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The Dead White Male You Should Read: Three New Books on Borges — Tom Faure

Oct 012013

Photograph: Christopher Pillitz/Getty Images

Borges at 80: Conversations
Edited by Willis Barnstone
New Directions, 192 pages, $18.95

Professor Borges
Edited by Martín Arias and Martín Hadis
New Directions, 288 pages, $26.50

Jorge Luis Borges: The Last Interview
Translated by Kit Maude
Melville House, 176 pages, $15.95

Jorge Luis Borges is a dead, white male. But he isn’t European. So he lacks imperialist cred and isn’t taught among the typical classics. As editor and translator James E. Irby remarks in the 1961 New Directions edition of Labyrinths, “Not being French has undoubtedly also relegated Borges to comparative obscurity in the English-speaking countries, where it is rare that a Hispanic writer is ever accorded any major importance at all.”

A lover of contradictions, he would appreciate the paradox of his current position: he is sometimes overlooked, often mislabeled. Some lazily lump him in with Marquez, with magical realism. Others tie him to dadaism, surrealism, modernism, post-modernism. Borges was a dreamer who described himself as constantly puzzled, stuck in a labyrinth, so perhaps he won’t mind being labelled so haphazardly. Probably aware of the futility of the exercise, David Foster Wallace attempted to classify him more accurately, calling him the “great bridge between modernism and post-modernism.”

He was barely even a writer—more a librarian, a professor of literature and philosophy who just happened to translate and write free verse poetry and brilliant experimental stories. His prose is usually short—compact yet expansive, deeply-rooted in a mixture of traditions yet simple in its fascination with time and eternity. A symbolist, Borges thought in metaphor from the beginning, but turned deeper into his imagination when he began losing his eyesight in his fifties. What results are his story-puzzles of infinite regression and infinite possibility.

New Directions was the first to bring Borges to an English-speaking audience when they published Labyrinths in 1961. That same year he and Samuel Beckett shared the Prix International, awarded by the Formentor Group (created by Carlos Barral). This brought more attention to his work. That collection of stories and short essays remains the essential primer to Borges. Now New Directions has released in short succession Borges at Eighty: Conversations and Professor Borges: A Course on English Literature. The former presents the interviews he gave to Willis Barnstone, Dick Cavett, Alastair Reid, and others during a visit to the U.S. in 1980. The latter is a transcription of twenty-five classes Borges gave in 1966 at the University of Buenos Aires. This spate of new material was just barely preceded by Melville House’s Jorge Luis Borges: The Last Interview, which came out in June, and contains a 1968 dialogue with Richard Burgin, a fantastic discussion with the editors of Artful Dodge, and of course the last interview Borges gave before his death.

In a short meditation written at Borges’ death in 1986, Sven Birkerts called him “the Euclid of the secret orders of time.” Birkerts, writing in the Boston Phoenix, captured the Argentine’s writing in as close to a nutshell as one can: “These are not stories at all. These fanciful narratives are the author’s way of telling us his truth; they are whimsical-looking ciphers in a most serious code.”

Nothing in Borges is superfluous or forgettable. But he was not much interested in character. Borges obliquely addressed this in The Last Interview. Burgin asks about writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald who have (Burgin’s words) “no metaphysical feeling.” Borges says, “They take the universe for granted […] They don’t think it’s strange that they should be living.” His stakes were metaphysical and only somewhat existential. One of his most memorable characters, Pierre Menard, decides to rewrite Don Quixote. To do this he seeks to immerse himself in old Spanish, recover his Catholic faith, and fight some Turks so as to become Cervantes. Menard’s work would be more formidable than the original, because Cervantes had the benefit of living in the sixteenth century. Cervantes had the benefit of being Cervantes. And the story is about identity and authority instead of personality.

In one article-cum-story, Borges invents a world where the spoken language contains no nouns (among other deformities). In the logic of Wittgenstein, the language dominates the world. On Tlön:

…they do not conceive that the spatial persists in time. The perception of a cloud of smoke on the horizon and then of the burning field and then of the half-extinguished cigarette that produced the blaze is considered an example of association of ideas.

Borges was a poet steeped in Leibniz and Spinoza, with a preference above all for Schopenhauer. He loved Whitman and Stevenson. He admired but also criticized Kafka and was fascinated by Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the tortoise. He described himself not as an author but rather as an interpreter through which writers of the past were filtered. He found a fascination in mirrors and labyrinths, in the distortions not only of the senses but of the mind. Everywhere he saw tradition, variation, and the fictional hrönir.

Centuries and centuries of idealism have not failed to influence reality. In the most ancient regions of Tlön, the duplication of lost objects is not infrequent. Two persons look for a pencil; the first finds it and says nothing; the second finds a second pencil, no less real, but closer to his expectations. These secondary objects are called hrönir and are, though awkward in form, somewhat longer. […] Curiously, the hrönir of second and third degree […] exaggerated the aberrations of the initial one; those of fifth degree are almost uniform; those of ninth degree become confused with those of the second; in those of the eleventh there is a purity of line not found in the original. The process is cyclical. (Labyrinths)

Born in Buenos Aires in 1899 to a bookish father and a mother whose forefathers were criollo soldiers, Borges was outspoken against Argentina’s support for Mussolini. Early in his life he took firm liberal stances—especially against the ruling Perón family. He became disenchanted by his home country, or at least he became more careful in public proclamations, which lack nuance. He also became less productive in general when he began to lose his sight. As with Milton, blindness did not end Borges’ writing career. But it slowed him down and hampered his reading of contemporaries, which might have contributed to the complaints that he ignored his country, its literature, and its politics.

Meanwhile he was too shy (and, perhaps, too clever) to fully embody a public persona, presenting himself as humble and apologetic for all the fuss made over his work. In his short essay “Borges and I,” he plays with the duality of his life as both a public figure and a quiet, sociable person. Just read this and shudder:

I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. (Labyrinths)

Twenty-seven years after his death, these new books show how much he affected to prefer the non-writing Borges to the controversial, acclaimed writer. That said, whether at the podium or in an interview, it’s not always clear which one is speaking. Though he says he hopes his work will be forgotten, and that he’d like to become Ellison’s “invisible man,” he seems to enjoy these conversations too much to completely disown the public Borges.

Though Borges tells Richard Burgin in The Last Interview that he hates cameras (because “a camera is a kind of mirror”), Borges clearly enjoyed being interviewed, and evidently also loved to teach, to converse about the writers he felt a closest kinship to—not Marquez or Cortazar or Joyce but Whitman, Shaw, and James. In Professor Borges, he covers a selective history of English literature from kennings to Stevenson, for Spanish-speaking students who have never encountered the tradition before. The main pleasure of this collection is to wade into the mind of a lover of books, the one-time head librarian of the National Library of Argentina. Borges again seems more like a curator of tradition than an inventor of fictions.

In Borges at Eighty, the writer comes alive, touring various universities and the New York PEN Center. Of all places, he is most revealing on The Dick Cavett Show. The discussion ranges from the differences between Spanish and English, to Hitler, to Citizen Kane. When Cavett asks about Argentina’s fascist past, Borges sounds resigned:

Look here. I think the Argentine Republic cannot be explained. It is as mysterious as the universe. I do not understand it. I don’t profess to understand my country. I am not politically minded either.

Borges’ literary games were so much more than clever tricks—they were metaphors through which he conveyed as poetically the strange, lonely world he inhabited. Cavett asks whether they are artistic flourishes or “something alive.” Borges replies:

I am always being baffled, perplexed, so a maze is the right symbol. They are not, at least to me, literary devices or tricks. I don’t think of them as tricks. They are part of my destiny, of my way of feeling, of living. I haven’t chosen them.

In other conversations from Borges at Eighty, he explains why free verse is as difficult as prose, and how either is more challenging than structured verse. He describes immortality as a threat, rejects his early work as too baroque, and explains simply that he never wrote novels because he could not do it. He admits, “I am a bit of a prig,” and expounds on the importance of saving humanism. He bemoans his inability to reason, finding in himself instead a preference for dreaming.

In these new books there is much to like about Borges the dreaming librarian, but, oddly, neither the writer nor teacher seems interested in including women in the library. He will say things like, as he tells Burgin, “I think men are more prone to metaphysical wondering than women. I think that women take the world for granted.” When asked to identify significant women in literature, he offers Emily Dickinson. When asked whether there are more, he says, “Yes of course.” He then suggests Silvina Ocampo, “who is translating Emily Dickinson at this moment.” Sometimes his remarks borders on the condescending. In The Last Interview, he tells Burgin:

I have known very intelligent women who are quite incapable of philosophy. One of the most intelligent women I know, she’s one of my pupils; she studies Old English with me, well, she was wild over so many books and poets, then I told her to read Berkeley’s dialogues, three dialogues, and she could make nothing of them.

It can be argued that Borges’ gender gap is also a gap in the tradition he so loved. Borges might have recognized this flaw, though he did not address it very well. As Colm Tóibín notes when discussing the Menard story, Borges is keenly aware of his difficult role as a writer and “the concept of the writer as a force of culture imprisoned by language and time.” Like many of his compatriots, Borges faced a crisis of identity: embrace Western modernism or turn back to the “gaucho” sensibility and poetic style of the earlier Argentina, exemplified by José Hernández’s poem El Gaucho Martín Fierro. But nothing captures better Borges’ conflict with identity—personal, visual, aesthetic, national, gendered—than the short epilogue to Borges at Eighty, from an interview held at the National Library in 1979. The statement touches on a number of problems with the notion of universality:

Reading should not be obligatory. Should we ever speak of ‘obligatory pleasure’? […] I have always advised my students: If a book bores you, leave it; don’t read it because it is famous, don’t read it because it is modern, don’t read a book because it is old. […] If a book is tedious to you, don’t read it; that book was not written for you.”

It is a shame Borges did not recognize his weak position on female writers. His critics either will not forgive him this, or perhaps they do not understand the Argentine’s general appeal to cosmopolitanism. His accepting of an award from Pinochet and professed admiration for Franco did not help either. Such utterances form one contradiction too many for the contradictory universalist.

Of the three new books, The Last Interview stands out in that it brings us the English translation of Borges’ last interview, with journalist Gloria López Lecube. He spoke with her right before his departure for Geneva, where he planned to die. In this “last” interview, he speaks fondly of his mother and describes for López Lecube how he dreams in color. We see a man anticipating his death with the air of a giddy boy who will finally learn how the magic trick worked.

