Category Archives: translation

EMPTY WORDS, a novel by Mario Levrero, reviewed by Ashlee Paxton-Turner

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EMPTY WORDS
by Mario Levrero
translated from the Spanish by Annie McDermott
Coffee House Press, 122 pages
reviewed by Ashlee Paxton-Turner

Empty Words Book JacketMario Levrero’s Empty Words is no ordinary novel. Organized as a series of handwriting exercises, Empty Words offers a look inside a novelist’s mind as he attempts to improve himself by improving his handwriting. Originally published in 1996 in Spanish, it is Levrero’s first novel translated into English. Annie McDermott, who introduces English language readers to Levrero, has translated other works from Spanish and Portuguese, and her translations have appeared in many places, including Granta, the White Review, Asymptote, Two Lines, and World Literature Today.

At first blush, however, Empty Words appears to be an unusual work to translate because it is ostensibly less of a narrative and more of a meditation on language itself. After all, it is structured as a series of handwriting exercises. But it becomes clear rather quickly that translation does not hinder the reader’s ability to appreciate Empty Words because that meditation on language and the shape of individual words creates a narrative of its own. Words do not exist in a vacuum, and the narrator’s efforts at writing words without meaning is futile. Both the shape of the letters and the words those letters form convey meaning. As Empty Words has semi-autobiographical undertones, it is ultimately the perfect introduction to Levrero for readers of English who might have otherwise remained unfamiliar with him and his work.

Levrero was born in Montevideo, Uruguay. He died there in 2004. Levrero has been referred to as the Kafka of Uruguay, possibly because his first novel, The City, published in 1966, was inspired by Kafka. In fact, Levrero once said that The City was “almost an attempt to translate Kafka into Uruguayan.” Levrero also claimed that he “didn’t realize it was possible to tell the truth” until he read Kafka. But despite such high praise, Levrero himself tended to shy away from such recognition, often avoiding publicity altogether. Further, as Annie McDermott put it in her translator’s note, he denied the existence of any literary career.

But Levrero does have a literary career, and Empty Words, through its series of handwriting exercises, showcases a talent for probing the innerworkings of an individual’s mind while writing about something ordinary and mundane: penmanship, handwriting. The handwriting exercises form the core of what the unnamed narrator, a novelist and writer, terms “graphological self-therapy.” As explained to the reader from the outset, the theory behind graphological self-therapy is that “by changing the behavior observed in a person’s handwriting, it may be possible to change other things about that person.”

This motivation for performing the exercises establishes an intimate space, where penmanship may reveal anxieties. The reader then has access to the innermost thoughts of Levrero’s anxiety-riddled protagonist. Although the focus is apparently on “draw[ing] the letters one by one and giving no thought to the meanings of the words they’re forming,” the narrator ultimately ends up considering the meaning of the words, all of which culminate in a humorous and engaging meditation on daily life and one’s own existence.

Mario Levrero author headshot

Mario Levrero

By structuring Empty Words as he does, Levrero may be implicitly asking the reader whether we can derive a deeper meaning from the shape of the letters, the form of the handwriting, just as the narrator asks this question of himself. Can the shape of the letters tell us something that the words themselves cannot?  To be clear, the novel is all in typeface; we do not see any handwriting. We only hear (or rather read) about the narrator’s difficulties with forming certain letters. “[H]ow the hell do you do a capital S?” Later on, a paragraph is devoted to improving “r’s”—“[r]ound and round the rugged rock the ragged rascal ran.”

But this is hardly a book of repeated words and letters. Indeed, any concerns that the exercises are a “clumsy substitute for literature” are unnecessary. A discourse on the shape of letters becomes an opportunity to step inside someone else’s mind. Why is he picking these words? Is he struggling to focus on the exercises? Why? Is there something else he wants to write rather than focusing on the exercises? It inevitably becomes like reading a diary that was not meant to be a diary. But because words inherently express ideas, meaning is inevitable.

To discover the meaning behind Levrero’s words takes patience. Empty Words does not follow a linear storyline (even if each handwriting exercise is dated and appears in chronological order). But Levrero encourages the reader’s patience by peppering the novel with clever and rather dry humor. The reader is incentivized to keep turning the pages to find the next digression from handwriting exercises to deadpan observations about daily life.

translator Annie McDermott headshot

Annie McDermott, translator

These observations crop up as the protagonist deals with his anxiety, with an impending move to a different house, and with the tense relationship between his dog, Pongo, and a white cat that appears one day. For example, taking a deadpan tone, Levrero’s unnamed novelist observes that his handwriting is messiest when he smokes more cigarettes than usual. He then concludes that “bad handwriting is caused by anxiety.” In other words, bad handwriting is evidence of anxiety, which must mean that the anxiety has subsided when the handwriting improves.

Although a short novel, Empty Words is the type of work one might start and stop somewhat frequently given the lack of a linear of plotline. Levrero seems to be aware of this possibility. Specifically, just as the reader may interrupt her reading of the novel, Levrero inserts various household interruptions that distract from the effort at perfecting the shape of letters. But these interruptions and distractions do more than reflect the potential that the reader may be experiencing something similar. Indeed, they add a richness by inviting the reader into the daily life of the world inside the novel. For example, the narrator’s wife and stepson keep different schedules and have different priorities that interfere with any strict focus on handwriting exercises.

After establishing this tension, it becomes especially easy to understand his trouble falling asleep when he knows his wife and stepson are awake and cannot be relied on to turn off the lights and the television or “refrain from making any noise once [he has] fallen asleep.” In this way, the non-linear structure succeeds: it is the logical choice for a novel about anxiety and self-improvement because anxiety and life hardly follow a linear trajectory.

In addition to these external interruptions, Levrero includes internal interruptions where the narrator interrupts himself. As often happens, he gets “carried away by the subject matter and forget[s] about forming the letters.” In a way, this makes sense, even if “sense is nothing but a complicated social construct.” Letters, too, are “a complicated social construct” that provide a framework for sense. By focusing on his handwriting, on something so mundane, his mind wanders. Perhaps, Levrero is also contemplating the reader’s mind wandering in these moments. But it is in these moments that Levrero shines as an author and McDermott as a translator, pulling the reader back into the novel. For example, in an early exercise, it is explained that “[t]o get anywhere in life, you have to believe in something. In other words, you have to be wrong.”

Such a strong statement tends to grab the reader’s attention and maybe refocuses the narrator, too, on the task at hand. At times, “despite the psychological pressure . . . to do other, more urgent work,” the handwriting exercises are prioritized because of their potential for self-improvement and what they might reveal about identity and personal principles. Of course, who knows if this “graphological self-therapy” leads to self-improvement. Levrero never actually says one way or the other. The narrator becomes more reflective as the novel progresses, but his anxiety remains in the background. But even if the exercises do not create the type of self-improvement that the narrator hopes for, they do provide a vehicle for offering a number of insights on life, which Levrero somehow offers without becoming cliché.

Levrero considers the ambitions we hold for ourselves—that “sometimes it’s no bad thing to aim high, especially in a field where everything colludes to make you aim low, where mediocrity is what really impresses people.” This sentiment is also part of the core of the novel. Self-improvement based upon improving handwriting is a high ambition, which common sense would suggest may well be futile or at least encourage low expectations of success.

But Levrero’s work is also a meditation on figuring out what we want to say. After all, even though the whole novel is apparently about forming letters (and not the words those letters form), there are frequent digressions and attempts to articulate any number of concerns or thoughts. In doing so, it is not unusual to get frustrated at “not being able to condense [the] story, to get to the heart of what [we] want to say.” We may “tr[y] again and again, and every time [we] end up going around in circles and getting lost in minor details.” For as much as the narrator gets lost in minor details, it is precisely those minor details of forming certain letters, looking after his dog, and engaging with his wife and stepson that make the novel so compelling. Sometimes, going around in circles is simply the point.

Levrero also makes a point about figuring out how identity evolves over time. At the end of the novel, the narrator explains that “[w]hen you reach a certain age, you’re no longer the protagonist of your own actions: all you have left are the consequences of things you’ve already done.” Perhaps, then, the benefits of improved handwriting are limited, and any self-improvement cannot wash away the consequences of prior decisions. Similarly, the writing itself outlives the writer, so at some point, even when the writer is gone and no more can be said, the consequences of what was previously written remains.

Or maybe, Levrero’s point is that arriving at any of these insights requires attention to ordinary activities like forming the shape of the letter “r.” In a tribute to the ordinary, Levrero creates an extraordinary work, reminding readers that words will never be empty.

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Ashlee Paxton-Turner

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.

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THE WAY THROUGH THE WOODS: ON MUSHROOMS AND MOURNING, a memoir by Long Litt Woon, reviewed by Beth Kephart

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THE WAY THROUGH THE WOODS: ON MUSHROOMS AND MOURNING
by Long Litt Woon
translated from the Norwegian by Barbara J. Haveland
Spiegel & Grau, 292 pages
reviewed by Beth Kephart

Cover art for The Way Through the WoodsWhen I read memoir I want: something to crack and something to rise, something to arc and something to stream, something to move across the page and, as it does, to move me.

I bought Long Litt Woon’s The Way Through the Woods: On Mushrooms and Mourning for the promise embedded in the premise. How would Woon make her way back into the world after the shocking, sudden death of the fifty-four-year-old husband with whom she had spent all her adult years? What do mushrooms have to do with recovering from such a loss? Does anybody ever actually recover?

Woon, who moved to Norway from Malaysia as an exchange student at the age of eighteen and stayed because of her love for her husband, Eiolf, is not, as it turns out, interested in the literary fissures and expansions and movements that generally interest me. Her prose, as translated by Barbara J. Haveland, is determinedly straightforward, lavishly undecorated, direct and directly to the point. Her structure is neither chronological nor intuitive. She holds her memories of her husband close, revealing little of the man she clearly loved, disclosing only the smallest glimpses of herself. She begins:

This is the story of a journey that started on the day my life was turned upside down: the day when Eiolf went to work and didn’t come home. He never came home again. Life as I had known it was gone in that instant. The world would never be the same again.

It’s the mushrooms that primarily preoccupy Woon in this book—the hunt for them in Norwegian forests, the challenges presented to amateur students and foragers, the friendships that begin to form over mushroom-themed meals, the way Woon’s “concentration is sharpened and the tension mounts” as she goes out into the Fungi Kingdom and reports back on the wildly interesting species that bruise, poison, delight, elude, or (depending on your preference) catalyze hallucinations.

Woon is, as it turns out, a terrific guide to mushroom secrets, scents, and dishes. She gets so good at this mushroom thing that she passes the difficult-to-master inspector’s exam. Her plainspoken prose provides essential clarity when she reports, say, on the fact that “the bulk of the mushroom consists of a dynamic, living network of long, shoestring-like cells known as mycelium, which spread underground or through trees and other plants,” then goes on to describe the world’s largest organism, the honey fungus, which “covers a stretch of woodland corresponding to almost four square miles” and is “estimated to be between two thousand and eight thousand years old.” It’s interesting stuff, riveting in its way, and about halfway in I decided to stop looking for the lyric leap so that might I experience this tale the way Woon chose to tell it. To follow her as she zags from morels to brain mushrooms, from the vocabulary of mushroom smells to the art of catching mice, from psychedelia to mushroom “bacon.”

Sure, I would have liked to have seen so much more of the husband that was tragically lost too soon; Woon shares a few tidbits, but we rarely meet Eiolf inside a scene. Sure, I would have liked to have known more than what Woon shares about the essence of her once-shared home. But the more I read, the more I remembered that this memoir had not been written for me. It had been written because Woon discovered, in the dark country of her grief, so many lanterned forests. She discovered mushrooms hiding in plain sight, and she took them into her kitchen, and she invited friends, and she was alone no more.

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Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of more than two-dozen books, an adjunct teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, and a co-founder of Juncture Workshops, which offers memoir resources and teaching. Her first memoir in many years, Wife|Daughter|Self, is due out from Forest Avenue Press in early 2021. More at bethkephartbooks.com.

MAX HAVELAAR: OR, THE COFFEE AUCTIONS OF THE DUTCH TRADING COMPAN, a novel by Multatuli, reviewed by Dylan Cook

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MAX HAVELAAR: OR, THE COFFEE AUCTIONS OF THE DUTCH TRADING COMPANY
by Multatuli
translated by Ina Rilke and David McKay
New York Review Books, 336 pages
reviewed by Dylan Cook

Cover art for Max Havelaar“I call a man a fool if he dives in the water to rescue a dog from sharks.” This is our introduction to Max Havelaar—a champion of the people, even irrationally so. He is a Dutchman who stands with Indonesian farmers. He is a bureaucrat who pushes against the orders of his superiors. Havelaar is a rare figure of compassion in the midst of Dutch imperialism, one who has the temerity and know-how to make tangible change. And, despite all of this, Max Havelaar is a minor character in the novel that bears his name.

Max Havelaar is likely an unfamiliar title to most American readers, and the Netherlands in general is an often overlooked source of literature. But make no mistake: the world over holds Max Havelaar in high regard. I recently had the chance to talk to a born-and-raised Dutchman, and I asked him if the title rang any bells. “Of course,” he told me. “It’s a classic, everyone reads it.” Think along the lines of Pride and Prejudice. In his short but poignant introduction to this edition of the novel, Indonesian author Pramoedya Ananta Toer makes the bold claim that Max Havelaar is one of the most important novels of all time. There’s a reason this novel caught the attention of writers like Karl Marx and Thomas Mann, and there’s a reason that when Freud drew up a list of ten great authors, Multatuli stood on top.

Multatuli is the mononymous pen name of Eduard Douwes Dekker, the son of a Dutch sea captain. The name “Multatuli” stems of Latin and roughly translates to, “I have suffered greatly.” When he was just eighteen, Dekker sailed on one of his father’s ships to the Dutch East Indies where he worked in finance before shifting into a government position. After nearly twenty years there, he rose to become the Assistant Resident of Lebak, but, after disagreeing with the Dutch colonial system, soon resigned and returned to the Netherlands. A few years later, in 1860, he would publish a novel about a man who becomes the Assistant Resident of Lebak, only to become disgusted with Dutch imperialism.

Photograph of Eduard Douwes Dekker; 1820–1887

Eduard Douwes Dekker, or Multatuli

Max Havelaar is a highly fragmented, nonlinear text. The novel features several narrators, depending on how you count, and the plot can quickly become cumbersome and difficult to follow. It begins with Batavius Drystubble, a coffee merchant in the Netherlands. He recounts the exact process of how this novel was written, all the while describing the highly political field of coffee brokering and how it requires the majority of his attention (“My business is my life” becomes something of a mantra for his narration). Along the way, Drystubble encounters an old acquaintance, Shawlman, who entrusts him with a packet of his writings, an eclectic mix of poetry and essays that Drystubble claims is the source material for the Max Havelaar portions of the novel. Of course, Drystubble is so engrossed in his work that he cannot possible spend his time writing, for his business is his life. Thus, he enlists Ludwig Stern, a friend of his son’s, to write some of the chapters regarding Havelaar. Only then, a sizeable chuck into the text, does the story of Max Havelaar begin.

The two narrators are not shy and frequently speak directly do the reader to voice opinions and curate information. The source material from Shawlman lingers overhead, and Drystubble and Stern routinely reaffirm that they must cut out certain details that won’t add anything to the novel. These metafictional moments make it feel more apt to group Multatuli along with early postmodern authors than with contemporaries like Hugo, Tolstoy, or Eliot. Multatuli constantly reminds us that he is writing a novel in the same way Italo Calvino reminds us that we are reading a novel. In the revised 1881 edition of the novel, Multatuli added an extensive network of endnotes, inserting everything from new details to personal opinions. He wanted the reader to know that the narrative is deeper than what exists on the page, and he did so in the same way that David Foster Wallace would in Infinite Jest more than a hundred years later.

You see, reader, I am searching for the answer to that how? Which is why my book is such a mixed bag. It’s a book of samples: take your pick.

While Multatuli should be commended for his efforts to restructure narrative, one must consider the downside of taking such risks—there are unfortunately many times where he sacrifices clarity for creativity. The narrators provide so much of their own commentary that it is often difficult to get situated as the reader is torn between the Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies. The novel itself is so restless that the reader is  never allowed to get immersed into a single narrative thread. To be frank, the style and structure of this novel read not quite unfinished, but a bit undercooked. For modern readers, there are many points where it may just seem easier to put down this book in favor of something a little more palatable. However, it is important to acknowledge that Multatuli wasn’t trying to write something beautiful and easy to swallow. There is no room for poetics in Max Havelaar because Multatuli’s goal was to inspire mutiny. The value in this novel is in what Multatuli says, not how he says it.

With that in mind, it’s crucial to understand Max Havelaar within its historical context: Multatuli may not have written with beauty, but he certainly wrote with contempt. When this novel was first published in 1860, European imperialism was more than three centuries old. The vast majority of Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East were all under European rule. Any voices that challenged this system were usually mild enough to be suppressed. Max Havelaar is the rare exception. At every opportunity, Multatuli describes the faults of Dutch imperialism. Frequently, the novel digresses into essayish passages against the Dutch that are often more gripping than the surrounding narrative. Critiques are written with surgical precision, always attacking the Dutch and sparing Indonesians. There are no slurs or stereotypes in this novel. There is nothing that paints native Indonesians as anything “less.” On the contrary, Multatuli treats the minutiae of Indonesian life with utmost respect to show his countrymen exactly how equal they are. Unlike Mark Twain, Multatuli was able to write about an oppressed group without including subtle linguistic cues that reinforce their marginalization.

Part of what makes Multatuli so adept as an exponent is his remarkable understanding of why. He does not settle for simply stating that oppression exists. Instead, he clearly explains how oppression is a systemic condition. Through Havelaar, we learn about the tactics of Dutch imperialism that perfected their hegemony. Dutch imperialists effectively made native Indonesians subjugate their compatriots. In the imperialist system, Dutch officials would appoint natives, called adipatis, to control smaller stretches of land. The Dutch would subsidize each adipati’s lifestyle, making them rich. If an average farmer had any grievances, they would direct them towards the newly aristocratic adipati. The Dutch washed their hands of blame because their subjects likely never saw a Dutchman’s face. Indonesians could never effectively rebel against the Dutch because they thought their problems were internal. The Dutch created a perfect system of exploitation, allowing them to create famines in Indonesia, home to some of the most fertile land on Earth. This is just one example of abuse. Multatuli gives us dozens.

Any turmoil that is impossible to conceal is blamed on a small gang of malefactors who will no longer cause any trouble now that overall contentment prevails. If want or famine has thinned the population, it was surely the result of crop failure, drought, rain, or something of the sort, and never of misgovernment.

Of course, any time the narrative begins to describe the atrocities taking place in Indonesia, Batavius Drystubble interjects. This is business after all, isn’t it? And his business is his life (it’s no coincidence that the capital of the Dutch East Indies was Batavia). If the Dutch do not maintain their control over Indonesia, then the coffee industry in the Netherlands will certainly collapse. For Drystubble, one of Max Havelaar’s narrators, imperialism is necessary for economic survival. Any element of the novel that critiques the Dutch system is most assuredly written by Ludwig Stern. Max Havelaar, as magnanimous as he is, becomes less important as the two narrators vie for power over the message. Stern calls for change, while Drystubble calls for stasis. Multatuli highlights how the complacency in existing systems causes change to lag, even in the face of necessity. In the context of the novel, Max Havelaar is a past tense character. Despite the progress he personally made, he did little to affect the Dutch system that Drystubble and Stern live in in the present. Multatuli did not merely want to proselytize, he wanted to show that progress is a generational process.

At the end of WWII, European imperialism was vulnerable enough to be toppled, and Indonesia was one of the first nations in this new world liberate itself. In August 1945, before the Pacific War had fully ceased, Indonesia declared independence. Sukarno, Indonesia’s first president, cited Max Havelaar as a personally influential text. Many Indonesians today agree, which is remarkable considering the novel wasn’t translated into Indonesian until 1972. Indonesia was a model for a path to independence that other nations could follow, and within the next three decades most of Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East would be politically decolonized. Much of the world outside of the United States understands Max Havelaar’s role in this domino effect. Reading this novel shows the absolute earliest stages of revolt in a way that’s still resonant. This is the undeniable importance of this novel. Few novels have had such a profound effect on global politics, and that feat ought not to be ignored. Max Havelaar may not be the most leisurely read, but, at the very least, it’s worth knowing the name.

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Author photo for Dylan CookDylan Cook is a student at the University of Pennsylvania where he studies English, with a concentration in creative writing, and Biology. He often reads and writes, and when he’s not doing either of these things, he can be found working in a lab, lost in the woods somewhere, or at dycook@sas.upenn.edu.

BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ, a novel by Alfred Döblin, reviewed by Tyson Duffy

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BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ
by Alfred Döblin
translated by Michael Hofmann
NYRB Classics, 458 pages
reviewed by Tyson Duffy

BERLIN-ALEXANDERPLATZ jacket coverA thought experiment: imagine that back during the peak prosperity years of the Obama Administration, with optimism at a high and unemployment dropping, that the good Dr. Oliver Sacks had unexpectedly published a despairing novel featuring a one-armed murdering pimp with white-supremacist leanings named Frank Beaverbrains.

This dull petty criminal wanders Manhattan—or some gentrifying urban center of high culture and national pride—selling tie stands and alt-right newsletters, roughing up prostitutes, shooting up bars, and volunteering for a number of disastrous heists before winding up a diminished nobody, an assistant porter at a small company with less than nothing left to him. The reading public, scandalized, intrigued, mystified, lines up at bookstores nationwide to make this strange novel a bestseller. Some years later, Trump rides a surge of white nationalism to the White House, earning the author a reputation as a kind of literary-political clairvoyant.

This, more or less, is the trick that Alfred Döblin, a doctor, writer, and German public figure, pulled off in 1929 with his publication of Berlin Alexanderplatz, released at the height of the so-called “Golden Years” of the Weimar Republic. Sometimes known as the “Stresemann era,” those too-few years in Germany before the dramatic rise of the Nazis were, for many Germans, seen as politically uneventful and even optimistic. When they weren’t swept up in a national sports craze, many had the time again to focus on family and work while German artists and scientists received a batch of major international awards that cemented the nation’s reputation as the cultural center of Europe.

Sebastian Haffner writes in Defying Hitler that between 1924 and 1929 “all was quiet, all was orderly; events took a tranquil course. […] There was an ample measure of freedom, peace, and order, everywhere the most well-meaning liberal-mindedness, good wages, good food, and a little political boredom.” Many middle-class Germans watched as the humiliations of the Great War and the political unrest of the early 1920s seemed to recede into the past. Although the thugs of the Nationalsozialistische had by then raised their ugly cries of blood and soil, the events of the Reichstag fire, the rise of Hitler, and the Anschluss were still years off and, to most, entirely unimaginable.

In this unique historical moment, Döblin’s story of Franz Biberkopf crashes into the scene, dripping with blood and rage. Released from Tegel prison in 1928 after serving four years for murdering his girlfriend, disoriented Biberkopf, representative of the forgotten underclasses, is thrown like a pipe bomb back into a Berlin society he barely understands. Although largely plotless, the tale centers on Biberkopf’s failed attempts to “go straight,” to give up his life of crime and redeem himself. He falls victim again and again to his own degeneracy, involving himself in the schemes of the duplicitous Reinhold, the criminal mastermind who becomes Biberkopf’s foe and foil. Filtering the story through a choppy literary expressionism—a German offshoot of modernism—Döblin presses the reader’s nose into the chaos of Berlin in 1928:

The police have blue uniforms now. He made his way off the tram unnoticed, mingled with the crowd. What was wrong? Nothing. Watch where you’re going or I’ll whop you. The crowds, the crowds. My skull needs grease, it must have dried out. All that stuff. Shoe shops, hat shops, electric lights, bars. People will need shoes to run around in, we had a shoe shop too, once, let’s not forget that. Hundreds of shiny windows, let them flash away at you, they’re nothing to be afraid of, it’s just that they’ve been cleaned, you can always smash them if you want. They were taking up the road at Rosenthaler Platz, he was walking on duckboards along with everyone else. You just mingle with the crowd, man, that’ll make everything better, then you won’t suffer.

The novel is a hyper-surreal fable, a fever dream replete with strange soliloquies, rotating points of view, shotgun blasts of violence, throes of eroticism, and dislocated intellectual ponderings. Images rise up and vanish; strange mini-dissertations on economics, science, and religion flash and reappear, virtually unchanged, dozens or hundreds of pages later. Discomfiting chunks of life—buildings, bar scenes, odd characters, scientific data—take shape awkwardly in the reader’s imagination as if coughed up from the haze of forgotten history. There is much repetition of ugly or seemingly unneeded nonsense words—widdeboom, chingdaradada, HOI HO HATZ—all of which is more or less the defining characteristic of Expressionism. “The book as a whole must not seem to be spoken,” Döblin once argued in his “Berlin Manifesto.” “It must seem to be concretely there” [emphasis mine]. In some sense, this book is not for mere reading but experiencing, confronting, combatting.

Like some other writers of his era, Döblin was attempting to break away from what was perceived to be the overly stylized, realistic literature of the nineteenth century, seen by some as ill equipped for an alienating, urbanizing, post-Great War society. (Werner Fassbinder’s mesmerizing fifteen-hour miniseries based on the book capitalizes on this aspect, with every rust-toned frame of the world’s longest German film crowded with ugly industrial machinery, seedy flashing lights, or some form of urban misery.) Along with Joyce, Musil, Woolf, Proust, and Dos Passos, Döblin sought to reshape literature itself. Yet unlike those writers, and despite the popularity of Berlin Alexanderplatz, Döblin never achieved the status some, such as Gunter Grass, felt he deserved. “Why then is this book today so little known, even in Germany?” laments Chris Godwin in an introduction to Döblin’s first novel, The Three Leaps of Wang Lun. Others also in awe of Döblin have asked similar questions, but even with this beautiful reissue by NYRB Classics, in a captivating translation by superstar Michael Hofmann, the stubborn fact of his continued underappreciation lingers on.

But in truth, it’s no big mystery. The literary mode of Expressionism, or what the author preferred to call “Döblinism” in literature simply doesn’t age well. Despite many good qualities, it feels like an antique, an oddly shaped tintype curio that, though it once caused a stir in its day, now sits on a museum shelf gathering dust. And since stories in books can never, of course, really be “concretely there,” as Döblin insisted—they can only be imagined—the reader is left to contend with a flood of contradictions, roving points of view, spurts of linguistic energy, and scenes of abject disgust that can make the book something of a challenge.

