel cannot explain to her young daughter what has happened to her father because she knows, but does not know. Without anyone or anything to pin her rage and confusion on, she blames her husband, wonders what he must have said or done to get himself in trouble and put his family in danger. This isn’t particularly likeable behavior, nor is her penchant for shopping, but again, this seems to be Szilágyi’s point, and it is profound. Would we feel her anguish more if she were the ideal wife and mother? How do we expect someone to act in the face of such terror, when confronted with the truth of how little control we have over our lives, no matter our wealth or social standing? Szilágyi’s portrayal of how people draw into themselves, get trapped by their own questioning when there are no answers is authentic and moving, but also creates a narrative dilemma. When we insist our characters be alone, we risk writing ourselves into corners where characters, and readers, get stuck in our own minds. Nevertheless, Daughters of the Air is a clear-eyed meditation on the experience of being haunted by the unknown and what we are perhaps too scared to imagine.

Leena Soman author photoLeena has an MFA in fiction from Bennington College and a Master of International Affairs from Columbia University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming online at Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, and Harvard Review. She lives in New York and is at work on a story collection.

 

 

 

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MALACQUA, a novel by Nicola Pugliese, reviewed by Robert Sorrell

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Malacqua cover art. Dark blue text against a white backgroundMALACQUA
by Nicola Pugliese
translated by Shaun Whiteside
And Other Stories Publishing, 198 Pages

reviewed by Robert Sorrell

It begins with the sea. Out the windows, down the alleys, on the perpetual edge of the city’s consciousness. In Nicola Pugliese’s Naples, the sea is everywhere. “From the street,” he writes, “loneliness falls gracefully away to the sea.”

A few years before the main events of Malaqua transpire the government and police of Naples decide to block access to the beach on a beautiful summer day. For a while, the children stare angrily at the line of police along the shore. Eventually the children slink back into the shade and despair of their homes and courtyards. But the sea, not one to be defeated by local government, begins to rise. It rises until it reaches the first row of houses, then moves farther into the city, leaking into basements, waterlogging wooden boards, wetting socks and shoes and the hems of dresses and pants. The police come to realize they cannot guard the sea, and so they leave.

“This had in all likelihood been an alert, a warning significant in its way,” the narrator informs us. The alert is for the events of October 23rd through 26th, the four days over which the novel takes place. The four days of rain.

Anyone who picks up And Other Stories’ edition of Malacqua, the first English translation of Nicola Pugliese’s Italian novel from 1977, will be immediately alerted to the strange weather which serves as the novel’s catalyst. Emblazoned across the book’s cover is Malacqua’s unofficial subtitle: Four Days of Rain in the City of Naples, Waiting for the Occurrence of an Extraordinary Event. Before even opening the book, the reader is clued into Pugliese’s supreme fascinations: water and Naples. And of course, the collision of the two.

The deluge brings chaos to the streets of Naples. Giant sinkholes open up and rescue workers swear they hear voices coming from the pits. Unearthly screams are heard throughout the whole city, seeming to emanate from the 13th century Maschio Angioino (also ironically known as the Castel Nuovo). Later, five lira coins will begin to play music that only children can hear.

The novel is divided into four parts, one for each day of rain, and loosely follows the perspective of Carlo Andreoli who, like Pugliese, is a journalist covering politics and local events in Naples. Pugliese was born in Milan but spent most of his life in Naples as a reporter. Malacqua, his only work in another genre, was published at the insistence of Italo Calvino by Italian literary powerhouse Einaudi, who also worked with Calvino and other luminaries including Natalia Ginzburg, Cesare Pavese, and Antonio Gramsci. But after quickly selling out its first print run, Pugliese decided to pull the plug on the project. No more copies were printed until after his death in 2012. This translation, by Shaun Whiteside, which comes 40 years after the original, is the first English version.

Pugliese is a playful writer, and many of the novel’s most enjoyable moments come from his quirks of language. He describes a mirror as “returning” a face to its owner. Waiting for the rain to stop is a “gruelling, progressive illness.” The weight of silence becomes “an airborne jellyfish, a transparent dream.” Not all of his experiments in language are as pleasing and strange, however, and at times his style can feel a bit forced, almost like a missed attempt at Thomas Pynchon.

Nicola Pugliese author photo

Nicola Pugliese

And there are other aspects of Pugliese’s writing that disappoint. Even a Republican Senator would have a hard time denying the author’s misogyny. Men are often visually assessing women, and in various interior monologues from the viewpoint of Neapolitan women Pugliese justifies sexual harassment, office affairs, ogling. “Ultimately a hand on your backside,” Pugliese writes, “is always an act of homage, a gesture of esteem.” The way that Pugliese not only allows but encourages his male characters to harass women, and then uses his omniscient narratorial powers to have women apologize for and accept this treatment as not just okay but almost desirable, is sickening at times. It says much about Italian culture (and literary culture in general) of the 1970s that sentences like the one above were not outside of the norm.

Experiencing something so outdated and uncomfortable in the novel, however, made me more surprised to find a theme in the first two chapters that seemed downright contemporary: what appeared to be an attempt to grapple with climate change in fiction. Or at the very least, horrific weather and climatic events, and humans inability to do anything about them.

Pugliese writes, “With all that water coming down and coming down, and when you were about to say: there, it’s stopping now, you didn’t have time to open your mouth before the water violently returned, a harsh and predetermined rancour, an irreversible obstinacy.” The final words, “a harsh and predetermined rancour, an irreversible obstinacy,” could very well be used to describe the horrible repercussions of the changes we have wrought on our planet. Is he answering the call of recent writers such as Amitav Ghosh and Margaret Atwood to include and incorporate climate change in fiction?

Pugliese does not use the words “climate change,” and nor is it likely that was he thinking in those terms when he wrote the novel in the 1970s (the advancing water feels akin to Calvino’s warning, in Invisible Cities, of the “inferno” of inhuman urban sprawl). However, despite any direct link, many of the themes and tropes that contemporary writers find important in integrating climate change in their fiction, in “climate fiction,” or any other genre, are present in the early pages of Malacqua. Weather, catastrophic events outside of human control, play a stronger role in the plot than the actions of any one person. And Pugliese is deeply attuned to the ways that the rain is simultaneously terrifying to the Neapolitans and, like climate change for many in the twenty-first century, quotidian. Malacqua is not a tale of apocalypse, but a tale of how humans adapt and survive in the face of bizarre and catastrophic climate events. The deaths of seven Neapolitans during the rains is described in chilling terms by local members of government and the police. “A mournful event, certainly, a tragic event, but also predictable, in some respects, from the ancient perspective of a city that lives its life in a continuous form of multiplication.”

Later in the novel, however, it becomes clear that Pugliese’s use of these non-human devices is more metaphorical than political. The story (almost a parable) of the sea rising above the shore and entering Naples to seek out children barred from swimming, should’ve been a sign. Not just to the inhabitants of Naples, but also to me. This is not a book about climate change. It’s just a novel with a touch of magical realism.

About this point in the novel, Pugliese’s narrative begins to drag. His strengths lie, like many good journalists’ do, in deftly stitching together narratives and quickly limning characters and situations. The novel glows when it is discussing the mood of crowds at the beach, people on the street, a group of police and government officials searching a building. When the rain overflows open sewers in part of the city, Pugliese writes, “Also gritting his teeth and muttering fuck off was Biagio Di Sepe, 45, from Avellino, who was determined not to give a toss and had put on his rubber boots.” Pugliese’s Naples is a fractured place, more town than city, still recovering from the war. But despite its bleakness, there is something like love in his descriptions of Naples and its inhabitants, shot through with a touch of symbolism and literary finesse. Neapolitans look out across the sea at night towards Capri, “outstretched and remembering, as alien to the city as an undeciphered tower, close, yes, so close, and far away, too.” Neapolitans who may not have much still have their city, their dialect, which one character calls, “not a literary invention, an artificial construction made by experts and linguistic experimenters, but the most authentic, the most genuine and the most felt expression of an entire people.”

But when he turns his focus away from the city to dip further into the lives and minds of a smaller handful of Neapolitans, he becomes moralistic, even preachy. In these sections, the writing loses a bit of its luster, and the novel begins to feel a bit overly “artistic.” (The final 51 pages of the book take place in the protagonist’s thoughts while he is shaving. I am not against this experimentation, but the decision does not seem to add to the novel. It does not enrich the sense of the character’s emotions or the tableau of Naples. It feels, rather, like a good writer trying hard to seem clever.) Instead of these interwoven stories giving a sense of Naples as a whole, it makes the book feel more curtailed, insular. Each character seems to be living inside her own reality, her own space, which no one else can enter. Perhaps in its way that is Pugliese’s point. That not even a semi-apocalyptic event can make people communicate, break down the barriers of tradition, gender, and class. By the novel’s end, I too felt like the Neapolitans driven inside by the rain: claustrophobic and melancholy, craving a breath of air, a hint of blue sky.

Robert Sorrell author photoRobert Sorrell is a writer and photographer living in Philadelphia. He recently graduated from the University of Chicago’s English program and has a piece of narrative nonfiction forthcoming from Mosaic Art & Literary Journal.

 

 

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PETITE FLEUR, a novel by Iosi Havilio, reviewed by August Thompson

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Petite Fleur cover art. A black sound wave coming from the horn of a phonogram with murder weapons inside of it

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PETITE FLEUR
by Iosi Havilio
translated by Lorna Fox Scott
And Other Stories Publishing, 120 pages

reviewed by August Thompson

Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver

The greatest allure of fiction is the unexpected. Every good book surprises you, and every great book surprises you in a way that, after the astonishment is complete, feels wholly natural—this strangeness couldn’t have happened any other way.

Iosi Havilio’s Petite Fleur is a great book because it is a work of surprises intimately knotted around each other. The plot twists and writhes. Murders and magic lead to diatribes about jazz fusion that leads to rebirth and love and examinations of the anxiety of parenthood and marriage. The unexpected is constant, the satisfaction complete.

The novel is about an Argentinian man, José, the narrator, and his startling power. In a starburst of fury, he discovers that he can kill without consequence. Every time he murders his waddling, jazz-and-whiskey-obsessed neighbor, Guillermo, the neighbor returns to life the next day with no memory of the violence from the night before. Each killing is set to a take of the song “Petite Fleur,” of which Guillermo owns 145 variations— that’s the kind of guy Guillermo, and many of Havilio’s characters are: passionate, pretentious, and innately killable. This first surprise propels the book as it opens. The rest of the story is too fun to give away in great detail. Spoiling the book’s madcap plotting is to ruin its essence, and to take away from Havilio’s mystic accomplishment.

Iosi Havilio author photo

Iosi Havilio

In a book dense with surprise, Petite Fleur’s most stunning achievement is that it works despite how much it plays with things that should fail. The novel takes form in one breathless, 120-page paragraph. No matter the subject, Havilio never gives the reader’s eyes or mind a rest. After the first killing of Guillermo, José sprawlingly describes the nit and grit of the action, “The blade went in far enough to knock his head out of line and with the same momentum again, barely more deliberate, the metal edge reached halfway through his neck. At least that’s how it looked to me, although it could have been a lot less than that, or possibly more.” This pendulum style of writing, with every presented reality undercut by unknowing, insecurity, is initially exhausting, but its constancy builds a portrait of an anxious mind that is compelling and convincing.

Beyond its aggressive style, the novel turns other on-paper flaws into virtues: it imbues, praises and mocks Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Jodorowsky all at once; it contains plot points that verge on cutesy (a firework factory goes up in flames, a stumped writer rediscovers his passion); it mirrors the spiraling repetition and the anxiety and fury that comes from boredom and loneliness.

To read Havilio’s novel is to experience the joy of watching someone bludgeon, stab, incinerate and smother the rules of writing. Every time Havilio introduces an errant plot point or a violent departure of character—and there are many, especially considering the book’s slenderness—there is a natural gut check that says but why? Why the killings, the cruelty, the nature walks, the lengthy scene dedicated to Elektra Complex fulfillment? The answer, which is maybe unsatisfying in its obviousness: because Havilio can, because he must. The world he’s built somehow demands it all.

Havilio’s alluring, enigmatic and fun prose is the grand unifier through all of the book’s oddness. It keeps you steady and intrigued when the book repeatedly sheds its skin. From the first sentence—“This story begins when I was someone else.”—Havilio sets a tone that I can only describe as seductive. You are in on the book-length joke the narrator is telling, but also scared by its intensity, its disassociation.

Upon another pilgrimage to Guillermo’s, José is again overcome with the inexplicable bloodlust that inspired his first killing. “His severed head invaded my mind, I felt the power again, the limitless rage.” In writing this, Havilio accomplishes something impressively manifold: this idea of José’s is funny because of its heightened absurdity, it’s disturbing because of how unhinged the imagery is, and it’s vaguely erotic, because of its dedication to power.

Repeatedly, José, an unemployed homemaker living in a machismo-infected society, finds his only power in the primal. After many of the killings, he makes passionate love to his wife, Laura. He fantasizes about the local baker’s assistant in a similar voice as when he fantasizes about murdering the cult-leader/spiritual-healer Laura may or may not be sleeping with. (The healer, by the way, is a self-described, and unconfirmed, disciple of Jodorowsky that advocates for the aforementioned Elektra-fulfillment, and another brilliant comic character.) For José, and, for many of us, one suspects, sex and violence are kin because they are both actions that follow the call of impulse. José feels fury and eroticism with the same parts of his brain.

Writing about sex is not an easy thing because, like hearing someone describe a funky dream, you really had to be there to understand the wonder of the experience. But Havilio manages to convey the automatic pleasure of making love, particularly to someone you know intimately. It’s rote until it’s surprising, it’s a relief and, at times, a stress or a symbol. José and Laura have a child and a life together. They have sex frequently when they’re happy and less when they’re not. José pines for other women and obsesses about Laura’s fidelity and is willing to give into kink and fantasy to help his wife achieve psychological absolution. Though their relationship is often tormented, their sex life is an interesting through-line that combines the domestic with the perverse. This juxtaposition is both tender and horrifying.

Writing about violence is maybe easier, or at least more appealing. Few of us know what it’s like to act out on true violence, which means reading about it is exciting in a way that reading about sex isn’t. Still, Havilio manages to infuse the violence with freshness and, more importantly, comedy. José’s freedom to kill without repercussion makes for something like a running joke across the book—every week,  José goes to “return the spade”—the phrase quickly becomes a continued euphemism for murder, to hilarious effect— he borrowed from Guillermo. The two build a rhythm: they talk, they drink, they listen to records, and then José plants the spade in Guillermo’s neck, or lights him on fire, or bashes his brains in, before returning home to look after his baby or fret about his increasingly depressed wife. Each incarnation more dramatic, more indulgent. José gets to play God one night a week, and the result is a delicious brand of asylum humor. It’s when sex and death meet that the book strikes its most refined comedy—a type of joke that is right on the precipice of upsetting the reader, “partly due to the incomparable lust that violent death arouses, I took Laura on an acrobatic sex voyage that lasted till dawn.” I can think of few writers that do stark deadpan as well as Havilio.

The translation work by Lorna Scott Fox is wonderful because it imports Havilio’s gymnastic approach to writing without sacrificing José’s conversational tone. Another pleasure of Havilio’s style is that it feels as if José is telling you one long story as you sit beside him. He’s a smart narrator, unafraid to use words that surpass dollar-bin colloquialisms, but also a narrator that is convincingly retelling a story he can’t quite believe happened. In the retelling, José finds another form of power.

It is tempting to talk about Petite Fleur, Havilio’s fifth novel, in the way that one always talk about things that are challenging, confusing, absurd and comic: it’s a nightmare, a fever, it’s Tolstoy on acid, a vertigo-romp through the nether. But the use of these words is usually shorthand for saying that the work inspires that perverse quake of relation, a narrative that beckons the oblivion within us all. An oblivion that few of us, if any, understand.

So let’s leave it as it is: Petite Fleur is a book about that queasy feeling where the primal, the inexplicable, and the contemporary mash together. And its impact, its askew joy, can only be truly understood by being there, thumb on the page.

August Thompson author photoAugust Thompson has worked as an editor and writer since graduating from NYU in 2013.  When he’s not working on fiction or watching the Boston Celtics, you can find him at the movies.

THE MINORS by Chris Ludovici reviewed by Ryan K. Strader

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The Minors cover photo. A cracked glass window in front of a red doorTHE MINORS
by Chris Ludovici
Unsolicited Press, 376 pages

reviewed by Ryan K. Strader

Hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in professional sports. A fastball travels at 90 miles per hour, moving from the pitcher’s mitt to the catcher’s glove in approximately .44 seconds. If the batter blinks, he’ll miss. For the last few feet that the ball travels, it is essentially invisible to the hitter. He has to have made his decision by then, whether to swing, how he’ll swing.