Spinoza says that we all feel immortal, yes, but not as individuals, I assume, rather immortal in a pantheistic way, in a divine way. When I get scared, when things aren’t going well, I think to myself, ‘But why should I care what happens to a South American writer, from a lost country like the Republic of Argentina at the end of the twentieth century? What possible interest could that hold for me when I still have the adventure of death before me, which could be annihilation; that would be best, it could be oblivion…

This is the most interesting thing about these new books, ultimately—not the lectures on Stevenson, but the description of his late solitary walks through Buenos Aires, or the colors of his blindness:

It came like a slow summer twilight. I was head librarian of the National Library and I began to find that I was ringed in by letterless books. Then my friends lost their faces. Then I found out there was nobody in the looking glass. And then things grew dim, and now I can make out white and gray. But two colors are forbidden me: black and red. […] I live in the center of a luminous mist. […] Grayish or bluish, I’m not too sure. It’s far too dim. I would say that now I live in the center of a bluish world. (The Dick Cavett Show)

One of the problems with writing a review of three recent books about Borges is the books do not bring much new attention to Borges’ texts, but rather to his persona. He comes off sounding self-deprecating and amiable, curious and perhaps a bit embarrassed by his fame. Though the books are by no means a definitive take, readers will enjoy immersing themselves in the wandering, conversational writer/non-writer Borges. Professorial dictums and self-deprecating jokes aside, his writing is more important. It must be read, reread, and played with. His work is universal and cosmopolitan in nature, and generally runs shorter than the average New Yorker article. Within a five-page story you will find a new language, a labyrinth, a library.

—Tom Faure

———————

Tom Faure is an MFA in Fiction student at Vermont College of Fine Arts. His work has appeared in Zocalo Public Square, Splash of Red, Chattanooga Times Free Press, The Journal News, and undergraduate magazines at Columbia University. He lives in New York, teaching English and Philosophy at the French-American School of New York. Contact: tomfaure@old.numerocinqmagazine.com

Love Song for a City of the Dead: A Review of The Mehlis Report by Rabee Jaber — Steven Axelrod

Sep 092013

First published in Arabic in 2006, The Mehlis Report is the first English translation from prize-winning Arabic author, Rabee Jaber, a love song and an elegy for his beloved home city of Beirut. The book transcends politics to become a tale of loss and memory, touching without an ounce of sentiment, uplifting without a speck of hope. –Steven Axelrod

The Mehlis Report
By Rabee Jaber, Translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid.
New Directions, 2013.
218 pages. $11.98.

Like Joyce Cary’s London and Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles, Beirut is a living presence in The Mehlis Report. The city has died and been reborn many times in the last 60 years, with all its incarnations superimposed on each other, like the acetate overlays in a mid-20^th century encyclopedia, in the minds of the people who love the place. This is not a brooding Islamic casbah full of fanatics plotting carnage in the shadow of the minarets, the war-torn hellscape portrayed by western media.

Instead, the novel gives us a vision of Beirut from the inside: a seaside town with a lovely corniche and a human history stored in the images of human memory: the old athletic club where a hotel stands now; the highway that replaced a warren of narrow streets. It’s a city of bars and hotels, mosques and bakeries, undergoing a construction boom in 2005, when the book takes place.

A man strolling from Monot to Abd-al-Whab street can buy a Mirinda orange soda and a manakish sandwich en route to his girlfriend’s apartment, even if he has to skirt the rubble from a recent car-bombing on the way.

The man in question is Saman Yarid, a local architect obsessed with the city in all its changing forms, unable to leave despite the entreaties of his two sisters. One of them has opened a bakery in Baltimore, Maryland; the other works as a translator for UNESCO in Paris. Neither of them can understand how Saman can stay on in Beirut, where sectarian violence still rages sporadically, fifteen years after the end of the Civil War. His third sister, Josephine, was kidnapped and killed at the height of that conflict, in 1983.

The first half of the book records Saman’s daily life among the specters and shifting landscapes of his beloved city: his various girlfriends, his work at the Yarid Architecture and Design Agency.

“I’m forty now,” Saman reflects. “and I’ve done nothing with my life.” Mostly he keeps track of the prominent citizens killed on the streets of Beirut – Samir Kassir, for instance, a professor of history at St Joseph University whose secondary career as a journalist writing editorials blasting Lebanon’s pro-Syrian regime in the daily newspaper Al-Nahar earned him an assassination by car bomb in front of his home on Furn al-Hayek Street.

The most horrific and newsworthy murder was that of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, in February of 2005. The massive explosion wiped out his heavily armored car, his entire motorcade, and a good chunk of the street on which they were driving. Saman walks by that street every day. The threat of car bombs plague his thinking. He is certain he saw two men planting a bomb in a car, during one of his long nightly walks. The big Mercedes seems to stare at him with a ghoulish squint of imminent doom after that encounter – silent, temporarily intact, like Monot Street before the Hariri assassination.

The bomb never goes off, if in fact there ever was one. Nevertheless, Saman is so afraid, so certain of the coming explosion, that he feels as if he has already died. Death is everywhere in Saman’s world as he stalks through the night streets and past the new surveillance cameras of a city perpetually dying but never reborn, eternally haunting itself in poisoned nostalgia of its remaining champions.

All of them are waiting for the release of the Mehlis report, the U.N. Security council’s investigation of the Hariri assassination, authored by German judge Detlev Mehlism who has been investigating the attack at the highest levels of the Lebanese and Syrian Governments.

Fittingly enough, ultimately the report changed like the city itself, under the stress of politics and religious strife. The original document, leaked to the press, clearly indicated the involvement of Hezbollah and certain high officials in Syria. But key witnesses recanted their confessions, documents disappeared, and a much less provocative report became the official version of the investigation’s findings.

For Saman Yarid and his friends, waiting in a purgatory of anxiety and doubt for the verdict of the United Nations, none of that matters. Time stands still as they tip-toe through the minefield of daily life.

This fear-tipped banality finds an uncanny echo in the routines of Josephine Yarid, Saman’s sister. She narrates the second half of the book, starting with the moment she wakes up from what should have been a fatal beating at the hands of her kidnappers.

She walks through a strangely deserted “green line” between east and west Beirut, touching dried blood matted in her hair, feeling little but an overwhelming thirst and the memory of pain, rather than pain itself. The full moon above the city convinces her that somehow, against all odds, she’s still alive.

Then she sees an old man who looks strangely familiar, though she can’t place him.

Look at my face, he said, and imagine me with white hair – not black like this but white.

I said I was tired – so tired and thirsty I couldn’t imagine him with white hair. But I’ve seen you before, I said, and I know you.

I wanted him to help me. To pick me up and carry me home. I wanted him to pick me up and carry me in his arms like a child – I wanted him to take me to my family. Why doesn’t he carry me home? I wanted to open my eyes and see myself back on the familiar sofa in my own familiar house again. To open my eyes and see the faces I knew looking back at me. I wanted them to look at me and tell me I’d come back, tell me I’d been saved. Why wasn’t he taking me home right then and there?

I stared at him and noticed that he looked like my brother – he didn’t just look like my father, he looked like Saman as well. But he wasn’t Saman. This man was older than my brother. I’ll try to picture him with white hair, I thought. And then he spoke again.

“Josephine, I’m your grandfather.”

At that moment, I knew I was dead.

Josephine has entered the afterlife and the Beirut of the dead bears a striking resemblance to the stilled and stifled living city her brother still inhabits. She walks it as he does, and watches him on the television, the only visual connection to the land of the living. Also, she reads and writes. In Jaber’s evocation of the afterlife, everyone reads, all the time. It’s the only activity that brings the dead any peace of mind, though they also write. They even have an assignment: to compress their life stories into a single page. It takes many drafts, and you can’t help feeling that the first half of The Mehlis Report might wind up as Saman’s initial effort, when he reaches the other side.

He has a long way to go, and so does his sister.

Meanwhile, they walk, and chart the changes in their worlds, and remember. For Jaber, both life and death are defined by the futile effort to escape the past. The dead have giant rats who will eat the longing for the living world out of their souls; the living receive no such service. Throughout both worlds and ricocheting between them, the images appear and disappear, recur and reassemble themselves: the city, the green line, the lost buildings and sun beaten squares, and most of all the moon. It’s everywhere in this book – the first thing Josephine sees when she wakes into the afterlife, the last thing Saman sees before he goes to sleep, invoking life and hope and the illusions of both. The moon bathes the city in light, but it’s reflected light, borrowed light, the memory of light, pale and insubstantial. And that last sentence with its chanting rhythms and repetitions, mimics the hypnotic, classical Arabic style, Jaber employs, defttly captured by translator Kareem James Abu-Zeid, as in the extraordinary passage where Josephine addresses her unheeding brother from beyond the grave.

For weeks Saman’s cellphone has been ringing, the caller disconnecting before he can answer, the number on his screen non-existent or incomplete. He senses that these calls are important, and the silence on the other end of the line haunts him. Literally:

Listen, Saman, I call you but you don’t answer. You look at my number and you don’t answer because you don’t know who it is … I call you but you don’t answer. I want to tell you things. I have so many things to tell you. I’m not alone. And neither are you … I call but you don’t answer. You look at the number and you don’t answer because you don’t know it. Wrong number you think, or the lines must be crossed, and you tell yourself to call the company and ask about this, but you never call and you never ask, because you’ve already forgotten about it and you’re nor really interested. I all you, but you don’t answer. I want to ask you why you’re not interested … I call you and you look at the number, but you don’t answer. It’s as if you don’t care. Why don’t you care? I’m not just talking about the phone. That should be clear by now. I’m talking about a lot of things… You were born in an evil hour. The old aristocratic house, the whole district. It too is passing through dark times. It’s not your fault: time’s the culprit. How can you find a story for your life, how can you write one, when you’re in the city at this hour?

Finally, she describes the Anatolian Fault, which balances the city on the edge of a possible earthquake at every moment, and the tectonic shift in Saman’s life when Hariri was killed: “The motorcade explodes and a black chasm appears on the road, and the city falls into it. The whole country falls into it.”

Saman dies himself before the Mehlis report is made public, before he finds what he’s looking for or resolves his life into any meaningful direction. He sees the people he knew on the other side – his sister, Harir himself, Kahili Gibran, others. He sees a man, a professional writer when he was alive, who “used to write for the sake of prestige. In this world he writes only a single sentence: ‘I write so as not to choke.’”