Watch yourself, Franz Biberkopf, you boozehound! Lying around in your room, nothing but sleeping and drinking and more sleeping!

Who cares what I get up to. If I feel like it, I can sleep in all day and not get up.—He bites his nails, groans, tosses his head from side to side on the sweaty pillow, blows his nose.—I can lie here till Doomsday if I like. If only the facking landlady would turn on the heat. Lazy cow, only thinks of herself.

His head turns away from the wall, on the floor by the bed is gruel, a puddle.—Spew. Must have been me. Stuff a man carries around in his stomach. Yuck. Spiders’ webs in the corners, you could catch mice in them. I want a drink of water. Who gives a shit. My back hurts. Come on in, Frau Schmidt. Between the spiders’ webs at the top of the picture (black dress, long in the tooth). She’s a witch (coming out of the ceiling like that). Yuck.

But in the final analysis, Döblin doesn’t belong to the company of Joyce and Dos Passos, nor the other German expressionists of his time, but with a strain of writing that can be called Superfluous Literature. In fiction, this mode originates with Turgenev’s defining Diary of a Superfluous Man and carries on through Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, Hunger by Knut Hamsun, Native Son by Richard Wright, and Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller—all of these stories of uneducated dullards who are emotionally and psychically disfigured by the absurd circumstances of a cannibalistic capitalism and a brutal modern context. In response, these Biberkopfs become cowards, adulterers, thieves, liars, murderers, criminals—lost souls of one kind or another. They reflect the horror of society back at you, begging readers to pay attention to a set of social realities that may have escaped notice. And perhaps if those middle-class Germans, lulled into docility by a brief period of political uneventfulness, had really heard Döblin’s message in 1929, Nazism may have had more difficulty sinking its claws into the heart Europe.

The final meaning of Superfluous Literature goes back to how we choose to shape our world, politically, socially, culturally. A man or woman who is not valued, never given opportunity, love, community, but simply made to scramble and stumble about in an attempt to survive and nothing more will become, as the Enlightenment thinker Adam Smith warned in 1776, “as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.

The final meaning of Superfluous Literature goes back to how we choose to shape our world, politically, socially, culturally. A man or woman who is not valued, never given opportunity, love, community, but simply made to scramble and stumble about in an attempt to survive and nothing more will become, as the Enlightenment thinker Adam Smith warned in 1776, “as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him, not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving of any generous, noble, or tender sentiment.” This is Biberkopf in a nutshell—misunderstanding life, misunderstanding himself, ignorant of generosity, nobility, unable to see any connection between himself and others.

Finally, as lost as he is, at the novel’s conclusion, our Biberkopf is not even allowed the relief of death. He is left a lonesome menial laborer and a lost soul. A superfluous modern man, wandering about, scratching his head at the meaninglessness of his fate.

Tyson Duffy is writer and editor who lives in Atlanta with his wife.

 

FAREWELL, AYLIS: A NON-TRADITIONAL NOVEL IN THREE WORKS by Akram Aylisl, translated by Katherine E. Young, reviewed by Ryan K. Strader

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FAREWELL, AYLIS: A NON-TRADITIONAL NOVEL IN THREE WORKS
by Akram Aylisli
translated by Katherine E. Young
Academic Studies Press, 316 pages

reviewed by Ryan K. Strader

Book jacket for "Farewell, Aylis: A Non-Traditional Novel in Three Works," depicting a barren mountainous countryside with houses

We don’t often read literature from Azerbaijan, for many reasons. It’s a small post-Soviet country that is hard to find on the map, with a Turkic language that makes finding translators difficult, and a government that still censors its writers Soviet-style. We don’t generally stroll down the aisle at a bookstore and discover the “Azeri” section. The only thing harder to find might be Georgian, and I’ll only say “might.” Probably most of us have no idea what novelists in Azerbaijan write about, what kind of social justice concerns they have, or what kind of risks those writers take to address those concerns.

The publication of Farewell, Aylis: A Non-Traditional Novel in Three Parts, by Academic Studies Press in November 2018, addresses these gaps in our literary exposure in several ways. For the first time we have Aylisli’s powerful and Nobel-worthy novel in English (he was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2014). Because Farewell, Aylis depicts ethnic violence against Armenians in Azerbaijan in the 1990s, Aylisli has been the target of censorship and currently lives under de facto house arrest in Baku. The publication of Farewell, Aylis could open up the Western canon to a powerful literary work, and open up Western writers’ understanding of Azeri writers’ political context. Part of our luck in receiving Farewell, Aylis is that Aylisli transposed much of it into Russian himself, making it accessible to more translators. This translation is by the poet Katherine E. Young, who was a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow for Farewell, Aylis, and has received several awards for her work translating contemporary Russian women poets.

We don’t often read literature from Azerbaijan, for many reasons. It’s a small post-Soviet country that is hard to find on the map, with a Turkic language that makes finding translators difficult, and a government that still censors its writers Soviet-style.

Farewell, Aylis is actually three novellas that cover several decades of social transition in Azerbaijan under authoritarianism. The historical circumstances depicted in the novellas are important context for the characters, but none of these novellas are “about” history or Azerbaijan per se. Each one is about an individual who is trying to understand morality and humaneness in a society where humane distinctions have ceased to exist.

The first novella is Yemen, and it is the only one that was published widely in Azerbaijan, in 1994. Yemen takes place during the Gorbachev years and follows Safaly, a teacher who goes on a trip to avoid the visit of some pesky relatives from Moscow. On the trip, he encounters Ali Ziya, an old friend whom he once accompanied on a pseudo-religious pilgrimage to Yemen.

Headshot of Akram Aylisli

Akram Aylisli

Past and present begin to bleed together as both men relive memories of the Yemen trip. On that trip, Safaly had gone on a walk one afternoon, and, finding Safaly missing from his room, Ali Ziya had reported to the Soviet embassy that Safaly was on his way to defect to America. This event seems comical to a Western reader, but in Soviet society denunciations and being reported to the Soviet authorities were not a small thing. For Safaly it is a revelation of the ways that the Soviet system has created a new type of individual, and that new individual has created a new society: “He suddenly understood: that which was called Soviet authority was also Ali Ziya—and so what if he drank tea, pouring it into the saucer and blowing on it.”

Yemen asks timeless questions about the ideological collusion between the individual and autocracy, and how it is that a society comprised of individuals can lose its moral bearing. When Safaly visits his home village, his uncle points out to him that the individual has to decide whether he will stand with or against his own society: “And are infidels really found only among Russians or Armenians? A kafir, nephew, isn’t distinguished by nationality, it comes from the essence of a person.” Society loses its moral bearing one person at a time, one Ali Ziya at a time.

The story can seem dream-like at moments, with Safaly’s most dramatic insights arriving during a fantastical whiskey-fueled conversation with astronaut Neil Armstrong, who passionately debates Safaly on whether national leaders are “far-sighted” or not. The writing reminded me of Moscow to the End of the Line by Yerofeyev, but Safaly’s philosophical trajectory is more cohesive and unfolds naturally and compellingly.

The second and most well-known novella in the trilogy is Stone Dreams. It was the publication of this story in a Moscow magazine in 2012 that Russian journalist Shura Burtin described as having “the effect of a bomb exploding,” and resulted in Aylisli’s being censored, the public burning of his books, and the revoking of his travel privileges.

Headshot of Katherine E. Young

Katherine E. Young

The protagonist of Stone Dreams is Sadai Sadygly, a well-known Azerbaijani actor who goes for a walk one morning and comes across a group of boys kicking an elderly Armenian to death. When he intervenes to save the Armenian, the boys beat him so badly that he winds up in the hospital. Unconscious in the hospital, Sadai relives several scenes from his childhood in the village of Aylis, as well as several scenes from his professional life in the city of Baku. Both strands of memory reveal the disintegration of relationships between the Azerbaijanis and the Armenians that he has known, and the moral frustration that Sadai has experienced as friendships and relationships have responded to ethnic and religious tension.

In the hospital, Sadai is attended by two men whose stories become interlaced with his. One is Dr. Farzani, haunted by his attempts to live a moral Muslim life, which resulted sadly in the break up of his family. The other is Dr. Abasaliev, a retired psychiatrist who has been slowly translating an ancient text related to the founding of the town of Aylis, and has discovered that, contrary to the popularly disseminated narrative, Aylis has Armenian roots. “If a single candle were lit for every Armenian killed violently, the radiance of those candles would be brighter than the light of the moon,” Dr. Abasaliev claims, while reading the history of Aylis to the unconscious Sadai and the attendant Dr. Farzani.

Stone Dreams is about the role of the “average” individual in a time of moral and spiritual confusion. None of the characters are perfect, but they struggle to understand how to honor their conscience in a time where the conflicts run so deep that it is almost impossible to live a truly moral life, before one’s family, one’s nation, one’s God. All of them ask fundamental questions about what their actions mean, and what they can do versus what they are powerless to do. Like most good writing that poses pressing questions about human nature, the story does not offer any neat answers or conclusions, but shows us what it means to grapple with these questions.

It is no surprise that after the reaction to the publication of Stone Dreams, the third novella never made it into print in Azerbaijan. A Fantastical Traffic Jam is magical realism in the style of Gabriel García Márquez, and takes place in a fictional country called Allahabad, ruled by a corrupt dictator. The protagonist is Elbey, a government worker who has known the dictator for most of his life—the two of them come from the same rural area, and their families are intertwined in surprising ways. In the tradition of Orwell or Bradbury, Elbey works for the Operations Headquarters for the Restoration of Fountains and Waterfalls in the Name of Progress and Pluralism, an “enigmatic organization” whose name “gave off the aroma of a splendid bouquet of lies.” Elbey is facing several professional and personal crises which cause him to scheme, manipulate, and try to out-think his dictator employer (something which isn’t easy to do) in an effort to avoid being killed…or avoid being induced to kill himself. The story moves back and forth between Elbey’s current day relationship with “the Master” (as the dictator is often referred to), Elbey’s childhood, and the Master’s childhood and rise to power. Unlike the other novellas, this one has a few epigraph-style lines from Aylisli at the beginning of each section, that point out certain important aspects of the text: It’s not meant to be a tale where each fictitious person has a real-life counterpart, but the story is meant to illustrate the way that “glutinous regimes devour themselves.” Like the other novellas, A Fantastical Traffic Jam explores relationships as a way of showing how greed and manipulation on a national level reproduce themselves in the lives of the people who serve the regime.

Farewell, Aylis holds many gifts for its reader. The novellas are each stylistically unique but have a historical and philosophical sequence that both unfold and dialogue with each other powerfully.

A Fantastical Traffic Jam was probably my favorite of the three for its stylistic inventiveness and use of irony. One day I’ll teach a class on tiny magical novels that blow up when read, and I can add Aylisli to my syllabus alongside Bulgakov and Zoschenko.

Farewell, Aylis holds many gifts for its reader. The novellas are each stylistically unique but have a historical and philosophical sequence that both unfold and dialogue with each other powerfully. The characters are realistic: not ideologues, not angels or rogues. The translation is smooth and rhythmic, and the stories maintain their internal thematic consistency in complex ways that speak to the chemistry between the novel and the translator. A reader doesn’t need to know anything about Azerbaijan in order to contact the world of the novels, because the characters are relatable and they capture what we need to know in their stories.

So often, academic presentations of literature create a false partition between the artistic and the academic: the reader can only encounter the art after wading through 800 essays, which tell the reader what to think and how to be appropriately impressed by the writing, and each of the essays cites 400 sources. This volume doesn’t do that.

While this non-traditional work is wonderful reading, the volume that Academic Studies Press has put together is unique in a few other ways. Because I’m an academic, I should be able to say this without offending too many people: It’s so nice to see an academic press present a powerful piece of art in a way that honors both its artistic value and its academic value. So often, academic presentations of literature create a false partition between the artistic and the academic: the reader can only encounter the art after wading through 800 essays, which tell the reader what to think and how to be appropriately impressed by the writing, and each of the essays cites 400 sources. This volume doesn’t do that. There is an introduction written by journalist Joshua Kucera that is helpful and readable, intelligent without being abstruse, and it doesn’t give away everything that happens. The novellas come next. A reflective essay by Aylisli ,which I’ll pair with a Solzhenitsyn essay when I teach writing next year, follows. It is a powerful—and somewhat magical (Márquez again)—piece. Aylisli reflects on his experiences as a writer, dealing with censorship, what it’s like to watch people burn his books, and his poignant relationship with his hometown of Aylis, from which he draws his pen name (his real last name is Naibov). There is a copy of a speech that Aylisli was supposed to give in Italy in 2016 but could not because his travel privileges had been revoked. And there is an afterward by Andrew Wachtel that considers how Aylisli fits in the larger tradition of Soviet literature and explains his relevance to our world today far better than I ever could.

The volume is unique because the novel is given adequate context, including the writer’s reflections, but the reader is also allowed adequate intellectual room to encounter the writing as a novel, as a story, without being overwhelmed with historical context or theoretical significance. I personally hope this starts a trend for publishing non-Western text in translation in volumes like this. Why shouldn’t we see more significant non-Western writing, and why shouldn’t we enjoy both responding to the stories that come from other parts of the world and learning some of the relevant context, without being overwhelmed by the context?

In a 2014 article, Dr. Mikhail Mamedov of George Mason University pointed out that when it comes to historical moments of conflict and oppression, “literary works are often more important” than historical monographs “because they reach a broader audience.” Stone Dreams, he argues, is the “most important novel to emerge so far” in the literary response to the conflict between the Azerbaijanis and the Armenians. He describes it as “a novel of repentance—and perhaps a gesture towards reconciliation,” a lovely description that is also challenging for all writers. Farewell, Aylis is not a reactive novel intended to prove any ideology right or wrong. Ultimately, it is a work of the heart and a work of love and acceptance for other people, no matter their history. Aylisli is setting a timely example for how to be a writer and what kind of literary offering to make, in a time of cultural strain.

Ryan K. StraderHeadshot of Ryan K. Strader earned a B.A. in Russian Literature from George Mason University, an M.A.T. from Clayton State University, and a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Composition from Georgia State University. She writes about post-Soviet writers, qualitative research methods, and writing pedagogy. She lives south of Atlanta with her husband and two kids, where she gets to read, write, and teach every day.

OPTIC NERVE, a novel by Maria Gainza, translated by Thomas Bunstead, reviewed by Justin Goodman

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OPTIC NERVE
by María Gainza
translated by Thomas Bunstead
Catapult, 208 Pages

reviewed by Justin Goodman

Optic Nerve book jacketOur bodies are both the fundament and the fundamental threat to our experience of the world. For artists and art lovers, this corporeality more often induces terror than acceptance: cancer’s ghostly invocations in Judith Kitchen’s The Circus Train, retrograde amnesia’s ever-recurring retractions in Christopher Nolan’s Memento, visceral depictions of the mythological in Goya’s Black Paintings. The referentiality of invoking such a list is what Argentinian art critic María Gainza reflects upon in her debut novel, Optic Nerve.

Written from the perspective of an unnamed Argentinian art critic, Optic Nerve flits from her present to her childhood memories, to her culture’s memories, in order to develop a lineage between self and cultural artifacts, become an optic nerve transmitting information from the external to the internal. The most representative instance of this transmission takes the form of a historical moment remembered by the narrator: while Señora Alvear, “once upon a time the famous soprano Regina Pacini,” sits at her dinner table beneath a painting by French animal painter Alfred de Dreux, “her eye travels back and forth constantly between the deer in the picture, still alive, and the other one, dead and served to them in lean cuts.” Optic Nerve spends much of its time traveling back and forth like this.

This semi-flux state is built into the novel’s architecture. The narrator’s present tense gives way to her past tense gives way to a historical artist’s past (including the aforementioned Alfred de Dreux, among others). First-person gives way to second-person gives way to third-person. A few pages in, one might feel trapped in quicksand. A meditation on how Courbet’s The Stormy Sea is the visual equivalent of Marcus Aurelius’ saying, “Let the universe decide,” becomes the narrator reminiscing about watching Point Blank (described, never named) late at night with its final shot echoing Courbet’s waves “thick as milk.”

Headshot of María Gainza

María Gainza

In her impulse for nesting thoughts, to move away from the present world while trapped in a mirror-like compulsion to reflect, there’s something Kafkaesque about it. A world in which the very act of struggling against the unknown strengthens its hold on you. Quicksand. One might find Josef K beside Optic Nerve’s narrator in the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. That her struggle-thoughts are connected to her experiences with the associated art pieces and their histories, leading one to realize the narrator herself is like a modern Señora Alvear. Fitting, since it leads one to fellow Argentinian Jose Luis Borges’ famous phrase from “Kafka and His Precursors” as well: “The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors.”

Despite what all this might suggest, Gainza rarely exceeds descriptive materiality. Be it her reporter’s tone or Courbet’s waves; what is visibly present is everything there is. Even as she ventures into metaphor, her language remains marked by the physical. Remarkably, it’s through metaphorical confusion that this comes across best. The unnamed narrator says of the two stone lions at the entrance of the National Museum of History in America, “I felt they could watch a person be impaled and still show no emotion.” This, of course, is illogical. Stone doesn’t feel. Yet the brutal bodiness of impaling exposes how compulsive this imaginative reflection has become, making golems of the stone lions.

It’s unclear if this intentional or translational, although the clarity of Thomas Bunstead’s translations of Enrique Vila-Matas’ A Brief History of Portable Literature and Juan Villoro’s God Is Round suggest it is a quirk in María Gainza’s writing. In another off-putting, physicalizing metaphor, the narrator compares herself to “a climbing out of an excavation” that finds “the final trio of bones” she has needed to piece together “the creature.” This ambiguity serves to strengthen the overall impression that’s central to the novel’s context, hence its shape: art can only be understood through context, through each person’s precursors. It is, one might say, in the eye of the beholder, which is where the haunting begins.

History—personal, historical, cultural, economic—haunts the body. The weight of the Kafkaesque can only be explained as hauntological, as what British cultural theorist Mark Fisher describes as “the debts to the past, the failure of the future.” This is most explicit in Optic Nerve’s depiction of the painter Hubert Robert who, searching for “real ruins,” ended up unmasking “a society that no longer saw itself living in a time of continuity, but rather a time of contingency.” Bracketing this meditation on Hubert Robert’s meditation is the story of the narrator’s mother’s mania: her compulsion to retreat to her grandmother’s house, her hoarding of seven sofas and “Sotheby’s catalogues dating back to 1972,” and “a lifelong obsession…to disseminate the ‘correct’ history of our country.”

Due to its colonial history, Argentina becomes such a site of contingency as Hubert Robert painted. All that’s left to the deteriorating body politic and the physical body is the preservation of a “correct’ history” of shared pasts, artists, and experiences such as Optic Nerve puts together. A history that tries to remember that grandmother’s house is just that, and not the US Embassy it had become by the narrator’s time. When we learn that Señora Alvear’s saccades to and from Alfred de Dreux’s painting is the ancestral history of our narrator, it highlights the walled perimeters of her world.

And as there is no fluidity between walls and the outside world, except the faint rains of recollection, the novel is ultimately claustrophobic. An initial comparison might be Ernest Sabato’s The Tunnel wherein Castel, the murderous painter-narrator, details his life and failed love from the confines of prison and his tunneled mind. Yet Optic Nerve is less hopeful. Castel knew his smallness, saw the walls. The closest analog would be Teju Cole’s Open City wherein Julius, a peripatetic psychiatric fellow, wanders freely the “palimpsest…written, erased, rewritten” of New York collecting various stories only to discover he’d erased his own. The absence of clear boundaries is a false freedom from the past, in the same way rain inevitably floods the reader and Gainza’s narrator.

And that Open City and Optic Nerve’s narrator are flaneurs is vital: they wander as one would look in a mirror, piecing themselves together and the world. When she’s diagnosed with thymus cancer, the Argentine critic considers how “for two years I’d had the sense that something was wrong inside me.” What compelled her against consulting a doctor? She ignored brokenness, didn’t see her walls. One has the sense that these are, instead of flaneurs, the ghost of flaneurs. The haunting of “a society that no longer saw itself living in a time of continuity, but rather a time of contingency.”

Whereas Sabato’s madman is passionately possessed, the clear-eyed wanderers merely become the ghost of their own haunting. Such is the horrible strength of a novel like Optic Nerve. It’s deficiencies—its clash of metaphor and physical, its jarring mix of domestic narrative and art criticism—don’t obscure its purpose. When the narrator visits the ophthalmologist for the first time, she attempts to use the seeing eye chart exactly eighteen inches away, as that was what “Rothko claimed was the optimal distance from which to view his work.” She transforms the eye chart into a painting, transforms her health into an aesthetic experience. She is trapped in the mansion of her mind, looking between the painted deer and a deer’s lean cuts. Later she looks at a Rothko poster in his office and feels “a clear sense of the brutal solitude of this slab of sweating flesh that is me.”

Fittingly, she had told the doctor that she was going to have an eye operation as a kid but was a “bundle of nerves.” Trapped in such “sweating flesh,” haunted by past debts and future foreclosure, the novel ends with the narrator quoting Jules Renard: “How monotonous snow would be if God had not created crows.” At this she feels “poetic joy,” but forgets its referent, as if a ghost, unable to escape herself.

Headshot of Justin Goodman and his catJustin Goodman earned his B.A. in Literature from SUNY Purchase. His writing–published, among other places, in Cleaver Magazine, TwoCities Review, and Prairie Schooner–is accessible from justindgoodman.com. His chapbook, The True Final Apocalypse, is forthcoming from Local Gems.

ALL FOR NOTHING, a novel by Walter Kempowski, reviewed by Tyson Duffy

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ALL FOR NOTHING
by Walter Kempowski
translated by Anthea Bell
NYRB Classics, 368 pages
reviewed by Tyson Duffy

All for Nothing book jacket featuring abstract pastel artworkEvery self-professed American optimist should read the oeuvre of Walter Kempowski—not that they ever will. The chronicler of brutality was never given a fair shake even by his fellow Germans, and despite strong book sales, by literary award committees. Kempowski had plenty of reasons to be angry—angry at his Nazi father whom he betrayed, at what the agonized Sebastian Haffner once called the “moral inadequacy of the German character,” at the literary world for snubbing him, and at every center of power involved in WWII: the Russians, British, Germans, Europe itself.

The triumphant Soviets—without whom WWII could not have been won—were responsible for imprisoning Kempowski as well as his innocent and elderly mother. The Allies, whom Kempowski had risked his life to aid, did nothing to help him once the war was over. He rotted in prison for eight years of a twenty-five-year sentence and never saw his mother again. “Again and again,” he wrote, not long before his death and less than two years after the Iraq War began, “there will be pictures of war and bloodshed, with no end to show in sight. The skyscrapers are already burning.” He must have believed that there was no reliable morality emanating from any single direction, that people—their militaries, governments, communities, and families—are all susceptible to self-serving lies, casual violence, and solipsism, in addition to occasional kindness and unexpected generosity. But while the decency is unpredictable and short-lived, brutality remains constant. This being so, perhaps life really is all for nothing.

Kempowski was a man who walked the middle path, despite outrage from all sides, stepping back to objectively examine the nature of state-sanctioned persecution from its fulminating epicenter out to the blood-spattered periphery, exempting no single perspective. Lamenting the extermination of millions of faceless people in concentration camps is too simplistic, he once suggested, so he decided in his massive compilation Echolot (partially translated into English as Swanson 1945) to include every last letter and diary entry he could find of Germans in the final days of the war—barbers, bank directors, Jews, Nazi officers, Thomas Mann, Eva Braun, Hitler himself, and hundreds of others. These “particles” amassed together in thousands of pages created a psycho-socio-political map of an era, an attempt at recreating what Lionel Trilling would have called the “huge, unrecorded hum of implication” of that particular milieu. He continued this same work, in a different way, in his novels.

“When humanity suffers, it should be recorded in literature,” Kempowski states toward the end of All for Nothing, a novel focusing on the von Globig family and their self-delusions as the Russian incursion of 1945 creeps forward to smash their crumbling Georgenhof estate, leaving all of them dead except for twelve-year-old Peter. Up until then, despite living within one-hundred kilometers of the Russian front, the von Globig family was busy personifying the idealized Nazi family, hanging icons of the Fuhrer around the house and heaping derision on their Polish house workers. But with the husband, Eberhard, off in Italy doing his duty for the Reich, the attractive, flighty, and superficial Katharina von Globig finds herself vulnerable to the persuasions of a local pastor who wants her to house a fugitive Jew for a night. Her decision to do this leads to the destruction of the von Globigs—prison for Katharina, suicide for Eberhard, and orphanhood for young Peter.

This novel is a painting by Bosch or Goya, every sentence a carefully placed stroke creating a beautifully detailed but two-dimensional depiction of life in a violent netherworld.

Nothing about this plot device, however, seems as impressive as the impression of that unrecorded hum of Trilling’s coinage. This novel is a painting by Bosch or Goya, every sentence a carefully placed stroke creating a beautifully detailed but two-dimensional depiction of life in a violent netherworld. The prose is broken up into short sections of a few paragraphs each, descriptive, simplistic, quizzical, and imbuing the writing with an ironic Zen shapelessness. Meanwhile, what seems to be the real heart of the story is carried to the Georgenhof, piece by piece, in a string of transient guests—a political economist, a Nazi violinist, a painter, a band of fleeing refugees. These strangers and their interactions with the von Globig family are described with inscrutable cool, the prose communicating the unique quality of tension and misplaced optimism that must have existed in an ennobled German estate in the outskirts of a nation-state on the verge of collapse.