I did not know anything about baseball when I picked up Chris Ludovici’s The Minors. Nick Rogers, one of the protagonists, reflects on the difficulty of hitting a baseball, and I ended up spending too much time engrossed in an ESPN Sport Science episode checking Nick’s information. It turns out that, football fanatic though I am, the fastball is a formidable opponent: 90 mph is a frightening, lethal speed, and statistically speaking, it is almost impossible to hit.

However, when we meet Nick in The Minors, baseball is part of Nick’s past, thanks to a shoulder injury. Back home and living with an aunt, the 28-year-old Nick tries to forge ahead by working as a contractor and living a self-serving life dating a succession of girls (most of whom, he claims, came onto him and not the other way around).

Until he is hired by the Heller family. Ludovici’s other protagonist is 16-year-old Sam Heller, whose family is preparing to move to Chicago. Sam’s father has relocated ahead of the family, and it is left to Sam’s mother to get the house fixed up and sold while shepherding Sam through her junior year of high school and keeping up with Sam’s eight-year-old brother, Oscar. Sam is a reflective young woman trying to navigate the abandonment she feels at her father’s moving ahead to Chicago, the alienation she feels from her mother (who she is sure only tries to make her life harder) and her emerging identity as someone very different from either her father or her mother.

Chris Ludovici author photo

Chris Ludovici

Ludovici has given Sam a complex character befitting her age; her internal monologue moves between both narcissism and the philosophic questioning of reality that is part of adolescence, making her believable and interesting. When we first meet Sam, she is ruminating on her impulse to try a cigarette, even though she knows she shouldn’t, and her internal debate covers everything from health to what she learned in psychology class to the sex appeal of oral habits:

So sometimes, when faced with a decision, she froze. Was her desire to smoke the next logical step in some long chain of desires that was set in motion when she was just a baby? Or was it some desperate, pointless attempt on her part to rebel from whatever programming was driving her these last sixteen years? How could she ever know?

Sam is never sure she knows, but she tries hard to discover what the rational system is that makes the adult world make sense, instead of trying to force reality to always fit her own childish wishes. Her self-awareness is unique, perhaps not entirely adolescent, but that is part of what I would say might make The Minors a great book even for teenagers. Sam doesn’t just want to rise above her youth, but wants to become someone she is happy being:

It was all a question of identity. Who did she want to be? Did she want to be the girl who, when faced with a situation she didn’t like, threw a big fit and made everyone around her miserable? Like her mother? […] Or did she want to be more like her dad? Someone who rolled with things, worked with them, found the good in everything and focused on that.

At the same time that Sam is trying so hard to understand herself, her limited understanding of what the adult world is like causes her to constantly stumble: She has misunderstood her mother’s motivations and she has oversimplified her dad’s reasons for “rolling with things.”

Nick is the contractor hired to fix up the house, from renovating a bathroom to fixing kitchen tile and rebuilding the old deck. In the Heller house, Nick feels needed and takes on some of the responsibilities of a big brother and father: he instructs Oscar about baseball, teaches Sam how to drive, and enjoys Liz’s nonjudgmental counsel about his girlfriends. For a short time, the Heller family takes on an unconventional form, and it changes Nick and Sam and their understanding of adulthood and relationships.

“What’s the deal with you and these people?” asks Nick’s aunt as he becomes more and more involved with the Hellers. Nick initially lacks the self-awareness to fully understand what is it with him and “these people,” and how quickly initial connection becomes affection, and how quickly affection becomes the responsibility. Like Sam, Nick possesses believably contradictory qualities. While he is brutally judgmental of wealthy white-collar men like Steve Heller (the first time he meets Steve he wonders, “What kind of a dickhead put product in his hair on a Sunday morning?”) he is deeply empathetic about the work that a mother like Liz does in raising her children, even while he is an insensitive jerk in his own dating relationships with girls.

The Minors is essentially a coming-of-age story, but it is unique in that “coming-of-age” is not restricted to the teenage character, Sam. Sam and Nick take turns telling the story, and both must “grow up” in different ways. Their perceptions and relational needs make these two connect with each other and ricochet off each other in sweet and painful ways: their relationship has overtones of sibling, parent, and suitor. Unfortunately, in such a complicated relationship it is hard to do everything right. It might be easier to hit a fastball than to always make the right moves in family life or know how to best care for loved ones.

This is a character-driven story, and Sam and Nick and the others have the nuance and beauty that comes from genuine affection on the part of the author. Such writerly love is infectious; it only took a few pages for me to care about Nick and Sam. The story’s premise about the nature of people and adulthood is fundamentally compassionate; people aren’t bad, Nick contends, they’re “just stupid.” They make mistakes and stumble through their relationships. In The Minors, coming of age is the acknowledgment that no one has really made it out of “the minors,” that everyone is trying their hardest and there are good moments and bad moments to life. When Liz describes her own coming of age, she says:

I thought there was going to be some corner I turned or switch I flipped and I would just be an adult. But it never happened. Instead, I was just the same old me, but I was doing grown up things. I was the same silly girl inside, but I was cleaning my house instead of an apartment; I was driving around suburban streets instead of city ones. There were times I felt like an adult, sometimes when I was with Sam or Oscar […] But even then there was a part of me that was always aware that I was doing these things that I was just unprepared for, that I had no business actually doing. That’s what I think adulthood really is—it’s just little kids playing dress-up.

For a teenager like Sam, internalizing this kind of compassionate view of others as “unprepared” means rejecting the narcissism of adolescence and embracing forgiveness. For Nick, this also means rejection of his old narcissism, but we’re not sure where the rest of his “adult” life will take him. I wouldn’t mind finding out where Nick goes in future books or short stories.

The baseball analogy is not overdone in the book; I’m actually harping on it more than Ludovici does, simply because I like it. This is Ludovici’s first novel, and it reminded me strongly of The Art of Racing in the Rain, by Garth Stein, another debut novel about a family, with well-written characters and an apt sports metaphor. I noticed however that this is not Ludovici’s first time writing a compelling younger female character: he has a short story in the second issue of Cleaver featuring Daisy, a fourth grader who has to figure out the difference between “being cool,” and being “awesome.” The Minors is a pleasure to read because of Ludovici’s capacity to give nuance to the experience of growing up and also being an adult. He makes us wonder, Is it different? Don’t we “grown-ups” know exactly what both Daisy and Sam are talking about?

Ryan Strader author photoRyan Strader earned a B.A. in Russian Literature from George Mason University and an M.A.T. from Clayton State University. She is currently an instructional designer and researcher. Her most recent instructional design project is the development of a class in writing and qualitative research methods at Georgia State University, where she is also a doctoral student. Her most recent publication is an upcoming book chapter on populism in young adult novels. She lives and works in the Atlanta area. Read other reviews by Ryan here.

 

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A MYRIAD OF ROADS THAT LEAD TO HERE, a novella by Nathan Elias, reviewed by Kelly Doyle

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A Myriad of Roads That Lead to Here cover art. Artwork of two men walking on a path that leads to mountains under a purple skyA MYRIAD OF ROADS THAT LEAD TO HERE
by Nathan Elias
Scarlet Leaf, 72 pages

reviewed by Kelly Doyle 

Nathan Elias’ first novella, A Myriad of Roads that Lead to Here, tells a story that is simultaneously frustrating and accessible. This bildungsroman provides a snapshot into the emotional journey of a naive and sometimes selfish narrator, Weston, as he grapples with the untimely death of his mother, which had occurred a few months before.

Home from college for the summer, Weston decides to walk to the ocean. He hopes that this trip, modeled after stories he has read, will cure him of his pain. Unfortunately, the reader quickly realizes that this journey is not only fruitless, but may have the reverse effect than was intended. Brief moments of human connection, as fleeting as smoking a cigarette and seeing another person doing the same or giving a child a quarter to buy a candy, are all that give Weston any relief on his walk.

During these moments, when Weston reaches out to another human being, the reader can feel the void in his heart. That void only grows as he moves on, determined to finish his painful quest and all the while aware that his life is falling apart. “I write in my journal about things I haven’t had time to think of,” Weston says, “what my life will be like without my mother, the fact that I may actually be in severe credit card debt after this trip, and what I plan to do when I get back.” He wishes he wasn’t “consumed by fear.”

When Weston invites his friend Saul to accompany him on the journey to the ocean, he envisions the two of them walking through the forests of America, clutching copies of Walden, breathing in the clear air and emerging at the end like newborns, all of their pain and sorrow cast along the side of the road. He hopes to find peace and closure, to banish the thoughts of ghosts that torment him. His pain is vague to the reader but present, manifesting in the form of dreams and ghosts and torturous thoughts that are never described in more than general terms. Beyond expected mourning, Weston appears haunted. This extreme inner turmoil may be explained by Weston’s very open and abrupt admission that he once partook in self-harm with an old girlfriend. Weston never elaborates on the incident aside from regular references to his scars, but it could indicate that Weston’s young adult life was not easy.

Whatever form of pain Weston experiences, he strives to escape. He hopes to find “freedom and independence” and, at the same time, he tells Saul, “Whatever it is that will cleanse us both of the distress we feel from losing our mothers.” Weston chooses Saul as his companion not because they are particularly close or because Saul is particularly savvy, but because Saul has also lost a mother. They can suffer together. Rather than escaping, Weston builds his own microcosm of suffering. He pretends to be positive, playing the devil’s advocate when Saul proclaims that he cannot “see everything as beautiful” as Weston does, but his pretended positivity doesn’t breach the surface. Weston begins to live off of other people’s kindness while maintaining the facade that he never accepts help.

Nathan Elias author photo

Nathan Elias

Weston often seems selfish, but this selfishness is followed by subtle reminders that he is only a kid. He misses his mother “sitting in the front seat, within arms reach, every so often checking on [him] to give [him] a smile, to realign [him] to a peaceful state.” The circumstances of his mother’s death are conspicuously absent from the text, aside from a vague reference to her habit of checking herself into the emergency room. Still, it seems clear that her death was sudden and occurred before Weston had an opportunity to grow up and learn to care for himself. Not only is he dealing with the loss of a loved one, but he is suddenly thrust into independence.

Weston chooses isolation and hardship to prove that he can care for himself, that he can live without his mother. He asks himself, “how can I ever find freedom and independence if I keep depending on people,” and decides that the only way to prove he is capable is to dissociate himself from the support system at his disposal. He is strung between desiring independence and desiring to be cared for. “You look at dependence like it’s weak,” his girlfriend tells him. “It’s not weak. It’s okay to let people love you. You know that, right?” Weston admits that he does not. Still, his obvious naivete proves that he cannot grasp the independence he wants, not yet. The conflict between his mind and heart manifests as hypocrisy and selfishness, dominating a character who consistently says one thing and does another.

Weston’s romantic idea of a Walden-esque journey proves ill-conceived and badly planned. The two men do not pack enough food, yet their packs are too heavy. They cannot walk the distance they expected and they cannot sleep outside like they had hoped. Rather than walking through vitalizing forests like Thoreau, they find themselves growing exhausted alongside highways and parking lots. Weston repeatedly reiterates that he does not want help from anyone, nevertheless, he and Saul soon resort to hitching rides, staying in people’s homes and shelters and eating others’ food, refusing to admit that their adventure is a failure. Weston turns to his girlfriend for help, admitting that he began dating her solely because she supports him. Once again, his selfishness becomes apparent, but this selfishness emerges out of his disorientation in a world without his mother.

When Weston and Saul arrive in the welcoming home of Weston’s cousin, the warmth and love they find bring Weston’s true problem to the forefront. Weston realizes that he “lost touch with a lot of people” after his mother’s death. He finally begins to recognize that this might be part of his suffering. Unfortunately, this realization seems to be quickly forgotten. He continues asking his girlfriend for favors. He continues contemplating his own struggle while remaining blind to the struggles evident in his cousin’s immediate family. Oddly, none of his family members mention the death of his mother or the unusual nature of his trip, and the novella never addresses the statuses of his father and stepfather.

Weston does not know who he is, what he wants, or how to fix his problems. His lack of experience, worldly knowledge, and self-awareness makes his healing process exasperating for the reader. His troubled young adult life offers some sort of explanation and his initiative provides hope for the future, but all the reader is actually given is the middle of his journey. Elias provides very little information about Weston’s family or the circumstances of his mother’s death; his narrative stops short before Weston has an opportunity to truly change before his life is either repaired or destroyed. This renders the story incomplete, missing the truly essential moment of change that Weston surely was looking for.

Who was Weston before this tragedy and who is he after? The reader is left to wonder. Nevertheless, this short snapshot into a young man’s life, though incomplete, succeeds in portraying the painful confusion that follows a tragedy. This novella provides readers who have experienced loss an opportunity to see their own feelings of confusion, fear, and disorientation reflected in a character’s search for rightness in a world that feels anything but.

Kelly Doyle author photoKelly Doyle studies English, creative writing, and psychology at Emory University. Her fiction has appeared in Firewords Quarterly, Stories Through the Ages College Edition, and others. She is the editor-in-chief of Emory’s literary magazine, Alloy, and she works in a developmental memory lab on campus. She loves to read and travel, and she plans to pursue a career in writing.

 

 

You may also enjoy:

THE MASK OF SANITY, a novel by Jacob Appel, reviewed by Kelly Doyle

SWIMMING LESSONS, a novel by Claire Fuller, reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier

KONUNDRUM: SELECTED PROSE OF FRANZ KAFKA by Franz Kafka reviewed by Eric Andrew Newman

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Konundrum cover art. A drawing of a man suspended between two ladders bent into 90-degree shapesKONUNDRUM: SELECTED PROSE OF FRANZ KAFKA
by Franz Kafka
translated by Peter Wortsman
Archipelago Books, 384 pages

reviewed by Eric Andrew Newman

With the centenary of Franz Kafka’s first three major publications having passed just a few years ago, a plethora of new translations of Kafka’s stories have recently been released. Among them is Konundrum: Selected Prose of Franz Kafka, with works chosen and translated by Peter Wortsman, a writer known for his own micro fiction. Wortsman’s selection of what he considers to be the very best of Kafka’s short prose, whether it’s a story, a letter, a journal entry, a parable, or an aphorism distinguishes Konundrum from the other new translations. This approach contrasts with the single book-length work of Susan Bernofsky’s new translation of “The Metamorphosis” and Michael Hofmann’s new translation of all of Kafka’s unpublished stories in Investigations of a Dog.

In the acknowledgements, Wortsman states that his only criterion for inclusion in the book is the ability of a piece to amaze him. In this way, his selections are more personal than a collection of Kafka’s most important works, or works that were published while he was alive, or works that went unpublished in his lifetime. Wortsman also says that his publisher gave him the complete freedom to dip into Kafka’s entire opus and translate whatever strikes his fancy. This kind of freedom is a gift not only to the translator, but also to the reader, as it gives Kafka novices the ability to sample his letters, journals, parables, and aphorisms without having to dive into each of the separate volumes dedicated to the subject and meticulously published by Schocken Books, the gatekeeper to most of Franz Kafka’s available writings.

Franz Kafka author photo

Franz Kafka

The first translations of Franz Kafka’s works from the German into English were completed by Edwin and Willa Muir, and published by Schocken Books in the decades following his death. The opening of Kafka’s story “The Metamorphosis,” as translated by the Muirs, is perhaps one of the most well-known first lines in all literature: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” However, later translations, such as my worn high school copy of Joachim Neugroschel’s version, would go on to describe Samsa as having transformed into a “monstrous vermin,” beginning the decades-long debate of whether it is more accurate to translate Kafka’s phrase “ungeheueres Ungeziefer” as “monstrous insect,” or “monstrous vermin.”

Wortsman, who retranslates the title of “The Metamorphosis” here as “Transformed,” sidesteps this issue by using the more colloquial phrase of “monstrous bug.” In the introduction to her new translation of “The Metamorphosis,” Susan Bernofsky mentions that when Kafka spoke of the story to his friends, he often referred to Samsa by the more playful term bug, rather than the stricter term vermin. This more playful, colloquial sensibility of Wortsman’s translation is also reflected in the new title of the piece, which translates directly from the German into English as “The Transformation.” With his new title, Wortsman wanted to strip the English translation of the heavily classical connotations of Ovid’s The Metamorphosis and give it a more accessible air, choosing the form “Transformed” due to how often the word appears in the text.

Kafka’s playful sense of humor is also highlighted in an excerpt from a letter that he wrote to his fiancée Felice Bauer, “I Can Also Laugh:”

I can also laugh, Felice, you bet I can, I am even known as a big laugher… It even happened that I burst out laughing—and how!—at a solemn meeting with our director—that was two years ago, but the incident has lived on as a legend at the institute.

With this collection, Wortsman endeavors to bring the comedy back to Kafka. In the forward to his previous book, Tales of the German Imagination from the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann, Wortsman relates the story of his aunt going to a reading given by Kafka in Vienna when she was younger. While she didn’t know what to make of “the gawky man and his strange stories,” what struck her the most was that throughout the reading Kafka could barely keep from shaking with laughter.