You feel that Rabee Jaber, winner of the 2012 International prize for Arabic Fiction, writes for the same reason, under the same ambiguous moon, trying to make sense of this world and the next, well aware that his efforts will fail.

In that other world, the departed learn to read each book many times, to dismantle and reassemble it, over and over again, though few books deserve such study.

This novel is surely one of them, well worth searching out among the libraries of the dead.

— Steven Axelrod

————————

Steven Axelrod holds an MFA in writing from Vermont College of the Fine Arts and remains a member of the WGA despite a long absence from Hollywood. In addition to Numéro Cinq, his work has appeared at Salon.com and various magazines with ‘pulp’ in the title, including PulpModern and BigPulp. A father of two, he lives on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, where he paints houses and writes, often at the same time, much to the annoyance of his customers.
Contact: stevenaxelrod@old.numerocinqmagazine.com

Unbearable Beauty: A Review of Seiobo There Below by László Krasznahorkai — Eric Foley

Sep 052013

“This is my recommendation: we must live more attentively.”

– László Krasznahorkai

Seiobo There Below
László Krasznahorkai
Translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Muzlet
New Directions
448 Pages, Paperback, $16.95

There was a time when, as a Romanian poet once put it, every rotten tree trunk held a god. In Seiobo There Below (Seiobo járt odalent, 2008), László Krasznahorkai reminds us repeatedly that this time is long past. Not only is the sacred in retreat from the world, but we have forgotten how to perceive it (two sides of the same coin, some might say)^[1]. And yet the fifty-nine-year-old Hungarian author persists in speaking of transcendence. For Krasznahorkai, the spirits that once conveyed mystery and authority have not completely withdrawn; traces of the divine may still be discerned in the making and receiving of tradition-bound forms of art. Seiobo There Below represents seventeen remarkably diverse and ambitious forays into aesthetic grace.

Seiobo is the fifth of Krasznahorkai’s sixteen books to appear in English. The fact that his other major novels in English translation – The Melancholy of Resistance, War and War, and Satantango – have primarily been set in Eastern Europe makes this latest effort seem like more of a departure than it actually is. A large part of the North American perception of Krasznahorkhai as “the contemporary Hungarian master of the apocalypse” (as Susan Sontag famously labeled him), has to do with the epic film adaptations of Krasznahorkai’s work that he and his friend director Béla Tarr have collaborated on (Damnation, Sátántangó, Werckmeister Harmonies), as well as the order in which the author’s books have appeared on these shores (his first novel, Satantango took 27 years to make it into English). As Seiobo’s translator Ottilie Muzlet has pointed out, Krasznahorkai’s Hungarian readership would be aware of the fact that the years 1999-2008 marked a transitional period in his work, which saw him turning increasingly to the Far East for inspiration.^[2]

Fittingly then, the original Seiobo is a work of fifteenth century Japanese Noh theatre, in which the titular goddess comes down from heaven to the earth below, bearing immortality. While the character Seiobo appears in one chapter of Krasznahorkai’s latest work, and Noh theatre pops up in a handful of others, the title Seiobo There Below describes more generally an arc that recurs in a variety of locations and tonal registers throughout the book’s seventeen sections. Each chapter presents an intersection (or failed intersection) between the sacred and the human, the immortal and the perishable, via aesthetic production and/or reception. Krasznahorkai alternates between Europe and Asia, ranging across 3000 years of cultural history, featuring familiar works such as the Alhambra, the Acropolis, and the Venus de Milo, but also a 500 year-old copy of Andrei Rublev’s Trinity Icon, the restoration of a Buddha sculpture, and the rebuilding of Japan’s Ise shrine.

In the book’s first section, entitled “Kamo-Hunter,” the object of aesthetic contemplation is a white bird standing in the middle of Kyoto’s Kamogawa river:

A bird fishing in the water: to an indifferent bystander, if he were to notice, perhaps that is all he would see—he would, however, not just have to notice but would have to know in the widening comprehension of the first glance, at least to know and to see just how much this motionless bird, fishing there in between the grassy islets of the shallow water, how much this bird was accursedly superfluous; indeed he would have to be conscious, immediately conscious, of how much this enormous snow-white dignified creature is defenseless—because it was superfluous and defenseless, yes, and as so often, the one satisfactorily accounted for the other, namely, its superfluity made it defenseless and its defenselessness made it superfluous: a defenseless and superfluous sublimity; this, then, is the Ooshirosagi in the shallow waters of the Kamogawa, but of course the indifferent bystander never turns up; over there on the embankment people are walking, bicycles are rolling by, buses are running, but the Ooshirosagi just stands there imperturbably, its gaze cast beneath the surface of the foaming water, and the enduring value of its own incessant observation never changes, as the act of observation of this defenseless and superfluous artist leaves no doubt that its observation is truly unceasing…

Vision is crucial in Krasznahorkai’s work. Even in the sad and hilarious thirteenth section, the sole chapter of Seiobo There Below to focus on sound, the visual trumps the aural when a failed architect delivers a hysterical lecture on Baroque music to a group of elderly villagers who cannot take in the man’s words, because “it was really his gut that captured the attention of the locals, because this gut with its three colossal folds unequivocally sent a message to everyone that this was a person with many problems….” In the Kamo-Hunter chapter, however, the white bird serves a dual function. If it were enough just to see this bird in the river, then the initial clause, “A bird fishing in the water,” would suffice. The bird is a living work of art, but Krasznahorkai also grants the creature “the artist’s powers of observation,” so that it possesses the very powers of aesthetic perception that the prose displays. From the outset, Krasznahorkai suggests that perceiving the sublime is going to take more than simply looking as we are accustomed to doing (though the indifferent bystander is incapable even of this).

In The Senses of Modernism, Sara Danius reminds us that, “The etymological meaning of ‘aesthetics’ springs out of a cluster of Greek words which designate activities of sensory perception in both a strictly physiological sense, as in ‘sensation,’ and a mental sense, as in ‘apprehension.’” The indifferent bystander never turns up, but there is at least one person who perceives the Kamo-Hunter with an etymologically faithful aestheticism bordering on obsession: our narrator. In this opening chapter, Krasznahorkai caresses his white bird in mesmerizing, exhaustive prose, returning to it again and again as he weaves his way through modern day Kyoto, the “City of Infinite Demeanor.” The above sentence continues for another half-page and is by no means one of the lengthier ones in the book (in defense Krasznahorkai’s long sentences, the man knows how to wield a semicolon). It is as if the author is attempting a feat of linguistic perception to rival the bird’s “truly unceasing” gaze of “enduring value.” This heroic effort ensures that, in a delicious paradox, even those chapters that present failed intersections between the sublime and the human enact a level of writerly attentiveness that approaches transcendence.

Let us note one further thing about this opening chapter: an adjective attached to the word beauty. “The bird is granted the artist’s powers of observation,” we are told, so that it may represent “unbearable beauty.” For Krasznahorkai, immanence is a terrifying proposition. Few of the encounters with the aesthetic sublime in this book lead to healing, redemption, or acceptance. In a later chapter, a migrant Hungarian labourer’s unintentional encounter with a Russian icon painting leads him to purchase a large, sharp knife. Given the volatile power of art, why would anyone desire to commune with it as intensely as Krasznahorkai and some of his characters do?

Desire itself is commonly held to be the engine of the novel. It is important to remember that Seiobo is a novel, albeit one that at first glance appears to unfurl beneath an entirely different logic. For starters, the chapters are structured according to the famous Fibonacci sequence, and vary in length from eight to forty-eight pages. In the absence of a single main character, one way to connect Seiobo’s episodes to a central longing is to consider what Krazsnahorkai has said previously about his writing, that the sentences “are really not mine but are uttered by those in whom some wild desire is working.” In this sense, the most obvious desire at work would be the Bernhardian compulsion to continue speaking, narrating breathlessly before that final end stop, death, is imposed.

Yet there is another, more commanding form of desire in Seiobo There Below. In a recent essay, Scott Esposito identifies in Krasznahorkai’s writing the aspiration to an “authority beyond the physical confines of our universe as we know it.” Is there another living novelist of whom this could be as convincingly said? Krasznahorkai’s search for this level of authority allies him with the high modernism of Joyce and Rilke (think Stephen Dedalus’s artist-God merging with the terrible angels of the Duino Elegies), and it may also be the driving force behind his search for transcendence in the process of making and receiving of art. There is a fine line between wanting to know God and wanting to be God, a fact which Krasznahorkai is well aware of, and exploits to his advantage. Esposito: “Modernism attempts to conflate the aesthetic with the religious.” Indeed.

The modernists’ desire for mastery has often been linked to the waning of traditional sacred structures in the West. In Seiobo, the European forms have long since been displaced, and it is only in Asia that we find contemporary cultures still connected to living traditions. Fredric Jameson has written that “Modern art drew its power and possibilities from being a backwater and an archaic holdover within a modernizing economy: it glorified, celebrated, and dramatized older forms of individual production which the new mode of production was elsewhere on the point of displacing and blotting out.” Certainly, on one level, this is precisely what Krasznahorkai is engaged in. But notice Jameson’s tense: Modern art drew. This quotation comes from Jameson’s Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, published in book form in 1991, when Modernism and its concerns were considered passé. What then is Krasznahorkai up to? Is he merely inhabiting an unproductive nostalgia for the past? Why can’t we shake our desire for wholeness? Perhaps, as Gabriel Josipovici has argued persuasively, Modernism’s concerns need to be understood not as belonging only to a particular era, but “as the coming into awareness by art of its precarious status and responsibilities, and therefore as something that will, from now on, always be with us.”

This is ultimately the reason why a book that examines the notion that the divine inhabits certain aesthetic objects can feel both epically, off-the-radar strange, and at the same time perfectly relevant. That Krasznahorkai successfully traces this inexplicable presence through a sixty-four clue Italian language crossword puzzle, the making of a Noh mask, and across a twenty-three page single sentence essay on the mysteries of the Alhambra is evidence of an astounding ambition and mastery. Here we are solidly in the realm of what Steven Moore would call “the novel as a kind of delivery system for aesthetic bliss.”^[3]

But Krasznahorkai doesn’t just dazzle, he terrifies. By the final chapter, Seiobo There Below has accumulated a horrifically beautiful, almost unbearable force.