Headshot of Walter Kempowski

Walter Kempowski

Kempowski was often criticized for pulling back when insight or judgment was perceived to be required of a character in his fiction, and I must say the criticism is not unwarranted. Although the excuse for Katharina’s unexpected choice seems to be that she was bored and in pursuit of excitement, her decision to harbor a Jewish refugee never comes off as entirely fitting. Would the amoral wife of a Wehrmacht officer living across the street from a Nazi official do such a thing? Would anyone even think to ask her? On the other hand, the most repulsive character of all, the local Nazi tyrant Drygalski, is given his moment of redemption at the end of the book, making a self-sacrifice that comes out of the blue. What are we to make of this? As the great wave of fighter-jet-and-motor-car modernity sweeps across the horse paths of East Prussia, the only casualties are the innocent, the elderly, the oppressed—the youthful Nazi soldiers get to sit around fires, cracking jokes. You could almost be forgiven for forgetting that the end of the WWII was actually a defeat for the forces of wanton evil. Although young Peter survives, he is so traumatized by his experiences that he entertains himself by looking at his dead Auntie’s blood under his trusty microscope, finding it to be a “crusted substance with nothing mysterious about it.” But if you’ve ever looked at blood or any living stuff under a microscope, you could hardly agree with that description.

Kempowski’s novel confirmed for me the bias of the unsafe middle path—when you draw back to view the world of destruction from such a great height, you’re liable to overlook a thing or two about human beings.

Do we live in a world in which admirable deeds are only carried out by awful people, and in which admirable people do nothing at all? It’s not the world I recognize. Kempowski’s novel confirmed for me the bias of the unsafe middle path—when you draw back to view the world of destruction from such a great height, you’re liable to overlook a thing or two about human beings. For one thing, their blood is no crusted substance but full of mystery. For another, the private madness and societal destructions of war do not represent the sole achievement of humankind.

At the same time, Kempowski’s depiction of what war does to a society cannot be brushed aside, its stubborn persistence in life is too central to our species. We are, perhaps, and despite our temporary decencies, a thuggish and warring animal with only self-preservation in our hearts. Perhaps that is true, but, despite it all, it’s by no means provable as the only truth.

I once had the pleasure of having dinner with Eddy L. Harris, the underappreciated American author of Mississippi Solo. He spent his life as the target of abuse from all sides of the American racial divide, particularly for his book Native Stranger, prompting his self-exile to France where he now lives. He seemed to me a kindly, Buddhistic fellow who had done the admirable work of pursuing truth at all costs, a thankless task. I asked him why walking the middle path seemed to be such a controversial choice. “Life is a turf war,” he said, with the tang of strong resentment. Those who presume to walk in the no man’s land between two opponents, critiquing the action on all fronts, can expect to gain nothing in the way of allies and everything of denigration from a polarized public. To be sentimental about this duty would be sheer dereliction, since, as Carl Jung once said, “Sentimentality is the superstructure erected upon brutality.”

Post-1945 Germans couldn’t quite countenance Kempowski’s implicit condemnation of the Nazis, and post-1989 Germans felt he was too soft on them. But there is a certain type of person, like Kempowski, like Harris, who ranges too far from the action to be categorizable in typical literary or social terms. They attempt to see fate and life through the eyes of God. And though, because of this, they may not be quite able to capture the individual goodness and nature of ordinary people and communities, they nonetheless have a message for us. How you respond to that grim tiding depends, unfortunately, on which side of the fight you are on.

Headshot of Tyson DuffyTyson Duffy is a writer, editor, teacher, and translator. He’s a former Fulbright Fellow and a current fellow at the CUNY Graduate Center Writers’ Institute. His most recent fiction appears in the Carolina Quarterly Review. He lives with his wife in New York City.

ADIÓS TO MY PARENTS, a novel by Héctor Aguilar Camín, reviewed by Kim Livingston

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ADIÓS TO MY PARENTS
by Héctor Aguilar Camín
translated by Chandler Thompson
Schaffner Press, 304 pages
reviewed by Kim Livingston

Adios to my Parent book jacket; red and white hands reaching for each otherAdiós To My Parents is a universal family story. Although the setting (Mexico, Belize, Guatemala) is unfamiliar to me—I’ve lived in the Chicago suburbs all of my fifty-one years and, regrettably, have taken only one Spanish class—the people in this book are so richly drawn that I know them instantly. For example, I recognize the author’s maternal grandmother, a cranky old woman who’s come for a rare visit: “When she’s upset with [my younger brother], she says: ‘I’m going to crack you one.’ By which she means she’ll slap him, but to Luis Miguel this sounds like sugar cracker, and he replies: ‘So let me have it.’” Every family has these stories, the ones we bring out when we’re all together again, so we can laugh at the old days and remember those who are gone.

But Aguilar goes deeper than most do at the kitchen table. As readers we learn about his grandmother’s childhood in Spain, her move to Cuba, and her life-long expectation that she’ll end up back in Spain. We know that for decades she sends her valuable linens to her family back home in preparation for her return. Eventually, we learn about her migraines and her husband’s unwillingness to pay for the healthcare that could save her decades of pain. We know that her husband is a serial cheater with dozens of children by other women. And we learn that she never gets back to her beloved Spain.

Each character has a compelling narrative arc, often focusing on the ways that youthful aspirations clash with adulthood. Youth, Aguilar writes, may be “nothing more” than “a delirium of believing, a future agreed upon before the world molds it into reality.”

Headshot of Héctor Aguilar Camín

Héctor Aguilar Camín

As the title suggests, the book centers on Aguilar’s parents. He opens by describing a photo of them standing on a beach in 1944 at the beginning of their life together. He shows us their promise, their love for each other, and then tells us right off that after they married and had five children, the father abandoned the family and disappeared for thirty-six years. When both parents are in their eighties, the father reappears, contacting Aguilar to ask for money. In the first chapter Aguilar writes, “I have no idea who this hunchbacked little man is when he greets me in the shadows of the entrance hall.”

Soon after, his parents both wind up in the same hospital at the same time, one floor apart. On a plot level, we’re in suspense, reading to discover how the family will respond to the father’s reappearance after all these years. The central question of this memoir, though, asks, What happened to the father’s youthful promise and charisma? Why did he leave his family? And how does a son whose father left him make peace with that?

To explore these questions, the author invites us in to the Aguilar Camín clan by recounting his grandparents’ journeys from Spain and Cuba, then to Chetumal, Mexico, just north of Belize in the state of Quintana Roo, where the family settles. Aguilar, a novelist, journalist, and historian, creates here something like a mash-up of Studs Terkel and Willa Cather, assembling his chronicle from collected stories and artifacts. Admitting the limitations of his own memory (“less an archive than a series of insights, a migration of butterflies”), he relies on outside sources such as legal documents, letters, newspaper archives, personal interviews, even his brother’s autobiographical poetry.

He comes at each event from multiple, often opposing, angles. The main conflict is between Aguilar’s father and grandfather. Everybody has a different opinion on what happened. His mother “sees betrayal on a biblical scale in the tale of a son ruined by a father’s greed.” His dad “paints a more prosaic picture of a father berating his sons for their shortcomings.” The truth, the author says, “is derived from the sum of the contradictions.” So he lets his characters speak, sometimes quoting them for pages at a time. He doesn’t take a side, even calls out his own prejudices (“I must […] admit to my heretofore negative and twisted opinion of Trini”). Because of this objective tone, we trust him as a narrator, and we see people in their full complexities, with action weighed against intent.

Throughout the memoir, Aguilar shows a thorough effort to understand his family’s geopolitical landscape, which is admirable. At times, though, the layered details were a bit much for me. In one case he takes three pages to explain how Othón P. Blanco—“A few words must be said about the man who gives the street its name”—founded the town of Payo Obispo, later renamed Chetumal; Aguilar begins with Blanco’s birth in 1868, takes us through his army career then provides detail on the Mayan uprising of 1895 and the resulting boundary treaty of Mexico and Belize, which leads us to Blanco’s use of a pontoon boat to protect the Mexican border, and on to his mild scandal with his wife before he marries her, and we end up a century later at the statue commemorating the city’s founding. Although he makes clear connections between the history lesson and his family, the first third of the book was difficult to read. Honestly, if I weren’t writing this review, I might have put it down.

But I am so glad I didn’t.

Once the foundation is built, the story takes off. Aguilar proves to be a competent guide, reminding us along the way of significant details we’d learned earlier, like previous-episode scenes before a TV show, allowing the reader to relax and enjoy the ride.

And, yes, the details of place are important. Landscape builds character. We see this clearly when Aguilar describes his mother and her family coming to Mexico for the first time:

They walk through Chetumal with visions of Cuba still fresh in their memories. […]The sky may be the same diaphanous blue, and the trees may be similar, but other things are not: the deadly monotony of the coastline; this down-at-the-heels town whose one saving grace is the wide, ramrod straight streets butting up against the jungle.

Only a few of Chetumal’s 7,900 residents were born here. The rest, like the Cuban girls and their parents, came from somewhere else. The town has no drinking water or electricity. Nor does the unpainted wooden house with a tin roof where the girls and their mother are obliged to settle in the day they arrive. […] In time the women will fill the place with flowers to delight the eye and stories to brighten their lives, but for the time being there are only cots, rooms without doors, boxes with crumbs of cement in them where the men keep their clothes and their tools.

Chetumal is where Aguilar’s parents meet and build a life together, where their future is bright. When Hurricane Janet forces 10-year-old Aguilar to leave the family home in Chetumal and move to Mexico City with just his aunt and siblings, Aguilar, who uses present tense for each stage of his life, making each one effectively part of the present, says, “I now think of our family as a kind of non-family without grandparents or a father, without the cousins, aunts, uncles and all the relatives whose longstanding friendships sink a family’s roots in a particular place. Being so far from Chetumal casts a shadow over our household.”

Over the years, Mexico City, too, becomes home. It is there that his mother, Emma, and her sister, Luisa, take center stage as matriarchs. The two of them are delightful to read. Aguilar strikes the perfect tone of gracious admiration with the occasional poke at their old-fashioned ways. In July 1969, Aunt Luisa approaches a large gathering in front of the TV in the sister-owned boardinghouse:

“Can’t anyone tell me what you’re all looking at?” she demands. Her voice crashes over the rapt audience like a wave on the shore, and the voice of an announcer trembling with feigned emotion fills the room. “We’re watching a man land on the moon,” someone says.

“Someone’s landing on the moon?” Luisa snickers. “Who says? You people will believe anything!”

“It’s the moon landing, Doña Luisa. The astronauts have landed on the moon.”

“The moon? The moon? For God’s sake!” Luisa exclaims. “The Gringos are filming it in the desert of Sonora.”

“On the moon, Doña Luisa.”

“The moon the Gringos built to cast their spell over the rest of humanity,” Doña Luisa asserts with an epic sneer. “The moon they stuck in your mouth with their fingers and you swallowed whole. Get out! You’re as gullible as a bunch of old women.”

Emma and Aunt Luisa love to tell stories about their lives, creating and maintaining the family mythos. Aguilar interviewed them, at their kitchen table, in 1991: “They hesitate at first, but soon they’re off on a freeform reminiscence. They butt in on each other constantly, adding details, insisting on corrections, or debating conflicting versions of the same or similar events. Some two hours later, they’ve laid the groundwork for the family history which takes up half this book.”

Throughout his life, Aguilar’s mother and aunt are a source of joy, reason, and pragmatism.  They also, though, believe that Aguilar’s father has been cursed by a witch. They come to believe he was born to fail. Like many of their peers, they trust the fortunes told by clairvoyants or “spiritual advisors.” Aguilar, a modern and educated man, is respectful of the women’s beliefs and searches for cultural significance in the phenomenon: “Necromancers and palmists soothe the city’s troubled souls. They satisfy the yearnings of thousands to feel less alone, to be consoled, to be protected against the whims of fate.”

It’s toward the end of the book, when he reflects on the long lives of his mother and aunt that Aguilar, the objective historian, shifts from artifact to emotion:  “Here I reach a point of narrative breakdown. My memory is becalmed in a narrow space where the sisters are neither old nor young, and that’s how I picture them for a very long time. […] All of a sudden the fortyish sisters who endure my teenage years are the seventy-year-olds who spoil my children.”

On their own, the women had raised Aguilar and his four siblings. They’d built a dressmaking business and run a boardinghouse, hunched over sewing machines late into the night. In the scene that Aguliar says typifies the fortitude of Emma, his mother, “hurricane-force winds batter the planks that comprise the front wall of our house in Chetumal. Emma rushes at the endangered wall and holds the boards in place with her bare hands […] keeping the catastrophe that threatens her house at bay despite the mindless fury of the storm.”

While the women are steady and strong, the men in this memoir are materialistic and self-absorbed. Aguilar’s description of his paternal grandfather is profound. Don Lupe, after the costly hurricane, sits cross-legged on the floor counting his money, “like a Buddha before an open safe”:

He’s flattening and stacking bills wrinkled and dirtied by the flood. […] He’s in his shirtsleeves, unkempt with his hair uncombed. Without his gold-rimmed glasses, his linen suits and the inevitable necktie, bereft of his alligator shoes and Panama hat, he has the unwashed look of a true peasant. There are corns on his feet, and his thick fingers hover over the bills with a sadness that exposes the roots of avarice in its most primitive form: want.

Acting out macho plays for power and pride, the men fritter away the family’s money, their loyalties to each other waxing and waning through the years. The one constant allegiance is of Aguilar’s father, Hector, whose deep-rooted ambition is to make his own father, Don Lupe, proud. But Don Lupe cheats Hector, stealing his lumber company out from under him, and giving the company to his other son, who runs it into the ground. Hector is crushed, not from the betrayal but from his own failure to gain Don Lupe’s respect. Hector doesn’t want his wife and children to see his shame, his weakness, so he abandons them.

In a kind of poetic symmetry, Aguilar’s own identity is, of course, bound up in the shadow of his father, “whose absence,” he admits, “has been my lifelong torment.” In the memoir’s final chapters, Aguilar struggles to reconcile his bitterness with the pity he feels for the shriveled, senile old man who has returned to his life. Ultimately this story is about compassion and forgiveness, about cherishing the stories, and the story-tellers, themselves. A model for all of us, in all of our wonderful, exasperating, conflicted families.

Headshot of Kim R. LivingstonSince 1993 Kim R. Livingston has taught English at Waubonsee Community College in Sugar Grove, Illinois. Recently she began working on her own writing again, inching toward an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Bay Path University. Now that her kids are mostly grown, she and her husband, after being cat people their whole lives, are helicopter parents to a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever.

SACRED DARKNESS: THE LAST DAYS OF THE GULAG, a narrative by Levan Berdzenishvili, reviewed by Ryan K. Strader

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SACRED DARKNESS: THE LAST DAYS OF THE GULAG
by Levan Berdzenishvili
translated from the Russian by Brian James Baer and Ellen Vayner
Europa editions, 240 pages
reviewed by Ryan K. Strader

Sacred Darkness book jacket; three rusty mugs hanging from nails on a blue wall“As with any book, my book had its own special fate—it was born by mistake,” claims Levan Berdzenishvili, in the opening chapter of Sacred Darkness. Levan wakes up in a hospital, sick and disoriented, with a high fever. He realizes he has some debts to pay before he can jaunt off to Hades. Levan is a specialist in Greek literature, so he doesn’t talk of “dying.” He refers to “my departure to Hades.”

Fortunately, Levan recovers from his fever and decides he has to deal with those debts. His debts have names: Misha, Borya, Vadim, and many others Levan knew when he was a political prisoner in the Soviet Gulag in 1983-1987. (The “Gulag” is a Soviet system of forced labor camps, where people convicted of everything from petty theft to political crimes were sent.)

The first person Levan wants to write about is Arkady Dudkin: “I set pen to paper (or rather, glued myself to a keyboard) not to write a great work of literature or to search for ‘lost time’ (Ah, Proust!) but to rescue a character who was about to disappear. I was fighting to rescue Arkady Dudkin. If it weren’t for me, Arkady would be lost, and no one would ever know that he’d existed and that his life had meaning.” Levan “rescues” fifteen people in Sacred Darkness. Each individual gets their own chapter. While Levan is always the narrator, his recollections of his incarceration are organized around the personalities and stories of these individuals, which he fears will disappear if he does not record what he knows about them. Of course, we learn much about Levan when he writes about others—he is witty, literary, and philosophical. We also learn about the complex—and sometimes comical—web of relationships that formed in the Dubravny prison in the mid-eighties.

Headshot of Levan Berdzenishvili

Levan Berdzenishvili

Levan is Georgian, a non-Slavic ethnic and linguistic group in the Caucasus region by the Black Sea. Sacred Darkness was originally published in the Georgian language, in 2010. It made its way into Russian, and now appears in English for the first time, translated from the Russian by Brian James Baer and Ellen Vayner. Thanks to the Soviet penchant for prisons, there are many extant Gulag memoirs, the most famous being Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, and many of them waiting to be translated. Levan’s book, however, is of special interest. Like many Soviet prison memoirs, it testifies to the power of language and humor as a survival skill and illustrates the prisoners’ determination to survive and the lengths to which they went to cope with the extreme conditions. Levan’s use of humor is especially witty; he employs humor to touch on themes of language and identity. The memoir as a whole poses questions about nationalism and independence, especially for the minority ethnic and linguistic groups that were subsumed by the Soviet Union.

Levan’s use of humor is especially witty; he employs humor to touch on themes of language and identity. The memoir as a whole poses questions about nationalism and independence, especially for the minority ethnic and linguistic groups that were subsumed by the Soviet Union.

It might seem strange to say that a Gulag memoir is funny, but Levan’s writing is full of paradoxical descriptions that are both comical and reveal the sad absurdity of the Soviet prison system. Given the subject matter, much of his humor is situational irony that serves to lighten his descriptions of prison life while piquing the reader’s interest. Startlingly, he describes his three years in prison as “the best three years of my life.” He explains: “When I say ‘the best years,’ I mean that in two ways: they were the best years of my life because at that time I was young—and what can be more beautiful than youth—but also because of the people that surrounded me, people the KGB had so zealously brought together.” An important aspect of Soviet incarceration by the mid-80s was that Soviet prisons differentiated between political prisoners and others. Hence, political prisoners were housed with other political prisoners. Levan, a linguist and specialist in classical literature, was imprisoned with other intellectuals. Prison life was no less harsh, but the company was different, and that made the intellectual and spiritual experience of prison qualitatively unique. Levan’s prison acquaintances include linguists, scholars, scientists, psychologists, writers, professional military officers, and teachers. They all represent the intelligentsia, the educated, intellectual class that influences cultural direction.

But the intelligentsia for the Soviet Union was “a bit of a problem,” explains Stephen James, Slavic language specialist at Mt. Holyoke College, who became friends with Levan in the 1990s and who I tracked down to shed light on Levan’s experience. “You educate people like Levan and then you expect them to just keep their heads down and be subservient,” James told me. “Sometimes that worked, of course. But then, in cases like Levan, you’ve got someone who actually believes what he reads and thinks he should act on what he believes.”

Levan was arrested in 1983 for “anti-Soviet agitation,” a charge that made him a “political prisoner.” These kinds of political charges arose from any behavior that challenged the sovereignty of the Soviet state. Levan had founded a secret Georgian Republican Party. Competing political parties were illegal. Moreover, advocating for Georgian independence from the Soviet Union was considered “anti-Soviet agitation,” a criminal charge that could carry up to twelve years in a labor camp.

Often times political charges were trumped up in order to get troublesome intellectuals out of the way, but in Levan’s case, James says with a laugh, “It was relatively honest!” in the sense that Levan was fighting for the liberation of his country from the dominant Soviet culture. In James’ mock amazement at the stunning honesty of the KGB, I could see how he would be friends with the dryly humorous writer of Sacred Darkness.

Levan writes that people who had been incarcerated during earlier eras describe the camps as “especially unbearable,” but he doesn’t mean that in the 80s it had become prosaic. Prisoners worked long days at labor-intensive jobs, were barely provided clothing or food, and were only allowed to write a certain number of letters home. Family visits were allowed once a year for two hours. The prison guards (who, Levan says, liked referring to themselves as “controllers”) could rescind any privileges at any time, for any reason, and often did so. In earlier eras, it was more common for people to simply be executed by firing squad, as the writer Gogol was.

Levan describes the 80s Gulag as having “one very distinct feature. We weren’t serving time in the scary 1930s, during the war or at the height of the dissident movement, or even during the Brezhnev period of stagnation, but in the era of Soviet democracy, glasnost, and perestroika […] one day the TV would offer us the typical Soviet news hogwash, then the next day, Ronald Reagan would be wishing us Happy New Year from the same screen.”

This seems funny, but again, it points out an ugly inconsistency: While Ronald Reagan is on the screen, and while the newspapers print previously outlawed texts like Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Heart of a Dog (a satire of the “new Soviet man”), Levan sits in prison with Misha Polyakov, who was sentenced to five years in prison for making copies of The Heart of a Dog. Under these circumstances, it takes a peculiar amount of grace to maintain good humor. But Levan and his friends often do, spending their free moments debating whether or not the Soviet Union should stay together or break up, whether Lenin is the true heir to Marx, and whether or not it is okay to eat doves in prison, since doves are a symbol of peace. Clearly, one should be careful about eating symbols.

After his release from prison, Levan became active in politics, helping re-create Georgia’s Republican Party and serving as a member of Parliament. Several of the people he met in prison went on to have political careers as well, especially in nationalistic movements that took hold as the Soviet Union broke up. One of these was Henrikh Altunyan, a Major in the Soviet Air Force that Levan seems to recall with particular affection. Henrikh was arrested on charges of anti-Soviet agitation. After 1987, when political prisoners were released, Henrikh went on to figure in Ukrainian politics and published his own memoir.

At the time of Sacred Darkness, one of Levan’s favorite stories about Henrikh seems to be the story of his arrest. The KGB knocked several times on his apartment door and threatened to break it down. Finally, Henrikh opened the door to reveal that the apartment behind him was full of smoke. Smiling kindly and gesturing to his “guests,” he said: “I saw you from the window, my dear guests. So sorry I kept you waiting. I had a few extra papers at home, so it took me some time to burn them. My sincere apologies. But now, please, come in, good people, search as much as you like!” Comical story-telling like this is the way that Levan memorializes Henrikh’s bravery, but he also can’t resist switching point of view if it will allow him to make a joke at the KGB’s expense. Levan says that the chief investigator is only concerned that Henrikh has used the phrase “good people,” a clear “anti-Soviet” idiom from Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita. “That’s not a good sign,” thinks the investigator as he enters the smoke-filled apartment. The perspicacity of KGB investigators is generally comical too, but in an entirely different way.

Perhaps because of Levan’s literary range, Amazon presents Sacred Darkness as a novel. The website says the book is “based on true events […] a thrilling marriage of reportage and fiction.” This sells Levan short. This is, after all, a prison memoir. The fact that he is witty and comedic, or that the work is literary in many ways, does not warrant a description which implies that the characters were not necessarily real people or that Levan’s narration itself is potentially less credible and “fictionalized.”

Once the idea that Sacred Darkness is “fiction” is introduced, the subversive strength and power of Levan’s—and the other prisoners’—humor and wit is dramatically reduced.

And here is my real complaint about that: Once the idea that Sacred Darkness is “fiction” is introduced, the subversive strength and power of Levan’s—and the other prisoners’—humor and wit is dramatically reduced. The humor is powerful not because it makes me chuckle, but because of its use as a survival mechanism and as a way for the prisoners to highlight the paradoxes and absurdities of a system that is denying their human rights. Humor is hope. It keeps despondency at bay and allows the men in this memoir (prisons were segregated by sex) to assert their identity in the face of a controlling totalitarian state. For this reason, I hope that the book does not end up being misunderstood as a novel or taken less seriously by readers.

Apart from the book’s historical value and comedic intelligence, Sacred Darkness also maintains an internal debate about national independence and national identity for the minority nations of the Soviet Union. It is not a Western view of the problems of the Soviet 80s. Interestingly, Levan seems to feel that at one time, he had as naïve a view of the West as we sometimes have of non-Western countries like Georgia.

One scene powerfully illustrates this. The prisoners find an old news reel, which shows British soldiers at the end of WWII returning their Soviet prisoners to Soviet territory. The British soldiers force the crowd across a bridge; if they turn back to the British, they will be shot. If they go ahead, they will walk back home into Soviet territory. Many of them choose to jump off the bridge and die.

This news footage alters the way that Levan understands the West. It is not that the problems of the Soviet system seem less problematic, but the reality of “democracy” and the collective imperfections of any regime, democratic or not, coming alive to him: “The West, which had seemed so picture perfect and flawless, became alive and real, and I realized that it had always had its own shortcomings.” Levan didn’t change his belief that democracy was preferable to the Soviet government or that Georgia should be independent, but he seems to think that the West suffers some naiveté when it comes to the Soviet world.

It might be that we still suffer some naivete about non-Western contexts in general, and that part of the value of memoirs like Levan’s is that it provides a little window into the world that we are missing when we consider present-day Russia. When I asked the memoir’s translator, Brian Baer, what drew him to this memoir, he said it was the text’s internal debate about the future of the Soviet Union. He explained that one of the reasons to keep the Union together “was out of fear that the Soviet republics would devolve into hard-right nationalism,” a fear that did become a reality. “Overall,” said Baer, “the memoir offers a look at late-Soviet dissident politics that cannot be simply mapped onto our Western political positions.” James, of Mount Holyoke College, would likely agree; he pointed out that Levan comes from a place that Western audiences know virtually nothing about, with Georgian writers, their complex history with Russia, and their perspective of the West being mysteries to us.

I have a strange fondness for Gulag memoirs whose authors writers often argue for a life perspective that is divergent from what we are used to. This perspective is epitomized by the paradox of Levan’s title, Sacred Darkness. Stephen James, one of the few Westerners who speaks Georgian, explained to me that the first word of the title can be translated as “pure, holy, or clean,” and the second word means “pitch black darkness.” To describe prison as a time of “absolute darkness” makes sense to us: the physical privation, privation of liberty, and the moral darkness of a system that uses imprisonment to repress subversive ideas.

But Levan also describes prison as “holy” or “sacred,” and the darkness as “cleansing,” an idea that doesn’t always make sense right away and can even seem ludicrous. He means that his prison experiences emphasized what was important in life, that he built unique relationships that changed who he was and helped him to re-formulate his understanding of personhood and politics. The “aesthetic of suffering” as it is sometimes called in Gulag memoirs, argues for hope and a renewed vision of truth from the trials of prison.