At first glance, one might assume the book is arranged in chronological order, as it begins with Kafka’s first known writing, a note he wrote to a friend, and ends with his last known writings, the notes he wrote his doctor while dying in a sanatorium. But on a closer inspection, the rest of the book doesn’t follow suit. Throughout, Wortsman alternates between early published pieces and later unpublished ones, whether they are stories, parables, reflections, or journal entries with no real discernible pattern. This approach, however, allows readers to experience the prose on its own merits, rather than as a strictly defined literary form. It also shows the reader how porous the literary borders between Kafka’s short prose and more informal writing can be.

Peter Wortsman translator photo

Translator Peter Wortsman

One example of this porousness is the short piece, “A Hybrid,” a favorite of mine from the collection. In the story, the narrator tell us about a creature he cares for that is half cat and half lamb, and how it is the favorite spectacle of the local children. He describes the mysterious creature as:

Head and claws come from the cat, size and stature from the lamb; both bequeathed the glint and wildness in its eyes, the soft and snug coat of fur, the manner of its movements no less leaping than skulking.

Even though it reads like a polished story, it was actually taken from one of Kafka’s journal entries. In the acknowledgements, Wortsman says he chose to include several journal entries that he imagines Kafka might have taken and published as stories, and it’s hard to argue in the case of “A Hybrid.”

However they came about, this reader is happy to have more of Kafka’s short shorts in print. Many of Kafka’s short shorts, particularly the ones from his first book, Contemplation, and his later book, A Country Doctor, seem to have been the prototype for the recent flash fiction, or micro fiction movement. Wortsman is singularly qualified to bring these short short stories back into the zeitgeist, as he himself is a writer of flash and micro fiction, having published a book of the form, A Modern Way to Die: Small Stories and Micro Tales. In fact, Wortsman published his translation of Kafka’s short “A Hybrid” in Gigantic, a contemporary literary journal that only publishes flash. Another favorite short short is “Poseidon,” a parable that imagines the god Poseidon so buried in bureaucratic paperwork he doesn’t even have time to enjoy the sea.

While the selections Worstman includes in Konundrum are terrific, I also have to wonder about the pieces he chose to leave out. One major omission here is Kafka’s breakthrough story, “The Judgement.” As one of Kafka’s first major works published in his lifetime and the product of what Kafka considered to be his ideal artistic process (he wrote it all in one night), it’s essential to any Kafka short prose collection. Still, Konundrum includes the rest of Kafka’s greatest hits that were published in his lifetime, like “Transformed,” “The Hunger Artist,” “In the Penal Colony,” and “A Report to the Academy,” as well as lesser known, but just as great, stories that went unpublished while he was alive, like “The Burrow,” “Investigations of a Dog,” “A Hybrid,” “The Bridge,” and “Poseidon.”

In his afterword, Wortsman remarks on how fresh and alive Kafka’s prose still is today and I can only agree. Once you dust them off and give them a new coat of paint, his surreal stories are just as relevant now as they were a hundred years ago. The absurdity of bureaucracy, a singular object of Kafka’s work, only seems to have grown in the intervening. Wortsman does an excellent job of maintaining the long, looping run-on sentences essential to German grammar, while at the same time keeping a rhythm and readability for the English speaking reader. In addition to being a solid collection for the Kafka beginner to start reading and enjoying his work, Konundrum is also a good collection for more modern and experienced readers who might appreciate a fresher, looser take on Kafka’s prose.

Eric Andrew Newman drinking a water bottleEric Andrew Newman currently lives in Los Angeles, but is originally from the Chicago area. He works as an archivist for a nonprofit foundation by day and as a writer of flash fiction by night. He has previously been named as a finalist for the Robert J. Demott Short Prose Contest and the Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Exposition Review, Gargoyle, Heavy Feather Review, Necessary Fiction, and Quarter After Eight, among others.

 

GODS ON THE LAM, a novel by Christopher David Rosales, reviewed by Brandon Stanwyck

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Gods on the Lam cover art. Clippings of human faces against a yellow backgroundGODS ON THE LAM
by Christopher David Rosales
Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing, 302 pages

reviewed by Brandon Stanwyck

Christopher David Rosales, on the dedication page, describes Gods on the Lam as “an homage to Roger Zelazny, without whose books I may never have been inspired to write.” Zelazny’s influence is evident. Famous for his direct execution and his penchant for genre-mixing, the lifeblood of the late speculative fiction author rushes through the twisty veins of this strange novel—Rosales’ second.

Gods on the Lam opens with a man named Wayne waking up alongside an Arizona highway in a ’70 Chevy that he’s “somewhat sure” belongs to him. He’s only halfway confident that the truck is his because he has no memory. To get a sense of what’s going on Wayne drives to the nearby town of Show Low, where he encounters Ruby, a mother on a decade-long search for her missing son. Believing that the answers to their questions may be linked, Wayne and Ruby team up and stumble upon a string of bizarre (possibly alien) abductions that have been afflicting the area, disappearances that have come to be known locally as the Burials.

As the cover art perfectly suggests, Gods on the Lam is a vibrant, pulpy collage that transcends genre. Rosales alludes to this in a brief scene during which Wayne chats with a hotel clerk with literary aspirations. “So, what’s the book about?” Wayne asks, and the clerk sums up his efforts with, “Sort of a Western-Sci-fi-Horror-Detective-Romance.” And Wayne, in his usual lucid way, responds: “Someone’s willing to publish that?”

Gods on the Lam’s eccentric nature is not immediately apparent, although the nuts and bolts that made the dime novels of the past so iconic are: a small southwestern town, set in the near past; a macho protagonist-narrator; a resolute but still potentially dubious dame, who admittedly used to be the kind of person who “would steal your wallet, and then help you look for it”; a shifty new sheriff in town who would prefer that some truths stay hidden; and a dark-hearted big business boss who purportedly has the ominous power to “make life where life was not meant to be made.” With secrets abound and treachery around every corner, old school detective fiction readers should have no problem getting sucked into this mysterious world. As a gritty neo-noir tale about lost memories and missing persons, Gods on the Lam plays into many of the genre’s familiar clichés and stock characters then moves beyond them.

Christopher David Rosales author photo

Christopher David Rosales

Rosales, not one to waste time, sprinkles in elements of horror and science fiction early on. Soon into their mutual investigations, the ensemble crosses paths with a skeletal “creature,” one of several seemingly subhuman monstrosities that have been reported in Show Low area newspapers prior to this encounter. The group deduces that the beasts must be the “cleanup crew” for whoever is behind the Burials, though it becomes evident later on that these primal figures may actually be the result of chemical testing gone awry… With Wayne as his conduit, Rosales illustrates in gnarly detail the horrors that certain human beings willingly unleash upon one another.

Wayne’s narration, while colorful, at times reads as awfully brusque—almost abrasive, in fact, with its candor. In one scene, a handful of characters traverse the “true wilderness” of a forest that has been untouched for generations, and Wayne describes a female character ducking away from menacing branches “as if they were the grasp of a rapist,” a jarring simile (and probably not one that’d be used to describe a male character’s actions). Wayne, later, compares dangling gasmask filter tubes to “limp wrinkled cocks.” Not exactly eloquent, but it paints a carnal picture. At one point, Wayne’s phrasing concerns Ruby, and he addresses his proclivity for indiscreet descriptors. “Sometimes I’m not good with my words, okay?” he admits, to which she responds with “I know” and moves on, an apparent sign that readers ought to do so as well. After all, the offhand narration manages to fit the tone and the hybrid nature of the text.

Gods on the Lam, at its heart, is a love letter to midcentury noir and speculative literature. Rosales’ palpable fondness for the inner workings of genre shines on each page—and thanks to that high-octane passion, Wayne’s voice comes to life and soars. Although his diction may be troublesome once in a while, the anomalous expressions add to the turbulent atmosphere of the narrative, because Gods on the Lam is one hundred percent bananas, in the best way possible.

Brandon Stanwyck author photoBrandon Stanwyck studied film, literature, and theatre at Cleveland State University. While there, he led a student-run theatre company. He currently lives in Ohio, where he divides his time between working on independent movies and writing fiction. His words have appeared in The Fiction Pool, Corvus Review, and elsewhere. Twitter: @BrandonStanwyck.

 

 

 

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PLAINSPEAK, WY, poems by Joanna Doxey, reviewed by Brandon Stanwyck

OCTAVIA E. BUTLER’S KINDRED: A GRAPHIC NOVEL ADAPTATION by Damian Duffy and John Jennings reviewed by Brian Burmeister

HOW WE SPEAK TO ONE ANOTHER: AN ESSAY DAILY READER, edited by Ander Monson & Craig Reinbold, reviewed by David Grandouiller

 

THE MASK OF SANITY, a novel by Jacob Appel, reviewed by Kelly Doyle

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The Mask of Sanity cover art. A dark photo of a man with a piercing blue eyeTHE MASK OF SANITY
by Jacob Appel
The Permament Press, 256 pages

reviewed by Kelly Doyle

The protagonist of Jacob Appel’s 2017 novel, The Mask of Sanity, is a doctor, a family man, and a murderer. Appel offers a rare insight into the life of this high functioning sociopath, Dr. Jeremy Balint. With a staggering seven master’s degrees, medical degree, law degree, and experience in clinical psychiatry, Appel is certainly authority enough to paint a convincing psychological profile of such a troubling protagonist. The close third person narration allows the reader to hear Balint’s twisted thoughts, while also observing and nearly falling victim to the carefully constructed facade of “the most ethical human being on the planet.”

Balint, in fact, appears to have a perfect life. After overcoming a difficult childhood, he becomes a successful cardiologist, marries a smart, beautiful woman, buys a house with a pool, and has two daughters who he adores. Living this beautiful life, Balint is tormented by the thought that it might not last. And it won’t, of course. He soon discovers that his wife is having an affair with a notoriously slippery colleague, Warren Sugarman. It quickly becomes apparent that Sugarman, a womanizing egomaniac, is sleeping with many women including Balint’s wife while neglecting his own ill-adjusted son. Balint reasons that the most important thing he can do is keep his domestic life intact. And so, as Appel writes, he “decides to murder his former friend and classmate.”

The reader becomes less sypathetic to Sugarman’s plight throughout the novel as he continues to schedule outings and dinners with both Balint and his wife, coaxing her to fall deeper in love with him as Balint watches and plays dumb to the affair. These particular scenes are made even more horrible by the fact that Balint’s wife appears to be geniunly in love with this clearly manipulative man. The sickening progression of this affair almost allows the reader to understand Balint’s fantasy of ending Sugarman’s life, despite his admitting at the start of the novel that “the real reason he was going to eliminate [his wife’s] lover was simply that he had decided he was going to do so–nothing more, nothing less.” Balint spends the rest of the novel spinning elaborate justifications for his actions, generally revolving around his two young daughters. This becomes a distinct pattern for his character. Everything is always justified around his subjective interpretation of morality and human worth.

Jacob Appel author photo

Jacob Appel

Balint tries to convince the reader that his daughters “matter above all else: his ultimate legacy, the guardians of his image after his death,” and that he is committed to maintaining the ideal home environment he and his wife had spent a decade building for them. The strength of this argument is lessened by his wife, who shows no intention of leaving them and continues to prioritize her family over Sugarman, conducting the affair silently in her free time. Still, any sympathy that this justification may have ilicited is quickly erased when Balint decides “that his plan require[s] multiple victims.” In order to cover up this well motivated killing, Balint decides to murder five other random people, and signify his actions by tying an emerald ribbon around each of their necks. For each murder, he provides several reasons why he acted justly, but he also becomes more and more obsessed with his public image as “The Emerald Choker” and actually begins to enjoy the killing itself. Throughout this process, Balint wins awards for ethics in medicine, “given to a clinician who has mastered the art of ethical decision making,” promotes a charity organization through his synagogue, and climbs up the rankings at the hospital where he works, effectively subverting readers’ stereotypical expectations for serial killers as social outcasts.

Balint is an intriguing character, but the narration limits the reader’s interpretation by providing what is practically a diagnosis for his condition before the novel begins. The book’s introduction argues that sociopaths are not usually iconoclasts or pariahs as we imagine. Instead, they are “all around us, smiling and perpetrating evil.” This is a fresh picture of sociopaths, people who “recognize the difference [between right and wrong], but simply do not care” and are not capable of developing that care. After this introduction, the reader is thrust directly into the narrative with the first line: “Killing, Balint discovered, was the easy part.” This leaves little doubt that Balint is a sociopath, essentially removing any possibility for redemption, limiting any questions or hopes that the reader might have and thereby sacrificing an opportunity for suspenseful ambiguity. Balint himself even considers the possibility of his condition, but decides that “whether he actually was a sociopath…was not worth thinking about.” Likewise, the reader is spared having to come to his or her own conclusion.

Nevertheless, the novel is haunted by the eerie paradox of having a killer who is also a doctor, a criminal who is also a hero. Appel continually exploits the one essential similarity between these two roles. Both doctors and murderers believe that they have the right to determine the fate of others. Balint is part of a committee who decides which patients receive heart transplants and which do not, deciding in essence who will live and who will die. This is a surprisingly unscientific process. His occupation’s assumed right to play God cultivates the ego and confidence necessary for his killing. To Balint, “life is like a game of chess that people play with God. And as long as you’re winning, God lets you stay down here on Earth. But when God wins, that’s when He takes you.” In this case, Balint is God. The book flashes between Balint sitting in on the transplant committee, and Balint roaming the streets searching for victims. These moments begin to feel strangely similar. In both cases, the parties involved try to justify their decisions, but the justifications never really feel right. One can’t justify murdering a young boy because he is fat and will in the future be bullied, just as one can’t comfortably deny life to a father because he has high cholesteral or used to smoke.

The novel concludes suddenly, leaving the reader with a pressing question. Throughout, the reader is led to believe that Balint never comes close to being discovered as a killer, but the unexpected last page may indicate otherwise. What went wrong? No clear foreshadowing seems to provide the reader with an answer to this question, resulting in a somewhat unsatisfying finish. The reader inevitably curses the author for not providing the answer somewhere between the lines earlier in the text, but only because the author has succeeded in shocking and engaging her.

The Mask of Sanity offers a new image of sociopaths and criminals while reminding readers that the same God complex often driving them is present in people we admire. Some of those people we call heros. That concept in itself may cause readers to second guess their neighbors, friends, maybe even spouses, providing a delightful fear that speaks to Appel’s accomplishment as a writer.

Kelly Doyle author photoKelly Doyle studies English, creative writing, and psychology at Emory University. Her fiction has appeared in Firewords Quarterly, Stories Through the Ages College Edition, and others. She is the editor-in-chief of Emory’s literary magazine, Alloy, and she works in a developmental memory lab on campus. She loves to read and travel, and she plans to pursue a career in writing.

 

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THE TOPLESS WIDOW OF HERKIMER STREET, stories by Jacob M. Appel, reviewed by Odette Moolten

MY SHADOW BOOK, a novel by MAAWAAM, edited by Jordan A. Rothacker, reviewed by William Morris

 

MY SHADOW BOOK, a novel by MAAWAAM, edited by Jordan A. Rothacker, reviewed by William Morris

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My Shadow Book cover art. Golden text over a black-and-grey starMY SHADOW BOOK
by MAAWAAM
edited by Jordan A. Rothacker
Spaceboy Books, 227 pages

reviewed by William Morris

In the summer of 2011, novelist and scholar Jordan A. Rothacker discovered a box containing the journals of a being known as Maawaam. Thus begins My Shadow Book—part literary manifesto, part metafictional frame narrative. The novel itself is credited to Maawaam, while Rothacker gives himself the title of editor. This framing device, the found manuscript, is used throughout literature as a way of creating verisimilitude in the reading experience. By claiming to have found and compiled Maawaam’s papers, Rothacker gives the novel legitimacy as a real, authentic document, while also absolving himself of any blame for the contents: he simply discovered these writings, and so is not responsible for their creation.

Despite Rothacker’s apparent effort to distance himself from the fiction, in Maawaam we have the character of a struggling writer. He calls himself a Shadow Man, a “double agent” writing in the darkness while presenting himself as a functioning member of society in the light. Is “Shadow Man” another way of saying “artist,” or is Maawaam otherworldly? Perhaps both. In his journals, Maawaam quotes William S. Burroughs, Anna Kavan, and Guy Debord; he writes about his love life and his deepest anxieties; and he includes excerpts of stories, poems, and novels he’s trying to write. He is deeply human. And yet all of this takes place in the shadows, where he convenes with other Shadow Men and Women. Maawaam refers to regular people as “the people of the sun.” He fragments his journals with a series of black stars, both to indicate section breaks and to remind readers that he lives by the light of a different, darker sun.