Writing about William Golding’s Pincher Martin, Josipovici notes that the traditional purpose of fiction is to protect us from the reality of our deaths. Krasznahorkai strips this protection away. The reality of death is often close at hand in Seiobo; many of the encounters with art bring a sharp awareness of mortality. For Krasznahorkai, the mystery of art is the closest thing to truth that we can glimpse, aside from death. (Perhaps it is no coincidence that these days we have less and less attention to give to either). At the end of the Kamo-Hunter chapter, our narrator advises his bird on the wisest course of action:

It would be better for you to turn around and go into the thick grasses, there where one of those strange grassy islets in the riverbed will completely cover you, it would be better if you do this for once and for all, because if you come back tomorrow, or after tomorrow, there will be no one at all to understand, no one to look, not even a single one among all your natural enemies that will be able to see who you really are; it would be better for you to go away this very evening when twilight begins to fall, it would be better for you to retreat with the others, if night begins to descend, and you should not come back if tomorrow or after tomorrow, dawn breaks, because for you it will be much better for there to be no tomorrow and no day after tomorrow; so hide away now in the grass, sink down, fall onto your side, let your eyes slowly close, and die, for there is no point in the sublimity that you bear, die at midnight in the grass, sink down and fall, and let it be like that—breathe your last.

It is possible, of course, that art will one day no longer be with us, but it is more probable that we will no longer be with art. When there is no one left who knows how to perceive a work, then it may well as crawl off and die, like the white bird that opens Krasznahorkai’s book. But we have not reached this point yet. Against the odds, making and perceiving continue.

—Eric Foley

———————

Eric Foley holds an Honours BA in English and Literary Studies from the University of Toronto and an MFA from Guelph University. He has been a finalist for the Random House Creative Writing Award, the Hart House Literary Contest, and the winner of Geist Magazine and the White Wall Review’s postcard story contests. His writing can be found online at Numéro Cinq and Influencysalon.ca. He lives in Toronto and divides his time between his writing and teaching at Humber College.

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

For a brief account of modernity and the loss of immanence, see Douglas Glover’s essay “Mappa Mundi, The Structure of Western Thought.“↵
For more on Krasznahorkai see the excellent Spring 2013 issue of Music and Literature, to which this review is greatly indebted.↵
“Literature is a rhetorical performance, a show put on by someone who possesses greater abilities with language than most people. This is reading for the same reason we might go to the opera or the ballet: to be dazzled by a performance.” – Steve Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History, Beginnings to 1600 ↵

On the Road Again (or, how shame informs identity): Review of Angel Igov’s A Short Tale of Shame — Tom Faure

Jul 162013

…the story is not only about fleeing one’s shame and insecurities but also about articulating one’s identity in the face of a larger, confusing society that never ceases to change. The stand-out moments of A Short Tale of Shame lie not in the resolution of the friend-love triangle, but in the characters’ semi-mythical experience of the journey. —Tom Faure

A Short Tale of Shame
Angel Igov, translated by Angela Rodel
Open Letter Books, May 2013
145 pages, $13.95

Angel Igov’s A Short Tale of Shame, translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel, is a fine novel that explores how we attempt to escape grief and humiliation, often literally by fleeing through travel.

In some respects Igov has crafted a classic road story. After the death of his wife, middle-aged former musician Boril Krustev has thrown a few belongings into his shiny red car and taken off, vaguely heading south. Tellingly, he does not bring with him a guitar—has not played in months. The story opens after he picks up hitchhikers Maya, Sirma, and Spartacus. They soon recognize him as the father of their childhood friend Elena. Surprisingly, they invite him to join them for the rest of their journey. Krustev tentatively agrees, without fully knowing why—he questions at times whether to leave the younger, liberal youths to their own adventures. Elena is at the heart of each character’s shame, and her libidinous involvement with the hitchhikers is revealed gradually and with artfully-controlled pace. Her awkward inclusion into and subsequent expulsion from the students’ friend-love triangle, all referenced obliquely through their reminiscences, ultimately produces much of the tension of the novel.

Born in Sofia in 1981, Igov studied at Sofia University and was a Fulbright visiting researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently working toward a PhD in European Literature and has been nominated for awards not only for his fiction but also for his criticism and translation. He has published two short story collections and won the Southern Spring award for debuts in fiction. A Short Tale of Shame was the co-winner of the Contemporary Bulgarian Writers Contest.

Igov’s novel is ambitious and experimental on two fronts: in its setting and in its style.

Some foreign readers will not immediately realize we are in “a country that geographically and culturally resembles Bulgaria, yet its history and ethnography seem to have gone some alternative way.”^{^[1]} This semi-fictitious “Thracian-dominated state” resembles what is known today as the historical region of Thrace—South East Bulgaria, North East Greece, and North West Turkey—a swath of land that has been invaded by everyone from the Huns to the Celts to the Romans. The setting informs an intriguing secondary theme: questions or crises of identity permeate the novel.

Today, Bulgaria’s population of 7.5 million includes ethnic Turks, Pomaks, Jews, Roma, Russians, Armenians and more. As the English-language Bulgarian magazine Vagabond puts it, “Its long history of local wars, migrations and – in later times – constant changes of national borders has complicated the picture further, turning what is now called Bulgaria into a place where a significant number of diverse minority groups live. Distinguishing between them is sometimes a strenuous task. Some of them are ethnic, others – religious. . . . The origins of most are obscure and often disputed.”^[2]

Recently become a member of the European Union (in 2007), Krustev realizes he can drive around the continent at his ease. He has boldly decided to cut through the slightly sketchy Rhodope Mountains to reach the Aegean Sea. We learn more about the history of the region, fraught with ethnic and territorial feuding. Krustev is of the Slavic minority but he muses that this “was no worse than being an Illyrian or Paeonian, and it was definitely much better than being a Dacian.” The history of Balkan upheaval mirrors his anxiety about his ethnicity and his music career. The hitchhikers, who have taken a semester off from college, also experience confusion about who they are and what their futures have in store.

Igov enhances the semi-mythological setting by invoking the story of Croesus and waxing lyrical about the tragic idea of hubris—which also reinforces the compelling themes of mixed traditions and confused identity.

The road formula has offered a long list of heroes, from Gilgamesh to Hunter Thompson, various forms of escape and salvation, but A Short Tale of Shame does not suffer too greatly from treading across worn paths. It is indeed a short tale but one rich with psychological intensity, a story unraveling through reminiscence and rumination. Along with the intriguing setting, Igov’s spare yet expansive writing is what really stands out:

So Sirma was of Lydian descent. Maya couldn’t have been more surprised . . . The absurd fact that Sirma hadn’t talked about it during all the years they had known one another, not only known one another, but had become a common organism, the three of them with Spartacus. It’s like your right leg blurting out to your left hand something it had never suspected, hmm, maybe that isn’t the best comparison, but given that it was something that wasn’t important in the least, why hadn’t she mentioned it until now? . . . To keep quiet about something that didn’t matter, that wasn’t OK, because it puts you in a privileged position and Maya was taken aback by the whole pointlessness of the miscarried secret.

Those consumer readers who are growing more and more used to computer-optimized, bite-size text blocks may have difficulty with Igov’s style of unremitting paragraphs—frequently lasting five or six pages—that flit from past to present and from character to character.

It’s not that Igov is obscurantist—far from it. Rather, he approaches clarity the same way our minds do: by wandering, emotionally sometimes, open to possibility and non-linearity, much like a road tripper might be. The careless reader misses out on what I find to be the main reward of longer, lyrical paragraphs: an energy that builds and amplifies the further the writer goes, building a tension within very sentences and even clauses that in some cases better mimics the madness of the itinerant mind:

As they came out of the water together, Sirma was still shaking from fury and relief, even though, she told herself, the three of them were not supposed to be here at all, and if everything had gone according to plan they wouldn’t be here, then this whole scene would never have happened, but in that case every moment and every action gave rise to and at the same time ruled out countless possibilities, tiny grains of sand, indistinguishable from one another they all dried off with the same towel which Krustev had prudently brought along, how had the thought that he would go and drown himself ever crossed her mind, given that the man had brought a towel, and they sat down on the ground.

The book’s ten chapters interchange close third-person narrators (for the most part switching between them as seamlessly as Virginia Woolf does in Mrs. Dalloway), and perhaps it is the nature of the automobile that helps preserve the pace and flow: all four characters, borne out in an aimless jaunt in this car, are equal protagonists escaping from various troubles, each given equal value in the rhetorical structure of the novel.

Even so, Igov’s curious form of free indirect discourse can be jarring—especially when it delivers exposition that risks feeling too condensed:

But perhaps every time was strange—wasn’t it strange that he was now riding with Elena’s father, the Beautiful Elena, she was surely the only person who had seriously threatened the unity of their trinity. Maya had brought her to them. She had introduced her ecstatically as her best friend from grade school. Damn, said Sirma. Elena was pretty, artistic, and a half-Slav. Her father had once been the guitarist in Euphoria, and now he was really rich.

Though omitting explicit references to On The Road or other obvious classic road stories, Igov’s novel does allude by name to The Catcher in the Rye^{^[3]}. This is apt; in their transformative journey the characters resemble Holden Caufield rather than Sal Paradise, and the traveling at hand is not for kicks so much as to escape phonies and figure out who they are.

“. . . The established eighth graders were just eighth graders, while the new eighth graders, who really should have been preparatory. . . . Sirma had told her one day some time at the end of the fall. You know what the older kids call us? Fakes. Why fakes, Maya didn’t get it. . . . I’m not trying to fake anybody out, Maya said, and I don’t get it at all, it’s not like we decided what they’d call our classes. . . . Maya didn’t know any of the upperclassmen and had nothing to say to any of them, but she was indignant nonetheless. Why the hell fakes?”

Again, the story is not only about fleeing one’s shame and insecurities but also about articulating one’s identity in the face of a larger, confusing society that never ceases to change. The stand-out moments of A Short Tale of Shame lie not in the resolution of the friend-love triangle, but in the characters’ semi-mythical experience of the journey. The novel ends by leaving the reader with a simple image—one that, unlike the complex ethnic history of the region, is more permanent: the characters gathered on the beach, Krustev deciding to pick up a guitar, the group discussing when to head back home.

—Tom Faure

————————————

Tom Faure is an MFA in Fiction student at Vermont College of Fine Arts. His work has appeared in Zocalo Public Square, Splash of Red, and a few undergraduate magazines at Columbia University. He lives in New York, teaching English and Philosophy at the French-American School of New York.