This isn’t a new aesthetic, or a new way of describing “dark” experiences; similar themes are overt in the prison memoirs of writers from other backgrounds and traditions. For example, the work of Viktor Frankl, the Austrian survivor of the Nazi camps, or Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright who led Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution after spending more than four years in a Soviet prison. What all of these writers have in common is that they argue for a specific view of intrinsic human value and identity: we are a someone. And we know what we are partly by knowing what we are not. By refusing to collude with powers that would silence our one, or our nationality, or our political orientation, we assert that we are. Levan writes that when the KGB was in his apartment going through his books and preparing to arrest him and his brother, his fear slowly left him, and his “courage and sense of self-esteem returned and increased gradually in the presence of those people who, in carrying out their jobs, were so far from truth and honor simply because the very business they were in was so disgraceful.” These elements of Levan’s perspective on dignity and identity can certainly map from East to West and back again.

Headshot of Ryan K. StraderRyan 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 BAREFOOT WOMAN, a novel by by Scholastique Mukasonga, reviewed by Rebecca Entel

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THE BAREFOOT WOMAN
by Scholastique Mukasonga
translated by Jordan Stump
Archipelago Books, 146 pages
reviewed by Rebecca Entel

The Barefoot Woman book jacketThe Barefoot Woman opens with the author’s mother, Stefania, imparting knowledge to her daughters. “Often in the middle of one of those never-ending chores that fill a woman’s day,” Mukasonga writes, “(sweeping the yard, shelling and sorting beans, weeding the sorghum patch, tilling the soil, digging sweet potatoes, peeling and cooking bananas…), my mother would pause and call out to us.” Much of the book proceeds from this image: we learn the details of her mother’s life and rituals through her endless work and we learn the kinds of things passed down from a Tutsi mother to her daughter—one of only two of eight children to survive the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

In that opening scene, Stefania tells her daughters how to properly bury a mother: “when you see me lying dead before you, you’ll have to cover my body […] that’s your job and no one else’s.” Her coming death during 1994’s Tutsi genocide hangs over the entire book from these opening lines, following Mukasonga’s earlier work, Cockroaches, which is specifically about the terrors her family and community faced during and after the exile of the 1960s, as well as the fate of most of her family members in 1994. The fact that Mukasonga could not heed her mother’s dictum—she was living in France during the massacre—is a driving force behind the book. Indeed, Mukasonga presents the book as a metaphorical shroud for the dead, though one she is unsure can complete its considerable task:

Mama, I wasn’t there to cover your body, and all I have left is words—words in a language you didn’t understand—to do as you asked. And I’m all alone with my feeble words, and on the pages of my notebook, over and over, my sentences weave a shroud for your missing body.

Headshot of Scholastique Mukasonga

Scholastique Mukasonga

In paying tribute to her mother, Mukasonga’s book also pays tribute to a little-known way of life that is no more. That way of life embodied complicated histories of Rwandan colonization and Tutsi exile. Mukasonga, who writes in French, and whose novels and memoirs explore these histories, here pays particular attention to certain details, such as her father’s rosary and Stefania’s dismissal of what she found to be “pagan”; rituals for newborn babies that changed because the correct plants were not available in the new environment of exile; the family’s adjustment to a new way of life and diet without the essential cattle of their former life; Stefania’s determination, in spite of those adjustments, to procure a cow for her eldest son’s traditional dowry.

Perhaps most poignant are Mukasonga’s descriptions of her mother’s relationship to their physical home. Forced into a rectangular structure with a flimsy metal door, Stefania was “like a trapped, frantic insect. Disoriented, she searched in vain for a friendly curve to nestle into.” Behind that new house, she then built an inzu: a circular, woven home that Mukasonga explains didn’t live up to the family’s original inzu in size, intricacy of design, nor the double courtyard and thresholds visitors had to pass through. Such details take on new meaning when a Hutu soldier’s “rifle butt crumpl[ed] the piece of sheet metal we used as a door.”

Like any writing about eventual victims of genocide, every detail of this book is soaked through with grief. The author writes of the inzu: “I’ll keep its name in Kinyarwanda, because the only words the French gives me to describe it sound contemptuous: hut, shanty shack […] Now they’re in museums, like the skeletons of huge beasts dead for millions of years. But in my memory the inzu is not that empty carcass, it’s a house full of life.” Even the lighter moments, ones almost humorous—Stefania’s secret adoption of underwear under her traditional pagne, for example—bear the weight not just of loss but of loss in which an entire people has met a violent, terrifying end. And so much of Stefania’s everyday life was about saving her children from the violence she knew would come: she put large jugs and baskets along the walls of the house for the smaller children to hide in when soldiers invaded, and Mukasonga remembers walking with her to dig up and replace old food that she’d buried in multiple locations for when her older children might need to flee by foot across the border to Burundi.

The episodic nature of the book’s chapters can be a bit jarring. For example, the book passes from topics such as how Stefania protected her children during soldiers’ raids to chapters about food (“Sorghum,” “Bread”) to chapters about marriage rituals. But I’d argue that such an assortment of seemingly dissonant topics belies the reality of the people she’s writing about, whose everyday lives were shaped by exile and imprinted by a constant threat of violence. In the chapter “Women’s Affairs,” we learn about rituals of adolescence and courtship, but the chapter ends with a discussion of the systematic rape of Tutsi girls and women by the Hutu. While traditionally babies conceived outside of marriage were not allowed to be born in the family home, for a young rape victim named Viviane, “solidarity and pity were stronger than tradition,” and so Stefania led a group of women in devising a water purification ritual for the girl and her child. Emblematic of The Barefoot Woman as a whole, Viviane’s story exposes the brutal reality of the book’s present while illuminating the traditions of the Tutsi, all the while showcasing Mukasonga’s mother’s place among the women of her community.

Headshot of Jordan Stump

Jordan Stump, translator

For readers primarily interested in learning more about how the Rwandan genocide developed over decades, Cockroaches may be the book to read first. But an understanding of the women Mukasonga comes from necessitates The Barefoot Woman.

What can a reader say after reading such a book, after reading about the intimate day-to-day life of someone who does not even have a grave? Perhaps the greatest compliment a reader can give any writer and her translator: I feel I now know this person and will not forget her.

Headshot of Rebecca EntelRebecca Entel’s short stories have appeared in such journals as Guernica, Joyland, and Cleaver. Her first novel Fingerprints of Previous Owners was published in June 2017 from Unnamed Press. She is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Cornell College, where she teaches courses in creative writing, multicultural American literature, Caribbean literature, and the literature of social justice.

NARRATOR, a novel by Bragi Ólafsson, reviewed by Katharine Coldiron

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NARRATOR
by Bragi Ólafsson
translated from the Icelandic by Lytton Smith
Open Letter Books, 120 pages
reviewed by Katharine Coldiron

Narrator book jacket; black and white footsteps on a yellow backgroundA man walks to the post office to mail his manuscript to a publisher, but he doesn’t complete the errand. Instead, he begins stalking another man, Aron Cesar, through Reykjavik. Hours pass. They watch the World Cup in pubs. They sit in the same movie theater watching La Grande Bouffe, a 1973 film about overconsumption. Aron is probably unaware of G., the stalker, following him everywhere with persistence but no outstanding purpose. After detailed observation, G. goes home without confronting Aron. The next day, G. decides he will after all mail the manuscript, which may or may not be the book, Narrator, which is currently in progress under the reader’s eye. 

Narrator is brief and quirky, rich and absurd, metatextual and extremely simple. It’s a walking narrative (in reality, a stalking narrative), which means it depends upon the motion of the narrator in order to go anywhere in particular. However, this book’s range is only within the mind; Aron’s and G.’s movements throughout Reykjavik are completely uninteresting, encompassing mostly pubs and shops of little consequence. But G.’s thoughts circle neurotically around his family, his failures, and Aron’s ex-girlfriend, Sara, for whom G. pined. In this way, and others, the vertical dimensions of the book are much more compelling than its movements through horizontal space.

Headshot of Bragi Ólafsson

Bragi Ólafsson

For instance, the book’s narration changes between third person and first person regularly, and its verbs shift tense from past to present often. There may be a deeper pattern of significance to these shifts, but in practice, on a single read, they bring freshness and chaos to a simple story. The difference between how G. sees himself in the third person and how he sees himself in the first person is not significant. It offers small but essential variation, like switching chairs at a long-running dinner, and it creates a triangulation—a more complex relationship—between G. and Aron, rather than a mere binary. That is, between the first-person G., the third-person G., and Aron, there are multiple connecting threads, instead of a simple back-and-forth.

In a novel in which there’s very little plot, elements that carry the reader forward include characterization, style, and how the text reflects on itself as a text. All these elements are stellar in Narrator.

The book also contains notes of dark humor that break up the relentless self-examination that characterizes G.’s inner weather:

To reward oneself for something that has not yet been achieved is something G. knows all too well. He uses the method all the time to motivate himself to do better, and it works. Because he could never live with receiving compensation for something he has not finished. The only thing that disturbs him in this respect is dying in the midst of an incomplete project for which he has already been remunerated. But would such a death not be a kind of payment?

Headshot of Lytton Smith

Lytton Smith

In a novel in which there’s very little plot, elements that carry the reader forward include characterization, style, and how the text reflects on itself as a text. All these elements are stellar in Narrator. One of G.’s tics is that he “doesn’t care to say” how a particular event occurred. He is protecting himself from the reader’s judgment, and from his own. He also reveals himself as a pretty pathetic figure while expressing hatred for Aron and his ordinariness. Aron leaps forth from the page as aggressively, hilariously ordinary, wrapped up in football and sex and furious at a friend for recommending something as weird as La Grande Bouffe. As for style, Ólafsson (with the help of his nimble translator, Lytton Smith) has assembled an extremely unique voice in this novel, one which teases and aggravates and evokes both pity and laughter, all in the course of a page. It is skilled enough to call to mind Italo Calvino, whose work is at once multivocal and instantly recognizable as his own.

And Narrator is nothing if not self-reflexive. At one point, G. fantasizes about an editorial board considering his manuscript, asking each other questions about it:

Perhaps they will have gotten no further than the point where I have the publisher himself say “But why is he pondering the publisher’s response? Should he not instead be worrying about the reader?” And when the two women, or three, agree, the publisher adds a third question: “Why doesn’t he just continue with the story?”

After a break, the next section opens with “And that’s what he does. He continues.”

The bulk of Narrator’s text is inner contemplation, and that’s exactly the kind of prose that many writing teachers insist is least interesting. Scenes speed a story up, while contemplation slows a story down and bores the reader. But this book, despite containing few traditional scenes, is a very quick read, and it never fails to intrigue. G.’s audacity as a stalker, and his constant lens upon himself, keep the tension high. Whether Aron will discover him or not seems to be the source of the tension, but it really isn’t; the question, appropriate for a novel this inverted, is whether G. will discover himself.

Headshot of Katharine ColdironKatharine Coldiron‘s work has appeared in Ms., the Rumpus, Brevity, and elsewhere. She lives in California and blogs at the Fictator.

THE FEMALES by Wolfgang Hilbig reviewed by Ryan K. Strader

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The Females book jacket; close-up of metal gearsTHE FEMALES
by Wolfgang Hilbig
translated by Isabel Fargo Cole
Two Lines Press, 129 pages
reviewed by Ryan K. Strader

“Perhaps…I should speak of castration, castration that mutilated my interior world,” mutters Herr C., the unnamed narrator of The Females. “I wasn’t operated on, it was all left attached to me, but the cells that steered it were dimmed; my cells, certain cells of mine, were sterilized and castrated. It was a castration of the brain, and fair femininity was the forceps they used.”

Herr C. is speaking from the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), and his narrative addresses the problems of gender and sex in a society where gender divisions are supposed to be a thing of the past. Herr C. isn’t physically castrated, but his masculinity is supposed to be “sterilized,” the “cells” that govern his male perceptions are supposed to have been made inert.

Except, the cells did not remain inert. It seems to be a general rule of human experience that whatever is denied becomes an obsession, and it’s certainly true for Herr C.: his stream-of-consciousness narrative is shaped by “the females.” He thinks about them constantly and looks for them everywhere. Is this a failure of the state? A personal failure? Or is the text about something else entirely?

The Females was my first encounter with the late writer Wolfgang Hilbig, who grew up in East Germany and was allowed to move to the West in the mid-80s. He died in 2007 and was buried in Berlin. Isabel Fargo Cole has been translating his work for twenty years now. She started working to gain Hilbig an English-speaking audience before his death, and The Females, from Two Lines Press, is her sixth Hilbig work.

Headshot of Wolfgang Hilbig

Wolfgang Hilbig

The Females is a slim book, just 130 pages, with no chapter divisions and text that is sprinkled with ellipses and hyphens that emphasize the free-association quality of Herr C.’s ruminations. The plot itself is also slim: the catalyzing event is the narrator’s loss of his job, where he worked in the basement of a factory. Through an iron grate he could watch the women upstairs working the factory machines and joking with one another. After losing his job, Herr C. claims that “all the females of the species had vanished from town, and with them had fled every trace of femininity. —Not only that, I felt that even feminine nouns had fallen out of use.” For the rest of the book, Herr C.’s monologue is shaped by his search for the females, and his perceptions of women, femininity, and sex. He moves back and forth in time constantly, covering his childhood spent partly in a work camp, his education, his attempts to be a writer, his inability to securely hold a job and his difficulties dealing with the labor offices.

Hilbig’s prose has been described as “earthy,” but this isn’t just a stylistic quality. His ability to use coarse physical description and imagery as a commentary on the individual’s relationship to the state is what I found most striking and artful about this little book. The narrator guides us through his skin conditions and masturbatory habits; it’s certainly “earthy” and even a bit gross sometimes, but the body illustrates the physical and moral collapse of the state. The human body is a reliquary for history’s failures, in this case the rupturing social experiments of the East German “new society,” where both class and gender will disappear. Herr C. describes genitalia and skin lesions with animalistic gratuity, but the point is that while the state has tried to forget what it means to be human, the human body does not forget.

Headshot of Isabel Fargo Cole

Isabel Fargo Cole
translator

My favorite example of this Hilbigian (if this isn’t a literary term, it should be) quality comes later in the text, when the narrator wakes from sleepwalking; he notes that sleepwalking seems to be one way that he “loses contact” with himself, and decides that the only “practical” way to find contact with one’s self is surely “not by bowing to the descriptions of you by others, which are often as cruel as can be.” The “description” that Herr C. then begins to talk about is the physical act of “procreating,” but his play on the various ways that the word “engender” can be interpreted and used allows his discussion about “descriptions of you by others” to move easily from talking about physical procreation to the social creation of the self as a civic subject:

If I become I…If you let me, just once, I’ll leave the trash heaps of my own free will, I’ll never be a pornographer again, I’ll forego my revenge. I’ll forget the state’s attempt to extirpate my gender by keeping my capacity for procreation secret; yes, I’ll accept it, I’ll forego procreating, I’ll never try to engender anything but myself. But they refused to believe that I wanted to forget, they wouldn’t even open their institution’s gates for me.

I’d made a serious mistake, I hadn’t pledged to keep engendering their idea—the idea that desire was permissible only as a gift from the state—no, I’d merely pledged to engender myself. And in so doing I forgot that I’d been recognized as an innate evil.

“Engender myself” means several things simultaneously here: it does mean a gendered self, as Herr C. feels that gender has been erased from his experience, but it also means to be known to one’s self (to “make contact” with one’s self instead of “losing contact”) and to engender the ideas of the state, to replicate (or “procreate”) the dominant narrative of those who control ideas and language.

This passage also illustrates the other sense in which I read The Females: as a tale about the oppression of the artist who is Othered by the state: in this particular case, the writer. Herr C. wished to be a writer, is haunted by the drafts that he wrote and lost, and tormented by the “pedagogues” who have assured him that his writing would be worthless. True to his obsession with the females, he suffers most when he remembers his mother scoffing at his ability to become a writer. The power of language to control the identities of subjects is affirmed by Herr C.’s recollections, and the role of language control in shaping whole societies is illustrated by his faith in the fake news of his own social context, always mixed in with his perception of the body and sex:

I was an uninvited guest in the literary sphere, and the literature I was permitted to read was one that couldn’t corrupt me—and, avid to learn something about the relationship between my prick and the females, I felt great respect for everything available in print. From all I was able to learn about the problem, it seemed conclusive that my prick was distasteful to the females; the females, I believed, preferred to go to bed with Enlightenment literature; I was at best a sad case study in those disquisitions.

[F]or heaven’s sake give myself time, I was told, by the newspapers, that is, for I had no confidante; yes, the newspapers were beginning now and then, in the section aimed at young people, to touch on questions of the relations between the sexes.

There are endless discussion points here: the power of the “literary sphere,” and questions about what makes something “literary” or culturally powerful, along with the temptation of state information to act as a “confidante” and source of identity for people. Herr C. is a subject of his language and only knows his physical experience through the language that has been provided to him; when he chaffs against sexual isolation, he is also chaffing against the sanitized language that has been used to control his perception of himself and his social role.

I should mention that Hilbig is not only transparent and sometimes grossly sharing-too-much in these passages; there are also moments of dark humor that made this reader chuckle, although they may not be for everyone:

Indeed, I knew that in their hearts the females loved men such as Lenin, who had no prick…or at least nothing was known about Lenin’s prick.

If there was something to be known about Lenin’s prick, then I am confident that Herr C. would know it and would share it with us.

Besides Herr C.’s proclivity for the word “prick,” there is his interesting proclivity for the word “female,” rather than “women.” At first this seemed to simply be another of Herr C.’s earthy descriptives that he just couldn’t shake. In wondering about females, he asks “mustn’t the females be made from earth as well?” and points out the bodily fluids that males and females share. But then Herr C. points out a deeper association that he is making, that comes from his childhood experience in a work camp, and it is both troubling and sobering: “I felt I must describe the females who lived in the torment and the simple solidarity of these barracks, where they were called females, because women staffed the guard details. That was where that honorific was invented: the females.”

In short, the “females” are the other human beings that have been dehumanized or Othered, like Herr C. It is meant to be an “honorific” that indicates solidarity and shared suffering, both in the sense of physical isolation and in the sense of cultural marginalization.

The book kept my attention because of the philosophical insights and the quality of the questions that the narrator’s experience poses about state and gender, identity/physicality, historical memory and the individual. Isabel Fargo Cole, in a wonderful 2017 interview with Joseph Schreiber of 3:AM Magazine, explained that what drew her to Hilbig’s work was that he had “courage,” that he described “dark things” and was able to charge that darkness with “mythic significance.” Hilbig is writing about the GDR, but “he ruptures the surface reality to delve far beneath it, and ends up in a place that seems timeless.” One of the great gifts of writers is timeless dissidence: courageous writing doesn’t vanish after the act, it remains present on the page to be read and re-read. The Females challenges several contemporary narratives in ways that are courageous and timely as our social milieu asks over and over again: What is the role of the individual, the artist, the writer? Which identities are privileged right now and which are subverted, and what is the cost of that subversion? What does it look like when those costs accrue over a generation or two? These are timeless questions though it continues to require courage to ask them.

Headshot of Ryan K. StraderRyan 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.

SLEEPING DRAGONS, stories by Magela Baudoin, reviewed by Katharine Coldiron

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SLEEPING DRAGONS
by Magela Baudoin
translated by Wendy Burk and M.J. Fièvre
Schaffner Press, 140 pages
reviewed by Katharine Coldiron

Thank goodness Magela Baudoin’s first book to be translated in English, Sleeping Dragons, is so short. The fifteen stories in this collection (adding up to only 140 pages) are so precise, bursting with such potency, that to increase the collection to 200 or 250 pages would just about kill the average reader. Nearly all the stories are perfectly formed, energetic little spheres—like new tennis balls, popping with their own elasticity the moment they drop out of the canister—and only so many of these spheres can hit a reader between the eyes before she must stop, dazed. The overall impression is of a writer with years of craftsmanship already behind her, ready to don the halo of South American literary fame.

Baudoin is Bolivian, but she is clearly influenced not just by the humor and confidence of the usual South American figures (Borges, García Márquez), but also by the sharpness of American minimalists like Raymond Carver and Lydia Davis. These stories are expertly honed, whittled to beauty and often terror. In “Moebia,” for instance, a journalist falls in love and moves into a prison—the story offers no real-world logic for this development—only to suffer heartbreak and stillbirth. In “Vertical Dream,” a highly interior story about dreams and windows, Baudoin asserts:

Forget the present, forget the now. People carried around an obsession with the future—a fear. It disturbed them—like a nightmare unfolding—the idea that they, or their successors, might descend into vulgarity, or worse, poverty. For poverty was the quintessence of horror.

The point of view varies from story to story; the author shifts easily from first person to second person to third. “The Girl,” one of the longest stories in the collection, dissects a couple’s disapproval as their friend’s wife descends either into madness or a neurological disease. Baudoin chooses to tell the story from a distant, omnipotent third person perspective, shifting rapidly from one set of motivations to the next. Head-hopping stories often feel loose and undisciplined, but this one is tight as a drum. The girl of the title is the one person whose head Baudoin never peeks into—except that the end of the story physically opens it up.

Magela Baudoin

Some of the stories in this collection seem to be the result of a conceptual constraint or a gimmick, such as “A Wristwatch, a Soccer Ball, a Cup of Coffee,” a dialogue-heavy piece that integrates these three objects into a conversation between a boy and his grandfather. Or “Wuthering,” which merely summarizes the tale of the Brontë siblings, in conversation. The oddest and least successful of these examples is “Mengele in Love,” which, given the book’s origin in South America, should be self-explanatory. But it’s one of the only stories in the book that feels incomplete. The narration is so internal, so unexplained, that the story feels like a series of unwoven threads, left hanging awkwardly. Perhaps the story would be less acceptable (particularly now) if it were charming, rather than its chosen mood of haphazard unease, but as written it’s just confusing.

None of that confusion is likely due to the translators, Wendy Burk and M.J. Fièvre. Their work is exemplary, transmitting Baudoin’s clear and plain language almost savagely across the page. In “The Red Ribbon,” for instance, a paragraph that’s been making flowery excuses for an underage prostitute’s position suddenly, and powerfully, withers: “when that indigenous reality collides with city life, freedom becomes a yoke dragging women into the world’s oldest meat grinder. Poverty grinds it all up: at an unimaginably young age, Indian girls surrender their bodies to urban fantasies for next to nothing.”

The overall impression is of a writer with years of craftsmanship already behind her, ready to don the halo of South American literary fame.

The two most moving stories are “Something for Dinner,” the opener, which feels like a Coen Brothers scenario crossed with the childhood of Julián Herbert, and “Opening Night,” which contains a species of quiet heartbreak too small and unglamorous for the likes of O. Henry. In it, a young man who works at a dry cleaner and loves opera almost to an obsessive degree comes within inches of seeing his favorite, Carmen, under the perfect set of circumstances. We root for him to get what he wants. But he does not. And his loss is so terrible that the story can grant solace neither to him nor to us. “He walked in smaller and smaller circles, finally arriving at the table in the back, as dizzy and bewildered as a child.” It’s the kind of disappointment that can’t be helped, in life or in fiction, and that wracks the reader, even if she has only invested a handful of pages into this fictional scenario.

The Spanish title of this book is taken from one of its several six-page stories, “The Composition of Salt” (originally La Composición de la Sal). The English title is taken from a different six-page story, but it represents the collection perhaps more properly than the original. Dragons sleep inside the walls of these stories, between the characters, inside their minds and their families, under their beds. These dragons come in many forms, but they are inescapable, and dangerous. Thankfully, Magdela Baudoin’s scalpel of a pen can perforate that danger and leave us free to roam about in their territory. What a relief.

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

AFTER THE WINTER, a novel by Guadalupe Nettel, translated by Rosalind Harvey, reviewed by Robert Sorrell

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AFTER THE WINTER
by Guadalupe Nettel
translated by Rosalind Harvey
Coffee House Press, 242 Pages

reviewed by Robert Sorrell

At the beginning of Guadalupe Nettel’s newly translated novel After the Winter, twenty-five-year-old Cecilia moves from her native Oaxaca to Paris. She arrives there without the usual image of Paris as a “city where dozens of couples of all ages kissed each other in parks and on the platforms of the métro, but of a rainy place where people read Cioran and La Rochefoucauld while, their lips pursed and preoccupied, they sipped coffee with no milk and no sugar.” However, there is something usual in her expectation for Paris. “Like many of the foreigners who end up staying for ever […] with the intention, or rather, the pretext of studying a postgraduate degree,” she takes up residence across the street from Père Lachaise cemetery, final resting place of Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, and Edith Piaf. “At different periods in my life, graves have protected me,” Cecilia shares, and the small apartment overlooking the cemetery suits her macabre nature perfectly.

Cecilia is one of the two first-person narrators in After the Winter, the other being Claudio, who grew up in Havana and now lives in New York City where he works in publishing. Like Cecilia, Claudio also has his quirks. His apartment is “a stone corridor very like a prison cell,” and he avoids interacting with people, not so much because he doesn’t like them—he maintains a few long-term friendships—but more it seems because he is afraid of the control he’d lose if he had to factor another person into his plans. In the novel’s first few pages he reveals, “I find living things frightening; you have to take care of them or they die. In short, they take up time and attention, and I am not prepared to give those away to anyone.” He makes this comment about plants, but it easily applies to humans as well.

In the beginning, the novel alternates between Cecilia’s and Claudio’s chapters, as Cecilia settles into her life as a student in Paris and Claudio continues his life in New York and his on again off again relationship with an older, well-to-do woman named Ruth. Ruth dotes upon Claudio, buying him expensive meals and treating him to nice bottles of wine and snacks from an expensive bakery. Beyond these niceties, Ruth seems to genuinely enjoy spending time with Claudio, who is sent nearly into fits of panic after their dates or sexual encounters. “You might say that we are good lovers if it were not for the fact that when we have finished,” he reflects, “I am flooded with an inexplicable sensation of disgust.” Claudio’s treatment of Ruth is just one of many signs that he is deeply unwell. Another is the morbid way he considers his apartment: “Here—and I give thanks to God for this—I have neither relatives nor friends I am overly close to. […] Protecting it from any intruders is my way of honoring my sanctuary and of turning it (I like the image immensely) into the mausoleum where I would like to be buried for all eternity.”

It is hard to know what to do with images like this, and other images earlier in the work, that, with a heavy hand, suggest Claudio is suffering from undiagnosed OCD. The way Nettel portrays Claudio and Cecilia often hovers between eccentricity and genuine mental illness. Yet, these actions and thoughts do not emerge as issues that the characters must grapple with, but rather as the author’s central way to develop their personalities.