As in his previous novel And Wind Will Wash Away, Rothacker here displays his wisdom, subversive influences, and literary prowess. He crafts a character better read than most of us, but also greatly troubled by his own psyche. Maawaam’s ruminations read like a love letter to suffering artists everywhere:

There are those nights when you get up to go to the bathroom—she remains there asleep—and you catch your reflection and you can see he is dying and you feel like you’re dying and you can feel it, the dying slowly and you wonder, is this how everyone feels all the time?

That question—is this how everyone feels all the time?—is fundamental to why we read. Literature gives us the opportunity to glimpse other lives and understand how other people think and feel, and the more we read, the more we realize that our feelings can be found reproduced in countless others.

Maawaam is obsessed with the phrase “give up the ghost,” which he interprets as a Shadow Man giving everything to the people of the sun. This sounds like both an unburdening of the soul and also a form of death. He says: “I have tried in my own way to be free… I have tried in my own way to give up the ghost. So many ghosts to give up before the final ghost.” These ghosts are the innumerable lives he’s created in the shadows, through fiction and poetry. For Maawaam to give up the ghost he must share his work with the world—a monumental task requiring him to finish the stories, poems, and novels he’s begun, or show them to us in their rough, unfinished state.

In The Secret Name, one of the novels Maawaam is writing, the protagonist (named Landry Bread) is sent on a journey to discover his “secret name.” Landry is a hopeless guy living in Atlanta, and wants nothing more than to believe there’s something more to him, some secret other self waiting to be discovered. Instead, what Bread finds is a novel titled Amerika the Beautifuk by a mysterious and enigmatic author named Maawaam (a book within a book within a book). Here we have the character, Maawaam, discovering his own secret name inside the text he’s writing:

in finding that name, and writing that character, I was writing a role for myself. I could write the novel, The Secret Name, and I could stage it like I found it, a manuscript in a box somewhere, and I am just the editor of it, and the actual author is this MAAWAAM. He is the author of the inner and outer text. The story of Landry Bread just floats there in the middle.

Jordan A. Rothacker author photo

Jordan A. Rothacker

The writer is essentially and irremediably tied to his work. Attempts to detach from the writing—through pseudonyms, frame narratives, and invented worlds—invariably lead the writer back to himself and his own anxieties and obsessions. But there is also pleasure in inhabiting this invented world. Maawaam’s mind is labyrinthine, and while it may contain some fictionalized elements of its creator, it is unique and compelling, and worthy of being explored in the closeness My Shadow Book achieves.

Rothacker’s novel, disguised as a journal containing a novel (and so on), is at times dizzying. The form is challenging in its unyielding metafictional twists. Identities are nested one within the other. What makes the novel so impressive is how, through all of these experiments in storytelling, Maawaam’s vulnerability and desire are thoughtfully articulated and reiterated in various aphorisms, quotations, and poems, in a feedback loop of loneliness and longing.

This is a strange and ambitious novel. To invent a writer whose work is as bizarre as Maawaam’s and then to lead the reader into those works, is no easy task. Rothacker writes from the heart, but disguises that heart in shadows. Or maybe he truly has discovered a heart in a box of papers in a shadowy closet, and he is illuminating it for us here. Either way, My Shadow Book is sharp and singular and full of mystery.

William Morris author photoWilliam Morris is pursuing an MFA in fiction at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. His work has appeared in print and online, most recently at Sediments Literary Arts Journal, Fiction Southeast, and Red Earth Review. He divides his time between St. Louis and Salt Lake City, and is always reading. He also works as an editor at Natural Bridge. His other areas of interest include cats, coffee, and cryptozoology.

 

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AND WIND WILL WASH AWAY, a novel by Jordan A. Rothacker, reviewed by William Morris

HUMAN ACTS, a novel by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith, reviewed by William Morris

TYPEWRITERS, BOMBS, JELLYFISH: ESSAYS by Tom McCarthy reviewed by William Morris

 

ALL THAT MAN IS, a novel by David Szalay, reviewed by Ryan K. Strader

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All That Man Is cover art. A profile headshot of a man shaded in blue and redALL THAT MAN IS
by David Szalay
Graywolf Press, 362 pages

reviewed by Ryan K. Strader

In an interview with NPR, David Szalay pointed out that the title of his novel, All that Man Is, can be read two different ways: “either as a sort of slightly disparaging, sort of all that man is, and this is it. Or it can be read as a sort of almost celebratory—everything, all the kind of great variety of experience that life contains.” Szalay seems to see his work as falling somewhere in between, not entirely “disparaging” nor precisely “celebratory,” since it is a study of men dealing with situations of personal crisis. While many reviewers have described All that Man Is as bleak and depressing, Szalay confesses that he might have a “lower expectation of life than the average.”

Whether the story is bleak or not, Szalay’s masterful writing has won All that Man Is significant international recognition, including being a finalist for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, Britain’s 2016 Gordon Burn Prize, and it was listed by the New York Times as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2016. Szalay is Canadian-born and currently lives in Budapest, but lived most of his life in Britain. British reviewers have compared him to fellow English writers Tessa Hadley and Edward St. Aubyn, while American reviewers have compared his thematic concerns to David Foster Wallace and his writing style to John Updike.

All that Man Is is not a traditional novel. It is nine separate stories with few substantive connections between the stories; the characters’ lives do not connect to make any narrative wholes, although the themes do work together to build a metanarrative.

Simon is a university student traveling on holiday with his friend Ferdinand. “What am I doing here?” wonders Simon several times, not just referring to where he is that precise moment but what any of his traveling activities mean. A fan of Eliot and The Wasteland, Simon ruminates on the illusion of free choice. Bernard, a young lazy Frenchman, is fired by his uncle and decides to go on a solitary beach holiday. In his decrepit hotel he befriends and has sex with a mother and daughter who are vacationing. Balázs, a Hungarian, has been hired as a bodyguard for Gábor and Gábor’s wife, Emma. Enamored with Emma, it takes Balázs a while to realize that she is a high-priced escort, and that “protecting” Emma is to be complicit in selling her. Karel, a self-absorbed university professor, is in the midst of a holiday weekend with his girlfriend, who tells him that she is pregnant. “That’s shit,” is Karel’s first response to the news, and decides he must convince her to have an abortion, even if it means being manipulative. Kristian is a Dutch news editor, about to break a huge story of an affair by an upper-level government official. At the height of his career and in love with the power that information gives him, Kristian is also at the height of hypocrisy: he had an affair of his own and has concealed it from his family. James is a sophistic salesmen of swanky real estate in the French Alps, who is trying to turn some condominium sales to his advantage while leading on his young assistant, Paulette. Murray, a washed up businessman living in Croatia, is unwilling to accept the financial and relational wreck of his life. Aleksandr is a Russian iron tycoon considering suicide in the wake of both losing much of his fortune and his wife’s announcement that she is leaving him. Tony, a retired septuagenarian and repressed homosexual, is facing the reality of aging, as he suffers from a car accident and well-meaning caretakers.

Roughly speaking, the age of the main character increases throughout the stories, with each man’s external crisis and corresponding internal identity crisis reflecting their unique stages. Altogether, the stories could be seen as telling The Story of a Man as he goes from university student to retired 70s, ricocheting from moments of decency to infatuation to narcissism. And yet, the fundamental need for meaning never changes, from university to retirement.

David Szalay author photo

David Szalay

As a woman reading a novel about the male experience, I did not find All that Man Is entirely bleak, and I do not think that I have a lower expectation of life than average. But I also did not think it had the “great variety” that the title suggests. Szalay does not shy away from description of men indulging carnal appetites, contemplating suicide, sacrificing integrity or family for positions of power, success, or prestige, or simply suffering from painful existential confusion. Interestingly, these men are not paragons of moral virtue, but they are convinced that something like “moral virtue” exists, somewhere, and they’re desirous of reaching it, even if the reaching is confused and ultimately doomed to failure. There is something tender to Szalay’s insight and description of male frailty in the face of what he calls “the predicament that we all find ourselves in,” which is facing mortality: these men have realized, to varying degrees, that sooner or later they will die. While their responses might sometimes make us cringe or roll our eyes, they are also entirely believable: these are men that I’ve known, men that I’m related to, and students that I’ve taught. It’s not all of them, hence my resistance to the notion of the “great variety” of male experience in this story, but it is certainly a worthy depiction of many of them, and the internal conflicts they describe as they wrestle against reality with very flawed characters and sometimes destructive desires.

One complaint some readers will have is the lack of complex female characters. To dwell on this, however, would miss the point of Szalay’s project. There is the obvious fact that strong female characters would alter the narrative landscape and the plot, and would easily steal the show from many of these men. But ultimately, I think it would miss out on one of the privileges of reading the book as a woman: to see that, even though these male characters express human appetites and desires in some less admirable male ways (for example, Karel refers to “chasing skirt” and Bernard debates a friend about Gwyneth Paltrow’s breasts) the expression of appetites is their effort to create a system of meaning. To get bogged down in the gender divisions that circumscribe the lived experience of these characters is to miss this, the connection between these male experiences and human experiences, and the book’s major theme of time, aging, and the futility of the appetites that motivate people. Karel, the university professor of the fourth story, for all his narcissism, has this powerful reflection on why he loves to study the medieval world:

Wonderful to imagine it, though. The whole appeal of medieval studies—the languages, the literature, the history, the art and architecture—to immerse oneself in that world. That other world. Safely other. Other in almost every way, except that it was here. Look at those fields on either side of the motorway. Those low hills. It was here. They were here, as we are here now. And this too shall pass. We don’t actually believe that, though, do we? We are unable to believe that our own world will pass. So it will go on for ever? No. It will turn into something else. Slowly—too slowly to be perceived by the people living in it. Which is already happening, is always happening. We just can’t see it. Like sounds changes, spoken language.

It struck me several times while reading this book about men that I was reading about how they were there, in some other world. But reading Szalay is to be immersed in there, and to realize that it’s here. These men are not “safely other.” In a strange way, Karel’s passages about medieval studies could be about the way that fiction brings together readers and experiences that might otherwise never connect.

One of the few connections between stories is that Simon, the young university student of the first story, reappears in the final story as Tony’s grandson. These are two of my favorite characters, and their connection is important not because they are biologically related but because they are the youngest and oldest men. In separate spaces they are simultaneously beginning and ending their adult lives, but they are asking the same existential questions. Tony, in one of the lovelier moments of introspection in the novel, contemplates an inscription on an abbey porch that says, “Let us love what is eternal and not what is transient,” and asks himself:

What is eternal, in his world? Wherever he looks, from the loosening skin of his weak, old man’s hands—which somehow don’t seem to be his, since he does not think of himself as an old man—to the sun shedding white light on the flat landscape all around, wherever he looks, he sees only…that which is transient.

The truth, Tony decides, is that the only eternal thing is the passage of time. Time has no end, although it dictates the end—and beginning—of everything else. Nearing the end of his life, Tony chooses to see his own participation in time as participation in an eternity that connects him with everything else that is time-bound. Aging then, and wrestling with time, is the eternity that—though it emphasizes the impermanence of each individual life—also connects Szalay’s men in a shared human narrative. Whether it is really an “eternal” narrative or not, is still debatable.

But Tony—and arguably, Simon—are the only characters that achieve this kind of revelation and change of perspective. Most of the stories are extended vignettes, and their sense of disconnection from each other mirrors the characters’ disconnection from other people. Szalay, who lives in Budapest and has lived in other parts of Europe, is intentional about representing his characters as geographically “decontextualized.” All of the men are Europeans who cross borders between countries at some point in their stories, whether it is for vacation or work, and Szalay has commented that the kind of movement possible in open-borders Europe can be liberating and also isolating in its freedom—the man who can move about at will, has no home. Every kind of human community—family, town, country, an ethnic community, a shared language—is tested by geographic distance.

The geographically decontextualized aspect of Szalay’s characters is important, and touches on my hesitancy to accept the novel as “all” that man is. These characters are all that man is when he is disconnected and decontextualized. In genres of self-awakening, like the bildungsroman, a character discovers context in some way: it might be fatherhood, or religious awakening, or the esprit de corps of the military, or any other number of connections, but immersion in some kind of community is the vehicle for wholeness. Szalay has not exactly inverted that norm, since his characters do not usually discover “wholeness,” but he has challenged it. If Tony is correct, and the only thing that is eternal is time, then attempts at other kinds of connection are only transient, and are as malleable as geographic borders are for Szalay’s characters.

Ryan K. Strader author photoRyan Strader earned a B.A. in Russian Literature from George Mason University, and an M.A.T. from Clayton State University. She is currently an instructional designer and researcher. Her most recent instructional design project is the development of a class in writing and qualitative research methods at Georgia State University, where she is also a doctoral student. Her most recent publication is an upcoming book chapter on populism in young adult novels. She lives and works in the Atlanta area.

 

 

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THE FUTURE WON’T BE LONG, a novel by Jarett Kobek, reviewed by Jordan A. Rothacker

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The Future Won't Be Long cover art. Two men walk down a city street in a photo using only blue lightTHE FUTURE WON’T BE LONG
by Jarett Kobek
Viking, 416 pages

Reviewed by Jordan A. Rothacker

Not even the greatest writers can write the story of how their own careers will go. Behind every success story that doesn’t involve something like the dark arts there’s always a lot of hard work, but also the presence of the most elusive element, luck. In his latest novel, The Future Won’t Be Long, Jarett Kobek meditates on the nature of artistic success. He follows two friends coming of age in New York City in the late-’80s to mid-’90s as artists, their personal development and their artistic development hand in hand, all hard living, hard work, and big dumb luck. While this is Kobek’s first book from a major publishing house—a measure of success for a once indie small press writer—he is no rookie; this is his seventh book to date (next year will see another, a 33 1/3 on Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s debut solo album, “Return to the 36 Chambers”). Kobek’s own career trajectory might mirror that of his characters, as he’s the kind of writer not afraid to dance back and forth across that nebulous boundary between art and reality.

If you read Kobek’s I Hate the Internet (We Heard You Like Books, 2016)—as you should have, it was one of the best books of last year—you’re already familiar with the protagonists of The Future Won’t Be Long. Here we begin with Adeline and Baby, meeting for the first time in 1986, in a squat in Alphabet City, and each takes turns telling the story in alternating chapters. We know from I Hate the Internet that in 2013 Adeline will be a famous comic book artist and Baby a famous science fiction novelist, but now we get to see how they get there, how a deep yet tumultuous friendship becomes the center around which two very different lives and careers orbit and evolve.

The New York City of the decade in which The Future Won’t Be Long is set is a city in transition, sloughing off the dirty skin of a seriously fertile artistic period to eventually reveal a heartless skeleton scraped clean by Mayor Giuliani and the NYPD by the book’s end. From the start, the city is riveting for Baby, who describes how he “wandered New York, its manic energy seeping into my bones. The pavement vibrated, resonating with billions of earlier footsteps, centuries of people making their way, the city alive with the irregular heartbeat of its million cars and trucks, of its screaming pedestrians, its vendors and hustlers. The roar and clamor infected my blood, transforming my walk.”

Adeline and Baby experience lower Manhattan for all it has to offer culturally from ’86 to ’96, mourning the passings of Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquit, and David Wojnarowicz, and hobnobbing with such people as science fiction novelist, Thomas M. Disch, Bret Easton Ellis, Grant Morrison, Norman Mailer, and club promoter/convicted murderer Michael Alig. And while Kobek might cram reality into his fiction through noted historic personages, there is a brilliant moment of trans-fictional reality where after the death of Basquiat, as Adeline stands outside his apartment on Great Jones Street, a friend of hers mentions musician Bucky Wunderlick who used to live on this block. The friend releases a small diatribe about how great Wunderlick still is, but how his most recent albums are different from his early work. Of course it is true that Wunderlick did live on Great Jones Street, but only in the Don DeLillo novel, Great Jones Street.

Kobek’s narrative deftness in this novel is illustrated by how the reader experiences the aging of the characters. Even though the alternating first person narrators talk to the reader and seem to be speaking from the present, the language, perspective, and awareness of each grows with each chapter as the narratives move forward in time. This conjoined narrative and character evolution is reminiscent of Joyce’s project in Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man as the narrative grows more clear and intelligible as Stephen Dedalus matures. In much of Kobek’s fiction, his characters often feel like props for cultural criticism and while this might be a problem, or cute gimmick, in the hands of a lesser writer, he pulls it off. He does so because he’s created round characters of depth and the incisive and witty critiques they convey further build out their identities while helping establish a time and place. Most importantly, the cultural critiques and observations delivered by Adeline and Baby mature with them, not just the level of perception, but the chosen topics too.