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

From Bulgarian Elizabeth Kostova Foundation for Creative Writing, a co-publisher of the original edition of A Short Tale of Shame.↵
http://www.vagabond.bg/high-beam/2022-diverse-bulgaria/2022-diverse-bulgaria.html ↵
Granted, one could argue Salinger’s novel is also a “road story.”↵

The Dying Spread Like A Plague: Review of Anna Kim’s Anatomy of a Night — Eric Foley

Jul 122013

“ . . . as if it were easier to die in the darkness, as if it would be shameful to die in the light.

– Anna Kim, Anatomy of a Night –

Anatomy of a Night
Anna Kim
Translated from the German by Bradley Schmidt
Frisch & Co., ebook
361 pages, $6.99

When Anna Kim’s third book, Anatomie Einer Nacht, came out with the venerable German publisher Surhkamp^[1] last September, the website sandameer.at called it “among the most exciting and beautiful German language texts in recent years.” This year, Bradley Schmidt’s translation of Kim’s novel is the first title to be released by Frisch & Co., a Berlin-based press devoted to publishing ebooks of contemporary literature in English-language translation. As founder E. J. Van Lanen has explained, focusing solely on ebooks allows the new press to dedicate its resources to translating a far greater number of works (Frisch & Co. will release five more titles in the next eight months).

Anna Kim was born in South Korea, but moved with her family to Germany when she was two years old. Kim studied Philosophy and Theatre at University of Vienna, where she wrote her masters thesis on the Georg Lukács’ Theory of the Novel. At 35 years of age, Kim is a past recipient of an Elias Canetti Scholarship, a Robert Musil Scholarship, and the European Union Prize for Literature. These awards not only provide evidence of the respect Kim has garnered thus far as a writer, but help to give a context for the type of European modernism her work is informed by – a novelistic tradition that values complexity, experimentation and ambiguity.

Anatomy of A Night is as strange a book as I have read in some time. Anna Kim takes chances; she writes in precisely the way she wishes, without concern for losing her reader. She has said in an interview that the ideal reader for this book will be “patient, willing to invest a lot of time and brain power, willing to confront themselves with a life that is so different from what we know, a life that may puzzle, confuse and cause disbelief.”

The book is set between 10pm and 3am in Amarâq, a fictional Inuit settlement in east-Greenland, where “Everything is shared, and everyone owns only one thing: themselves.” In the course of five hours, we watch eleven townspeople commit suicide.

Tasiilaq By Night

Amarâq is Kim’s stand-in for the real settlement of Tasiilaq, Greenland; the book was inspired by actual events. Kim first became curious about Tasiilaq in 2008, after 16 of the town’s residents tried to kill themselves on a single evening. Apparently, such “suicide waves” occur at around the same time each year in Tasiilaq: in one night, 5-20 people will attempt suicide, without prior arrangement or agreement with each other.

In Kim’s Amarâq, unlike in Tasiilaq, all suicides succeed. In addition to the eleven who die on the night in question, at least a dozen other suicides and murders are described as part of various characters’ pasts. If, as Lukács writes, “the content of the novel is the story of the soul that goes to find itself, that seeks adventures in order to be proved and tested by them, and, by proving itself, to find its own essence,” then the content of Anatomy of a Night is the story of a community of souls moving in paradoxical isolation towards the discovery of a shared essence: self-inflicted death.

There is the sense that some ominous force lurks in Amarâq, which condemns the people to their cycles of suffering and death, almost as if they were caught up in a bad dream. “The dying spread like a plague,” Kim writes in the prologue, “the victims appeared to have become infected by nothing more than a touch or a gaze—afterwards it was called a disease.”

Fog drifts in and out of scenes, and it is often difficult to place where exactly we are in the town, or even in time, as Kim switches back and forth between tenses within the same paragraph, sometimes even in the same sentence. For more than half of the novel I was certain it must actually be called Anatomy of a Nightmare – I had to keep going back to the title page to remind myself that I had added that final syllable.

A number of possible motives for the suicides appear over the course of the book. Yet, like the “iridescent icebergs” Kim so beautifully describes, these motives “float through the dimensions like images from the past, hazy, unapproachable, you can lose yourself in a desire to grasp them . . .” However much we may wish to come to a conclusion about the cause of these deaths, Kim is artist enough to let each theory stand for what it is: a possibility.

Kim’s prose style also enacts the difficulty of reaching concrete conclusions. Her beautiful sentences offer riddles as often as they clarify. Chapter 1 begins:

Sivke Carlsen has just met a stranger; he tosses his shoes into the air, and they freeze for a moment, suspended in the darkness, as if they were following an invisible path, tracks in the snow.

This mysterious opening suspends time and induces disorientation. For a reader unacquainted with gender of the name Sivke, there is the additional confusion as to who is tossing their shoes in the air. Is “he” Sivke Carlsen, or “the stranger”? More significant, though, is how the shoes “freeze for a moment, suspended in darkness.” Have we entered an alternate, surreal universe, or is Kim is simply employing metaphor? The next sentence reads:

She can’t see his face, he’s draped in a uniform, seems tall, but also very thin, his clothes hardly touch his body, rather they protrude from it, like a board.

Now we are beginning not only to see, but to understand. Sivke is a “she,” and “he” is “the stranger,” whose clothes fit him strangely. Moreover, we see this man as Sivke does, from her point of view, in what is commonly called third person limited omniscience. As a reader, things are almost getting comfortable. Then comes the third sentence:

He often finds himself on earth because in truth the sky is limitless, in flight the certainty of the plain is abolished and makes room for an ambiguity that short circuits the eyes and the brain; suddenly it’s possible to toss sleds into the air, to hang them from the firmament, ride them across the sky, a trip that feels like a ride through the snow: it’s a little quieter up here, the silence interrupted by the voices of individual birds, the rushing of the wind replacing the rushing of the sea, the runners gliding soundlessly, as if they’re passing over fresh snow.

We have jumped to a completely different point of view, inside the stranger’s head. All of a sudden it’s as if the book itself has short-circuited our eyes and brain, taking us up in the air with those shoes. And there’s that crucial word, hanging there with the sleds and the shoes: “ambiguity” (Mehrdeutigkeit Platz, Kim writes in German, literally: Ambiguity Place). The scene continues with the stranger, introduced as Jens, slipping on a pair of boots. Eventually he and Sivke embrace. But what about the shoes? Kim doesn’t describe them coming back to earth. She doesn’t even tell us why they were thrown up into the air. Such is the world we have entered.

Kim’s sentences repay close rereading, but there were also many occasions throughout the book you have to bracket comprehension and move on in the hope of further clarity ahead. Another challenge the text presents is the overwhelming number of characters that appear, one after another, in short enigmatic scenes. In the course of Anatomy of a Night’s 360 pages, no fewer than forty-eight integral personages appear. Gradually, we learn of the events – poverty, abandonment, abuse, alcoholism, death – that have led the eleven suicides to where they find themselves on this particular evening. To help the reader keep track of the characters and their connections to one another, Frisch and Co. has published this map on its website:

[Click on the image to make it larger.]

48 is the same number of characters in Robert Altman’s A Wedding (Altman set himself the challenge of doubling the 24 characters from his 1975 masterpiece Nashville), but Anatomy of a Night is no Altmanesque romp, bursting at the seams with life. Most of Kim’s scenes unfold with only one or two individuals present, as if to emphasize the inner solitude of these characters, the silence and space that surrounds them. Structurally, the book reminded me more of Richard Linklater’s early 90’s film Slacker, in which one vignette or set of characters gives way to the next, each of them connected, by time and geography, through the camera’s movements. Yet both Slacker and A Wedding, set over the course of a single day, are daytime films. Kim’s novel belongs to the night, full of “wind and destruction,” as an epigraph from To the Lighthouse reminds us. Kim excels most at creating the space of this night, anatomizing it, painting the haunting connections between isolated beings:

As soon as the wind’s breath has abated, the dogs howl; exposed on the banks of the river, they live in holes buried in the ground and sing in their pack, infected by soloists whose song, still isolated, still thin, belongs to the darkness like the rush of the wind and invisibility: the night permits much that appears impossible in daylight, even dying—as if it were easier to die in the darkness, as if it would be shameful to die in the light.

— Eric Foley

———————–

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

For a moving account of the role this publishing house played in the career of just one of its authors, see Holly Case’s recent article in The Nation, “Safety Net: On Thomas Bernhard and Siegried Unseld.”↵

Language of the Heart: A Review of Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s A Brief History of Yes — Jason DeYoung

Jul 082013

A Brief History of Yes is seemingly a novel about a break-up, but it is also about an inestimable loss of something, something nameless, ancient, beyond or before language. It is a homesick novel. —Jason DeYoung

A Brief History of Yes
Micheline Aharonian Marcom
Dalkey Archive Press, 2013
119 pages, $14.00

A Brief History of Yes is a weeping novel. Its cohesion is mourning. Ineluctable sorrow manifests in its structure and grammar, in its sounds and imagery. Its subject is one woman’s obsessive grief and despair after a break-up. But it would be impertinent to think of A Brief History of Yes as a trite break-up novel. In prose, in thought, in raw emotion it defies expectations, seeking in its disregard of traditional novel form to describe in the “language of the heart” the misery of having one’s ideals and ideas of love confronted and dashed by a lover. And Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s abiding interpretation of this language is reaching and relentless and unrestrained.

Micheline Aharonian Marcom is the author of five novels. The first three—Three Apples that Fell from Heaven (2001), The Daydreaming Boy (2004), and Draining the Sea (2008)—take as their subject genocide, and operate loosely as a trilogy. For Marcom the role of the artist is to be “concerned with the things as they are: not as they ought to be,”^[1] and in these first three novels she depict characters in all their warmth and coldness, hopefulness and despair. They are intense, deeply felt novels, uninhibited by subject or style. Her new novel, A Brief History of Yes, is the companion novel (and the second in a new trilogy)^[2] to The Mirror in the Well. Marcom describes these new novels as “domestic,” and they are ostensibly about love affairs. The Mirror in the Well explores physical love, ecstasy, and (very openly and beautifully) female sexuality. As Marcom told The Rumpus, in The Mirror in the Well “I wanted to write a book, in effect, from the female sex, where the word ‘cunt,’ that fine and strong old Anglo-Saxon word from Old Norse, is, I hope, a little bit rehabilitated as a word…the taboo on its use upended.”