In this sense, Nettel mainly defines Cecilia and Claudio by their preferences and neuroses. The way they decorate their apartments, or don’t, how often they call their friends, what they like to eat for breakfast. Nettel seeks to draw out her characters through these small particularities. She shows us Claudio enraged in his kitchen after his espresso machine breaks. “It is unconscionable the degree of security household appliances can give to us,” he says. Here is Cecilia cooped up in her Paris apartment, the opposite of Claudio’s fastidiousness: “I tried to wash myself only as much as necessary so as to avoid suffocating in my own odours.” It’s as if these moments on their own speak volumes about her characters’ personalities. These early sections of After the Winter show the dangers of trying to create a character out of personal habits and quirks. The way Claudio gets out of bed, the way he organizes his apartment, Cecilia’s love of cemeteries. I got the feeling that these details could be insightful or telling, if they hinted towards other aspects of personality, but they seem to be presented as self explanatory, without acknowledging the gulf that often sits between thought and action.

Guadalupe Nettel

Because of this, in the first half or so of the book, Claudio and Cecilia have the impression of cartoon characters, their opinions and the way they maintain their apartments seems exaggerated to take the place of personality. It’s also clear that neither Cecilia nor Claudio know what they want out of most situations, and while that is not abnormal, it causes a slight problem for a novel that is focused so closely on them and told in first person narration. Further, while Cecilia and Claudio do sometimes act, they seem to often fall into the trap of passive narrators/ main characters: things always seem to be happening to them, but they never seem to be doing anything themselves. This effect is exacerbated as we move into the first winter of the novel and both retreat further into themselves, rarely interacting with others. “By December,” Cecilia admits, “my life had been reduced to a ghostly state.”

And yet, as the novel goes on, somehow in spite of the early surface treatment, Cecilia and Claudio start to attain mass, to gain qualities and desires more telling than how they decorate their apartment or the fact that they both seem to have morbid fascinations. Cecilia meets her next-door neighbor Tom, an Italian who is an excellent cook and shares his food and music with her as the two slowly enter into a relationship. Tom, however, has a serious illness that frightens him deeply. He takes a long trip to Italy to see family and contemplate the rest of his life without telling Cecilia when he will return. It is during this trip that the event the novel has been leading the reader toward finally occurs. Cecilia and Claudio meet.

It happens, of course, at Père Lachaise cemetery, where Claudio is looking for the grave of poet César Vallejo. He’s accompanied by his friend Haydée, an acquaintance he’d made during his university days in Paris. After graduation, Claudio moved to New York, and Haydée stayed in Paris where, years later, she would meet Cecilia. When Claudio suggests a stroll around the cemetery, Haydée is reminded of her friend who lives in an apartment right at the cemetery’s edge. And so the three of them head into Père Lachaise in search of Vallejo’s grave.

The alternating structure of the novel, switching between Cecilia’s and Claudio’s perspective, makes the reader wonder from the very beginning when the two characters will meet. And yet, maybe because their meeting has been so built up in the reader’s mind through the juxtaposition, the initial interaction is a bit of a letdown. Claudio immediately falls for Cecilia for no apparent reason. He describes the moment as like a “meeting of souls,” and shares later, “I have not been able to get [Cecilia] out of my mind ever since.” He is drawn to Cecilia through her apartment, which is fitting given his fraught relationship with his own and the strange way that his personality and his apartment seem to collapse into each other. Cecilia’s is a small place “devoid of pictures or any decorations or distraction,” that leads Claudio to incorrectly assume that “as I am, Cecilia was a lover of order and cleanliness.” Yet, Claudio mistakes this spartan quality—the result of malaise and, Cecilia says later “completely unintentional”—for carefully studied austerity. This is the mistake that starts Claudio’s obsession with Cecilia: he mistakes an apparent trait for her real personality. After meeting in Paris, Claudio writes fervent emails to Cecilia, quickly deciding he is in love with her and that for the first time in his life he has found someone “suitable for me.”

By this point in the novel it becomes clear that neither Claudio or Cecilia are particularly reliable narrators, and that their own judgements—such as Claudio’s belief that he is in love with Cecilia after seeing her apartment—are often skewed, the motivations different than they appear. Claudio believes he sees a reflection of himself in Cecilia, and throws everything into wooing her instead of focusing on the life he has already built in New York City and Ruth who, despite the terrible treatment, still seems to love him. Cecilia, on the other hand, seems deeply unsure of what she wants, if she wants to live in Paris, or live at all. Claudio and Cecilia keep in touch over email, visiting each other a few times, before it becomes clear to Cecilia how little Claudio really cares for her. Soon after, her neighbor Tom returns from Italy, and his condition worsens. Cecilia often considers killing herself, yet, the time spent with him in the hospital gives her an incredible sense of meaning. She shares that it is, “the most important experience of my life. I, who had always considered myself useless, had, at last, the impression that I was good for something.”

The portrayal of mental health in After the Winter leaves much to be hoped for. Claudio’s (eventually diagnosed) OCD seems too obvious, pulling on vague cliches about cleanliness and organization, and Cecilia’s depression seems gratuitous and uncomplicated. But it’s hard to say whether this might be due to the fact that the reader is getting their experiences from a first-person narration. This viewpoint doesn’t relieve the author of responsibility, but it does complicate the issue. What are the ethics of portraying mental illness in such a way? It reminds me of the question around stories of addiction and eating disorders: is there any way to tell these stories without glamorizing the experience, and maybe even having an effect on readers that is the exact opposite of what the writer intended? For me, Cecilia and Claudio’s mental health were treated a bit too much like foibles or quirks, treated like their apartments and habits of dress: colorful details that added to the outline of their character instead of real issues that they struggled with and which caused them real pain.

The title After the Winter seems to imply progress, or hope. After winter comes spring and summer, the rebirth of plants and the return of the idyllic “Paris of films,” Cecilia despises when she arrives. And indeed, spoiler alert, the two characters do seem happier, or at least more settled, at the book’s end. Claudio finally realizes that he should be with Ruth, and Cecilia finally seems to find aspects of her life in Paris to enjoy: she pours herself into her work, and spends a lot of time with her friend Haydée and Haydée’s new baby.

And yet, at the story’s end, Claudio and Cecilia don’t seem to have addressed what, sadly, united them from the beginning: that their attempts at happiness always relied so heavily on other people. They became archetypes of a different kind of tragic love; not tragic because the two are kept apart by country, family, or religion, but because they believed too strongly in the myth that love by itself would fix all their problems.

robert-sorrellRobert 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.

STRANGE WEATHER IN TOKYO, a novel by Hiromi Kawakami, reviewed by August Thompson

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STRANGE WEATHER IN TOKYO
by Hiromi Kawakami
translated by Allison Markin Powell
Counterpoint Press, 176 pages

reviewed by August Thompson

When you are lonely—truly lonely, not alone by choice in the search for liberty— the bloom of your energy and language changes completely. Your fellow lonely become the only people alive that are fluent in you.

In this state, you see the lonely everywhere. On the subway, you meet with longing, desperate eyes. In the station, you open the exit door and they say thank you with such sincerity it feels like an embrace. You reconnect with the periphery characters from your old lives. Coworkers, friends long removed from your orbit, abandoned lovers, and, in the case of Hiromi Kawakami’s sweetheart novel Strange Weather in Tokyo, former teachers and the alumni of your high school.

The language of the lonely is often based in deficit. To be lonely is to be flung from the kinds of bonds society values most: coupledom, friendship, family. Loneliness suggests difference and, in the more dire cases, loss.

For Tsukiko and her former high school Japanese teacher, who she calls Sensei, loneliness is based in melancholy. Sensei is a beautiful weirdo, a straight-laced and classic man who collects serving teapots, finds thrill in mushroom hunting and may or may not have a magic briefcase. He’s older, and a widower. His life, like Tsukiko’s, is hunched by hurt. He has lost too much and is unable to grow close to anyone for fear of losing more.

Hiromi Kawakami

Tsukiko suffers from a tuneless depression. She doesn’t understand love and ruined her one youthful chance at conventional happiness through awkwardness and inaction. Since then, she’s existed in a kind of rudderless mute, detached from intimacy. She has normalized loneliness and convinced herself that she is happy, or close to happy, despite the profound ache and regret that turns the banal into the tragic—after reflecting on the time she suffered through her great love’s wedding to another woman, she breaks down in the midst of eating an apple. “I had a craving for an apple so I took one from the basket,” she observes. “I tried to peel it in the way my mother did. Partway round, the skin broke off. I suddenly burst into tears, which took me by surprise. I was cutting an apple, not chopping onions—why should there be tears? I kept crying in between bites of the apple. The crisp sound of my chewing alternated with the plink, plink of my tears as they fell into the stainless steel sink. Standing there, I busied myself with eating and crying.” It takes a certain breed of loneliness, and a special author, to turn an apple into a tragedy.

The motor of Strange Weather is the slow love that builds between Tsukiko and Sensei. At a neighborhood bar, they run into each other after decades of absence. Maybe at another time they would have exchanged pleasantries and moved along. But they are both living in the same kind of underwater blue. They chat and find that their language is the same. They start to build an intimacy without schedule, running into each other at the bar, sharing meals and drinks, telling simple stories, laughing at their inconsistencies.

Relaying the plot of Strange Weather is like relaying the happenings of a gorgeous, lazy summer. You experience so much that feels magic and special, but when you detail it to a friend it sounds minute. There was the food you ate, long talks you had, weather and walks you enjoyed. So vibrant and honey-yellow in the moment, so devoid of juice in retelling.

This makes Strange Weather sound boring, which is misleading. Beyond two sequences that dip into the spiritual and the otherworldly, Strange Weather focuses on the pleasantness of finding someone who speaks as you speak, feels as you feel, and the fear and the anxiety of losing that person because humans, above all else, are most skilled at inflicting hurt on each other. There’s little gunpowder to the story, but that isn’t its aim. Its aim is to explore the joy and pain that surround sorrow, which it does with perfect tenderness.

Despite their quirks and oddities, the main characters are very much real people. The goal of all fiction is to infuse even the most fantastic characters with realism, but when I say real people here I mean they are average people. They are lovely and terrible, kind until they’re not, funny in idiosyncratic ways, ashamed of who they are and who they should be, and in constant stages of emotional flux.

They lack the vocabulary to speak how they feel. They quarrel to the point of separation over baseball. They get mired in social expectation—their difference in age should make romance impossible. They are choked by how abstract so much of feeling is, how cheap talk is, in the face of love.

Although they live on the outer rim of one of the biggest cities in the world, Tokyo, Tsukiko and Sensei live like actual people do. There’s none of the excess or the pandemonium of nightlife. Their delights are based on contentment: to go to the same bar, to eat the freshest food, to argue about customs, to drink sake until you feel silly. These gentle rituals, after all, are the foundation of all great loves.

At first, the writing seems almost rigid, but the purpose of the style soon reveals itself, perhaps the result of Kawakami’s long collaboration with the translator Powell. There are no petals on the prose, yet there are still moments of blossom.

Gentle is perhaps word the word that best sums up the writing in Strange Weather in Tokyo and the book itself. It’s no easy thing to be gentle, and a grave difficulty to make gentleness interesting. But Kawakami, the Tokyo-born author of seven novels and recipient of several literary awards, accomplishes this through consistency: her writing rarely wavers into the sentimental, and, in Allison Markin Powell’s translation, keeps the same kind of gorgeous bluntness sentence after sentence. The cumulative effect is a kind of swoon:

We soon switched to saké. I picked up the bottle of hot sake and filled Sensei’s cup. I felt a sudden rush of warmth in my body and felt the tears well up once again. But I didn’t cry. It’s always better to drink than to cry.

What is most amazing about the writing is the subtle way that Kawakami delivers gut punches like this by avoiding the prosaic. At first, the writing seems almost rigid, but the purpose of the style soon reveals itself, perhaps the result of Kawakami’s long collaboration with the translator Powell. There are no petals on the prose, yet there are still moments of blossom.

Like the writing, Tsukiko and Sensei’s stilted courting of each other is based in placid consistency, the inability to escape past pains, and the held breath of restraint. It’s refreshing to see love spring from something other than charisma. So many of our stories are about the excellent falling for the fabulous. This one is for the strange, the eccentric, the pained. How great a relief to read about people that are as damaged and afraid as you are, as the people all around you. How satisfying to watch them find love.

And so the truest accomplishment of Strange Weather in Tokyo, this funny little book about the ways isolation leaves us heart-scuffed, is that it achieves fiction’s noblest goal: in painting vividly the feelings of loneliness, it makes the reader feel less alone.

August 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 usually find him at the movies.

HORSEMEN OF THE SANDS, two novellas by Leonid Yuzefovich, reviewed by Ryan K. Strader

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HORSEMEN OF THE SANDS
by Leonid Yuzefovich
translated by Marian Schwartz
Archipelago Books, 232 pages

reviewed by Ryan K. Strader

The translation initiative Read Russia characterizes Leonid Yuzefovich as a writer whose books “gray the lines between faction and fiction,” using historical figures and settings in his work. “Faction” is for artful historians (or for historian artists, perhaps), writers who know how to be suspicious of fictionalizing, but also know that history is never just facts. This description of Yuzefovich makes sense, since he is a historian by training and taught history for many years, but has emerged as an influential contemporary fiction writer in Russia.

Yuzefovich has been publishing fiction and nonfiction in Russian since 1980, but his work first appeared in English in 2013 with a series of historical detective novels, translated by the prolific Russian translator Marian Schwartz. Horsemen of the Sands is a new volume, also translated by Schwartz. The volume contains two novellas: The Storm, which takes place in an elementary school, and Horsemen of the Sands, a mystical tale about the real-life warlord R.F. Ungern-Shternberg, who fought both the Chinese and the Bolsheviks for control of Mongolia during the Russian Civil War, which lasted six years after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution.

Each of these novellas grays the lines between faction and fiction in different ways, in their choice of subject and in the structural weaving together of historical elements and fictional characters. At first glance a reader might wonder why they were published together, but they complement each other in ways that a casual reading might not appreciate, and they indicate why Yuzefovich is a contemporary Russian to read, for Russophile readers and for readers new to contemporary Russian literature.

Horsemen of the Sands features “the Mad Baron,” General Ungern, who was captured and executed by the Bolsheviks in 1921. The story takes place when the Baron is powerfully roaming Mongolia (early 1921), recruiting villagers to his army with stories of his magical invincibility. The scenes of Ungern are framed by the narration of a young Soviet military officer stationed in Mongolia, who meets Boliji, an elderly herder who recalls an encounter with Ungern when he was a child. Boliji’s brother fought for Ungern for a time, and discovered the secret of the Baron’s invincibility: a gau, a Buddhist amulet that had been given to the Baron by a grateful Buddhist lama. The magical gau made it so that the rules of ballistics seemingly did not apply to Ungern: bullets fell before him, or were twisted into worthless pieces of metal on the ground. Boliji produces the gau as proof of his tale, and gifts it to the Soviet officer, which sets off another adventure for the narrator as he asks an excessively snotty historian (the kind who does not do “faction”) to validate the age of the gau.

The Storm takes place on a seemingly prosaic day in a contemporary elementary school, when Nadezhda Stepanova has safety officer Dmitry Petrovich Rodygin come speak to her fifth grade class about safety on the roads, and the dangers of intoxicated driving. Rodygin is well practiced at effective speaking methods; he has mastered the art of delivering stories in such a way that they “make an impression.” Unfortunately, Rodygin is also relationally ignorant: in his zeal to “make an impression” on fifth graders, he is inhumane in his storytelling approach and ends up upsetting several pupils.

Leonid Yuzefovich

The story’s viewpoint switches around several times, sometimes within the same chapter, following both what is happening in the classroom as Rodygin paces around (terrifying the children with stories of what happens to drunk drivers in Turkey and Singapore, and implying that wives and children are partly to blame if a man becomes a drunk) and what happens outside of the classroom, as the janitress cleans and students run to the bathroom and Nadezhda Stepanova goes to the market for a cake for the other teachers. The roving narrator is especially effective as Rodygin speaks to the class, congratulating himself on his teaching technique, while Vekshina, a student in the front, row suffers terribly with thoughts of her drunk father. The reader comes to understand the complicated relationships between Nadezhda, a beloved leader of her little “flock” of fifth graders, and the students themselves, who band together against the scary outsider Rodygin.

Rodygin floats back and forth across the front of the room, completely unaware of his inability to see the students as human beings with their own stories and relationships. He is convinced that he is a good teacher, but good teachers often say that the privilege of teaching is learning from one’s students, and I doubt that Rodygin has ever thought of himself as a student of fifth graders. While The Storm doesn’t feature any obvious “historical” character, there is something so veracious about the storytelling and the recounting of the elementary mindset that it feels like the reportage of an ethnographer. When Rodygin mentions someone who had a leg amputated, a little boy asks, with great practicality, “How far up?” Every story Rodygin tells becomes an imaginative foray for one student or another. One of them, Vera, who apparently thinks of herself as a grown up since she “developed” early, makes awful comments that a husband and wife are a single Satan, as if she has any idea what she is talking about. This is definitely fifth grade, rendered so faithfully that it doesn’t quite feel like fiction.

With such divergent subject matter and different approaches to narration and structure, it might seem difficult to detect the ways that The Storm and Horsemen of the Sands connect with each other, but thematically they complement each other very well. The most apparent thematic connection is that of Russia’s protean cultural identity: East and West, manifest by an older generation that saw the political upheaval of the late 20th century and the younger generations that did not.

In Horsemen of the Sands, the scene that speaks most eloquently to this theme is the narrator’s encounter with the Bronze Horseman, the famous statue of Peter the Great in Leningrad (St. Petersburg). One of the more iconic images in Russian literature, the Bronze Horseman shows Tsar Peter on a reared up horse, triumphantly leading Russia toward a powerful future as a major player on the European stage, with his new European city, St. Petersburg, laid out before him. As the narrator considers the story that Boliji the herder has told him of General Ungern, he imagines Ungern as a second horseman, this one made of sand. Unlike the Bronze Horseman, the one made of sand “falls to dust” in the wind.

These two horsemen do not merely illustrate the competing personalities of Peter and Ungern. The iconic image of the horsemen draws the text’s speculation about Russia’s identity crisis much deeper than that of national leadership; the men represent completely different cultural visions. The narrator speculates that while his grandparents were small children and these horsemen faced off, “East and West were two mirrors placed on either side of Russia, and Russia looked first at the right, and then at the left, each time amazed that its reflection in one mirror did not look like its reflection in the other.” Different leaders always make for different ideas about national direction; in the case of Russia, these two horsemen actually represented completely opposite cultural faces for Russia, either of which could be Russia’s heritage. As far as being a work of history, this is one of the more interesting things about this novella: we see the bloody competition of Ungern’s “yellow faith” (Buddhism) for dominance, we see how powerful and ambitious the anti-Bolshevik presence was in Ungern’s time, and we see a sliver of Russia’s violent contact with China; all of these parts of Russia’s “Eastern reflection” are elements of Russian history that we Westerners rarely encounter.

The Storm approaches cultural identity from the standpoint of generational change. Rodygin represents a past generation, a “specimen” of an old order of thinking that will inevitably die off. While buying some berries from an elderly woman, Nadezhda Stepanova considers what her old age will be like. The teachers’ boardinghouse where she enjoys the summers used to have a man-made pond where an eccentric man kept two Nile crocodiles. One of those crocodiles was shot, and is now stuffed and sitting in a museum collection: “Like any dumb creature, it lived outside history; on the other hand, by its death it inscribed itself into the context of the period and reflected the singularity of the historical moment.” Nadezhda Stepanova’s memories of the crocodile resurface when a colleague comments that there’s “quite a likeness” between the stuffed amphibian and Rodygin. “He’s a specimen, too,” remarks the colleague. “But that’s all right, their rule will end soon.” A moment later a little boy spits out a berry pit that makes “the sound of a bullet,” a clever metaphor emphasizing the inevitability that children grow older and take the cultural reigns from their elders, whether elders are willing to give them up or not.

As a teacher, I like the idea that the “bullet” is aimed at the instructional style that Rodygin represents, where teachers know everything and students’ tasks is to become like their instructors. But Yuzefovich has more in mind; Rodygin represents rule through fear and misinformation. What’s more, the story asks questions about how we should age: while Rodygin feels that his soul is burning with the frustration of being “misunderstood” by the students, Nadezhda Stepanova thinks of getting older in the boardinghouse with her letters and pictures from her students hanging on the walls. Some adults are the shepherds for the younger generation, and some adults only become stuffed “specimens” of another time, too full of their own ideologies to recognize value in the vivaciousness of younger people.

These are fitting novellas to bring to an American public in particular; they eschew the Russian penchant for long philosophical monologues or dialogues that create philosophical debate and meaning in a work, and instead, Yuzefovich opts for the more “American” style of communicating meaning through events themselves.

These are fitting novellas to bring to an American public in particular; they eschew the Russian penchant for long philosophical monologues or dialogues that create philosophical debate and meaning in a work, and instead Yuzefovich opts for the more “American” style of communicating meaning through events themselves. However, this very quality makes him a writer for readers who are willing to read closely. He doesn’t waste words, and events and moods change quickly, sometimes within a sentence. I got the gist of the stories the first time I read them, but had to read a second time, and slower, to really appreciate the nuance of his descriptions and precision of his syntax. The internal consistency of the novellas is a testament to the craft of the writer, and also to Schwartz’s translation, which insured that the text’s internal arguments remained intact.

I don’t want to make these novellas sound too erudite though. Schwartz commented in a 2017 interview with Book Riot that it’s unfortunate to hear people describe translated Russian literature as overly difficult, 800-page tomes. While Russians certainly do love their Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Schwartz argued that a good translation is pleasurable and worthwhile to read, that a translation “is a door to a new world very likely not accessible any other way.” Russia is a huge country with countless writers waiting in the queue to find their way into English. I have no doubt that it’s a difficult, even somewhat painful task to decide which writers should make their foray first to other audiences. As a Russophile, I don’t think I could make those decisions. As a result, I appreciate it when someone has made that choice wisely and artfully. Yuzefovich deals with philosophically interesting themes, but the unique structure and his “faction” bent certainly do make the novellas a pleasurable and worthwhile introduction.

Ryan 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 ADVENTURES OF PINOCCHIO, a novel by Carlo Collodi, reviewed by Beth Kephart

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THE ADVENTURES OF PINOCCHIO
by Carlo Collodi
illustrated by Attilio Mussino
translated by Carol Della Chi
MacMillan (1926), 401 pages

reviewed by Beth Kephart

The Oldest, The Newer, and the Four Pinocchios

The Pinocchio in the book on my lap is not the persistently gullible feather-in-his-cap Disney version with the Jimmy Cricket conscience and the wish-upon-a-star existence.

My Pinocchio—La storia di un burattino—comes from the mastermind himself, the Italian serialist Carlo Collodi, born Carlo Lorenzimi, who didn’t start writing for children until late in life. He’d been in the seminary as a young man. He’d volunteered in the Tuscan army. He’d written satire, translated fairytales, and by the 1880s, it would seem, he was primed for his most memorable creation.

You don’t have to stretch to note the parallels that dominate our news cycle. Donald J. Trump was prefigured more than 130 years ago. 

If Disney’s Pinocchio is an affable, pliable ingénue who was reconfigured, according to the lore, to look more like a boy than a puppet, Collodi’s is an anti-hero—a wooden thing with barely any ears who mostly can’t see beyond his own nose, no matter its current proportion. He is persistent, insistent, impossible, exasperating, willfully obtuse, a regular screw-up. You don’t have to stretch to note the parallels that dominate our news cycle. Donald J. Trump was prefigured more than 130 years ago. He was augured by a satirist who was most supremely skilled in imagining poor, and poorly curbed, behavior.

My 1926 MacMillan edition of Pinocchio was translated by Carol Della Chiesa and illustrated by Attilio Mussino, who found the character overbearing, spectacularly needy. “He came to live in my study and, after that, never left me a moment,” Mussino wrote. “He literally dogged my footsteps, following me everywhere—along the streets, into the theaters, to my luncheon.”

How desperately well we know that feeling. How hard it is, we find, to look away from the sort of character who does not want to learn, does not want to work, does not like the truth—who is, in short, an opportunistic groveler who sells most anyone who might shine a brighter light infuriatingly short.

Right at the start Pinocchio is stealing Geppetto’s orange-yellow wig—trying it on for size, riling the marionette maker. A few pages on, and there Pinocchio is, smashing the head of a friendly cricket with a hammer. “Woe to boys who refuse to obey their parents and run away from home,” the cricket had said, a few beats ahead of the puppet’s violent temper tantrum. “They will never be happy in this world, and when they are older they will be sorry for it.”

But Pinocchio—that’s the thing—is never actually sorry, not, at least, over the course of the book’s first few hundred pages. He might say the right words, on a very rare occasion, but when the chance to do the wrong thing again presents itself, he’s all in. He veers from one bad choice toward the next. His friends are unseemly, they are riff-raff, they are swamp. His actions are self-serving, but he can hardly save himself.

Here’s a scene: Pinocchio, after a stint in jail, has (for will he ever learn?) been out stealing grapes. Hapless as always, he is snared by a trap. Released by the farmer who set the trap, Pinocchio is brought to the farm, chained like a beast, and told to guard the chicken coop. “I deserve it! Yes, I deserve it!” he claims, feeling sorry for himself, playing the victim.

Pinocchio will say whatever’s necessary to get out of the jam. If he had Twitter, he would Tweet it. But it’s not long before he’s out and about again, doing whatever he pleases.

“I have been nothing but a truant and a vagabond. I have never obeyed any one and I have always done as I pleased. If I were only like so many others and had studied and worked and stayed with my poor old Father, I should not find myself here now, in this field and in the darkness, taking the place of a farmer’s watchdog.”

Pinocchio will say whatever’s necessary to get out of the jam. If he had Twitter, he would Tweet it. But it’s not long before he’s out and about again, doing whatever he pleases.

Case in point: After a mild attempt to locate his father, Pinocchio finds himself on an island, looking for “places where one may eat without necessarily being eaten.” Pinocchio, make no mistake, would rather beg to eat than earn the right. It’s only after he is outright starving—and promised bread, cauliflower, cake, and jam—that he agrees to carry a woman’s jug on his head. This lovely woman, as it turns out, is a fairy he’s met before—a fairy Pinocchio claims to love. Sated and instructed, he promises her that he’ll be good now, for real. But the grifter is no promise keeper. More bad company. More bad choices. More trouble afoot, and mostly of his own making.