Early in the work we see Adeline defending the film Pump Up the Volume, with the insight of a precocious teenager: “Even if one strips away all the terrific clichés and demands of the three act screenplay, there is something enormously appealing about Christian Slater establishing that radio station in his parents’ basement. One doesn’t often see that in film, one doesn’t often see private worlds, disconnected realities built by outsiders through force of will, constructed with taste and abstention.” Soon enough Adeline treats the television show, The Wonder Years, according to its wider social context, tossing off the line: “The whole thing is an excuse for Baby Boomers to remind everyone yet again the irrefutable Monumentalness of the 1960s.”As we enter the 1990s the focus of her gaze gets more serious and we see the deep wisdom of an old soul. Her take on the first Gulf War rings even more true today: “it hadn’t been a Good War where all the citizens buckled down under the weight of collective sacrifice. It wasn’t even a Vietnam, with the American poor and dispossessed mangled by freedom fighters. The war was a video game in real time on a global scale, in which we unleashed billions of dollars of weaponry on a bunch of ill-educated Arabs.”

Baby is more of a babe in the woods of the New York wilds and the wealthy, cosmopolitan Adeline plays a mentor role until he is financially and intellectual more able to stand on his own. Stripped of innocence through club land sojourns, Baby starts to find his voice as a writer and finally Kobek’s scathing critique has another outlet. The greatest hits are when Baby is given to comment on the politics of his time, which he describes as “A world in which the zombified corpse of Ronald Reagan embraces profound and systemic industry deregulation and is followed into the presidency by Bill Clinton, a back slapping Southern politician who never saw a civil protection that he didn’t detest;” and on art, as when he reminisces on Andy Warhol: “he was a beacon for America’s fucked-up and alienated and gay kids. He transformed himself into a living idea like a Tibetan tulpa, an image that self-replicated across the whole culture. But the thing about Andy, the inexplicable thing, is that in addition to being a media superstar, he was the greatest American artist of the twentieth century. I’ll defend that position to death.”

The author himself has also experienced some reconciliation with his past through the publication of this novel. Last year, he told Chelsea Hodson at Literary Hub, “There’s btw, there’s I Hate the Internet, and there’s an unpublished manuscript called The Future Won’t Be Long. They’re all part of an unofficially series—the American Decadence series—which spans from 1986 until 2013.” While I Hate the Internet was written after The Future Won’t Be Long, it’s clear that the reverse order of publication gave the author the chance to see this earlier work with new eyes. In the penultimate chapter, when Baby admits he and Adeline “were only another group of rich white people on drugs,” it sounds more authorial, an apology, and a moment of exegesis. Soon enough, in that chapter told by Baby, a different narrative voice takes over, seemingly Kobek himself. It is a post-I Hate the Internet Kobek voice. The new voice delivers a long rant with each sentence considering the different things fiction never addresses, such as “the way that free speech is the booby prize of democracy” and “the way the concept of intelligence was devised by men to exclude women.” It is at once a jarring and brilliant piece of writing that takes the reader out of the narrative, but thematically rounding it all out and giving the author a chance to stand in the same place of retrospect and reconciliation as his characters. Nostalgia gives way to growth.

The Future Won’t Be Long pulls no punches depicting cultural producers toiling in the fields, working with anything at their disposal, all to catch that budding glimmer of inspiration making it all feel worth it before the ghastly reality of the marketplace comes to bear. We feel the truth in the work and that feeling is evidenced by a career reaching a well-earned future.

Jordan A. Rothacker author photoJordan A. Rothacker is a poet, essayist, and novelist who lives in Athens, GA where he received an MA in Religion and a PhD in Comparative Literature. His books are The Pit, and No Other Stories (Black Hill Press, 2015), And Wind Will Wash Away (Deeds, 2016), and the meta-text My Shadow Book by Maawaam (Spaceboy Books, 2017).

 

 

 

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ISLAND OF POINT NEMO, a novel by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès, reviewed by Rachel R. Taube

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Island of Point Nemo cover art. A red-and-white striped spiral against a light blue backgroundISLAND OF POINT NEMO
by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès
translated from the French by Hannah Chute
Open Letter Books, 450 pages

reviewed by Rachel  R. Taube

Island of Point Nemo is a fast-moving adventure story featuring murderers, romance, and preternatural turns. But dig further into those turns, and the novel is ultimately a eulogy to books, both as physical objects and as containers for fiction. Written by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès and newly translated from French by Hannah Chute, Island of Point Nemo features suspenseful plotlines that intertwine in such a way as to make the reader question the natures of fiction, reality, and history.

This is Blas de Roblès’ ninth book and his second to be published in English. The philosophy-professor-turned-novelist’s prize-winning first book to appear in English, Where Tigers Are at Home, arrived relatively quietly in the U.S., but received positive reviews from Kirkus and NPR, which praised it as “a challenge to readers who want their fiction to offer a quick pay-off.” Island of Point Nemo, too, rewards patience, and despite some failings of tone, it is an unpredictable ride that successfully plays with form to develop its themes.

The primary plotline is an odyssey in the tradition of Jules Verne and Conan Doyle, featuring characters inspired by Captain Nemo and Sherlock Holmes. As the protagonists solve the mystery of a stolen diamond, they encounter helpful princes and scientists, murderous eunuchs, roving armies, and circus freaks that lead them around the world and to its most isolated corner, Point Nemo. A secondary plotline features an ereader factory, [email protected] Books, run by the despicable Monsieur Wang, who loves profit and cares little for literature. Subsidiary storylines follow the romantic lives of several of his employees.

Island of Point Nemo’s greatest strength is its willingness to play with the idea of fiction itself. The book comes into its own in the last third, as the various plotlines begin to overlap—briefly—and influence each other. “Reality” blurs, and Blas de Roblès leans into the idea that one of his characters puts forth: “There is no reality that is not rooted in some prior fiction.” Events in one plotline reappear as fictional stories in another. Literary references are plentiful, and familiar characters occasionally emerge to interact with our detectives. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, Sherlock Holmes, Moby Dick, The Count of Monte Cristo, and others provide liberal fodder for characters, settings, and plot. As one character asserts, “If you think about it, every book is the anagram of another.”

Time, too, is in flux, and we readers are like the characters who ride a mysterious train, “passengers of this moving Babel [that] drifted haphazardly through suspended time.” Timelines seem to begin after they end, like a snake that eats its tail. The stories of the detectives and the ebook factory fit together like Russian nesting dolls, only you can’t figure out which doll is the bigger one. As the reader, there’s a pleasure in finding and untangling these intersections, in beginning to understand what all these stories have to do with one another.

Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès author photo

Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès

Throughout, Blas de Roblès often aims to be both fun and funny, and most storylines share a bawdy tone. The adventures are grand, and the over-the-top characters lend a sense that anything can happen next. However, in the service of his humor and his desire for unpredictability, Blas de Roblès also employs a great deal of sexual violence. Monsieur Wang’s abuse of his employees includes watching them on hidden cameras and forcing one woman to undress in front of him; the HR director, catching him masturbating to a video, plans revenge. A woman convinces a sailor to have sex with her and then cries rape, one of the detectives believes, to test the anti-rape device she invented. A prostitute is forced to have a secret code tattooed on her anus, which she must continually show to visitors by penetrating herself with a mirrored device. If these images startle here, they do so equally in the book. One has the impression that Blas de Roblès intends for them to be at least as comedic as they are uncomfortable. Violence, sex, and crudeness can of course be compelling and even funny subjects, but I found these scenes neither humorous nor carefully handled. Ultimately, they lacked empathy, and this detracted from the other, better-explored themes.

The book’s greatest empathy, instead, is for physical books. Blas de Roblès and his characters have an abiding love and deep nostalgia for “real” books, which, in at least one plotline, have been completely replaced by ebooks. When one character discovers a secret library, the author describes it as something rare and beautiful, to be protected. In one particularly enjoyable set of chapters, Blas de Roblès recalls the men and women who used to be employed in cigar factories to read aloud to the workers, to keep them entertained. Storytelling for them is power.

In this world, ebooks, on the other hand, are fragile and untrustworthy. Throughout, ereaders break or malfunction or get hacked. They are also inherently corporate and capitalist, in contrast with the seemingly natural magic of paper books. Monsieur Wang thinks, “The important thing was not even that they purchase the most recent ebooks, but that over and over they buy the possibility of purchasing them.” Blas de Roblès’ concern is one familiar to anyone who follows publishing news: that the people behind ebooks are out to destroy “real” books, and that paper books could disappear. Perhaps this is a more compelling line of reasoning in France, for years a European holdout on ebook adoption that has only recently experienced a jump in ebook sales. But the lesson feels a few years out of date from a U.S. perspective, especially for this avid Kindle user. We know that ebooks aren’t replacing real books, that ereader purchases have slowed and paper book sales have evened out. Rather than denying us access to literature, digitization of libraries has democratized publishing and allowed for more public access to books and historical documents than ever before (though not without raising issues of copyright)—further intermingling our reality with the vastness of real and fictional pasts. Blas de Roblès’ concerns may be romantic (don’t we all love the smell and feel of a bound book, still?), but they ring hollow, even within the reality of his novel.

One notes that Island of Point Nemo is not currently available for purchase in ebook form.

Rachel Taube speaking into a microphoneRachel R. Taube is pursuing her MFA in Fiction at UNC Wilmington. She has been an Electric Literature-Catapult Scholarship recipient and a Tent Creative Writing Fellow, and she holds a masters in Creative Writing and Gender Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. You can find her fiction in Storychord and Apiary Magazine. Follow her on Twitter at @racheltaube.

 

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INSURRECTIONS, stories by Rion Amilcar Scott, reviewed by William Morris

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Insurrections cover art. A flock of red, white, and black birdsINSURRECTIONS
by Rion Amilcar Scott
University of Kentucky Press, 191 Pages

reviewed by William Morris

Welcome to Cross River!

The stories in Rion Amilcar Scott’s debut collection, Insurrections, are set in Cross River, Maryland, a small East Coast city you won’t find on any map. The city itself is a work of fiction, but the lives of its inhabitants feel startlingly real. Among the Cross Riverians—or Riverbabies, depending on who you ask—included in this collection are a suicidal father, an old man known as the slapsmith, and a pair of brothers separated by the constantly flooding Cross River, which gives the city its name and divides it into the affluent Northside and impoverished Southside.

North/south, eloquent/colloquial, holy/profane: these dualities are brought to life throughout Insurrections, winner of the 2017 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. In their citation for awarding the collection, the judges describe Scott’s writing as: “hard, humane stories, free of grandstanding yet full of grace, that loom in the mind long after reading.” And the judges are correct. These stories are at times hard, filled with moments of violence and helplessness. But they are also humane, alive with innocence and beauty where it’s least expected.

One of the darker stories is “A Friendly Game,” which begins with Casey and Kwayku, two boys who play basketball and make fun of an apparently crazy woman, calling her “Lady MacBeard.” Casey is quiet and awkward. Kwayku is an athletic jokester with loads of pubescent sexual energy. But Casey has one thing Kwayku lacks: a girlfriend.

Jealousy, Casey is sure, is the reason for all of Kwayku’s mocking, because Marcy is Casey’s girlfriend, “ass and all.” But Kwayku’s jokes go too far: first he calls Lady MacBeard Casey’s mother; then, during a heated game, he says, “Watch, man, I’m gonna fuck your girl. What you think about that?” Casey tries to stay levelheaded throughout the story, trusting that Kwayku’s words are hollow, but is finally pushed too far when, in their final game, Kwayku describes the things he claims to have done to Marcy when Casey wasn’t around. After all the insults and harassment, he can take no more. But Casey’s outburst is misdirected; rather than swinging at Kwayku, he takes a large rock and hurls it at Lady MacBeard, “striking the top of her forehead” and knocking her out. And then:

Casey looked into Kwayku’s face, hoping to see something other than what he saw: a stare of revulsion and pain. It looked like a fright mask, forever molded into an expression of rubbery distress. And Casey couldn’t help it, or even explain it, but it brought him laughter. He laughed like hell until burning water spilled from his eyes onto his cheeks.

By the end of the story, Casey has lost his stolid exterior. He’s been sympathetic throughout, taking Kwayku’s abuse without retaliation, but the hard truth of the story is that we often hold in our torment until it’s too late, then take it out on the wrong person. The burning tears spilling from Casey’s eyes are a bitter reminder that doing the wrong thing feels vindicating when you’ve suffered so much wrong yourself.

Rion Amilcar Scott author photo

Rion Amilcar Scott

But Scott also shows us the small ways that life is beautiful. An unemployed father teaches his eleven-year-old daughter to play chess in “202 Checkmates.” One of her first lessons: “Chess is like real life. The white pieces go first so they got an advantage over the black pieces.” The father shows himself capable of joking and intimacy over the chessboard, something unusual in their home. Her father goes on to crush her in game after game, the daughter tallying her losses vigilantly throughout the story, her respect for her father’s skill mounting.

Despite losing once, then 57 times, then 201 times, she always remembers that “if a pawn makes it to the other side [of the board] it becomes a queen.” She never forgets the image of “a little pawn magically blossoming into royalty on that last square.” She says: “It became something I longed to see. Sometimes when all was lost, I’d just inch a pawn forward, but the piece never made it.” She holds on to this hope of her pawn becoming a queen, just as many of Scott’s characters hold on to the thing they long for as the world throws stones at their heads.

Over the course of these many losses, the daughter has improved. She’s been visiting a nearby park, where players congregate around boards to play chess in public, and learning new strategies from these strangers. In their 202nd game, the daughter’s newly acquired skill gives her father something to sweat over. She’s moving in ways he’s never seen, and it’s clear he’s worried about the game. This is how she describes the moment when she has her father, for the first time, close to checkmate:

I imagined my father’s mind racing, cataloging everything that had ever tumbled down around him. I put my hand on a bishop, my would be assassin, and thought of my father’s heights when he won, how he galloped around. The depths of his despair at losing, I expected, would be equal to the peaks. He’d mope about, his face fallen and miserable, his posture stooped as if his back ached. I took my hand from the piece and leaned back in deliberation.

Although she slyly lets her father take the game, the daughter finally gets a pawn across the board and becomes a queen. Her kindness, in not defeating her father at his own game, is repaid with a brief moment of grace, the blossoming she’s waited for all along.

There are many other moving stories in Scott’s collection, most of which were originally published in literary magazines before the book’s release. Insurrections is an invitation into the inner lives of people in hard circumstances, but it is also a highly imaginative collection. One of the more unusual stories, “Party Animal: The Strange and Savage Case of a Once Erudite and Eloquent Young Man,” uses footnotes to cleverly introduce Reverse Animalism, a disorder that causes functioning members of society to retreat into the wild and abandon civilization. This disorder concerns scholars in Cross River, who fear for the future of the afflicted. Those suffering from Reverse Animalism might be on to something, though. Life in Cross River is often difficult, sometimes cruel, as Scott knows life is for many of us. When Scott’s writing ventures away from strict realism, as in the invented disorder in “Party Animal,” the imagined world he creates captures something intensely real. In each of these thirteen stories, there is surprise and sadness, Scott’s beautiful language and the deepening mythology of Cross River. These stories consistently achieve the level of the best hard, humane fiction.

William Morris author photoWilliam Morris is pursuing an MFA in fiction at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. His work has appeared in print and online, most recently at Sediments Literary Arts Journal, Fiction Southeast, and Red Earth Review. He divides his time between St. Louis and Salt Lake City, and is always reading. He also works as an editor at Natural Bridge. His other areas of interest include cats, coffee, and cryptozoology.

 

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MAP DRAWN BY A SPY, a novel by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, reviewed by reviewed by Jacqueline Kharouf

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Map Drawn by a Spy cover art. A black-and-white photograph of a city street filled with large advertisementsMAP DRAWN BY A SPY
by Guillermo Cabrera Infante
translated by Mark Fried
Archipelago Books, 240 pages

reviewed by Jacqueline Kharouf

Posthumous novels are both a joy and, sometimes, a let-down. Left behind by an author whose polished work stands as a testament to the full capacity of his or her mind, the words on the page surface at first like an extension from the past. This one last bit of evidence left for us to find. The posthumous novel should be examined and praised as a rare object—hidden in a vault, locked in an old suitcase, tucked into an envelope—and given a small bit of license for being not quite the full body of work its author intended.

At least, this is how I will approach and critique Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s third posthumous novel Map Drawn By a Spy. This book is a psuedo-memoir, a recounting of the several months Infante spent trapped in post-revolution Cuba. He was born in 1929 to Communist parents who moved the family to Havana in 1941. Infante was a supporter of the revolution and even knew Fidel Castro when he was a thug in the UIR (Unión Insurrecional Revolucionaria). Later, Infante was named cultural attaché to the Cuban embassy in Brussels. He wrote short stories, edited a literary supplement for a Cuban newspaper (that was later shut down by the government), and wrote film criticism under the pseudonym “G. Caín.”

In 1965, while working in Brussels as cultural attaché he received a phone call that his mother was dying in Cuba. He flew to Cuba, attended her funeral (his mother had died of an untreated ear infection), and within a week, hoped to return to Brussels with his two daughters. The night of his intended departure he was detained at the airport and ordered to return to the Foreign Ministry. The week turned into two, then a month, and eventually, after finagling a transit visa to Spain for the debut of his novel Three Trapped Tigers, Infante left Cuba for the last time on October 3, 1965. He tried to remain in Spain, but was ultimately exiled to the United Kingdom. He lived in London, became a British citizen, and remained there until his death on February 21, 2005 at age 75.