While The Mirror in the Well burns with the rapture of an illicit affair at the edge of love, A Brief History of Yes wallows in the fizzling of a break up at the edge of madness. Its main character, Maria, is a middle-aged woman of mixed heritage—Armenian and Portuguese. She is divorced and has an eight-year old son. She is difficult to characterize since much of the novel focuses on her inexpressible emotions and internal conflicts (at one moment she summons this disheartening reaction: “I would not like this feeling that I have now, which is a feeling without a name, not a feeling even…”). She is passionate, a woman who “loves love,” and she is flawed—she believes quite wrongly that her lover is some sort of savior. The lover is an engineer, and we have Maria’s understanding of him to rely upon: “a man who is reasonable above all things (above love).” Between the characters lie a multitude of insurmountable dichotomies and intractable psychological wounds: Maria is from a Roman Catholic family, he: a Protestant; Maria is metaphorically the heart, the lover is the head (in fact, he has a concaved chest as if no heart can lie beneath his ribs); they are both haunted by parental abuses—she by her father’s, he by his mother’s. The polarities continue as she says “yes” to everything, while he says the decisive “no.”

It is a relationship ill-fated from the outset as Maria intuitively knows, yet she continues to believe that they were brought together because she “called” to him, as her grandmother had “called” for her husband, Maria’s grandfather. There is a mysticism that runs through this novel. Ghosts, daemons, and old-world gods inhabit Maria’s mind—holdovers from her heritage, perhaps. But they’re not to be dismissed. They give her depth and soulfulness whereas her lover denies his deeper passions and seeks “only…playful and happy girl[s] to sleep with and to love.”

The interplay of gods and spirits relates to the overall time structures of the novel, too. From the first sentence there is a sense that for the next 119 pages the reader will hear a tale that has been told before, that is perhaps both ancient and modern: “So that, yes, here are the two lovers, again…” (my itals.) Marcom steeps herself in an heirloom narrative—unrequited love—and time is elusive and recursive in A Brief History of Yes. In the timeline of the novel, the earliest chapter is just a few months before the lovers meet, and the latest one is three months after the break-up. With each chapter we shift forward and backward, shuffling vortex-wise around the night of the break-up.

Jean-Paul Sartre writes on Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury that “the order of the past is the order of the heart,”^[3]. While apt words for Faulkner’s novel, they also apply here. From the start we know that the couple has parted. We know that they were together for one year—from August to August, from “dry season to dry season.” But time is something that resides in this novel like a capricious god, giving it a semblance of arc, and Marcom does a superb job of placing the actual break-up scene close to the middle of the book. But in many ways time becomes odd, sometimes superfluous—“There is no today”—and at other moments of dire importance. We are locked in Maria’s festering memory. Some chapters straddle two timelines, some depict scenes that never occurred, and at the crux of the novel there is a breakdown of reality all together—“she pulls her own heart from her chest…” Maria in fact “puts scene together” to see what “unhappiness looks like.” At times we cannot be certain of what we are shown. Maria is smarting from grief, bewildered, and Marcom shows us how “trauma is a repetitive mode of the mind,”^[4] giving the reader less of a narrative and more of a stratum of grief. Marcom is writing “into” her character’s emotion. And the suspense of the novel is whether despair will take Maria under or will she be washed ashore—“Madness either destroys you at the abyss, or from there a new form is made; something else is born.”

In counter beat to Marcom’s rendering of this language of the heart, palpitates a plaintive, commiserating music, echoing Maria’s emotions. The song of the hermit thrush reoccurs through out the novel. It is a bird, Harold Bloom writes, that “behave[s] … like a person in mourning, withdrawing from the world when overcome by grief.”^[5] It is a stunning image for Marcom to apply, and creates an enticing allusion with the fourth section of Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”:

In the swamp in secluded recesses,
A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song.

Solitary the thrush,
The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,
Sings by himself a song.

Song of the bleeding throat,
Death’s outlet song of life, (for well dear brother I know,
If thou wast not granted to sing thou would’st surely die.)

Yes, Whitman is grieving Lincoln, but Maria views the break up as a death too: the lovers have “died to one another.” The thrush’s “death carol” (Whitman) is an “ingrained [song], what sounds and song-form were made in his species millennia ago” (Marcom). Grief is old, the thrush’s warble is its serenade:

And the thrush: two ounced the song filling the tiny lungs the hillside grove and hills in the distance his brown small body brown feathers black eyes and pink grabbing feet he hops up and he cannot be seen while he sings, hides as he sings, and seeing him he does not look like a god, Maria thinks: small brown not-beautiful bird but for the melody and in his song all of the world, its beauty, its growth and decay.

Music appears elsewhere in the novel and entwines itself with language. Marcom has called her novel a “literary fado,” comparing the novel to a style of Portuguese music that is mournful, characterized by sentiments of resignation and melancholy. “Song is always a nostalgic form, the past is always its guide—the longing for home,” she writes. By the end of the novel, Maria is a woman in exile—her ex-husband and son celebrate Thanksgiving without her, her lover doesn’t want to see her, she is hundreds of miles away from her mother, even further from her native home of Portugal. Amália Rodrigues’ “Fado Português”^[6] plays on the radio. It is around this time the word saudade emerges:

In English you don’t have this word, and there’s no accurate translation of it. Is it nostalgia? Or yearning for the absent one? Or the love that remains after the beloved has gone? All of this could be saudade. Have you not seen your Christ on the cross? And why does the Protestant deny the image where the knowledge can be felt.

I love that, “where the knowledge can be felt.” It is without words, obscure, similar to the hermit thrush’s song, to Whitman walking with the “knowledge of death,” to the elegiac voice of Amália Rodrigues, to Maria’s internal place where she goes when she is feeling pain, a place without language. In fact, A Brief History of Yes, and most of Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s work, is a challenge to the sufficiency of language. She strives through neologisms and disarticulated and run-on sentences to press the English language to do more. And despite the third person perspective, A Brief History of Yes is ultimately a private narrative, built out of one individual soul’s language, unhinged from collective rules of punctuation and meaning and time:

It is the early morning of the American holiday of the mythical meeting of the Indians and the English, and Maria is not celebrating today, she doesn’t cook the holiday fare and in any case her son is with his father in another city celebrating, eating, and the old husband fucking his American wife with the horsy face and there is nothing chosen or wrong with a horse’s face, Maria thinks, my face today is lined, aggrieved, unmalleable, and the icon suspended above my bed when I was a girl, the small palm-sized image Mãe hung on the wall above my headboard of the Madonna and Child, one of grandfather’s early icons, of the small unreal-looking Jesus child, the stiff, small-faced, thin-faced mother of Christ inviting, eventually, Maria’s own face today years later when she took the photograph of herself and saw the grief of the lost son, lost lover, husband, and father in it.

A Brief History of Yes is seemingly a novel about a break-up, but it is also about an inestimable loss of something, something nameless, ancient, beyond or before language. It is a homesick novel. As the title suggests, this is a history of a word, of the word, not a love affair or a couple or a life. “Lover, the world began with a yes.” (The echo with the Christian Bible is unmistakable, compounding the sense that Marcom is working with material that is old, elemental to the human condition.) Without yes there is nothing, we are told. It is from the Old English, the “single present subjunctive of beon, to be.” Without yes there is no life, no richness of feeling, no good, no bad: no heartbreak, but no love. It is yes that starts the affair, and it is yes that Maria ultimately returns to for self-salvation.

There are few living American writers who write novels as challenging, mesmerizing, and intriguing as Micheline Aharonian Marcom. She proves herself again and again to be a writer with an unremitting gaze, and her work wounds and leaves behind sacred scars as they show us a love for humanity’s spectrum—its gorgeousness and wretchedness. Since she takes on as her subject the ineffable in her characters, her novels are difficult to talk about and convey. Her characters often go to a place—whether internally or externally—that is beyond or without language. And, if they themselves have no language for their feelings, what is our hope in being able to speak about it? We offer our silent commiseration, our imperative as sincere readers. Often I sense there is something in the novels that aches to re-experience the charge and mystery of myth, and as with A Brief History of Yes, her novels read like poetry. Structured, yes, but full of sequences that don’t succumb to the dictates of prose, passages that go on unpunctuated and grow wild on the page. It is a style honest to Marcom’s characters and to her own challenge to push language, a style that brings forth originality and worthy of love.

—Jason DeYoung

——————————————-

Jason DeYoung lives in Atlanta, Georgia. His fiction has appeared or forthcoming in REAL: Regarding Art and Letters, New Orleans Review, The Los Angeles Review, Numéro Cinq, and The Best American Mystery Stories 2012

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

Shushan Avagyan, “Interview with Micheline Aharonian Marcom,” Context, No. 22, Dalkey Archive Press, Date?↵
“I think of it as a trilogy because I’ve written three ‘domestic dramas,’ different from the historical books which preceded them.” Micheline Aharonian Marcom in interview with Taylor Davis-Van Atta, “A Conversation with Micheline Aharonian Marcom,” Music & Literature, Issue 1, page 144↵
Jean-Paul Sartre, “On The Sound and the Fury: Temporality in Faulkner,” We Have Only This Life to Live: The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre 1939 – 1975, New York Review of Books, 2013, page 21↵
Taylor Davis-Van Atta, quoting Micheline Aharonian Marcom, “Marcom & the Possibilities of Language,” Music & Literature, Issue 1, page 164↵
Harold Bloom, Walt Whitman, Chelsea House Publishing, 1999, page 92↵
For those who are interested, this song is based on José Regio’s poem Fado Português. Even if you cannot read Portuguese (as I cannot) a quick web translation reveals the precision of Marcom’s choice in this song with its reoccurring lines: que, estando triste, cantava, / que, estando triste, cantava.↵

Underground Man Revisited | Review of My Struggle: Book Two, A Man In Love by Karl Ove Knausgaard — Eric Foley

May 072013

What ultimately matters is the magnitude of Knausgaard’s investment in his project, the sense that here is a man writing to save himself, writing to survive, writing because these things mean so much to him. Somehow, he is able to make them mean almost as much to us. Like all great art, whatever the genre, one leaves these books with a renewed feeling for what life and art can be.
—Eric Foley

My Struggle: Book Two
A Man in Love
Karl Ove Knausgaard
Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett
Archipelago Books, trade cloth
576 pages, $26.00

A Story of the Struggle to Tell a Story

“Meaning requires content, content requires time, time requires resistance.”
—Karl Ove Knausgaard

The year is 2007. For the past four years, Karl Ove Knausgaard has been trying to write about his troubled relationship with his deceased father. Though the 38-year-old author has two previously acclaimed novels under his belt (Out of the World, 1998, and 2004’s A Time For Everything), this time around the attempt to cast his material into fiction isn’t working:

Wherever you turned you saw fiction. All these millions of paperbacks, hardbacks, DVDs and TV series, they were all about made-up people in a made-up, though realistic, world. And news in the press, TV news and radio news had exactly the same format, documentaries had the same format, they were also stories, and it made no difference whether what they told had actually happened or not. It was a crisis, I felt it in every fiber of my body, something saturating was spreading through my consciousness like lard, not the least because the nucleus of all this fiction, whether true or not, was verisimilitude and the distance it held to reality was constant. In other words, it saw the same. This sameness, which was our world, was being mass-produced . . . I couldn’t write like this, it wouldn’t work, every sentence was met with the thought: but you’re just making this up. It has no value.