“Four Pinocchios” is, today, the measure of a Trump whopper, according to the Washington Post’s intrepid fact-checking reporter, Glenn Kessler. It is a construction built on a satirist’s tale, a drubbing named for a character whose lie-lengthened nose must, at one point, be sawed off by a troop of woodpeckers. “I am a rascal, fine on promises which I never keep,” says the original Pinocchio in a moment of truth.

Collodi ties Pinocchio’s momentary episodes of despair and self-reflection to uncomfortable consequences. When, for example, Pinocchio catches “donkey fever” after months of irresponsible behavior in the Land of Toys with his irascible, Putin-esque side-kick, Lamp-Wick, his ears grow long as “shoe brushes.” Again he succumbs to whining remorse: “‘Oh, what have I done? What have I done?’ cried Pinocchio, grasping his two long ears in his hands and pulling and tugging at them angrily, just as if they belonged to another.”

But Pinocchio will have to endure this bout of remorse, for—overwhelmingly long-eared and four-footed and shaggy now—the transformed marionette is bought by a circus owner. The circus man teaches his new donkey tricks and then announces him to the world: “Great Spectacle To-Night… First Public Appearance of the Famous Donkey Called Pinocchio.”

Then: “That night, as you can well imagine, the theater was filled to overflowing one hour before the show was scheduled to start. Not an orchestra chair could be had, not a balcony seat, nor a gallery seat; not even for their weight in gold.”

It sounds, well, an awful lot like a campaign rally.

Four Pinocchios” is, today, the measure of a Trump whopper, according to the Washington Post’s intrepid fact-checking reporter, Glenn Kessler. It is a construction built on a satirist’s tale, a drubbing named for a character whose lie-lengthened nose must, at one point, be sawed off by a troop of woodpeckers.

By the end of Collodi’s Pinocchio the marionette has ceded to the fundamentals of humanity—learned the value of work, learned the essence of compassion, learned the beauty of being brave on behalf of others, rescued, from the belly of a shark, himself and his long-suffering father. He has willingly sacrificed for the fairy, now lying ill. He has wanted to be forgiven, and he is. For all his antics, he has ultimately been redeemed. Even that back-from-the-dead cricket approves his transformation.

Pinocchio asks: “I wonder where the old Pinocchio of wood has hidden himself?”

“There he is,” answered Geppetto. And he pointed to a large Marionette leaning against a chair, head turned to one side, arms hanging limp, and legs twisted under him.

After a long, long look, Pinocchio said to himself with great content:

“How ridiculous I was as a Marionette! And how happy I am, now that I have become a real boy.’”

Such is the stuff of fairytales.

Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of 22 books, an adjunct teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, and co-founder of Juncture Workshops. Her new book is Wild Blues. She can be reached at www.bethkephartbooks.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

MINA, a novel by Kim Sagwa, reviewed by Kelly Doyle

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MINA
by Kim Sagwa
translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton
Two Lines Press, 237

Reviewed by Kelly Doyle

When adults look back upon their teenage years they chuckle, roll their eyes at their own naiveté, or slap their foreheads in retrospective frustration. And they have a lot to say. Writers have been exploiting the tumultuous years between thirteen and eighteen ever since the first angsty teenager began committing regrettable acts in an attempt to find herself. Writers feast on change, on transition, on fear and tension, all so inherent in the teenage being. From The Catcher in the Rye to Looking for Alaska to The Outsiders and The Perks of Being a Wallflower, we have seen poor judgment, insecurity, the occasional misguided romance, and the search for identity drive stories.

A new novel, Mina, written by Kim Sagwa and translated from Korean by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton, also attempts to chronical this transformative time of life, but in the context of a world that does not condone individuality, experimentation, or choice. Through unconventional characters, a high-pressure setting, and an unapologetic directness that is both off-putting and enthralling, Sagwa creates an entirely different kind of teenage drama. By placing three emotional, confused young people in a world of restraint and hidden suffering, she ignites an explosion of a story that is entirely new. It does not have the charming humor of John Green or the contrariety of J.D. Salinger. Instead, it is an immensely serious and angry portrayal of a teenage breakdown.

On the surface, the protagonist Crystal could be mistaken for a standard teenager with standard feelings. She lives an upper-middle-class life in P-City, Korea, where she struggles with the usual teenage problems of boys, alcohol, and fitting in. She loves music and cheesecake. At the beginning of the novel, the reader is led to believe that Crystal’s insanity, or “weirdness” as other characters refer to it, is in response to the societal pressures that surround her, specifically in relation to school. Her friend Mina describes their lives as “Cram school, home, school, test, school, school, cram school, homework, tutor, cram school, home, tutor, cram school, home, school, back to cram school, back to tutor, back for a test back to homework back to school back to school back to school. Home. Cram School. How can anyone think this is normal? It’s crazy.” In addition, they are well aware of the emphasis their families place on class, and where they fall within the hierarchy of their world. Their society is made up of an “exclusive middle-class lifestyle that is selfish, ignorant, and irresponsible […] while in another section of the city the lives of the losers slowly sink.” This attitude spills into Crystal’s worldview and she begins seeing everyone as nothing but a position in her ranking system: “this person’s worthy, that person’s unworthy.” Crystal’s parents are rarely home. She is starved for attention and lacks an emotional outlet. The only one is Mina and Mina’s brother Minho, with whom Crystal believes she is in love. Crystal says that her life is all about coping just so she “will have an opportunity to carry heavier burdens.” It is easy to understand why she might be “weird.”

Kim Sagwa

However, as her weirdness devolves into an entirely different form of insanity, it becomes harder to imagine that society is the only force at work. Crystal is narcissistic and sadistic, believing herself smarter than everyone in the world. “People are idiots, and I hate idiots,” she says many times throughout the novel. “Stupid kids ought to be put to work on a farm […] I wish I could tell them there’s no reason they should exist. Then kill them, a slow, painful death. After the job is done I’ll have a good laugh.” She vacillates between wanting everyone dead and merely wanting them below her, “underfoot so she can call down and tell them they can’t come up.”

Kim opens with a premise that has been written and rewritten and places it in a world where the normal sequence of events is outlawed, twisting the classic bildungsroman it into a terrifying spectacle of a life going terribly wrong.

On top of that, Crystal is obsessed with Mina, simultaneously hating and loving her, fantasizing about murdering her and being her hero. The reader’s relationship with Crystal changes drastically when she acts upon her dark instincts for the first time. Finding an abandoned kitten, she pulls its tail, hits it, throws it repeatedly against a wall, and eventually puts it in a plastic bag and throws it out the window. The entire episode is overlaid with her overflowing emotions. “As she laughs she feels anger infiltrating the laughter—more and more anger […] her laughter changes to hysteria.” For the rest of the novel, as if the torturing and killing of the cat have unleashed something that can no longer be controlled, her emotional volatility worsens, culminating in elaborate hallucinations and terrifying fantasies. She attempts to explain her feelings in long monologues and internal contemplations, but she lacks empathy and logic. Citing new problems on every page, her twisted worldview seems to be constantly changing. She ranks everyone in a fashion reminiscent of the grades that control her life and is extremely conscious of class and intelligence. “I hope the planet dies,” she says. “Before I turn twenty. If the planet dies then all the idiocy in the world can be saved—salvation from stupidity.” She has no social understanding and seems to be utterly alone. Her rants span for pages, ending chapters without making any convincing arguments. Throughout this spiral, the reader fears more and more for the safety of Mina, who remains the focus of many of Crystal’s thoughts and fantasizes. The beginning of the novel reads like a social commentary, but it plays out like a horror movie.

The narrator exists somewhere between Crystal’s mind and an all-knowing god, reporting her thoughts as well as information she would have no way of knowing. This unconventional narrative pattern alloys Kim’s voice to distinguish itself through images that are precise and visceral. The story is fast-paced because the reader feels Crystal’s franticness—the volatility and transience of each individual moment.

Kim creates a new kind of teenage drama, a story that is not concerned with pleasing the reader or making anyone happy. She writes a coming of age story in a setting where development is impossible, where pressure decides everything, where structure replaces individuality. 

Yet the narrative provides the reader with no respite from the darkness of Crystal’s mind. It spans the entire course of the novel, resulting in a gritty read. Crystal is incomprehensible, difficult to understand or relate to. She is one of many teenagers molded into identical students, and she can only become as different as her daring allows. Crystal is so helpless that, in this time of transition, she can only create choice for herself if she not only breaks the rules but breaks the very foundation of the world in which she lives. As soon as she begins to believe this, any less than radical solution becomes impossible. In this way, Kim creates a new kind of teenage drama, a story that is not concerned with pleasing the reader or making anyone happy. She writes a coming of age story in a setting where development is impossible, where pressure decides everything, where structure replaces individuality. She opens with a premise that has been written and rewritten and places it in a world where the normal sequence of events is outlawed, twisting the classic bildungsroman it into a terrifying spectacle of a life going terribly wrong.

Kelly 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.

COMEMADRE, a novel by Roque Larraquy, reviewed by Justin Goodman

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COMEMADRE
by Roque Larraquy
translated by Heather Cleary
Coffee House Press, 152 pages

Reviewed by Justin Goodman

There is a plant “whose sap produces […] microscopic animal larvae” that can consume rats “from the inside out.” It can only be found on “Thompson Island, a small landmass in Tierra Del Fuego,” within Argentinian screenwriter Roque Larraquy’s debut novel Comemadre—the name of this plant of spontaneous generation. Translated in the novel as “motherseeker or mothersicken,” this fictitious plant and its larvae symbolize the dual powers of violence to create and destroy. First as crime, then as art. It is an unmistakably self-conscious symbol for an unrepentantly self-conscious novel, going so far as to have the artist-narrator of the second part dissecting a biographer’s write-up of him and his legacy. Thankfully this consciousness doesn’t eat the novel from the inside out. However, the primary issue of the novel is precisely the necessarily maximalist philosophy this consciousness requires for its slim 129 pages. By the time the comemadre plant has been introduced on page 74, it becomes just another symbol in a long chain of symbols as opposed to the centralizing (and titular) symbol it intends to be.

The comemadre is even introduced as “a botanical digression.” A digression from what, you may wonder? By this point, the initial narrator, Quintana, a doctor at Temperly Sanatorium in 1907 Buenos Aires, has already dragged the reader through a minefield of concepts. First, he ogles the head nurse, Menendez, who, he says, “fits entirely into the space of those words.” Her existence is reduced to the textual and external. Menendez, instead of being pregnant with meaning, becomes a pregnant pause, the ellipses of her identity-concealing occupation. Then a coworker and rival for Menendez’s attention, Papini, tells a layered joke about a “‘fellow [killing] his wife because she wouldn’t tell him what she was doing on the bidet’” in order to explain phrenology. This is followed by a demonstration by the head doctor:

Next to [the duck] is a wooden box of average size. Its lid, which opens down the middle, has a large, round aperture at its center, bordered by the word ergo. Under the lid is a blade that shoots out horizontally with the speed and force of a crossbow. On the sides of the box, next to the reliefs of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, are the words cogito and sum, respectively.

The head doctor decapitates the duck, its head “[remaining] on the ergo,” while “it looks at us. Or thinks the thoughts of a duck.” This demonstration is followed by a report from an eighteenth-century doctor who recorded a similar event in humans at the guillotine. It’s at this point, fourteen pages in, that we arrive at the guiding story of Comemadre: Can the doctors of Temperley Sanatorium convince patients to be guillotined and then get them to talk about the afterlife? In other words, unlike these preceding moments of textual and external understanding, can the doctors transcend exteriority?

Roque Larraquy

Probably not, as several images later (including a fake serum, tin frogs, and circling ants) Quintana’s story concludes with his visceral and violent act of propagation upon Menendez; Quintana, in pursuit of transcendence, makes a mother of her, becoming the motherseeker eating her from the inside out. The savagery of this (pro)creative act is reduced in the second part, taking place in 2009. Here, all that remains of Quintana is his journal, which becomes the inspiration for a final art piece for the artist-narrator and his partner, Quintana’s great-grandson. To be frank, the problem this poses is too great for the novel to overcome: the holistic feeling of Quintana’s story, as troubled as it is by abundance, is broken apart in the section of the novel that reads like an extended afterword. Over-comprehensive is the word. There is too much weighing on Quintana’s story to recontextualize and revitalize it effectively. On its own, in fact, Quintana’s story would have been complicatedly interesting. It resembles Ernesto Sabato’s 1948 Argentinean classic The Tunnel, another story of obsession and the possibility of transcendence. A refreshing, Modernist turn.

As it is, however, Comemadre is not a bad debut in the slightest. Roque Larraquy is a strong monologist. One of the most memorable moments being the previously mentioned explanation of phrenological characters via a man’s curiosity about what his wife does with a bidet. The second part, insomuch as it is an extended monologue, hits the right notes for a narrator-artist with such memorable lines as “I think, no one likes a child prodigy in a Dior vest.” And while his characters often border on tropes—Doctor Papini is a familiar figure as the big idea, all bravado comic relief—there does remain an air of mystery about Quintana’s motives. At times indifferent as Mersault in Albert Camus’ The Stranger, at times as technically cruel as the Nazi doctor Mengele. A concentration camp survivor once said that “I have never accepted that Mengele believed he was doing serious medical work […] He was exercising power.” This would be a fitting description of Quintana. Strikingly, Josef Mengele fled to Buenos Aires after World War II.

And as for the translation by Heather Cleary, it is hard to imagine Comemadre functioning as effectively as it does without her. Much like her work on Sergio Chejfec’s The Dark, she brings clarity to writing that is dense and overflowing.

And as for the translation by Heather Cleary, it is hard to imagine Comemadre functioning as effectively as it does without her. Much like her work on Sergio Chejfec’s The Dark, she brings clarity to writing that is dense and overflowing. While these two projects are markedly different—Chejfec’s writing is mazy, Larraquy’s is layered—they both require a translator that can parse their complications. What rough edges exist in this novel are inherent to the novel. Quintana, observing the doctors of the Sanatorium applauding their American benefactor for proposing to head nurse Menendez, notes that she is “condensed, made material; she adopts her decisive form.” This would be an accurate description of Cleary’s contribution to the novel as well.

At the end of the description of the guillotine box for the Cartesian duck it follows: “the phrase and figures clearly bear allegorical weight, which diminishes the charm of the whole.” A more fully formed reflection on Comemadre doesn’t exist. Just as the comemadre larvae spontaneously generate in the plant’s sap, symbols seem to spontaneously generate in the leaves of the book. The larvae themselves are stored in a black powder that is described by the artist-narrator of the second part as having “an irregular texture.” Comemadre has an irregular texture. It wants to mean too much, so much that it inserts addendums to inform you of its intent. Perhaps Archibald Macleish’s final words in “Ars Poetica” are overstated. But when I read almost wonderful novels like this one I’m still reminded of them: “A poem should not mean/but be.”

Justin Goodman earned his B.A. in Literature from SUNY Purchase. His writing–published, among other places, in Cleaver Magazine, TwoCities Review, and Prairie Schooner–is accessible from justindgoodman.com. His chapbook, The True Final Apocalypse, is forthcoming from Local Gems.

KATALIN STREET, a novel by Magda Szabó, reviewed by William Morris

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KATALIN STREET
by Magda Szabó
translated by Len Rix
New York Review Books Classics, 248 Pages

reviewed by William Morris

Four children play together in a quiet neighborhood. The children are Henriette Held, the young daughter of a Jewish dentist; the Elekes sisters, Irén and Blanka; and Bálint Temes, the handsome son of the Major. Their game is Cherry Tree, in which they all sing and spin in circles, and one of the children “chooses” another, the one they love. In this innocent game, the girls invariably choose Bálint, and each girl develops her own particular feelings for the boy; when it is his turn to choose, though, Bálint always prefers Irén, the oldest and most serious of the three. This is one of the earliest memories shared by the Elekes, Temes, and Held families, who form a lifelong, tragic bond in Magda Szabó’s Katalin Street.

The bond between these families is cemented when, later in life, Bálint and Irén are married. Their eventual marriage seems a given from childhood, but is stalled by other relationships, the tumult of life in postwar Hungary, and the death of their friend Henriette. During the German occupation, the Elekes and Temes families attempt to hide Henriette, who is Jewish, but through a series of miscalculations she is discovered and killed by a German soldier. Henriette’s ghost literally haunts the novel, wandering helplessly through time and observing her friends. More troubling for the living is the memory of Henriette, which is bound to the memories of their younger, happier selves.

I first encountered Magda Szabó when NYRB Classics published Len Rix’s prizewinning translation of The Door, named one of the 10 Best Books of 2015 by the New York Times Book Review. This Hungarian novel, originally published in 1987, had suddenly become one of the most celebrated books of the year. When I read The Door I knew nothing about Szabó or her work. I knew only that this book was, according to Ali Smith, a “compelling, funny, and horrifying novel.” Reviews online praised The Door unanimously, and it was on the “Staff Picks” shelf at my favorite local bookstore.

Magda Szabó was born in Hungary in the early twentieth century. She was a teacher, poet, novelist, playwright, and children’s author. A succinct yet thorough biography, found in each of her books, tells the story of a career complicated by war and politics. Szabó’s early success as a poet—she won the Baumgartner prize for her 1947 collection Return to Man—became a political liability under Hungary’s Communist rule, so she turned to writing stories and novels.

Following the success of The Door, in 2016 NYRB Classics released Iza’s Ballad, translated by George Szirtes. Iza’s Ballad, like The Door before it, is a story about younger Hungarians’ attitudes toward the older generation. In The Door, a young writer clashes with the proud older woman she hires as housekeeper; Iza’s Ballad centers on the tense relationship between a grown daughter and her aged mother. In his introduction, Szirtes asks, “What to do with the old? What to do with parents or grandparents who can’t cope with modern life but cling to lost ways of acting and feeling?” This seems to be a major concern in Szabó’s work: How can we make progress without abandoning the older generation? Her characters often fail, acting cruelly toward those who represent dated ways of thinking.

Where the younger characters in The Door and Iza’s Ballad readily abandon old beliefs in the name of progress, Katalin Street’s characters face loss and longing. They yearn to return to their idyllic childhood, full of gossip and games, while facing the tumult of adult life in postwar, Communist-controlled Budapest. And the main symbol of that childhood is the titular Katalin Street, best described by Henriette Held when she sees it for the first time at six years old:

The houses—tall, narrow edifices standing at the foot of Castle Hill—were very different from the ones she was used to. Of the Castle itself she knew nothing. It was a source of awe and wonder, like an illustration from her book of fairy tales. At the far end of the street was a strange little construction whose nature and purpose she could not begin to imagine. Where she had lived before she had never seen a European-style well, let alone a Turkish one. It must have been early summer, because there were blossoms on the lime trees and she had noticed the scent.

The smell of lime trees, the image of a castle on a hill: these are the lovely memories Irén and Blanka and Bálint recall. They also remember the games, filled with love and freedom, that they played in each home’s garden. Yet all of these memories are distant, marred by the death of Henriette. There can be no consolation in returning to Katalin Street for a visit. All of the beauty of the old neighborhood is gone. The characters now live in an apartment on the opposite side of the river: “the place that sheltered them from the rain and the heat of the sun, nothing more: a cave, if slightly more comfortable than a cave.” They detest the new apartment for not being their old home and despise it further because, from the window, they can see across the river to Katalin Street, where their childhood home is covered in scaffolding. The house, in its current state, is “like a childhood friend who, either in anger or a spirit of fun, had put on a mask and forgotten to take it off long after the party had ended.”

All of this is captured in precise and vivid language by Len Rix, recipient of the 2018 PEN Translation Prize. In awarding this prize, the judges cited Rix’s artistic subtlety, “the mastery to allow Szabó herself to stand out as an exemplary writer.”

All of this is captured in precise and vivid language by Len Rix, recipient of the 2018 PEN Translation Prize. In awarding this prize, the judges cited Rix’s artistic subtlety, “the mastery to allow Szabó herself to stand out as an exemplary writer.” Szabó’s approach in Katalin Street feels markedly different than in The Door or Iza’s Ballad, novels that moved through time more or less chronologically, following a smaller cast of characters. Here, Szabó’s scope is larger. Readers follow her characters back and forth through time, experiencing the impressions and injuries that the years have made on each character.

If Iza’s Ballad asks, “What to do with the old,” Katalin Street wonders “how to carry on living when we are haunted by the memory of everything we have lost.” For Irén and Bálint, carrying on means learning to love one another anew; they are, after all, not the children they were when they first fell in love. For Henriette, it is a matter of watching the lives of the ones she loves, knowing there is nothing she can do to reach them. And for Blanka—who has always loved Bálint and knows she will never have him—the only option is to flee. Blanka moves to a distant island, where she marries a man who does not ask much of her past.

As dark and troubling as Szabó’s novels often are, they are not without glimpses of hope and good intent. In the opening pages of The Door, the narrator admits: “I killed Emerence. The fact that I was trying to save her rather than destroy her changes nothing.” But, of course, this fact changes everything. The desire to save someone from oblivion—no matter the result—comes from a place of compassion. Likewise, though Iza is unkind to her mother until the old woman’s death, the love she’s always felt for her mother surfaces in the novel’s final moments.

Hidden in the tragedies of Katalin Street is a different kind of hope, one built not on returning to a glorified past, but on manifesting remembered joys in the present moment.

By leaving Katalin Street and abandoning her family, Blanka seems to have dispelled all hope of reconnection. She flees because proximity to the places and persons she loves is too painful. Yet the departure and the ensuing distance produces a counter-reaction. Blanka begins to cook as Mrs. Temes taught her. She sews cushions just like the ones her own mother sewed for her as a girl. Many of the books lining the shelves of her husband’s study are translations of the same books Mr. Held once owned. By staving off memories of Katalin Street Blanka begins to embrace all of the beauty the others, still living in Budapest, believe is forever lost. When Henriette’s ghost visits to watch Blanka play the instruments native to her new island home, the music she hears makes Henriette recall “her own mother’s presence far more strongly than anywhere else.” Hidden in the tragedies of Katalin Street is a different kind of hope, one built not on returning to a glorified past, but on manifesting remembered joys in the present moment.

William-MorrisWilliam 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.

GASLIGHT: Lantern Slides from the Nineteenth Century, essays by Joachim Kalka, reviewed by Katharine Coldiron

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GASLIGHT: Lantern Slides from the Nineteenth Century
by Joachim Kalka
translated by Isabel Fargo Cole
New York Review Books, 233 pages

reviewed by Katharine Coldiron

With a title and subtitle like Gaslight: Lantern Slides from the Nineteenth Century, the reader will be forgiven for thinking Joachim Kalka’s book is a collection of visual art. It is not. Though it does contain a handful of visual descriptions, it bears not one illustration, woodcut, or photograph. No lantern slides, and no visual depictions of gaslight. What it has instead are words, many of them, artfully arranged. Kalka’s words, assembled into eleven essays and a preface, are densely packed and remarkably pointed. Although his purpose is to glance back at the nineteenth century, not to historicize it, or even to theorize about it with a particular agenda, Kalka is a highly organized thinker. His insights prove scintillating, if specialized.

The specialization is the rub. Few of the essays in this book are likely to be suitable for a reader without a preexisting interest in the essay’s subject matter. For example, this reviewer has particular interest in Richard Wagner and Marcel Proust, and so I found the essays about those two topics engaging and novel, appreciating Kalka’s acute insights and nodding along vehemently. On the Ring cycle: “The music so magnificently…unifies the whole complicated narrative of the Ring of the Nibelung that only closer examination of the plot logic reveals how confused and contradictory it is.” This is wholly true, and as a flaw, it both overshadows the work and is easily overshadowed by the work—but if you have never seen or listened to the Ring cycle, how would you know that, and why would you care? It’s unfortunate when prior knowledge is necessary for enjoyment, but in this case, the enjoyment gets ramped up significantly when the prior knowledge is there. The book is focused primarily on German literature and history, which is suitable, as Kalka is a German critic. However, this focus might limit Gaslight’s accessibility for readers of mostly English literature.

In fact, the literary aura of this book is a healthy reminder that for Western literary scholars and readers based in Europe, France is the key wellspring of the canon, more so than is Britain. Kalka speaks of Balzac the way an American critic might speak of Dickens; Proust and Flaubert are foundational figures, rather than Joyce and (George) Eliot. Frankenstein is mentioned here and there as an important novel of the nineteenth century, but a book written by an American critic focused on the same century might position Shelley’s novel as one of the load-bearing posts of the era’s technological excitement/anxiety, not an incidental part of it. Then again, Kalka does point out that the canon itself is a construct:

For us the literary canon, at least up until the late nineteenth century, presents itself as a fixed, well-ordered whole, something we take for granted, almost like a natural phenomenon, and we must exert our imaginations to reconstruct how controversial this canon of our classics actually was, how precarious, how historically contingent.

Joachim Kalka

Though stuffed with adjectives and adverbs (“brilliant” is a particular favorite), Kalka’s writing is highly readable, flowing like a mountain stream. But it hops from one topic to another so quickly, rushing over figures and historical events as if stones at the bottom of the water, that people who have not logged significant time in academic libraries might find themselves bewildered. What’s so unusual about his writing is its in-between nature. It flits between topics so rapidly, and lacks a meaningful thesis so frequently, that it isn’t recognizable as scholarship; however, Kalka writes about such heavily literary topics, and touches on such a wide range of difficult literature, that it’s not really general-interest work. Scholars of the nineteenth century will find this light reading, and civilian readers will find it potentially impenetrable.

Part of the reason for this impenetrability is the organization of the essays. One of the least entertaining essays, about Friedrich Schiller, is the opener, and an amusing essay about cake in Madame Bovary and elsewhere, and British food in a Robert Louis Stevenson novel and elsewhere, comes past the halfway point. The essays are roughly chronological in terms of their primary topic: essays on the early nineteenth century appear toward the beginning of the collection, while later figures like Alfred Dreyfus and Jack the Ripper come toward the end. But the subject matter jumps around so frequently that this chronological sense is not all-consuming. Indeed, the only connecting thread across all the essays is the focus on the nineteenth century itself. Otherwise, only one other topic appears across several of the essays: anti-Semitism.