Guillermo Cabrera Infante author photo

Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Map Drawn By a Spy takes place during those months Infante was detained in his homeland. It is a narrative about an unnamed Cuban native and diplomat (the author loosely disguising himself) who returns home to Cuba for his mother’s funeral and is detained for four months before he can leave and return to Europe. The revolution is just beginning to transform Cuba into a kind of prison state. Everyone is either watching or being watched. You are either a revolutionary (and therefore loyal to the government) or a counter-revolutionary (and probably subverting the government and the revolution in some way—perhaps intellectually, politically, or in terms of sexual orientation). Everything is rationed. Everyone is supposed to follow the rules, the expectations—of gender, class, government hierarchy. And the rationale is clear: everything within the state of Cuba is being slowly consumed by the dictatorial power of one person, Fidel Castro.

In a 2000 interview with Oscar Hijuelos for BOMB magazine, Hijuelos asked Infante about his relationship with Castro. Infante recalled one of Castro’s early televised speeches in which he claimed the revolution would not “be like Saturn and it won’t devour its children” (a reference to Roman mythology in which Saturn cannibalizes his offspring to secure his own supremacy). Infante retorted: “But it will devour its grandchildren instead.” He went on to explain to Hijuelos:

It was pathetic but it was also prophetic. Saying things like that contributed to the banning of the magazine [Revolución] some time later in 1961. Enough was enough when [Castro] closed the magazine and announced his Stalinist credo: “With the Revolution everything, against the Revolution nothing.” And it was only for him to decide when and who were against or in favor of his Revolution. It took me years to extricate myself because you don’t leave your country as if leaving the party—which was over anyway.

In much the same way that Infante was slowly hunted and persecuted by Castro, the unnamed protagonist of Map Drawn By a Spy is also detained and pursued by a bureaucratic system designed to entrap dissenters and punish counter-revolutionaries. After several attempts to meet with Raúl Roa, the minister of foreign relations, or Arnold Rodríguez, vice-minister, so that he could somehow resume his trip to Brussels, the unnamed protagonist realizes he is being punished:

The incident made him finally accept that Roa would not see him, that Arnold’s call to the airport about an interview with the minister was an excuse as patently false as the one they had given the Swiss ambassador. But if that was the case, why had Roa’s name and an interview with him been offered as justification for aborting his trip? Besides, why had they waited until precisely the very last moment to block his return to Brussels? Who, if not Roa, had been behind it?

And like Infante, the unnamed protagonist is also heavily burdened by the loss of his country:

Finding himself face to face again with what Lisandro Otero would call revolutionary reality, the odd incongruity hit him: he was in his own country, but somehow his country was not his country; an imperceptible mutation had changed people and things into their mirror image; everyone and everything was there, but they weren’t themselves, Cuba was not Cuba.

Much of Infante’s novel/memoir (only Infante himself could tell how much of it is fictionalized) concerns the loss of his homeland as a betrayal of the ideals which he first believed were necessary for the success of the revolution—freedom from Batista’s oppressive military regime, independence from overpowering colonizing powers like the United States, and a new license for freedom of expression. But gradually the revolution becomes swept up in its own hypocrisy and both Infante and the unnamed protagonist understand he cannot be a true writer if he is not allowed full range of expression:

In the interview he addressed the dilemma of the revolutionary writer, saying that for a truly revolutionary writer the Revolution itself offered solutions. What’s more, he promised to devote all his future works to revolutionary literature—not to a literature that was revolutionary but to literature of the Revolution. In answering the questions, he knew he had no intention of writing such books. He believed politics and literature were locked in a lifelong battle and he had already made his choice, a decision he would not renounce.

But for all the subversive and dissenting criticism Infante scatters throughout the book, this novel is also filled with plenty of banality. The seemingly incessant waiting and lack of work or useful pursuits gives Infante plenty of license to womanize and (presumably) forget to call the wife he left back in Brussels. There is a side to this book more concerned with name-dropping (in fact, the end of the book also includes a handy glossary of all the people Infante met during his time in Cuba) and perhaps self-assurance of his own importance. It is, at times, entirely distracting from the direction of the story, but then again I’m not sure Infante intended the novel to be read widely, or even if he intended for the novel to have a specific direction. In fact, the title Map Drawn By a Spy, is more a romantic phrase than an indication of the life of the protagonist (it is referenced late in the book when the unnamed protagonist meets Alejo Carpentier, another Cuban novelist, who has a map drawn by an English spy hanging on his office wall; it is also referenced in an epigraph from Infante’s own novel View of Dawn in the Tropics).

At the end of their interview, Hijuelos asked Cabrera Infante about his legacy and whether he was interested in being remembered in a hundred years. Cabrera Infante coyly deflected:

I am convinced that in a hundred years time the only writing remembered in Spanish will be Borges. I told him so at our last dinner at the Brown’s Hotel, telling him he shouldn’t worry about getting or not getting the Noble Prize. I then added, “Of course you’re not interested in the money from the prize.” And he smiled and said, a sudden Argentine: “No crea, no crea.”

Another instance of name-dropping, perhaps, but Infante’s voice of dissent defined his career as a writer and a critic. He would not allow the revolution to swallow him whole and, perhaps to mourn the demise of his country and the consequences of the revolution, he wrote a chronicle of the last time he spent in his homeland.

Jacqueline Kharouf author photoJacqueline Kharouf has an MFA in creative writing, fiction, from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has appeared in Harpoon Review, Matchbook Literary Magazine, Gingerbread House, The Examined Life Journal, Shout Out UK, South Dakota Review, Fiction Vortex, Otis Nebula, NANO Fiction, and Numéro Cinq Magazine. In 2011, she won third place in H.O.W. Journal’s Fiction contest, judged by Mary Gaitskill. Jacqueline blogs at jacquelinekharouf.wordpress.com; tweets @writejacqueline; and hopes you “like” her Facebook page “Jacqueline Kharouf, writer.”

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NOTES OF A CROCODILE, a novel by Qiu Miaojin, reviewed by Ryan K. Strader

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Notes of a Crocodile cover art. Crocodiles suspended in yellow light, hanging by red threadsNOTES OF A CROCODILE
by Qiu Miaojin
translated by Bonnie Huie
New York Review Books, 242 pages

reviewed by Ryan K. Strader

“Even if this book is neither popular nor serious, at least it’s sensational,” claims Lazi, the narrator of Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile. “It’s about getting a diploma and writing.”

Lazi is a clever satirist though, so don’t take her at her word. As it turns out, Notes of a Crocodile was both popular and sensational in Taiwan, Qiu’s native country. Lazi does get a diploma and she writes quite a bit, but it’s hardly prosaic. Notes of a Crocodile is Lazi’s coming of age story as a lesbian at a university in the years following the collapse of Taiwan’s martial regime. In the novel, Lazi grapples with a series of relationships that teach her what self-inquiry and liberation are, how to navigate the gender labels that have warped her, and how to stop warping herself and her close relationships with her own fear and self-loathing.

Lazi’s reflections are dated from the late 1980s, emphasizing the sudden public emergence of queer communities—and other Taiwanese communities oppressed under almost four decades of martial law—during those years. The literary scene of 1990s Taiwan experienced a glasnost-style explosion of experimental literature and openness to new social theory. One unexpected result of this was that queer literature moved easily into the mainstream. Notes of a Crocodile, first published in Chinese in 1994 and now available in English translated by Bonnie Huie, was considered a significant literary arrival for the Taiwanese queer community. While it wasn’t Taiwan’s first popular piece of “gay literature,” it was an engaging and exceptionally popular book that established Qiu as a cult figure in queer literary circles for its treatment of sexuality and identity, and earned her mainstream attention for its experimental structure. The book was popular enough that the main character’s name, Lazi, became a slang term for “lesbian.”

The novel’s unique historical context is important to Lazi’s story, and to Qiu’s background as a writer, but part of the novel’s context is also that Qiu, an open lesbian, took her own life in 1995, at age 26. Just before her death she wrote a second novel, Last Words from Montmartre, available in an English translation by Ari Larissa Heinrich, and described by Heinrich in an interview, at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, as an “experimental suicide memoir.” Like Notes from a Crocodile, Last Words from Montmartre also features a lesbian narrator; in both texts the narrator’s biography is similar to Qiu, but the character is also fictionalized extensively. Qiu’s death has meant that the two novels are examined extensively for clues as to why she took her own life, but Heinrich cautions anyone from drawing conclusions, pointing out that Qiu’s family and friends have remained very quiet on that issue.

Qiu Miaojin author photo

Qiu Miaojin

Notes of a Crocodile would have been oddly predictive when Qiu first wrote it. Lazi seems to have her finger on the precise gender-centric issues and anxieties that our culture is presently addressing. During one conversation with friends, Lazi suggests, “Hey, we should form a gender-free society and monopolize all the public restrooms!” The proposition is meant to be fantastical and comic, but most of Lazi’s “fantastical” ideas are connected to her very real and very universal struggle to “join the rest of humanity” by having transparent relationships, where she can be honest with herself and others. As Lazi realizes, the only way to enjoy real friendship and love “was to gradually reveal my secret. I would begin to construct my internal blueprint. There was no other way I could go on. For me, it was a matter of life and death, and of pain.”

But, just as Lazi gets serious, Qiu introduces: a talking crocodile.

Qiu inserts chapters featuring the comical adventures of several crocodiles—who usually wear “human suits” when they venture among humanity—throughout Lazi’s “notebooks,” her collection of letters and recollections about her years at a university in Taipei.

The first time the reader meets the crocodiles, two of them are visiting a Lacoste shop (the crocodile label) and admiring the clothes, particularly a mink coat. But they cannot ask to try it on, because that would involve removing their own coats, and then they would be exposed as crocodiles.

Much better to just stroke the mink coat and imagine wearing it.

Meanwhile, rumors of crocodiles circulate, and the tabloids print stories. It is rumored that the college age population has been infiltrated by crocodiles, while the older crowd purchases the tabloids and watches the news for any mention of them.

“What was everyone after, anyhow?” wonder the crocodiles. “If that many people secretly liked them, that’d be totally embarrassing.”

The crocodiles are Qiu’s clever and engaging metaphor for queerness. They hide from the media (which seems to be talking about them a lot), go grocery shopping, take baths, have gatherings where they can admire each other’s human suits, and sometimes they try to go on television and talk about themselves. Even though the crocodiles spend most of their time trying to mask their identity or at least down play it, their short moments of comedic focalization satirize straight perceptions of queerness and queer attempts at blending in, while appealing to the universal human problem of performance and impersonation: when we fail to accept ourselves and choose to wear masks, we become some other strange animal, and give up the possibility of being known by others. As Lazi learns, other people cannot really love her without knowing her. The performance separates the crocodiles from the human company that they crave, just as Lazi realizes that her “secret” is separating her from the people who would love her.

We learn almost nothing about Lazi’s family of origin or her childhood, except that she has always known she cares for girls. During her freshman year, she falls in love with an older student, Shui Ling; the relationship is passionate but problematic, bringing out the worst in both women. Her second relationship, again with an older woman, is also ill-fated, but it’s through these two experiences that Lazi achieves an admirable degree of self-awareness and moves beyond fantastical, passionate ideals of love to a reality in which she can “confront the meaning of every great love that has shattered.” Her shard-by-shard self-inquiry is a formidable attempt at liberation from her destructive patterns.

Qui has created a panoply of colorful characters around Lazi. These include Meng Sheng, a rich kid with a violent streak, his co-dependent sometimes-lover Chu Kuang, Tun-Tun, a brilliant and musically gifted woman, and Zhi Rou, Tun-Tun’s artistic girlfriend. Seen only from Lazi’s perspective, we can enjoy Lazi’s humorous and sometimes caustic recollections, but we miss out on knowing these characters’ deeper motivations, or how they really see Lazi. With the short-sightedness of youth, Lazi records that many of the important images from her university years have accumulated “a weight I never expected,” and so at the time “I never did say goodbye or thank you to all the people in those images. With a stiff upper lip, I stood back and watched as they slipped out of my life.”

This isn’t a crusade novel, or fiction that lectures about gender and sexuality; nor does Lazi wallow in her outsider status or embrace a victim’s stance toward the world. Her growth as a character is satisfying, and Qiu knows how to engage the reader with Lazi’s failures as well as her epiphanies. While Notes of a Crocodile presents itself as a “school novel,” it is not location-driven the way school novels like Prep (Curtis Sittenfeld) or The Secret History (Donna Tartt) are. Instead, I was reminded of the angsty drama of J.D. Salinger, the episodic and tongue-in-cheek experiments of Kurt Vonnegut, and the persistent cultural exegesis through literary and film references of David Foster Wallace, more than I was of other coming-of-age-at-school tales.

There is no way to know the degree to which a loved book influences the larger culture. We like to believe in the activist value of art; Lazi seems to understand that great love and great art is revolutionary, maybe political; one of the crocodiles certainly hopes so, as he attempts to go on television and sing for us. Taiwan has led Asia as the country most accepting of the queer community: the Taiwanese courts became the first Asian court system to recognize same-sex marriage, in May 2017, the same month that this English translation of Notes of a Crocodile came out. That’s a serendipitous connection, but nevertheless it seems to honor Qiu. In the City Lights interview, Heinrich points out that Notes of a Crocodile made Qiu “a household name of sorts in Taiwan—she’s even taught in high schools.” That kind of attention would certainly have aided the cause of the singing crocodile who wanted some attention, but Heinrich suggests that it might also have been disruptive for the introverted Qiu. We’re left to wonder what Qiu’s comments might have been on her book’s cultural influence and the legal acceptance of same-sex marriage.

Lazi argues that mapping secrets and pain can be a matter of life and death, and Qiu’s suicide seems to attest to that. Considering the stresses of our present age, where identities and ideologies are masking and unmasking, the intrapersonal mapping of identity is even more significant for artists that would influence culture. That might be another way that Notes of a Crocodile is oddly predictive; or, its tendency to speak so clearly to our global present might mean that Lazi—and Qiu’s—struggle for self-identification is timeless. In either case, Notes of a Crocodile is an important addition to literature that addresses identity and sexuality, as well as a significant stylistic legacy from a writer prematurely lost.

Ryan K. Strader author photoRyan Strader earned a B.A. in Russian Literature from George Mason University, and an M.A.T. from Clayton State University. She is currently an instructional designer and researcher. Her most recent instructional design project is the development of a class in writing and qualitative research methods at Georgia State University, where she is also a doctoral student. Her most recent publication is an upcoming book chapter on populism in young adult novels. She lives and works in the Atlanta area.

The Apostle Killer, a novel by Richard Beard, reviewed by Ansel Shipley

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The Apostle Killer cover art. A man's shadow stands in front of a tunnel made of yellow rings with red bordersThe Apostle Killer
by Richard Beard
Melville House, 331 pages

 reviewed by Ansel Shipley

Jesus is the enemy in The Apostle Killer: a socialist anti-establishment religious extremist. In the novel, Richard Beard creates a world that melds both the superstitious past, in which a self-described Messiah could amass a frighteningly large following, and the skeptical present that labels such men religious extremists and terrorists. “With Jesus, the trickery is without end. If he feigned his death he was extending a pattern that started with the miracles because what you see, with Jesus, is rarely what you get.”

The protagonist, Cassius Gallio, is a counterinsurgency agent, a “Speculator” tasked with stamping out superstition and political threats to Rome’s control over Jerusalem. As a young man, Gallio found himself assigned to disprove Jesus’s miraculous resurrection and quickly became embroiled in a twisted web of uncertainty and dangerous machinations. A series of dead-ends and Judas’s suicide (which Gallio is convinced was a hit performed on Jesus’s orders) results in Gallio being sent to Moldova in career exile. After his old partner Valeria, now a major mover-and-shaker in Rome, reopens the case against Jesus, Gallio returns to Jerusalem to prove once and for all that Jesus’s resurrection was a scam. Richard Beard is no stranger to religious fiction: similar to The Apostle Killer, his novel Lazarus is Dead approaches a core Christian myth and reimagines it, attempting to depict the life of Lazarus and his lifelong relationship with Jesus. The Apostle Killer marks a shift in Beard’s stylistic focus. While many of his early novels could be described best as literary or realistic fiction, this novel is squarely detective fiction.

Beard doesn’t skimp on the old-world gore as each Apostle meets his demise in increasingly brutal ways (Philip has a rope threaded through his hamstrings and is crucified upside-down, and Simon is sawn in half with a chainsaw). The novel is framed around each of these violent deaths; each chapter’s title consists of the apostle’s name and how he met his end: Chapter One is “Judas ‘burst asunder,’” for example, and Chapter Eight is “Bartholomew ‘skinned alive.’” This technique ensured that this reader began each chapter with a degree of trepidation, eager to see how each apostle met his horrific end, but also mildly disturbed by Beard’s graphic depictions of gore and violence.