Finally, after returning home from a visit to the region of southern Norway where he grew up, Knausgaard stumbles upon a new strategy: to alter the distance between the work and the world by getting “as close as possible to my life.” That evening, after his family has gone to bed, he sits down at his desk and describes what he sees in front of him:

In the window before me I can vaguely see the image of my face. Apart from the eyes, which are shining, and the part directly beneath, which dimly reflects light, the whole of the left side lies in shade. Two deep furrows run down the forehead, one deep furrow runs down each cheek, all filled as it were with darkness, and when the eyes are staring and serious, and the mouth turned down at the corners it is impossible not to think of this face as somber.

What is it that has etched itself into you?

This mini-scene repeats itself in My Struggle. Its first appearance is on page 28 of Book One. There, we read it as a description of the book’s brooding central character, an isolated, conflicted man. In Then, Again: The Art of Time in Memoir, Sven Birkerts writes that the genre “begins not with event but with the intuition of meaning—with the mysterious fact that life can sometimes step free from the chaos of contingency and become story.” 962 pages later, near the end of Book Two, Knausgaard’s mini-scene reappears verbatim. Only at this point do we learn the scene’s greater significance: that it is the turning point in Knausgaard’s attempt to write about his father’s impact on his life, the kernel that contains the six volume autobiographical saga to come.

While the above passage is a good example of how Knausgaard employs repetition across time to build meaning in his work, it also neatly enacts, in miniature, another type of movement the author utilizes in the My Struggle books to powerful effect: a quietly intense attendance to visual phenomenon, always linked to the act of perception/self-perception, with a particular emphasis on the perceiving apparatus (the eyes), will suddenly be followed by a shift to a larger, abstract question. (Indeed, Knausgaard’s epic, relentless attempt to answer the question that ends the passage – “What is it that has etched itself into you? – could rightfully be said to form the true subject of these remarkable books.)

But let’s go back to February, 2007: Knausgaard has just begun his new method. He seeks to “dramatize the inner self” by uncovering his past: first five pages a day, then ten, and near the end as many as twenty pages; he writes as quickly as possible in an attempt to escape his conscious notions of what the form should be, trying to move beyond the desire (amply exhibited in his previous novels) to produce aesthetically beautiful prose. By 2009, Knausgaard has accumulated 3600 pages. That same year, the first part of his novelistic “autobiography,” entitled Min Kamp (“My Struggle”), appears in Norway to equal amounts of praise and controversy. The controversy is not so much over the title, with its echoes of Hitler’s memoir (Mein Kampf in German, Min Kamp in Norwegian), but has rather to do with the people the author has “exposed.” In a northern European nation that prefers to keep family trauma private, Knausgaard has written directly about the most personal aspects of his family experiences without any attempt to disguise or change the names of his ex-wife, his father, his grandmother, and other friends and family. When the second volume of My Struggle appears, Knausgaard’s mother calls him and begs him to stop. An uncle threatens to sue. Ultimately, author and publisher agree to change a few of the names in subsequent editions, but the media storm grows, first spreading through Scandinavia, and then across Europe. Most agree about the power of the work, but at what cost has it been achieved? The books become a national obsession, selling 450,000 copies in a country of less than five million people. Norway’s culture minister declares the work the “the greatest account of our generation.” On a national radio program, Knausgaard will go on to say that he feels he has made a “pact with the devil.”

Last August, a few weeks before Archipelago Press released Don Bartlett’s excellent translation of My Struggle: Book One in North America, the book received the “James Wood treatment.” Writing in The New Yorker, Wood praised the work as “intense and vital,” stating that it contained “what Walter Benjamin called ‘the epic side of truth, wisdom.” The first volume of My Struggle is indeed a rarity in contemporary literature; part memoir, part unhinged bildungsroman, it ploughs through and ultimately transcends both genres with a driving seriousness of intent, delving more deeply into the human experience than anything I’ve read in a long time. Fixated on the shadow Knausgaard’s father cast over his childhood and teenage years, and ending with the thirty year-old Karl Ove confronting the horrible death of that father from alcoholism, the 430 page book alternates between extended, minutely detailed descriptive passages and essayistic meditations on death. The result is a kind of crackling slow-burn, a fearless examination of, as Carlos Fuentes once said of Frida Kahlo: “internal darkness under midday lights.”

This month, My Struggle: Book Two makes its North American debut. If Book One centered on death (in order to downplay potential controversy over Knausgaard’s Hitlerian title, the work was published as To Die in Germany and A Death in the Family in the U.K.) then Book Two is loosely organized around the concept of love (and has already been published across the pond under its subtitle A Man in Love). While it is possible to read Book Two on its own and still get something out of it, to do so would be like opening up Remembrance of Things Past for the first time at Within a Budding Grove. Much of the power of Proust and Knausgaard’s projects comes from their length and breadth, which allows for a gradual accumulation of patterned detail, as specific themes and moments repeat themselves in subtle and not-so-subtle variations. In both works, repetition is key.

My Struggle: Book Two primarily covers 2003-2008, years when Knausgaard left behind his old life and partner in Norway and moved to Stockholm. For readers of Book One, Knausgaard’s escape to Sweden possesses added significance: it was after Karl Ove’s own father moved away from his family that he began the drinking and isolation that fourteen years later would leave him dead. Knausgaard does plenty of drinking in Stockholm, but rather than fall apart, he falls in love – with the poet Linda Bostrom.

Linda Bostrom

Knausgaard imbues these scenes with the nostalgic power of true love glimpsed in retrospect. He vividly captures the feel of early love, the uncertainty and vulnerability at the beginning, when things could still go either way, as well as the ecstatic heights:

The town sparkled around us as we walked home, Linda in the white jacket I had given her as a present that morning, and walking there, hand in hand with her, in the midst of this beautiful and, for me, still foreign town, sent wave after wave of pleasure through me. We were still full of ardor and desire, for our lives had turned, not just on the breath of a passing wind, but fundamentally. We planned to have children. We had no sense of anything awaiting us except happiness.

Over the course of My Struggle: Book Two, Karl Ove and Linda become parents to three children. One of the pleasures of the work is the associative, non-chronological way Knausgaard unfolds his story, shifting in and out of different periods according to the movement of thought and memory. Because of this, Book Two begins with all three children already born and the early stages of infatuation between Karl Ove and Linda a relic of the distant past.

The first thing one notices about My Struggle: Book Two (other than the fact that it is a hefty 146 pages longer than its predecessor) is a decrease in the level of intensity that filled Book One. With the father figure dead and buried, the sense of dread behind each sentence is palpably lessened. E.M. Forster once remarked that “mystery creates a pocket in time.” Book One utilizes the mystery of Knausgaard’s father (why is he such a cruel, tortured man? How exactly will he meet his end?) to mesmerizing effect. Throughout that first volume, wherever young Karl Ove goes, the father’s shadow follows; there is always the sense of movement towards further revelation. Many of the scenes in Book One possess an aura of somnambulant terror, as if anything could occur at any moment, which provides a momentum that propels the reader through some of the lengthier descriptive passages. A roughly 60-page description of young Karl Ove trying to secure alcohol for New Year’s Eve, for example, unfolds in painfully slow fashion beneath the constant apprehension over whether the father will find out what the son is up to. The tension builds until, at the end of Book One, Karl Ove pays a second visit to his father’s corpse (again, repetition). Here, something opens up in him, and he begins to see the intertwining elements of death, life, and time in a different way:

. . . there was no longer any difference between what once had been my father and the table he was lying on, or the floor on which the table stood, or the wall socket beneath the window, or the cable running to the lamp beside him. For humans are merely one form among many, which the world produces over and over again, not only in everything that lives but also in everything that does not live, drawn in sand, stone and water. And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor.

With this conclusion to My Struggle: Book One, the last two sentences of which rhythmically and thematically echo the final sentences of the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past,^[*] the great tension is released. A new point of realization has been reached.

Initially then, Book Two lacks both the momentum and the mystery of Book One. Certainly love can be a mystery, but at the outset of Book Two it seems more like a daily slog, as we are confronted with scenes of Knausgaard’s new family life. Only in the light of what has come before do these scenes gradually accrue a resonant force. The still fearful, still internally isolated Underground Man persona that Knausgaard continues to develop here—picture a 21^st century Raskolnikov schlepping a stroller, a diaper bag, and two toddlers up a hill while his wife stands at the top in a foul mood, a third wailing infant in her arms—is understandable precisely because we know what he has come out of. Although the hated father is dead and Karl Ove has escaped to a new country, Knausgaard still struggles to relate his internal and external worlds, and to be around others. Most moving, in these early scenes, is Knausgaard’s depiction of his own quest to be a decent father, as he attempts to raise his young children without duplicating the paternal coldness, cruelty and occasional rage he was treated to during his own upbringing. We come to see that for the adult Karl Ove Knausgaard, love means following through on one’s commitments, regardless of how fucked up one feels inside.

So it goes for 67 pages, with little of what contemporary publishing would call “narrative tension” or “drive.” As with certain sections of Book One, we begin to suspect that the day-in-day-out nature of these scenes, the very mundaneness of their details, is the point; these scenes need to be long for the same reason that the infamous sermon on hell in the third chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man needs to be long: to enact, rather than simply describe the interminable, real-time duration of certain life moments. And yet, after a while, we begin to wonder if this is all Book Two has to offer.