GASLIGHT is not what it seems, in nearly any way. Non-visual despite its visual title and subtitle, non-scholarly despite the scholarly titles of its essays, lively despite its focus on a period remembered in British and American history as being tightly buttoned up. It’s David Markson without the conciseness, and Harold Bloom without the sourness. Should your interests inhabit the same turf as Kalka, he’ll make your neurons hum.

Translator Isabel Fargo Cole

Perhaps this topic is unavoidable for a German critic writing after World War II about events taking place in or near Germany prior to World War II. The Holocaust may be an unavoidable lens for a look back, even if that look is at something so far back as lantern slides. But Kalka offers useful information and fresh analysis about European anti-Semitism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He explains the Dreyfus affair thoroughly, yet succinctly, and his emphasis on the way the incident tore society apart resonates distinctly with the current right-wing movements here, in the UK, and in Europe. “As with many things we take for granted,” he notes in his essay about Jack the Ripper, “a chance circumstance can open up a chink into the past.” In his long essay about Wolfgang Menzel, Kalka calls Menzel’s appalling caricature of Jews “the mad, racist rejection of all that is ‘foreign.’” The closing essay, “Bucolic Anti-Semitism: A Commentary,” uses folk songs, postcards, and other artifacts of middle-class Germany to trace an odd, “jocular” anti-Semitism woven into the fabric of German culture.

From a purely abstract perspective, the exploration of the history of anti-Semitism […] could be just as entertaining as the structurally comparable lunatic fringes of cultural history: UFOs, the true author of Shakespeare’s works, the pyramid prophecies. But the pages of these pamphlets and books are shadowed by a vast horror…

Of course, it was Hitler who changed the character of German anti-Semitism into something not at all bucolic. But Kalka’s point is useful: bigotry appears harmless until it isn’t. “Lunatic fringes” such as birtherism would, today, be much funnier, had they not evolved into our current predicament. But Kalka does not go that far. And why should he? He is a German critic, as this collection does not allow the reader to forget.

Gaslight is not what it seems, in nearly any way. Non-visual despite its visual title and subtitle, non-scholarly despite the scholarly titles of its essays, lively despite its focus on a period remembered in British and American history as being tightly buttoned up. It’s David Markson without the conciseness, and Harold Bloom without the sourness. Should your interests inhabit the same turf as Kalka, he’ll make your neurons hum.

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

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

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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

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

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

reviewed by Jeanne Bonner

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

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 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
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

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 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
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

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

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

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NEST 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 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 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
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.

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.

Jeanne 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
 by Honoré de Balzac
translated by Jordan Stump
New York Review Classics, 242 pages

reviewed by Ashlee Paxton-Turner

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.

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

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.

TIME OF GRATITUDE, essays and poems by Gennady Aygi, reviewed by Ryan K. Strader

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TIME OF GRATITUDE
by Gennady Aygi
translated by Peter France
New Directions, 135 pages

reviewed by Ryan K. Strader

When I was a twenty-one-year-old college student and had zero sense of self-preservation, I rode alone on the train in Russia several times between Petrozavodsk and St. Petersburg—unaccompanied, on an overnight train, sleeping in a bunk car with strangers. I was also very chatty because I was trying to learn Russian. Talking up Russians who wanted to sleep seemed like a way to endear myself to my bunkmates and perfect my language at the same time.

At first, it was hard to start conversations. Finally, at one point, one drunk Russian man was lamenting my lack of useful knowledge—I didn’t know card games or anything about professional swimmers. “What do you study?” he asked me.

When I mentioned that I knew Pasternak’s poetry, his face lit up. “Your schools aren’t complete shit after all!” he said joyously, as though his faith in American education had just been fully restored.

Suddenly we had something to talk about. Poetry. Russians know their writers. That lesson stayed with me. From then on, I advanced conversationally on my bunk-mates by mentioning Pushkin, Pasternak, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva. If they didn’t care for poetry, I could switch to the novelists. The tactic rarely failed.

When I received Time of Gratitude to review, I was expecting to discover a new Russian poet. That is, a poet who fit in well with the other Russian poets I knew. A poet “like” Pasternak, or “like” Blok, even if it was in some intangible abstract way that we like to describe one poet as being like another. I had expectations about what a Russian poet would sound like, given my experience of the modernist Russian canon.

But Time of Gratitude is unexpected, in many ways. Its very first lines, which are an opening to an essay that pays tribute to Boris Pasternak, read:

I am writing of a Poet who possessed an Apollonian beauty at the age of seventy and of an ecstatic twenty-two-year-old…myself—‘and I cannot draw a line between us’: not between myself now and myself then, nor between them both and the divinity of the Poet whom the young man adored.

These lines took me by surprise—Aygi can’t, he says, “draw a line” between himself and Boris Pasternak, and, in truth, his poetry itself doesn’t sound “Pasternakian.” If I started conversations on the train by bringing up the work of Gennady Aygi, I am not sure how far I would have gotten.

In fact, I wouldn’t have gotten far at all: Aygi’s assertion of his place alongside Pasternak would likely have been contested, and perhaps even seen as subversive. Aygi is not easily granted a spot in the canon of Russian poetry, for a number of reasons.

While he has many admirers, among them the poet Alex Cigale, and his long-time friend and translator Peter France, and while many scholars of Russian literature have encountered his work, he is often described as “avant-garde” and as being outside of the Russian lyrical tradition, with very little apparent influence from Russian masters. Such detectable influence from the writers that Russians think of as “theirs” is important.

It is possible that Aygi’s Chuvash background and its influence on his work might have something to do with his outsider status as well. A rural region almost 500 miles east of Moscow, Chuvashia has its own Turkic language and rural culture. Aygi’s work is marked by rural images, values, and a spirituality rooted in nature. In his poetry, this background melds with European modernism in unexpected ways: Time of Gratitude also comments on Kafka, Nietschze, and Kierkegaard.

On top of all this, Aygi was writing in a singularly oppressive historical moment. In my search for interviews and information about Aygi, I found critics that see his work as genius, those that see his work as spiritual, and those that see him as “not Russian,” almost a fraudulent presence amongst Russian poets. The tributes in Time of Gratitude ended up striking me as Aygi’s own commentary on participating in multiple worlds—erasing the lines between Chuvash and Russian, between languages, between philosophies of writing—or re-framing those relationships to create a new sense of unity within himself and his own experience. Such moves are always threatening to someone, and it seems that Aygi has his detractors.

In his introduction to Time of Gratitude, translator Peter France claims that Aygi, who died in 2006, clearly did not suffer from Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” but was instead “a poet of gratitude, gratitude for the human and natural world, gratitude for the artistic creations of others.” “Gratitude” might be another way of describing “influence” for Aygi, but it struck me as a lovelier description because it encompasses the many ways that Aygi felt literary influence as both personal and communal, not simply a matter of poetics. One of Aygi’s most touching memories in Time of Gratitude is a conversation with Pasternak when Aygi was going over a draft of one of the older poet’s novels:

At our second meeting he asked me a question with some embarrassment, slowly and hesitatingly: “Tell me…you are a man…of the people…forgive me for talking like this!…Tell me, does my novel seem to you not to be ours?”

I was staggered—it was as if all the depth of the suffering of my incredible interlocutor was revealed to me. “Boris Leonidovich, what are you saying! It’s ours, it’s ours absolutely!” in the ardour of my reply I was almost choking. Pasternak threw his arms around me.

This conversation underscores Pasternak’s perspective on art, which seems to have been Pasternak’s primary influence on the young Aygi. He describes Pasternak as an artist who saw each human being as “a complete world” in themselves; this dignifying of the individual endowed them with what Aygi calls the “Pasternakian Freedom,” an individual spiritual significance which both dignified the individual’s voice and connected all people into a shared humanity. This perspective seems to have both validated Aygi’s unique voice as a Chuvash-Russian poet and connected Aygi to what was ours—a literary tradition of “the people,” one that values connectedness to the extant literary tradition but also cherished individual voice: “I simply abandoned myself to the power of his Freedom—this mattered more than ‘literary problems,’” writes Aygi. “And this Freedom discovered for itself where he could spread himself in the expanse of its flight and its magnificence.” Such recollections are important to what Aygi refers to as his “spiritual orientation,” by which he seems to mean both his spiritual beliefs and the “spiritual orientation” of much of his poetry. Peter France touches on this spiritual affinity between Pasternak and Aygi in the obituary he wrote in The Guardian: “like Pasternak’s, his poetry was a poetry of light, seeking to assert the values of human community and oneness with the rest of creation.”

It does not seem odd to me that “community” and “oneness” would have begun with an appreciation for the individual, particularly an individual who crossed ethnic and linguistic categories as Aygi did. Born in 1934 in Chuvashia, Aygi moved to Moscow in his early twenties to pursue his education. His first poems were written in his native Chuvash, earning him disapproval from the Russian community. Pasternak encouraged him to switch to Russian, assuring him that “only writing in Russian will allow you to articulate fully everything that is happening within you, in the way of an emerging poetry, as we talk.” The choice to switch seems to have been a difficult question of identity for Aygi, both because claiming a place amongst Russian poets was to claim a “greatness” and literary influence that would quickly be resented, and because it may be seen as rejection of his Chuvash heritage.

Peter France records in Aygi’s obituary from The Guardian that it was at this time, when deciding to write poetry in Russian, that Aygi changed his name: his original surname was Lisin, a Russified name, and Aygi was properly Chuvashian, meaning “that one.” It seems like a calculated choice, but it did not protect Aygi from being shut out of both Russian and literary circles for most of his life. In the same essay on Pasternak, Aygi notes that the writer Hikmet warned him, “There is no question you must go over to Russian, it will correspond to what you have in you. But remember: They will never forgive you for this move,—that you, the son of a small nation, will exist within a great literature.”

While Aygi does not clarify an exact “they” that Hikmet is referencing, such lack of forgiveness seems evident in the larger critical community. Since perestroika such silencing is probably not malicious; rather, it is the unfortunate historical aftermath of a political environment that sought to silence difference. It is startling to realize how limited our knowledge of Russian writers of the twentieth century might really be, given the extent of Soviet censorship, and it humbles the notion of a “canon” that is easily recognizable to American students and Russian traingoers alike, to think of what might have been missed. Aygi was still alive and living in Moscow when I was there, but no Russian literature instructor ever pointed me to him. Nor would they have known to do so.

Time of Gratitude is an unusual text: the collected pieces are both prose and poetry, some of them written for events and some written as personal reflection. Translator Peter France has organized the book into two sections. The first one is devoted to Russian and Chuvash writers and artists, including Boris Pasternak, Kazimir Malevich, Varlam Shalamov, and Chuvash poet Mikhail Sespel. The second section includes pieces in honor of non-Russian writers and artists, and includes Kafka, Baudelaire, Max Jacob, and the Swedish writer Tomas Tranströmer. The title, “Time of Gratitude,” was borrowed from a cycle of poems that Aygi wrote in 1976-7, marking a time of grieving over the politically inspired murder of his friend Konstantin Bogatyrev. In publishing this new collection of Aygi’s works that pay tribute and gratitude to other friends, France concluded that the same title was still appropriate.

In a sense, this collection is a complement to the earlier collection of poems, as expressions of thanks to writers who helped to sustain Aygi through the “difficult times,” which Aygi describes as beginning in 1958 “like a single immense dark avalanche.” While he is not always specific about the precise nature of the difficult times in Time of Gratitude, the reader understands why France says that Aygi “wrote from a deep awareness of the losses and destructions of the 20th century.” In Time of Gratitude, Aygi touches on the imprisonment of Chuvash poets, the death of friends, the censorship of his own work and the censorship and death of Pasternak.

In an interview published in New Directions’ 2007 edition of Aygi’s poetry, Field-Russia (also translated by Peter France), Aygi describes how he understands “literary influence,” and his comments shed light on the structure of the pieces selected for Time of Gratitude. Aygi claims that his “literary education” can be traced to “something different,” which he describes as “addressing the writers themselves rather than their ideas, whether literary or otherwise.” During dark periods of his life, he insists that his mind would turn to the ideas of certain writers, and he would write to them as people with whom he was having an existential debate, rather than write as if he were trying to build images in accordance with the structure of their work. Because of this relationship with writers as partners in conversation rather than as masters to be imitated, “the continuingly influential and genuinely living images of certain teachers constituted for me their ‘legacy,’ their life-long support, and the strength of this kind of ‘contact’ was more powerful than any literary considerations.”

This existential “dialogue through poetry” is present in his poems in Time of Gratitude, such as “For a Conversation About K.” Dedicated to Olga Mashkova, “K.” refers to Kafka:

earth is just a thought—freely visiting:

changing:

sometimes known to me
in a thought that is Prague:

and then I see
a grave in the city—

it is like a grief-thought:

earth—of suffering!…his—as of that thought
which is now so constant!…

I shall say of that grave “a dream”:

and—as even wounds do not make us believe it is real—

he seems dreamed
in another sleep:

as if unending:

by me

Of all the poems in Time of Gratitude, this one struck me as most “like” Aygi’s work in other published volumes. Sleep is a theme in many of his works, and the ethereal sense of questioning reality seems to be a consistent quality of his writing, even in his prose in Time of Gratitude. While the poem is thematically “Kafkaesque” in that it deals with the nature of reality and the mystery of suffering, it also flouts expectations of “Russian” poetry with its use of free verse and its chant-like syntactical structure. Several critics have described his work as “shamanistic,” an adjective that recalls his rural background and emphasizes his avant-garde characteristics.

It was not uncommon for Soviet writers to be unpublished at home and have their works published—sometimes without them even knowing—in the West. With perestroika, Aygi developed a broad European audience, and his work has slowly become better known to American readers. Peter France points out in an interview in Beloit Poetry Journal that while Aygi is considered a “modern classic” to a few, he is still fairly unknown, despite being a pioneer of free verse in Russia and bringing recognition to Chuvashian writers. Time of Gratitude is one attempt to gather and publish more of Aygi’s work; France hopes that at some point Aygi’s extensive collection of letters to people all over the world will be gathered together and published.

I did find Time of Gratitude to be a personal and intimate way to enter the world of Aygi’s poetry for the first time. Since I began with Aygi by reading his memories of those who had been “fathers” and mentors to him, I felt invited to encounter the poet as a person first, aside from the poems, and thereafter it was difficult to separate the poet from the poems. France has commented that, as Aygi’s friend, he often experienced the same difficulty. Given Aygi’s approach to other writers though, as “genuinely living images” that sustained him in ways poems by themselves never could, it seems fitting that Aygi might be introduced to a wider American public this way.

Ryan 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.

TRANSLATION AS TRANSHUMANCE, a book-length essay by Mireille Gansel, reviewed by Rachel R. Taube

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TRANSLATION AS TRANSHUMANCE
by Mireille Gansel
translated from the French by Ros Schwartz
Feminist Press at CUNY, 112 pages

reviewed by Rachel R. Taube

For Mireille Gansel, the work of translation is an all-consuming task. Before embarking on a project, Gansel first immerses herself in the world of the poet she is translating. She studies the historical context of their writing as well as the personal context. Wherever possible, she engages with their physical environment: she visits their home, observes their writing space. And, ideally, she listens to the poet read their work aloud. Attempting to translate a single German word, “sensible,” in a poem by Reiner Kunze, Gansel travels from West to East Germany to “[listen] to the poet read, alert to his intonations and facial expressions. In the tiny blue kitchen, I was conscious of his precarious everyday life.” She imagines the letters from friends in exile that he’ll never receive, and the mingling of his two languages, a German abstracted by Nazism and a Czech repressed by war, both of which survive in the poetry of his contemporaries, in songs from his childhood. Here, in this intersection of past and present, Gansel finds the word for “sensible”: fragile.

In her book-length essay, Translation as Transhumance, Gansel describes employing this practice of immersion for her translations of Bertolt Brecht, Peter Huchel, Xuan Dieu, and, most famously, the complete works of Nelly Sachs and her correspondence with Paul Celan. Gansel divides the book into short chapters, poetic meditations on a particular place or poet, which document her travels and her revelations about translation: Translation is the “essence of hospitality.” It is “a hand reaching from one shore to another where there is no bridge.” It can be understood “both as risk-taking and as continual re-examination,” the translator’s work fluid, changing as word-meanings morph through time, and even as the translator herself changes. Gansel inserts original German and Vietnamese poetry throughout and explains how she comes to each translation, what each taught her, in a word-level analysis that will speak to any student of translation or of poetry.

The book’s title, which is the same in both English and French, refers to a shepherd’s job: “transhumance” is the long, slow movement of flocks across plains and valleys as they search for greener land by way of ancient routes. It is “the slow and patient crossing of countries, all borders eradicated.” At a time in which words are losing their meanings and border walls are once again growing tall, Gansel illustrates for her reader the difficult work of border crossing.

Mireille Gansel

After working on her German translations, Gansel travels to Vietnam, where she lives for several years, learning Vietnamese in order to translate an anthology of poetry to protest threats of American intervention. To fully understand the music of the language, she learns to play the monochord, which she calls the soul of Vietnamese poetry, and to understand the poetry of a dying mountain people, she spends time in their raised bamboo houses, sharing their rice. She learns to consider, alongside a word’s literal translation, “the implicit allusions of an entire social imaginary.” She gives, as an example, the word duyen, which literally means “attachment,” but could be translated as “love sworn for eternity,” “bond of the soul,” “nuptials,” or “fate,” and references a wildly popular eighteenth-century epic. The one word cannot be translated as just one word.

Back in Europe, translating Nelly Sachs, because Gansel can’t speak to her, she travels to Stockholm and pours through the German-language Bible that Sachs was reading as she wrote, trying to understand the ancient Hebrew rhythm that Sachs absorbed and infused into her poetry. She decides that “from now on translation would mean taking syntactical and semantic risks” and begins employing extended compounds like “the ones standing-with-you-in-the-light!” Over the course of the book, she arrives at one lesson after another, in one country after the next.

Of course, this type of total immersion isn’t available to most working translators. Translations as Transhumance is certainly less a how-to than a memoir that lets the reader in on Gansel’s process. For her, that immersion becomes necessary because of the particular contexts of her work: in each case, Gansel grapples with the colonization of language. For example, in translating Vietnamese poetry into French, the language of the country’s colonizer, she must be careful to avoid “the French tradition of translation that favored an exotic approach,” which, as her translation partner put it, “arouses simply a sense of foreignness, without being able to communicate the emotions.” Similarly, in translating Brecht, she is acutely aware of German as the language of oppression, and she attempts to capture the playwright’s reappropriation of a Nazified German in his work. Languages, she finds, exist both within and outside of their colonization. In addition to being the language of the oppressors, for people like Gansel’s elderly relatives, German is the language of family. Their German is accented with the languages of neighboring countries, “punctuated by exiles and passed down through generations… This is the German that has no land or borders. An interior language.”

Often, Gansel refers back to this idea, what she refers to as the interior or soul language, which exists without a home, a sort of mystical truth-meaning that must be captured by the translator in mere words: “translation came to mean learning to listen to the silences between lines, to the underground springs of a people’s hinterland.” As her mentor in Vietnam, Nguyen Khac Vien, writes, “Staying faithful means first and foremost seeking to recreate the work’s humanity, its universality,” and liberating language from exoticism and appropriation. This is a poetic and engaging directive, if nebulous. It gestures towards the poet’s work of infusing small words with great and inexpressible Truth, as they exist both in and beyond their context.

But more concretely, in pursuing this goal Gansel aligns herself with a particular strand of translation theory. On one end of the spectrum is a practice that prizes word-for-word or phrase-for-phrase translation and even grammatical fidelity. Meanwhile, those on the other end of the spectrum focus on the meaning of the original text, accounting for the cultures of the two languages and valuing a translation that has the same effect on a reader as the original. Gansel falls definitively on the latter end of the spectrum, claiming in another essay: “There are fidelities that are worse than betrayals.” Instead, she mines culture in order to communicate a poet’s larger ideas and references, risking “going beyond the literal meanings of the words, in order to access their deeper meanings.” When Gansel speaks of a language of the soul, what she really means is: Put the dictionary aside, for a moment. Immerse yourself in the world of the poet, and their words will unfurl to their full size and meaning. Language is limiting, so let us engage it with all the tools at our disposal. With thoroughness, with humanity, with love, communication is possible.

One cannot read these meditations without remembering that Translation as Transhumance is itself a work in translation. For this reason, I wished more than once for a translator’s note. What is translator Ros Schwartz’s theory of translation? Did Schwartz visit Gansel’s desk? Did Gansel read portions of the book aloud to her, press her tongue to her teeth and bring the words to life? Gansel includes poems in German and Vietnamese, as previously mentioned, which we see translated into English. If we are to read pages about translating a single word, we must know if the English version comes from the French translation Gansel made, or from the original, or through an intermediary. Schwartz is a prolific and award-winning translator of French into English who has written and spoken widely. I would have relished a few words from her on this meta-project.

The success of Translation as Transhumance lies, finally, in the quality of this translated prose. Because we can’t actually read the final products of Gansel’s work, we depend on her descriptions of success, which tend to result in a lesson for the translator. By using a lyric voice that leads the reader from memory to theory and back again, our author (mostly) avoids moralizing and instead illuminates a fascinating and earnest process. In the final pages, Gansel comes to one more realization:

[A]s I sat at the ancient table beneath the blackened beams, it suddenly dawned on me that the stranger was not the other, it was me. I was the one who had everything to learn, everything to understand, from the other.

This excerpt perhaps best explains Gansel’s obsessive commitment to research and immersion. She is trying to decenter herself. The language of another’s soul is accessible once hubris gives way to empathy. And so, with slow and patient work, the borders can be crossed.

Rachel-TaubeRachel 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.

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

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MIRROR, 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

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 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.

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

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SCHLUMP
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

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 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
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

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-ErspamerMelanie 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
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

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 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
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

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-sorrellRobert 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
by Iosi Havilio
translated by Lorna Fox Scott
And Other Stories Publishing, 120 pages

reviewed by August Thompson

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

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 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.

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

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KONUNDRUM: 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

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.

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 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.

 

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

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ALL 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

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 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 MADELEINE PROJECT, a work of creative nonfiction by Clara Beaudoux, reviewed by Ryan K. Strader

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

 

 

THE MADELEINE PROJECT, a work of creative nonfiction by Clara Beaudoux, reviewed by Ryan K. Strader

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THE MADELEINE PROJECT
by Clara Beaudoux
translated by Alison Anderson
New Vessel Press, 285 pages

reviewed by Ryan K. Strader

In 2013, a young journalist named Clara Beaudoux moves into a Paris apartment. The previous tenant, a woman named Madeleine, lived there for 20 years before passing away in her nineties. Strangely, Madeleine’s things have not been removed from the cellar. “All I had to do was open a door, the door to my cellar, for the adventure to begin,” writes Beaudoux.

At first, the nature of Beaudoux’s adventure is journalistic and intellectual: curious about who Madeleine is and why she has left a room full of old memorabilia, Beaudoux decides to go through Madeleine’s items on Twitter—as she opens each box, she tweets its contents. Dishes, jewelry, old mattresses, mysterious little gadgets that have been tucked away in envelopes for decades emerge in tweeted photos, with 140 character captions:

“I could see right away that Madeleine seemed to be well organized. She kept back issues of Historia.” (2 Nov. 2015)

“I think Madeleine must have inherited her parents’ things too, like these coal coupons.” (2 Nov. 2015)

“There are vast quantities of photographs in these suitcases, I’m a bit overwhelmed, is this Madeleine?” (3 Nov. 2015)

“A little announcement, with black edges. I’d seen his name the day before on a business card in this suitcase.” (6 Nov. 2015)

But this journey quickly becomes something else. Madeleine has left behind history that few of us bother to keep, either because we are too foolish to understand the significance of the historical events marking our lives, or because we fail to create meaningful, tangible records in these days of Twitter and email, or perhaps because we would rather let go of painful images, painful words or traumatic histories. Somehow none of these usual reasons inhibited Madeleine, as Beaudoux discovers: Madeleine has left behind suitcases of postcards, pressed flowers, photos, her family records dating back generations, and letters from loved ones lost in World War II.

For Beaudoux, a Paris-based journalist for the France Info news network —and for lucky readers—the weighty reality of the gift that Madeleine has left us is overwhelming.

Clara Beaudoux

First published in France in 2016 and now available in English translated by Alison Anderson, The Madeleine Project is a compilation of Beaudoux’s tweets, complete with her growing sense of discovery and familiarity with Madeleine. Born in 1915, Madeleine watched World War II claim relatives and friends, and then spent her entire working life as a teacher in an elementary school. She never married and did not have children; instead, Beaudoux relies on the recollections of a godson and neighbors, along with the photos and letters from the cellar, to partially piece together Madeleine’s story. This is a book that makes connections: between generations, between hand written letters from decades ago and the digital age genre of the tweet, between an era that feels lost to us and our daily reality, between our view of history as impersonal, and our sense of each individual’s history, between the notion of history as scholarly and Twitter as mundane, between the graphic novel and the biography.

“We should always study history in this way: it should always be incarnated. After all, insignificant people too have made History, not just the great men that history books talk about,” writes Beaudoux. The project of recovering Madeleine’s story raises questions about our contemporary disconnection from history: our world is indelibly marked by the historical events of Madeleine’s youth, but it is difficult to feel the import of that history personally. To experience Madeleine’s letters is to be reminded (or perhaps to be taught) that each life is shaped by the history of its moment, and that our own historical circumstances are shaping our choices, our words, and our relationships, just as Madeleine’s shaped hers. And, of course, it reminds us of the shared nature of history-making: Madeleine’s story quickly becomes Beaudoux’s story.

The surprise connections between two women living almost 100 years apart is one of the poignant and tender parts of The Madeleine Project. “What did ‘happy’ mean for a young woman of 25 in 1940?” wonders Beaudoux, herself not much older than Madeleine would have been when writing letters to family while Europe was at war. Beaudoux often records her questions and thoughts in ways that emphasize the bonds between strangers, and our need to emphasize communal affection in times of distress. “I no longer look at the old ladies in the neighborhood the same,” observes Beaudoux. When the November 2015 Paris attacks interrupt Beaudoux’s life, she recalls a line from one of Madeleine’s war-time letters: “It’s such a comfort to love each other so well, dear boy, especially now.” Madeleine “was referring to the Second World War, and that’s what I felt in 2015,” records Beaudoux. This widening of our perception to include connection with those around us—especially those who may be different from us—may be the greatest gift that The Madeleine Project gives us, and it is ironic that it comes through Twitter, a medium that often seems to reinforce differences.