The setting of The Apostle Killer manages to evoke both ancient Damascus and Jerusalem and the modern Middle East, blending CCTV, air travel, and cell phones with horse drawn carts and the Roman Circus. While surveying his surroundings upon his return to Jerusalem, Gallio thinks, “Car bomb…a sign of the times. The leaves are back on the trees so the blast happened at least a year ago, but in Jerusalem past and present coexist. Possibly the future too.”

Richard Beard author photo

Richard Beard

Beard’s writing elevates this conventional plot however. His clipped sentences and blunt observational narration feels hardened by age and regret. The tight prose remains engaging even through the center of the novel when the plot begins to lose steam, ensuring that the reader won’t lose to much interest. The unusual depiction of Jesus proves to be The Apostle Killer’s strongest asset. Throughout the novel, Gallio ruminates on the strangely slippery nature of Jesus, how despite having an intimate knowledge of Him he can’t remember what he truly looked like: “when the face is moving, it is him, recognizably a cult leader with a fanatical following. On pause, however, the stilled image never accurately captures the living individual Gallio would recognize.” Beard returns to the idea of Jesus being unrecognizable many times throughout his novel: Gallio is unable to adequately recall his face for an APB, so he uses an apostle’s likeness instead (since they all looked basically the same). Every person asked to describe Jesus remembers him looking differently, and somehow every famous painting depicting Jesus is just as accurate and just as unique as the next.

While the individual beats of the story don’t fall flat, they often feel formulaic. In many ways, The Apostle Killer is a fairly straightforward crime thriller, elevated by strong writing and a unique plot. Cassius Gallio is the hard-bitten investigator exhausted and washed up from a decade of exile; his marriage has failed and his ex-wife and daughter now live with one of his old colleagues; he struggles with his lust for his younger female partner. Gallio’s affair with said partner (who is married with two children) often felt less like an integral part of The Apostle Killer’s story and more like something Beard included because detective novels almost always have immoral affairs.

The handling of Jesus and the depiction of Christianity as a dangerous and unsettling cult that only over time has been shaped into something that is palatable and has mass appeal is The Apostle Killer’s most effective idea. The novel is otherwise a fun and engaging crime thriller and its consistent dips into old-world brutality kept me engaged through the end. While the narrative lull in the middle may run the risk of losing serious fans of crime thrillers, I remained interested and excited until the novel’s mostly satisfying conclusion.

Ansel Shipley author photoAnsel Shipley is a graduate of SUNY Purchase college with a degree in literature. While there he was the senior literary editor of the student-run art and literature publication Submissions Magazine. He currently lives in Brooklyn where he writes freelance critical reviews and volunteers at Hullabaloo Books.

 

 

 

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GOING DARK, stories by Dennis Must, reviewed by Ashlee Paxton-Turner

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Going Dark cover art. A rough sketch of a faceless man sitting in a chairGOING DARK
by Dennis Must
Coffeetown Press, 167 pages

reviewed by Ashlee Paxton-Turner

An aging and dying actor, a blank slate, a forgotten man. This is the first narrator the reader meets in Dennis Must’s 2016 collection of seventeen short stories, Going Dark. The narrator of the title story, though a nobody, shares much in common with the other narrators and characters of the stories that follow in the collection. Indeed, throughout the collection, Must’s characters wrestle with important questions about identity, sanity, and morality, as their lives are colored by the particular details of their lives: their cars, the music they listen to, and their work. . The reason the first narrator, the actor, considers himself a nobody is that his identity is simply that of every character he has ever played. His own identity is simply lost.

The characters in this collection have done everything from acting to working the night shift in a college town’s only hotel to working as a night watchman in the local steel mill. They seem to be reflections on Must himself, who has co-founded a commercial real estate firm, taught school, worked as a cabinetmaker, short-order cook, lightning rod installer, florist, bartender, and bellhop. Additionally, he spent some time working in a glass factory and steel mill as well as in construction and on a railroad. The book luxuriates in this richness as Must describes people from all walks of life trying to grapple with whatever stage of life they find themselves in at that moment.

For example, in the title story, “Going Dark,” the narrator first tries to respond to basic questions that he might be asked: “Where do you live?” and “How many children do you have?” “And your wife—who is she?” But in answering these questions, the narrator, the dying actor, begins to grapple with an essential question that come at that stage of life: “What is there to be afraid of?” For the narrator, all of the roles he has formerly performed and the way that those roles—those people inside him—demand attention, wanting to continue existing is “[t]he source of [his] deep anguish.”

Dennis Must author photo

Dennis Must

Many of the protagonists in the collection, some of whom appear in multiple stories, seem to be asking themselves “who am I?” For the dying actor “who am I?” is a hard question after playing so many roles and struggling desperately to create a singular identity as life winds down. The young narrator of the story “Marine Band,” Ethan, must ask himself if he has only been pretending to be someone else. When Ethan was a child a young soldier, Chester, played the harmonica, and when he died at war, Chester’s mother gave Ethan Chester’s harmonica. After performing for his fifth grade class, Ethan “[feels] ashamed” and “like a paper solider.” For Ethan, “[Chester] was the star,” and Ethan was only pretending. Ethan is also the narrator of the final story, “The Joining.” Here, he must decide at a young age if he will turn away from the destiny of a high school aptitude test to become a mortician, even once the opportunity to become a mortician presents itself, or continue on as a night watchman, a job he xxxx.. Wrapped up in that question is another question of what it must mean if his brother’s “fate was actually [his]?” His brother, Jeremiah, had the opportunity to become a mortician after falling in love with the town mortician’s daughter. But for Ethan, he believes that “[Jeremiah] was going to be punished for something [he’d] reneged on[.]”

From the beginning, Must keeps probing the difference between reality and fiction. Just what is real? In “Going Dark,” the narrator says to his conscience, “I have to see you, to look you in the eyes, if I’m to believe you’re for real.” In “Houseguest,” the main character, Edgar, wonders “if somehow watching [a phantom woman] will cause [her] to melt away, to evaporate.” All along in this story Edgar struggles to determine if this woman is really there in the house with him. What is real and what isn’t? In a story that seems to allude to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, Must explores the line between sanity and madness. Instead of a suffering from paranoia developed from guilt as in the narrator of Poe’s story, Edgar’s madness develops by first making up a backstory for himself that might satisfy the neighbors. He, then, dreams about hearing “the former tenant’s heart beating in the upstairs bedroom” before finding a photograph of a naked woman he begins to believe is living with him. From then on, it is no longer the ticking of a timepiece or the former tenant’s heart. It is the sounds of a piano or “a woman’s voice singing a Cole Porter medley.” Edgar hums classical works by the likes of Debussy and Ravel on his walks, but the voice he hears is singing a Cole Porter medley; he’s hearing jazz. Maybe that’s another clue about Edgar’s state of mind—what he hums and what he hears at night do not match.

With this line between reality and fiction, sanity and insanity, should the reader trust these narrators? There is no doubt that they struggle with ordinary imperfections. Perhaps, it is Must’s insistence on never totally masking these imperfections that makes the narrators deserving of the reader’s trust. After all, by revealing the narrators’ struggles and imperfections, Must makes them more relatable and believable. Even “Houseguest,” told in the third person, is told both by the third person narrator and in italics by Edgar himself. Who should the reader believe? Are they really even different narrators in the first place?

Must’s prose is poetic. In the last line of “Going Dark,” Must writes, describing what the end of the narrator’s life will look like, “And bystanders will drop jeweled rings and eyeglasses in his wake.” The crisp prose allows his counterintuitively to blur reality. For example, in “Boys,” the reader must repeatedly ask herself what is really going on in the bathroom where the former resident of the apartment had died. But Must makes sure that the reader is grounded in a real place with sentences that tell the reader concrete and specific details like “[t]he radio’s playing New Orleans” and “[the house] sat across from Hollyhock Avenue Grade School with an oak swing hanging by link chain from the porch ceiling, a garage whose walls were covered with license plates from every state in the Union, and a tiled bathroom [. . .] all white.” Even when the narrators and characters grapple with their identity, madness, or simply doing the right thing, Must uses his prose to ground his reader. In fact, his use of prose expertly highlights the split between what is real and what is not by combining poetic prose with crisp, concrete prose.

Taken together, Must’s collection is a perceptive exploration of very real parts of life—childhood, marriage, employment, old age, and death, to name several—that reveals how even ordinary and prosaic aspects of life can be full of anguish and can lead to mental deterioration. In the story “Wartime Stockings,” the narrator, James, must confront the darker aspects of his mother’s life upon finding her partially dressed “with her head resting on a cast-iron burner used for summer canning” and the “gas jets wide open.” He realizes that “[t]he dark chapter was hers alone” and that he “only was privy to its halcyon pages.” James concludes, though, by wondering “if somehow [he] should have understood.” Maybe he should not have missed his mother’s anguish. In this collection, Must ensures that his reader will not make the same mistake. We must not overlook the anguish that accompanies even the most ordinary aspects of life.

Ashlee Paxton-Turner in front of a bookshelf

Ashlee Paxton-Turner is a native of Williamsburg, Virginia and a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where she was an English major with a concentration in creative writing. A former Teach For America corps member, who taught high school mathematics teacher in rural North Carolina, Ashlee is now a law student at Duke University.

 

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LATE FAME, a novella by Arthur Schnitzler, reviewed by Robert Sorrell

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Late Fame cover art. Abstract, colorful paintings of men's facesLATE FAME
by Arthur Schnitzler
translated by Alexander Starritt
New York Review Books, 136 Pages

reviewed by Robert Sorrell

Herr Eduard Saxberger lives in a pleasant apartment overlooking the Vienna Woods. Each night after spending the day in his civil service office, he eats at his usual restaurant where he interacts little with his companions beyond small talk and basic requests, and goes for a walk. His life is stable, if a bit empty. But one day a young man named Wolfgang Meier appears at the door, clutching a copy of the Wanderings, poems by Eduard Saxberger, and the somewhat bumbling, bourgeois civil servant is thrown back into a past he hardly remembers.

“You’ve read my Wanderings?” Saxberger exclaims, “People still read my Wanderings?”
“People might not read them any more,” rejoins Meier, “but we read them.”

And so begins, Late Fame, Arthur Schnitzler’s satire of Fin de Siecle Vienna, published in the U.S. for the first time more than a century after it was written. Just barely hitting the hundred page mark, Late Fame is short, even for a novella, but Schnitzler’s writing is powerful in its simplicity. Characters and images are pinned up like butterflies on a cork board. Alexander Starritt’s translation from the German is clear and graceful as well, retaining some of the ineffable air of Germanic grammar, commas cutting and stitching together clauses with a clear precision. Take Saxberger’s meditation, after spending some time with the small group of artists and intellectuals that Meier introduces him to: “And it seemed to him that he belonged among these people. As if much of what they said of themselves was also true of him and as if he, too, still had battles to fight as they did.”

Much of the novella takes place in the shadow of this group, “Enthusiasm,” into whose clutches Meier slowly draws Saxberger. The group meets each night in a coffeehouse, where they label anyone who’s had success as a sell-out while paradoxically bemoaning the fact that the public pays no attention to them. There is much bickering and gossip and name calling, and no writing of any kind. In fact, very few of them ever seem to produce, except a small, timid man named Winder who is ridiculed for the fact that he likes to write all sorts of things and seems to have little trouble forcing himself to sit down and do it.

At one point, Saxberger asks why they are calling a certain table “talentless,” and he receives this droll response which perfectly sums up the whole group: “‘Talentless,’ interjected Meier in his calm way, ‘is what we generally call those who sit at different tables from us.’”

These moments in the coffeehouse prove that Late Fame’s real targets are not the aristocrats or social values lambasted in English satires like Vanity Fair, and works by Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, and later Evelyn Waugh. Instead Late Fame zeroes in on the posturing hacks, the (mainly) men who call themselves artists and wear all the trappings of the title, but do none of the work. As Saxberger admits to himself once he’s gotten to know Enthusiasm better, “They assuredly had a tremendous amount of talent between them; work, however, was something they actually did very little of.”

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Arthur Schnitzler author photo

Arthur Schnitzler

Arthur Schnitzler, as the back of any copy of his books will tell you, was part of a Viennese circle of intellectuals and artists that included Sigmund Freud and the writer Stefan Zweig, whose memoirs provided much of the source material and inspiration for Wes Anderson’s recent film Grand Budapest Hotel. The story of Late Fame’s manuscript itself wouldn’t be out of place in one of Anderson’s kaleodoscopic plots. Finished in Vienna in the early 20th century, the manuscript sat in an archive until 1938, managing to survive previous attempts by the Nazis to burn Schnitzler’s work (along with Freud and Zweig, Schnitzler was Jewish).

The novella wasn’t published, even in the original German, until 2014. There is a bizarre coincidence between the subject and title of the novella and its arc through history that is hard to miss. And there are other overlaps between Late Fame and the real world. Much like the characters in Late Fame, Schnitzler, Freud, Zweig, and their group met often in a coffeehouse to discuss their practice and trade ideas. Freud was supposedly quite taken with much of Schnitzler’s work, which is frank in its depictions of sexuality to the point of being scandalous. One of his plays, Reigen, explores the moments right before and after 10 couples have sex. His novella Dream Story was also the inspiration for Stanley Kubrick’s last film Eyes Wide Shut, an erotic drama starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.

Yet desire works in a different way in Late Fame. While Enthusiasm is mainly made up of young-ish, headstrong men, there is one woman, an actress who is always referred to as Fräulein Gasteiner. Gasteiner becomes one of Saxberger’s loudest champions, lauding the Wanderings and their poet in a loud voice whenever given the chance, providing another driving force for Saxberger’s ballooning ego. Gasteiner is one of the main proponents of putting on a salon night for the group to introduce Vienna to Enthusiasm’s work, and simply insists that Saxberger’s work must be on the program. She comes by his apartment to check on his progress and makes proclamations like “Truly, this is a poet’s study,” in a dramatic voice. Their gazes and touches linger. But the sexual undercurrents are always misdirected and it’s never clear where the line is between sexual desire and desire for fame, power, and attention.

Late Fame’s approach to its titular subject reminded me of the recent case of Vivian Maier, the Chicago nanny and amateur photographer whose street photography, rediscovered in a storage unit, recently spawned a whole cottage industry of books, documentaries, and gallery shows. The photographs, made by a woman who had died years earlier with no direct descendants, were latched onto by new owners who rode to fame on Maier’s coattails, or at least attempted to (the owner of a majority of her negatives, John Maloof, was nominated for an Oscar in 2015 but didn’t win). No doubt the group Enthusiasm hoped they had found their Vivian Maier in Eduard Saxberger. “For today’s generation,” Wolfgang Meier tells Saxberger soon after meeting him, “the Wanderings are the work of a newcomer—because no one knows them.”

After the salon evening (spoiler alert) goes horribly, Saxberger begins to wonder if he was happier before this all happened. Before Meier and his rediscovery of the Wanderings, and the salon and Fräulein Gasteiner. In Late Fame it turns out that there are two kinds of “artists,” those who love to create, and those who love the idea of being an artist. After the salon, Saxberger isn’t sure he wants to be either.

At the center of Late Fame is a question of utility: what (and perhaps whom) is art for? As pretentious as the question may sound, Schnitzler means it quite honestly and simply. The members of Enthusiasm use art for their own self-promotion, Saxberger doesn’t know what to do with it, and no one, really, seems to benefit from it. At the end of the novella, Saxberger mentions to a young writer, “‘Let’s make a deal,’ … ‘You don’t need to read my poems and in exchange I won’t read yours either.’” It’s comforting to think that great art will become famous on it’s own merit, as if it can somehow float to the surface without learning to swim. But sometimes, like Vivian Maier’s photography or Arthur Schnitzler’s little gem of a novella, it sits in a closet for years before being taken out and admired anew. Late Fame, it turns out, is for all of us who ruminate over art, who wonder what purpose it serves, and why, for reasons good or bad, we keep making it.

Robert Sorrell author photoRobert Sorrell is a writer and photographer living in Philadelphia. He recently graduated from the University of Chicago’s English program and has a piece of narrative nonfiction forthcoming from Mosaic Art & Literary Journal.

 

 

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FIVE STAGES OF GRIEF FOR WRITERS When Dealing with Negative Feedback, a craft essay by Floyd Cheung

 

THE BURNING GIRL, a novel by Claire Messud, reviewed by Amanda Klute

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The Burning Girl cover art. A match forms the silhouette of a girl's profileTHE BURNING GIRL
by Claire Messud
W.W. Norton & Company, 247 pages

reviewed by Amanda Klute

Hindsight never fails in providing a comprehensive scope of recently-felt chaos—this is the key narrative tool Claire Messud employs in her intimate coming-of-age novel, The Burning Girl. The Burning Girl offers deep insight into a seemingly minuscule and ordinary loss of two young Massachusetts girls, and quietly probes us to ponder the necessity, ridicule, and unfairness that results from a society prizing itself on the lack of innocence as means of survival.