The Madeleine Project is the first half of Beaudoux’s cellar investigations and interviews. This partial view might be frustrating for a reader who is invested in Beaudoux’s personal journey or the emerging facticity of Madeleine’s life. There is little of Madeleine’s own language available through Beaudoux’s tweets: the reader has to rely on Beaudoux’s 140 character description of a letter’s contents. At times I wanted answers to specific questions about Madeleine (or her stuff—what was that strange object in the picture on page 18, anyway?) and the end of the Project came far too soon, to me. In many respects, looking for a person who has passed away is bound to end with some disappointment and sense of futility, like Patrick Modiano looking for another Parisian of that era, Dora Bruder. As a reader, I felt as if an interesting conversation had been cut short. But that is because this is not a fiction story, where all the questions are resolved at the end—The Madeleine Project is about a real woman who is gone, and a real woman who is still living her own story and searching for information about Madeleine. Answers are not forthcoming for all of our questions about her. If I feel distress at not being able to ask Madeleine questions and understand her better, Beaudoux seems to feel that she is mourning a lost friend: “And I put it all back as it was, as carefully as I can.  As if you might come back to get everything.”

Fortunately for us, Beaudoux has not stopped searching for Madeleine. She has continued to tweet (in French, @clarabdx) about her project, and hopefully those further adventures will soon arrive in translation, as well.

Ryan 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
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 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
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, B@bil 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

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-TaubeRachel 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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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
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

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-KharoufJacqueline 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
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

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 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.

MIKHAIL AND MARGARITA, a novel by Julie Lekstrom Himes, reviewed by Ryan K. Strader 

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MIKHAIL AND MARGARITA
by Julie Lekstrom Himes
Europa Editions, 336 pages

Reviewed by Ryan K. Strader 

Today’s Moscow has plenty for tourists who are fans of the writer Mikhail Bulgakov: museums, character statues, and guided city tours dedicated to the 20th century writer and his work, especially his most famous novel, The Master and Margarita. In 2002, I was a college student studying in Russia and Bulgakov tourism had not yet exploded; those of us with a resolute affection for all things Bulgakov had to be content to walk around Patriarch’s Ponds, a park that figures prominently in The Master and Margarita, and imagine the characters sauntering over to join us on a park bench.

I used to do just that: sitting on a bench, I would imagine Professor Woland walking by and joining me, accompanied by Korovyov in his ugly trousers and Behemoth, the large cat who walks upright and carries a pistol. Professor Woland is, of all things, the devil, incarnate as a learned magician. Korovyov and Behemoth are his demonic minions. Perhaps the naked witch Hella would join us next on the bench…  

In The Master and Margarita this unholy group easily wreaks havoc on a Moscow that denies the existence of devil or Christ, evil or good, and trusts only in the moral compass of Soviet bureaucracy. The “Master” of Bulgakov’s title is, of course, a writer, a satirist who recognizes Satan easily when he arrives in Moscow disguised as a professor. As a result of his clear sightedness, the Master has been censored out of publication in the name of Soviet decency.

I was only 20 years old at the time of these imagined Woland encounters in Moscow, but the question at the heart of my engagement with Bulgakov’s novel was about what my young self might decide to believe about good and evil and love: Would I insist, as the Muscovites of Bulgakov’s story did, that the devil wasn’t real, even if I saw him? How does one recognize Satan strolling around a park, anyway? What are the telltale signs?

And of course, some very pressing questions to a romantic-minded young woman studying Bulgakov’s works: Who the devil was the real Margarita, anyway? What about her inspired Bulgakov? What kind of private risks might she really have taken to protect Mikhail’s work?  Would she make a pact with the devil, if she met him? Might she, in the USSR of the 1930s, a country tense with purges and arrests, very well have met some satanic fiends? 

Julie Lekstrom Himes

Julie Lekstrom Himes’ novel, Mikhail and Margarita, imagines the love affair that might have inspired The Master and Margarita. This is Himes’ first novel, following the publication of several short stories and essays. Himes is a physician in Massachusetts; interestingly, Bulgakov was also a physician. In an interview with the literary website Eye 94, Himes describes reading Bulgakov’s collection A Country Doctor’s Notebook (reflections on his early years as a doctor) and identifying with “the fear and regret and self-questioning” of a young doctor. Identifying with Bulgakov’s “voice” as a doctor encouraged Himes to try writing from his perspective, to imagine what compelled him to write one of the canonical Russian texts of the 20th century.

Like Bulgakov, Himes mixes genres easily and engagingly, meshing history, fiction and romance. While Bulgakov wrestled with the issue of Russia’s moral ambiguity and tackled the existence of Jesus Christ, Satan, and the histories we use to define good and evil, Himes’ story is motivated by the earthier questions: What had happened earlier in the day, the very first time Bulgakov sat down to write a story about the Master and the devil in Moscow? What kind of woman would have drawn Margarita from Bulgakov’s imagination? Himes pulls the existential wrestling of Bulgakov down to earth, to the story of Mikhail, a playwright, who is drawn to the secretive and generous Margarita, a young woman who habitually develops romantic attachments to writers.

Himes opens her story in 1933, with Mikhail and the poet Osip Mandelstam sharing dinner at a restaurant. It is a seemingly mundane evening, with Mikhail failing to attend to everything the politically disgruntled Osip says. “Only in this country is poetry respected,” Osip declares. “There’s no place where more people are killed for it.” Osip’s comments presage his coming arrest and sentence to internal exile, as a result of his irreverent poetry about Stalin. Mikhail is unable to intervene on his friend’s behalf; grief at losing Osip brings Mikhail together with Osip’s young ex-lover, the lovely Margarita Nikolayevna.

In Osip and Mikhail’s circle of friends, Himes depicts numerous writers and artists of that time, including the director Stanislawski, and the poet Anna Akhmatova. Himes is skilled in developing her characters not as historical cameos but as very human beings trying to balance their consciences against the harsh demands of censors, all while lacking the moral advantage of our historical hindsight. Osip’s friends wonder if he might have done something to deserve arrest—surely there is some reason for what is happening?—and Mikhail fears for his own publication future even as he is desperate to help his imprisoned friend. These are not model dissidents or trained activists, but artists dazedly struggling to understand government betrayal.  Margarita’s affection for Mikhail is founded on how he responds to Osip’s arrest: “I think what you’re doing is—well, it’s brave. You’re not pretending that there wasn’t a crime committed here.” Margarita has faith that speaking the truth is a powerful and meaningful act, and this faith is the foundation of her attraction to writers in general and Mikhail in particular.

Mikhail is chosen to draft a letter to the government arguing for Mandelstam’s release. In the letter, he argues that, “Writers by their nature love their country but if their countrymen no longer have affection for them, then perhaps the better answer is to allow them to emigrate.”  Stretched between his national identity and his role as a writer, Mikhail cannot shake the conviction that writers belong to their country and their country needs them. He doesn’t want to emigrate; the suggestion is made to highlight how badly Russia needs its writers. This concern with the relationship between writers and their country is a peculiarly Russian theme.  The task of a country’s writers is to define those words that frame the social experience: imagination, individuality. Such words describe the concepts by which human beings know themselves, and are the foundation for thinking about national and individual identity. (For this reason, Mikhail Bulgakov, writing to Stalin in 1930, describes himself as a “satirist” and asks, “Am I thinkable in the USSR?” The question assumes a correlation between his identity as a Russian writer and the Russian public’s imagination.) In Himes’ novel, this tension between national and artistic identity is maintained by the alternating choices Mikhail and Margarita make that affect each other and Mikhail’s future as a writer. Mikhail wavers between Margarita’s belief in his truthfulness and his need to preserve his reputation; he likes being a well known playwright. “To disappear is my freedom; for you, my dearest, it would be your prison,” chides Margarita.

The story is dramatically complicated when Ilya Ivanovich, a powerful member of the secret police, also falls for Margarita. None of Himes’ characters are one-dimensional; Ilya is conflicted by his own capacity to destroy others and his desire to protect Margarita. When Margarita is questioned for her association with writers and sent to a labor camp, both men must try to save her. Margarita’s negotiation between Mikhail, the man she loves and the writer she wants to protects, and Ilya, the man who has power over Mikhail, provides the Faustian drama for the novel.

Himes claims Goethe, Marlowe, and Bulgakov, of course, as her literary progenitors. I am strongly reminded of the dissident novelist Vassily Aksyonov, as well. This influence is particularly legible in Himes’ description of the fictional meetings between Mikhail and Stalin. Stalin is believably narcissistic, powerful and childish, by turns. He has Mikhail brought to him in a garage where he is working on a convertible, with sleeves rolled up and grease on his hands. He urges Mikhail to go for a ride in the convertible with him, and enjoys explaining mechanical particulars of the engines. To Mikhail he says:

“You getting this, Playwright? It’s a matter of how we push the earth away.” He nodded. It was he who moved the world; he liked that idea. “You know nothing of cars do you? You’ve heard of Piaquin? The painter? No? Well you won’t now, either, I suppose. Piaquin was like you.”

And yet, Stalin likes Mikhail’s plays: “You make me feel smart,” he explains to the nervous and distressed Mikhail. Just as in real life, Stalin’s capriciousness could mean inexplicable protection.

Each year another author produces a work of fiction that explores the story of an iconic text or writer, albeit rarely one that addresses a Russian text or writer. Mikhail and Margarita is unique because it deals with a text that is not widely read in America, but is undeniably iconic in Russia. It is a work of “historical invention,” because it is both a carefully researched historical portrayal of the social circumstances under which Bulgakov wrote, and it is a fictional romance. Of works in this genre, Himes’ novel is less in the mode of those, like The Meursault Investigation (by Kamel Daoud), which re-tell a canonical story from a new perspective, and more like The Secret of Costaguana (Juan Gabriel Vasquez), which speculates on the origins of a Joseph Conrad novel.

Himes’ novel is lovely and stands on its own for a reader who has no prior experience with Bulgakov’s work or Russian literature. But for the reader who is familiar Himes has woven in references and details that are delightful: Ilya purchasing warm apricot juice for Margarita, or Bulgakov’s observation of Margarita standing by a window as if “she might actually fly from it, revealing herself to be an entirely different creature than the one he knew.” Such details evoke the atmosphere of The Master and Margarita, but in Himes story none of them are incidental, they each carry their own meaning for Mikhail and Margarita. I recognize Himes’ book as both a compelling work in its own right, and a love letter to Bulgakov’s novel.

Ryan 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.

 

 

You may also enjoy:

EXPOSURE, short stories by Katy Resch George, reviewed by Rebecca Entel

THE GERMAN GIRL, a novel by Armando Lucas Correa, reviewed by Kellie Carle

TRYSTING, fiction by Emmanuelle Pagano, reviewed by Rachel R. Taube

 

BARDO OR NOT BARDO, a novel by Antoine Volodine, reviewed by Amada Klute

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BARDO OR NOT BARDO
by Antoine Volodine
translated from French by J.T. Mahany
Open Letter Books, 163 pages

reviewed by Amanda Klute

Take the existential universe of Jean-Paul Sartre and pull his pants down around his ankles—this is the paradoxical narrative met with in French comedic novelist Antoine Volodine’s Bardo or Not Bardo. Volodine’s blunt, absurdist style illustrates a marriage between the profound and the comedic, using humor as a weapon to further investigate humanity’s most unanswerable questions. 

Bardo or Not Bardo greets its audience with death—a formality granting access to the real meat of the novel: the “Bardo,” a Tibetan afterlife where Volodine’s characters are required, through heavy influence and persistent guidance, to navigate this purgatory-of-sorts for seven weeks. Once the forty-nine days are complete, they are forced to choose between rebirth or religious sacrifice: they can be reincarnated as either human or animal, continuing the cycle of life and death, or they can be abolished from suffering and become Buddha. Reminiscent of Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, Volodine’s characters, through seven vignettes tracking from death through the afterlife, consistently waste their freedom and their opportunities at enlightenment even while aided by the teachings from the Bardo Thodol, or the Tibetan “Book of the Dead.” Each vignette reads as its own separate story, only tied to its former or predecessor through themes of fatality and rebirth. The characters only matter as vessels for Volodine’s experiment; his ultimate motive within Bardo to is to wholly explore what hilarity occurs when humanity is confronted with its own mortality.

If, like me, you are not regularly inclined to existential philosophy or absurdist humor, I’d encourage you to ignore your predispositions when approaching Bardo or Not Bardo (after all, the book won the inaugural people’s choice Albertine Prize for French fiction). Volodine erases our partisan ideals of religious afterlife and illustrates, through vivid absurdist imagery, how humanity’s real tragedy lies in our stupidity. “It’s sad,” says Yasar, the bartender of the afterlife’s ‘Bardo Bar,’ “thinking about clowns who can’t make anyone laugh.” Death, afterlife,  ascension to heaven, reincarnation is not romanticized here, but rather in Volodine’s hand becomes hilariously flawed, as characters wander aimlessly, selfishly, defiantly against their religious teachings to a fate of monkey reincarnation, creating an isolation shelter inside a sand dune, or simply choosing a life of narcolepsy. Their fortune is wasted, their “path to knowledge” ignored as Volodine creates a striking parallel between the insignificant priorities of the living and, likewise, the dead, demonstrating humanity’s existence a crude cycle of self-fulfilling hysteria.

Antoine Volodine

“Antoine Volodine” is the predominant pseudonym used by a popular French comedic novelist credited with twenty published novels, including Post Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven, and Minor Angels (for which he won the Prix de Livre Inter and Prix Wepler prizes in 2000). The majority of his works are set in a post-apocalypse, where radicals and fools of the “post-exoticism” movement have all been arrested for their non-conformity and subversive attitudes. Volodine also publishes under the pseudonyms “Lutz Bassmann”: We Monks & Soldiers, and “Manuela Draeger”: In the Time of the Blue Ball, among others—while also being an active literary translator of Russian to French fiction. Bardo or Not Bardo was translated by J.T. Mahony, an American MFA student at the University of Arkansas, who has translated other Volodine works prior. 

Struck by Volodine’s command of language, I found myself captivated by his sharp authority of wit and profound philosophical questioning, everything pondered but nothing answered, revealing life, death, rebirth and afterlife to be just as absurd as reading recipes from a Tibetan cookbook to a murder victim. As these characters move toward enlightenment, they find their own success thwarted by a fear of failure, and thus condemning their fate like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Take Volodine’s sixth vignette, “Dadokin,” where the title character and a fellow Bardo ghost, Schmollowski, meet up along their journey to a new life. During their time together in the Bardo, Dadokin begins to reveal his insecurities to Schmollowski as they approach their ever cryptic fates.

This horrible wait they’re imposing on us…The walk to the wombs…Waiting to be reincarnated…What if they make a mistake? What if they put me in a bad fetus, huh? If I end up in the body of a spider, for example? I hate spiders…Schmollowski, you won’t let me fall, will you? You’ll squish me right away, right?

Volodine concludes the sixth vignette not by revealing the particulars of Dadokin’s fate, but leaving his audience on a cliffhanger as Dadokin begs for death by “squishing.” We know not whether Dadokin’s fate truly was what he feared, but nevertheless understand Volodine’s intent to illustrate how we as a collective species are, more often than not, our own worst enemy.

The novel’s “vignette” style is not particularly suited for a single reading, in one sitting—but rather consumed in small doses. With each vignette, Volodine increases his expositional language, interrupting the overall flow of the novel, but requiring the complete attention of his reader at all times. Volodine’s writing, not dense, but persistent, peels back layer after layer patiently. Consider this excerpt from the second chapter of Bardo, where Volodine distinctly exercises his subtle skill at questioning life’s purpose through the veil of comedy:

And do you know how you yourself would react? In this situation, in the dark, in fear… What would you choose? Dissolution, or reincarnation? Nothing forever more, or a new life of suffering? For example in a frightening and despicable body? As a baboon, a chicken? A powerful mafioso? 

His humor can be missed if not read carefully, and most of his subtle wit and absurdity is found between the lines, rather than in his plot.

The “post-exoticism” movement is Volodine’s self-created genre that is fleshed out further in his novel, Post Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven; the genre effects radicalization and change of previous narrative structures to introduce new literary elements of an absurd nature, from plot to created language. It details images of jail cells and interrogations, afterlife and listlessness, revolution and disillusionment, and human depravity. Not what many would imagine a comedy to consist of, and yet Volodine’s mastery of the “post-exoticism” craft makes philosophy a digestible and enjoyable read. His style is entirely authentic, devoid of any accepted pretext in style or plot as he has created not just a narrative, but a literary atmosphere entirely from his own cosmos. Honesty is best served on a platter of bowel indigestion, irrational fear of spiders, and one horribly grotesque theater performance. Our fear and paranoia of death (and what may follow) is inspected by Volodine in Bardo or Not Bardo, a large child with a magnifying glass—and we the ants, chasing after our own tail.

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.

THE GERMAN GIRL, a novel by Armando Lucas Correa, reviewed by Kellie Carle

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THE GERMAN GIRL
by Armando Lucas Correa
translated by Nick Caistor
Atria Books, 360 pages

reviewed by Kellie Carle

“Today I’m going to find out who I am.”

This declaration from Armando Lucas Correa’s debut novel The German Girl frames the journey of one of Correa’s characters, Anna Rosen. The journey leads her to her great-aunt, Hannah Rosenthal, Correa’s second narrator. Hannah’s story reveals the strength and perseverance necessary in order to survive as her family joins other Jewish refugees headed to Cuba on the SS St. Louis to escape Nazi-occupied Germany. Anna learns from Hannah’s stories, gaining a better understanding of her aunt’s seclusion in Cuba, and of her father who died before she was born. Broken into four parts, the novel explores how these two lives converge. Anna and Hannah, both, tell their own stories as they experiences loss and come face-to-face with obstacles that will force them to face their weaknesses and recognize their strengths.

The editor of the top-selling Hispanic magazine in the United States, People en Español, Correa is an award-winning journalist. He wrote The German Girl originally in Spanish under the title La Niña Alemana.

The German Girl permits readers to enter the minds of two twelve-year-old girls as their lives are shaped by the tragedies of the SS St. Louis and 9/11. Correa expertly combines fact with fiction, as he constructs and then deconstructs the lives of two young girls. He also illustrates the importance a family’s history and the need to pass down history through the generations. The story of the contemporary girl, Anna, is imbedded (as is her name) in Hannah’s and though this is the conceit of the novel, it is also a weakness.

Anna does not receive the same treatment and attention as Hannah and her arc depends on Hannah’s story coming to fruition. Until that occurs, Anna feels like a device invented to get to Hannah’s arguably more interesting life.

The novel immediately transports readers to 1939 Berlin, where Hannah decides that she will kill her parents in fear that they are trying to abandon her to the Nazis. History alerts readers of the impending events of the Holocaust but Correa focuses on the impact of fear and how Hannah, who is “almost twelve years old,” struggles to make sense of a world where a neighbor, once her playmate, now refers to her as “impure.”

Besides her mother, the only consistent figure in her life is her best friend, Leo. Correa alters the construction of his prose whenever Leo is present, deviating from concise and observant to  elaborate and longwinded phrasing to match Hannah’s difficulty in keeping up with her best friend.

Leo was a passionate person. He didn’t walk, he ran, always in a hurry, with a goal to reach, something to show me that I shouldn’t miss. He also visited various neighborhoods, trying to figure out what was happening in this city of ours, which was falling apart bit by bit. Occasionally he mingled with the Ogres marching and shouting the streets with their flags, but I never dared to join him.

In this way, the author reminds the reader that this is a historical novel, not a textbook, based on true events. Leo’s passion is balanced with a sense of urgency, his need to constantly be on the move matched with the setting of dilapidated buildings and a fear of the other. I found myself re-reading these passages, ensuring that I did not miss anything in Leo’s energetic presence on the page, often times trying to catch my breath, much like Hannah, in my attempts to keep up with him as I too allowed him to show me things I should not miss.

Armando Lucas Correa

Hannah and Leo refer to the Nazi party and its members as “Ogres,” as they convey a youthful understanding of the monsters who control the world around them. Cast out by her friends and neighbors who view her as disgusting, the term translates the fear that triggers Hannah’s decision on the first page. She would rather kill her parents than be abandoned and sacrificed to the Nazi monsters.

She does not kill her parents. Instead, after Hannah and her family are forced from their home after her father’s brief imprisonment, they set sail on the now infamous SS St. Louis with several other Jewish refugees in hopes of finding relief in Cuba before possibly settling in New York. Correa combines fact with fiction, weaving the tragic true story of the passengers aboard the SS St. Louis into his novel. On Saturday, May 13, 1939, several hundred Jews boarded the St. Louis, a German ship, as a last hope of escaping Nazi Germany. The original plan was to take these refugees to Cuba where they would wait until they were allowed to enter the United States. However, under pressure from the Nazis, Cuba’s director of immigration passed a decree that forbid any more refugees from entering the country. The passengers on the St. Louis became pawns of Nazi and Cuban scheming and eventually the ship was forced to leave Havana. In the days that followed, the ship sailed along the U.S. coast, but American officials denied it entry and the ship and its passengers were forced back to Germany, where most were sent to death.

Correa juxtaposes Hannah’s story with Anna’s. Anna’s father was killed during the events of 9/11 while her mother was still pregnant with her, leaving her with a desire to discover the type of man her father was, unaware of his past or what remains of his family.

Then a package arrives that jolts Anna’s story and gives life to this part of the novel. The sender is revealed to be the almost eighty-seven year old Hannah. From this point on the book gathers momentum as one learns how her father spent his childhood while the other confronts how her father met his demise. At this point in the novel, Correa ventures away from splitting his characters’ points of view equally and focuses on Hannah. Anna’s plot line becomes overshadowed by the intricate details Correa provides regarding what became of Hannah between the ages of twelve and eighty-seven.

Correa displays his extraordinary talent in depicting his young characters while embedding the truth of the St. Louis within this novel as a way for his audience to gain a better understanding of the forgotten passengers on the ship who sought relief from their tormentors but were turned away. Many survivors, however, are unable to speak and are haunted by the memories of those they watched sail away and never heard from again. In one of these instances, Anna and her mother meet a woman who traveled on the St. Louis along with Hannah. However, the elderly woman is unable to remember Hannah and is reluctant to relive her painful past. In response Anna redoubles her effort. “I don’t want to end up feeling the same guilt toward him,” she says, seeking her father’s story through her great-grandmother’s.

I’m only nearly twelve! At my age, you still want your parents around. Shouting at you, refusing to let you play when you want to, giving you orders and lectures when you don’t behave.

Hannah is able to have what Anna cannot during part two of the novel. While aboard the St. Louis her father and mother resume their roles as parents instead of outcasts trying to smuggle themselves out of Germany while she enjoys lavish parties, discovers she is going to be a big sister, is reunited with Leo, and is once again left to explore her surroundings free of the watchful eyes of the Ogres. Correa incorporates correspondence between passengers on the St. Louis with Cuban and, eventually, American officials who state that they can no longer accept the refugees. With an eye to the present refugee crisis, he reminds us of the story of the St. Louis.

As the ship makes its way to Cuba despite being told there is no room, the refugees become desperate, formulating ways to ensure that they will not have to return to their home countries and face the “Ogres” that have invaded their homes. Hannah is left to wonder what will become of her family should the Rosenthals be allowed to disembark once the ship reaches Cuba’s shores. And, if permitted to leave, she fears she will be separated from Leo, Correa growing their strong bond into that of a first love during their short period of calm.

However, when they reach Cuba, Hannah is not only separated from her beloved Leo but from her father as well. Even though readers are provided with a sense of hope, the promise that Anna will meet Hannah, this hope is brought into sharp contrast with the characters’ sense of loss. By part two of the novel, both have lost their fathers. Correa again illustrates his young characters’ understanding of the world around them. As Hannah and her mother are forced off the ship, she struggles to steal one last glance at her relatives as they drift farther away from her.

The Ogres had snatched my Papa from me. The Cuban Ogres. I couldn’t kiss him. I couldn’t say good-bye to him, or Leo, or the captain.

Hannah and Anna suffer from the loss of their fathers, a fact that strengthens their bond once they meet. After becoming separated from her father, Hannah and her mother decide to stop speaking German and accept that the Cuban people will only ever see them as “Pollacks.” However, after Anna’s arrival, Correa resumes the split point-of-view technique. Hannah sees a lot of her younger self in her great-niece, launching her into a past she would rather forget. Anna becomes fascinated by the secrets that haunt her great-aunt and the rumors that her Cuban neighbors whisper about her. While Anna delights in the fact that she is named after such a mysterious woman, Hannah forces herself to reflect on her, finding comfort in what she has gained such as Anna’s father, who left her with someone to carry on their family name outside of Cuba.

Kellie Carle earned her BA from Old Dominion University in Virginia, MA from West Chester University in Pennsylvania, and MFA from Spalding University’s Low-Residency program in Kentucky. When she is not exploring the realms of speculative, jazz, and historical fiction, Kellie avidly pursues misspelled words, botched plot lines, and rudimentary characters. Her work can be found in Pennyshorts, Sick Lit. Magazine, and Phindie. To learn more, please visit her website at kelliecarle.com.

TRYSTING, fiction by Emmanuelle Pagano, reviewed by Rachel R. Taube

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

TRYSTING
by Emmanuelle Pagano
translated from the French by Jennifer Higgins and Sophie Lewis
Two Lines Press, 154 pages

reviewed by Rachel R. Taube

Emmanuelle Pagano’s Trysting is an intimate romance among hundreds. This book of fictional fragments, each in the first person, features character after character—most of indeterminate gender, age, and history—falling in and out of love. The self-contained pieces range from one sentence meditations to several hundred word flash fictions. The shortest of these could be writing prompts, while others read as prose poems. Reading Trysting can, in fact, be like reading a book of poetry, and it benefits from slow, thoughtful study. You could linger over any one piece, reread it and taste the rhythm, the carefully chosen words.

The deliberate and emotionally dense Trysting is representative of the kind of writing that earned Pagano the European Union Prize for Literature and translation into a dozen languages. But this is the first time Pagano has been published in English, and Jennifer Higgins’ and Sophie Lewis’ interpretation is a piece of art in its own right. Though they lose some nuances of expression and must forfeit some of the clarity of the French, Higgins and Lew