Though the book is a work of fiction, it could just as well be one of creative non-fiction, or an authentic “true story,” as it addresses how many young children first experience loss: the end of a friendship. Through the unity and dissention of these two diverse, modern-day teenage girls, Messud leads us to question pre-existing philosophies of “innocence lost is experience gained.” “Can’t you see I’m contaminated? Can’t you see the grown-up dirt all over me?” asks Messud’s narrator, seventeen-year-old Julia Robinson, lamenting why she is not allowed to indulge in childish whims.

Here, I believe, Messud subtly points an accusing finger to contemporary notions of expected feminine maturity. Why must innocence be irrevocably lost? In our current climate of political turmoil, action franchises, and technological gratification, Burning Girl offers us a quiet investigation into the “how” and “why” a cord between two young girls was forcibly severed.

If Julia is the observer of The Burning Girl, her former friend, Cassie Burnes, is the observed. The novel recounts the quiet and sudden disintegration of their friendship. An upcoming senior in high school, Julia pieces together the theories and motives of her once-best-friend’s eventual disappearance from the small town of Royston, Massachusetts that was once their congenial playground. The novel is split into three parts: the first details the final summer of their friendship before progressing as high school freshman, the second presents the split that occurred as they entered high school, and the third and final section explores the nature of Cassie’s demise and ultimate disappearance from Julia’s life. Narrated like an old wives’ tale spread throughout a village, or a ghost story to be whispered and maliciously exaggerated, the loss of Cassie’s virtue is more or less public opinion and speculation that her oldest friend intends to correct.

Claire Messud author photo

Claire Messud

Claire Messud is the New York Times best-selling author of The Emperor’s Children (2006), and, more recently, The Woman Upstairs (2013). She is married to the English-American literary critic James Wood, of the New Yorker, and the two have been acclaimed as “the first couple of American fiction.” She thinks of her work as devoid of a genre, claiming her novels belong to “the kind that’s no kind.” Messud completed undergraduate and graduate studies at Yale and Cambridge, and her debut novel, When The World Was Steady, was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1995. She teaches creative writing at a variety of universities along the east coast, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters has recognized her with the Strauss Living Award and the Addison Metcalf Award. Messud is also a fellow at the Berlin Institute of Advanced Study.

Unfortunately, the disappointment of The Burning Girl lies in its language, which is generally unspectacular, with a few surprising gems along the way. Comma heavy and abundantly overwritten, the narrator’s stream-of-consciousness tells me I’m gathering my information from a young female who is not fully adept at storytelling yet. In one such example, Julia notes, “seventh grade is differently difficult for each person.” The clumsy phrase “differently difficult” pulled my focus from the story; this became a recurring theme in my reading. Though written as a flashback, the Julia’s maturity is elided, making the book feel sentimental, and turning Cassie into a pitiful martyr of her woebegone innocence. The narrator is (convincingly) overwhelmed with remorse, but this tone drips with every word Messud writes, blocking the reader from truly connecting with the characters. While credible, it does not make an enjoyable read.

You’d never think it. …in the same way that he [Goya] was in seventh grade art class for me, and the French Revolution was in ninth grade history, and who was going to make that connection? That’s sort of what happened with Cassie and me. I guess I was Goya, just doing my thing, and she was the French Revolution.

Here, The Burning Girl perfectly illustrates how the loss of a friendship can correlate with the loss of virtue, and severely alter and distinguish the paths of two young women. I personally find a novel is only as good as its ending, and Messud offers us one consistent with her themes of disillusionment. “The happy ending is no ending,” states Julia, reflecting on the lost friendship. “Nobody particularly wants the happy ending when they care more about the story than the person.”

Amanda Klute holds a Bachelor of Arts from Washington College in English Literature and Theatre. In addition to her internship at Cleaver Magazine, she has worked and written for The Summerset Review, The Collegian, and is an avid member of JASNA’s newsletter, Bits and Scraps. She is currently located on the East Coast and is a freelance writer and director.

 

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THE REFRIGERATOR MONOLOGUES, a novel by Catherynne M. Valente, reviewed by Ansel Shipley

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The Refrigerator Monologues cover art. A comic panel that looks into a blue-lit room with a microphoneTHE REFRIGERATOR MONOLOGUES
by Catherynne M. Valente
Saga Press, 147 pages

reviewed by Ansel Shipley

Catherynne M. Valente’s most recent novel, The Refrigerator Monologues, exists in an odd space between novel and what could be called a pseudo-parable. Valente’s six protagonists and her interconnected narratives clearly parallel famous female comic book characters and their narrative arcs. Each of them, in fact, exhibits numerous traits that link her to a specific DC or Marvel property, ensuring that nothing is lost on the reader.

The goal then of the novel is not to tell a unique story, but to point out the flaws of another medium’s storytelling, such as when a character—clearly playing off supervillain Harley Quinn—remarks that “Grimdark” (Valente’s Batman parallel) is motivated by nothing more than “some seriously freshman poli-sci haiku that sounds super deep and means jack except that a rich man’s going to make a poor man bleed.” This stylistic choice has both benefits and drawbacks: while the writing often feels pedantic and obvious, Valente’s goal is to point to a very specific trend in comics, and superhero comics, as a rule, lack subtlety.

Having written an extensive library of novels, short fiction, poetry and non-fiction, Valente is far from a newcomer to feminist writing. She received the James Tiptree, Jr. Award and the Lambda Award for GLBT Science Fiction or Fantasy. The briefness of The Refrigerator Monologues shows that her goal when writing was not to craft a detailed world or write deeply engaging prose but to make a critical point in an enjoyable and effective manner. The novel becomes almost a thesis through fiction, establishing and following a clearly outlined argument and with each of the six stories depicting a new example affirming her position.

In general, this technique works. Each story is individually engaging, and Valente manages to link them all together satisfyingly while making powerful and cogent commentary on the misogynistic treatment of female characters in comic books. The first five protagonists are clearly drawn from characters created in the 1980s and 1990s, when comics were notably aggressive in their misogyny: the first, “Paige Embry is Dead,” references Gwen Stacy’s involvement in Peter Parker’s powers and her eventual death; the second, “The Heat Death of Julia Ash,” acts as a commentary on the treatment of Jean Grey’s Phoenix Saga, where it was revealed that Professor X, worried that Grey would become unstable and dangerous, placed psychic bindings in her mind to contain her powers.

This plot became both an iconic part of the X-Men mythos and a clear example of the way female comic characters were stripped of their powers “for their own good.” As Julia Ash becomes more and more powerful, she remarks, “they turned on me, eventually. Oh, they were so concerned, my boys. Only for my own good, only because they were so worried about my delicate constitution!” This passage represents the best of Valente’s criticism: instead of making a direct indictment of comic book plotting, she blends her anger at ingrained predatory misogyny into the narrative.

Catherynne M. Valente author photo

Catherynne M. Valente

The Gwen Stacy narrative most recently depicted in 2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man depicted her as an Oscorp employee whose actions led to Peter Parker’s superpowers. 2014’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2 revealed her death, a tragic plummet ending with the snapping of her neck. Valente employs the bones of this story almost beat-for-beat in “Paige Embry is Dead” to powerful effect. Many people consider Gwen Stacy’s death to have marked the end of the “Silver Age” of comics, as comic books began to move in a more mature direction; characters could die brutally, and superheroes could truly fail. Valente’s choice to begin The Refrigerator Monologues with a critical homage to this classic story speaks to her deep understanding of the comic medium. The novel follows an extremely effective trajectory and the plot and distinctive characterization between the sections ensures that the six stories are impactful both individually and as a combined work.

Valente suffers from a tendency to over-explain, however, leaving nothing to be inferred from her stories. Her characters repeatedly break the fourth wall to make a declamation against the terrible treatment they have experienced at the hands of the world. Near the end of “The Heat Death of Julia Ash,” Ash states, “It’s a funny thing. You go your whole life thinking you’re the protagonist, but really, you’re just backstory. The boys shrug and go on, they fight and blow things up […] and eventually you’re just a story your high school boyfriend tells the kid he had with his new wife.” The argument Valente makes here is important and certainly in need of greater recognition and investigation, but her ham-handed exposition can become tiring, particularly in the second half of the novel as the frequency of her explicit commentary increases.

The final story, “Happy Birthday, Samantha Dane,” proves to be the most effective argument in the novel. Unlike the first five protagonists, Valente uses Samantha Dane not as a specific parallel but instead as an example of how contemporary comics treat female characters. Over the past decade, Marvel Comics (and, to a lesser extent, DC Comics) has made a concerted effort to diversify their superhero line-ups: a female Thor, an Afro-Hispanic Spider-Man, a Muslim Ms. Marvel, a gay Iceman, etc. While these actions are commendable, Valente argues that there remains deep-seated misogyny within the comic world. “Happy Birthday, Samantha Dane” depicts a new, hip, young superhero team called “Avant Garde,” whose superhero identities and powers are vaguely related to art.

The girlfriend of an Avant Garde member—the titular Samantha Dane—is eventually murdered, stripped naked, and crammed into a refrigerator. Valente demonstrates that even though this diverse superhero team includes male and female superheroes on equal footing, the women in the periphery are just as disposable as women in comics have always been. Samantha Dane remarks, “I belong in the refrigerator. Because the truth is, I’m just food for a superhero. He’ll eat up my death and get the energy he needs to become a legend.”

While Valente’s overt exposition can be blunt and poorly integrated at times, there is no denying it is deeply effective. She forces her readers to see the prevailing misogyny in comics and how despite a great deal of lip-service to progressivism, comic book stories are still brutalizing women to give their male protagonists a little extra motivation.

Ansel Shipley author photoAnsel Shipley is a graduate of SUNY Purchase college with a degree in literature. While there he was the senior literary editor of the student-run art and literature publication Submissions Magazine. He currently lives in Brooklyn where he writes freelance critical reviews and volunteers at Hullabaloo Books.

 

 

 

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FINGERPRINTS OF PREVIOUS OWNERS, a novel by Rebecca Entel, reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier

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Fingerprints of Previous Owners cover art. The tops of palm trees against a night skyFINGERPRINTS OF PREVIOUS OWNERS
by Rebecca Entel
The Unnamed Press, 209 pages

reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier

“The narrator of this book is a Caribbean woman. You may have noticed that the writer of this book is not,” Rebecca Entel notes in a preface to Fingerprints of Previous Owners, her novel set at a resort built on the nettle-choked ruins of a former slave plantation. Alluding to her research and credentials as a scholar of nineteenth-century American literature, Entel does more than attempt to deflect criticism for cultural appropriation. She declares her investment in this story, as well as her intention to free her characters from a colonial narrative frame.

She begins with Myrna Burre. Entel endorses Myrna’s authority by locating the story’s point of view in this islander who’d “never arrived here from anywhere.” When we meet her in the novel’s opening lines, she and the other “A-Y-S” staff (At Your Service, pronounced “eeeeyes”) are gathered on the beach, wearing white sheets over their uniforms, to perform a compulsory pantomime of a native welcoming ceremony for tourists who are aboard a boat named, with casual tactlessness, The Pinta. (Their baggage is brought by The Nina.) “A team of people with the name of the resort scripted across their chests would appear, arrange its bodies as prosthetics for whatever they needed to do,” Myrna reports, indicting by defamiliarizing this arrival ritual, in which a staffer playing Columbus distributes “coins of small value” for the tourists to trade for necklaces and candy.

As “one of the maids they heard but didn’t see” sweeping crabs from the pool deck with her wire broom, Myrna is perfectly positioned to scrutinize the fictional island called “Furnace” (a corruption of Ferdinand and Isabella) by paying guests, and “Cruffey” by residents (many of whom, including Myrna’s mother, share the surname). Publicly, she sticks to the scripted bland descriptions of buffet meals and perfect weather and a Jamboree featuring “our local steel drum band and native women selling native crafts”). But privately, she makes us privy to fraud she detects: the “local” band playing “Trinidadian songs on Floridian-Jamaican drums,” the hour-earlier tourist time zone, a tromp l’oeil coral reef painted on the pool floor, the “native” label that doesn’t fit anyone she knows.

Rebecca Entel author photo

Rebecca Entel

Clearly, Entel has done her research. Details like these, revealing the resort’s flimsy façade—“the brand-new strapped over everything like duct tape”—and the subservient stance of employees laboring in a service economy, ring true to my work as a maid at a Spanish colonial-style resort in Arizona. Where she exaggerates—for ironic, if not comic, effect—she exposes visceral truths. Her credibility is evident in choices she makes to craft this story. By amplifying the dissonance between the island’s different versions—seen and unseen, mythological and historical—Myrna’s point of view compels the plot to pursue what’s hidden: Cruffey Island’s past, which is to say her ancestors’.

Myrna’s life—and livelihood—hinges on this hidden history. “Say the word estate at work and look down at your palm for your firing papers,” she warns, addressing the erasure at the root of this story. The Cruffey Plantation is lost to history: missing from the resort map, an inland life forgotten or unspoken by the elders. But even before the plantation, Myrna notes, the island’s identity was misplaced by the official archipelago map depicting their home as “a dot named twice, neither time by us.” If one purpose of a map is to lay claim to the truth, this map that decorates the Furnace Island guestrooms robs the islanders of agency, casting Myrna’s family and friends as inhabitants of one of many “scattered seeds floating away from the finger of Florida, that imperative pillar to our point of exclamation.”

Without facts or artifacts to anchor her, Myrna is at sea, her future uncertain. Her college plans derailed by the need to support her mother (mute with grief after her husband’s death and son Troy’s relocation to “the capital”), she goes “inland, back in time, instead.” She searches for tangible proof of her ancestors’ existence in the stones erupting through the soil—“stones my ancestors…had quarried and carried and packed in place, like planting gravestones.” This digging and accounting echoes the work of her deceased father, the island’s dentist, who remembered his patients by counting their pulled teeth, “all the holes on the island.”

And so Myrna’s second, secret, shift begins, as she slashes blindly through the thorny haulback with a machete, looking for the abandoned plantation’s foundation walls. This physical labor is sticky, dusty, bruising, and stinging. It rivets the reader to her actions with sensory detail, as she excavates, like her father once did, to “find where the pain was coming from…and to dig out the source of it.” Feeling her way, Myrna makes a mental map of the estate to match the one she’s discovered in a copy of The Cruffey Plantation Journal 1833, stolen from a visiting tourist’s room. In a perfectly plotted scene, Myrna finally enters the estate through the kitchen—literally, a “place of fire, of food, of sustenance, of labor” and symbolically, the place where race, gender, and social class intersect—and finds a tangible link to the written record of a one-armed enslaved woman named Tildy.

The stolen journal’s owner is Jasmine Manion, an African-American woman from Wisconsin who owns the consignment shop where the old book turned up. Jasmine has hired Myrna’s cousin Lionel to give her an unofficial tour of the other side of “paradise”: Junkful Beach, called “Scruffy” by the kids, “mangy with brush, shore scalloped with choppy water, and flotsam she wouldn’t believe washing ashore from across the Atlantic.” Jasmine’s part in the novel’s unsettling climax, which I won’t spoil, is just one example of the way Entel keeps digging for complexity, through the ways in which her characters’ roles and lives intersect.

Entel makes great use of the landscape as a psychological setting, from the thorny inland concealing truth to the wind-torn, trash-filled shore that residents scour, feeling “lucky to collect the junk.” Writing against a gendered tradition of travel narrative in which men pose as conquerors and women journey to self-discovery, she ties Myrna’s personal quest to a larger story, expanding her vision with a series of first-person “bench stories” that fill narrative holes as they accrue on a story-telling site built from the estate’s “took apart walls.”

Poet Derek Walcott proposes, in his illuminating essay “Isla Incognita,” that, in order to see clearly, we must “proceed backward from knowing, from all the stories [we’ve] been told about islands.” Both in spirit and in its structure, Fingerprints of Previous Owners follows this profound advice to rediscover the island of the author’s—and the reader’s—invention. Of course, the prickly political question of who gets to write what will not, and should not, be settled by Entel’s sincerity. And you may have noticed that the reviewer of this book is not a Caribbean woman, either. But in my view, Entel’s novel is brilliant. Through a series of strategic narrative choices, she both inhabits and interrogates the island she created, demonstrating how fiction can expand a reader’s empathy and, even, a writer’s authority.

Elizabeth Mosier author photoElizabeth Mosier is a novelist and essayist. Her reviews have appeared most recently in The Philadelphia Inquirer and Cleaver. Her essay “Believers” was named a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2015, Read more at www.ElizabethMosier.com.

 

 

 

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