Then, on page 68, Knausgaard returns home from the birthday party of one of his young daughter’s friends. He steps out alone onto the balcony, has a smoke, drinks some stale diet coke:

I returned the glass to the table and stubbed out my cigarette. There was nothing left of my feelings for those I had just spent several hours with. The whole crowd of them could have burned in hell for all I cared. This was a rule in my life. When I was with other people I was bound to them, the nearness I felt was immense, the empathy great. Indeed, so great that their well-being was always more important than my own. I subordinated myself, almost to the verge of self-effacement; some uncontrollable internal mechanism caused me to put their thoughts and opinions before mine. But the moment I was alone others meant nothing to me . . . Between these two perspectives there was no halfway point. There was just the small, self-effacing one and the large, distance-creating one. And in between them was where my daily life lay. Perhaps that was why I had such a hard time living it. Everyday life, with its duties and routines, was something I endured, not a thing I enjoyed, nor something that was meaningful or that made me happy. This had nothing to do with a lack of desire to wash floors or change diapers but rather with something more fundamental: the life around me was not meaningful. I always longed to be away from it. So the life I led was not my own. I tried to make it mine, this was my struggle, because of course I wanted it, but I failed, the longing for something else undermined all my efforts.

It is difficult to convey the full force of this passage without also including what preceded it: a forty-plus page description of a middle-class Swedish child’s birthday party, where a Norwegian father remains intensely within himself, unable to connect with the others, even those he likes. This struggle is made more poignant by the fact that we see how Knausgaard’s three-year old daughter Vanya already exhibits these same social tendencies, this same furious need to be accepted by others, coupled with the inability, on a bodily level, to figure out how to join in the other children at play. For Knausgaard and his daughter, a routine social occasion is a source of fear, shame, and longing.

A Few Words About Titles

Given that Hitler’s memoir is often published in North America, even in translation, under its original German title, for some the English “My Struggle” will not have the same resonance it does in Norwegian. The above passage from page 68 of Book Two is the first time we get a direct reference to, and partial explication of, the work’s title. Here, the emphasis is on the struggle to balance being in the world for others versus being in the world for oneself—the struggle to exist, on a moment-to-moment basis. In a recent interview, Knausgaard said that he chose the title Min Kamp on something of a lark. He liked the friction it carried between the daily, personal struggles of the individual and the larger structures of ideology and politics that function in opposition to private life. My Struggle: Book Six reportedly contains an essay that delves further into this issue, focusing on a comparison between Knausgaard and Hitler’s books, but English readers will have to wait a few more years for this.

If nothing else, Knausgaard’s series does foreground, in immense detail, the struggles of everyday life. By placing this struggle in the background, as the UK version does on its cover, the emphasis becomes reversed. Whether this retitling was done in order to avoid controversy or to more easily market the volume-by-volume content of Knausgaard’s work makes little difference; it interposes a too-large distinction between each book in the sextet, as if there were no significant overlap. The throughline of struggle is downplayed, the totality of the whole sacrificed for an emphasis on each volume as an individual marketable product.

For make no mistake, struggle, in conception and reality, runs through everything Karl Ove does, everything he thinks. Happy or sad, in joy or despair, he suffers apart from the rest, alone. In this, he is a true Underground Man.

Notes From Underground

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“All the same, if we take into consideration the conditions that have shaped our society, people like the writer not only may, but must, exist inthat society.”
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The above words (or rather, their Russian equivalent) were written in 1864 as a description the original Underground Man. Dostoevsky’s name appears 16 times in My Struggle: Book Two. Like Karl Ove in My Struggle, that main character of Notes From Underground is also a writer composing a sort of memoir: “I, however, am writing for myself alone, and let me declare once and for all that if I write as if I were addressing an audience, it is only for show and because it makes it easier for me to write. It is a form, nothing else; I shall never have any readers. I have already made that clear . . .” Interestingly, Knausgaard has said in interviews that he too “didn’t believe that anyone would be interested in this writing, because it’s so personal, so private.” This thought set him free at his desk, to write “for myself, by myself.”

As Dostoyevsky writes in a passage that applies equally to My Struggle’s central character, the Underground Man’s dilemma, “lies in his consciousness of his own deformity . . . the tragedy of the underground [is] made up of suffering, self-torture, the consciousness of what is best and the impossibility of attaining it, and above all else the firm belief of these unhappy creatures that everybody else is the same and that consequently it is not worth while trying to reform.”

While the Underground Man feels isolated from the rest of society, he is also a product of it, and perhaps, in the end, not quite so hideously unique as he imagines. Knausgaard realizes that his is as much a problem of perception as anything else, but does not know how to change:

Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck, how stupid I was. I couldn’t find any peace in a café; within a second I had taken in everyone there, and I continued to do so, and every glance that came my way penetrated into my innermost self, jangled about inside me, and every movement I made, even if only flicking through a book, was likewise transmitted outwards to them, as a sign of my stupidity, every movement I made said: “This is an idiot sitting here.” So it was better to walk, for then the looks disappeared one by one, admittedly they were replaced by others, but they never had time to establish themselves, they just glided past, there goes an idiot, there goes an idiot, there goes an idiot.

This paradox of the Underground Man, painfully separate from society, while at the same time yoked to and created by it, is presumably what allows Karl Ove to see himself as outside, different from the rest, and still write “the definitive portrait” of his generation, a work that has resonated so deeply for so many others.

The other reference point for the Underground Man, particularly from a Norwegian perspective, is Knut Hamson’s Hunger. In the course of My Struggle: Book Two, Hamsun’s name is mentioned 11 times. In one scene, a Swedish filmmaker begins jokingly calling Knausgaard “Hamsun,” for his reactionary Norwegian views.

Knut Hamson

In Hunger, we are again presented with a writer struggling to maintain his dignity in an urban setting. Hamsun’s Underground Man is defined by his extreme refusal to partake in the pleasures of everyday life, to join the crowd by accepting help in the form of food or money. Knausgaard too is interested in refusal. Late in Book Two, Knausgaard’s friend Geir Gullickson informs him that: “Not to strive for a happy life is the provocative thing you can do.” A page or so later, Knausgaard responds: “All I know is that success is not to be trusted. I notice that I get angry just talking about it.”

Style

The prose of Book Two is similar to Book One: the long sentences and paragraphs do not induce anxiety in the way that Thomas Bernhard or László Krasznahorkai’s writing can, but rather project a certain detached calm. A typical Knausgaardian sentence piles independent clause upon independent clause, linking these with comma splices where grammatical convention would seem to call for a period, semicolon or coordinating conjunction. 800 pages into the My Struggle saga, these splices were still tripping me up. I began to wonder if it was a function of the translation; perhaps Norwegian possessed different conventions with regards to sentence structure?

A perusal of Knausgaard’s previous novel, “A Time for Everything,” revealed that the author does indeed know how to “properly” punctuate. A typical passage from that work reads: “Cain felt the gaze of the crowd at his back, but he didn’t turn; in a strange way their exit felt like a victory: it was just the two of them. In a few minutes the festivities would continue, and the wonder would dissipate itself in them.”

47 words in total. The varied punctuation helps to regulate the flow of the two sentences. We stop at the periods. And pause at the semi-colon and colon. Each of the two commas is followed by a coordinating conjunction (but, and). Now, compare this to the writing in My Struggle:

Later that autumn the temperature plummeted, all the water and the canals in Stockholm froze, we walked on the ice from Soder to Stockholm’s Old Town, I hobbled along like the hunchback of Notre Dame, she laughed and took photos of me, I took photos of her, everything was sharp and clear, including my feelings for her.”

One sentence, 57 words: one period, seven commas. My guess is that the run-ons in My Struggle are the result of Knausgaard’s compositional method, and that he decided to leave many of them untouched as a statement about the formal constraints of his project. As he recently told Eleanor Wachtel, length and speed were crucial: “It had to be long, and I had to write very quickly, so I could be ahead of my thoughts all the time.” By consistently eschewing the aesthetics of a properly punctuated sentence, Knausgaard allows data and detail to pile up without the emphasis that more varied punctuation would provide. At one level, the My Struggle books seem to be about getting as much of the world’s content as possible onto the page, rather than arranging this content for artful effect. Knausgaard will sometimes leave a sentence deliberately clunky to enhance this impression. Listen to the repetition of the word “mind” in the final clause here: “The boxer incident, when I hadn’t dared kick in the door, and the boat incident, when I hadn’t dared to ask Arvid to slow down, as well as Linda’s concern about my failure to act, had played on my mind so much that now there was no doubt in my mind.”

Eyes Within a Face

“What is a work of art if not the gaze of another person?”
—Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book Two

Which is not to say that there aren’t still beautiful passages and artful effects, but rather that these are not the point of the work. In particular, Knausgaard has a knack for describing eyes, getting at the essential individuality and emotion they convey. Knausgaard is obsessed, in a conflicting way, with how he sees the world and how others see him. It is little wonder, then, that painting is his favourite art (Book One contains a beautiful passage describing the eyes in a late Rembrandt self-portrait), or that the most frightening creature he can imagine, from a childhood dream, is a lizard-like figure without any eyes.

How Knausgaard perceives his own eyes often provides a clue to his relationship with the world. When he first arrives in Stockholm:

I studied myself in the mirror for a few seconds. My face was pale and slightly bloated, hair unkempt and eye . . . yes, my eyes . . . Staring but not in an active, outward-facing fashion, as though they were looking for something, more as if what they saw was drawn into them, as if they sucked everything in.

Since when had I had such eyes?

There is only one scene in Book Two where Knausgaard’s mother is remotely critical of him: after he moves to Stockholm, she lashes out at how he left his wife and then fell in love again so quickly: “I couldn’t see other people,” Knausgaard summarizes, “I was completely blind. I saw only myself everywhere. Your father, she said, he looked straight into people. He saw immediately who they were. You’ve never done that. No, I said. Maybe I haven’t.”

Later, his love for Linda changes the way he sees by bringing him into closer proximity to reality: “Before, I had always been deep inside myself, observing people from there, like from the back of a garden. Linda brought me out, right to the edge of myself, where everything was near and everything seemed stronger.”

Struggle with Form/Struggle as Form

“ . . . I could counter that Dante, for example, had written just fiction, that Cervantes had written just fiction, and that Melville had written just fiction. It was irrefutable that being human would not be the same if these three works had not existed, So why not just write fiction? . . . Good arguments, but that didn’t help, just the thought of fiction, just the thought of a fabricated character in a fabricated plot made me nauseous, I reacted in a physical way.”
—Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle, Book Two

In Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, David Shields describes being overtaken by a similar feeling: “Every artistic movement from the beginning of time is an attempt to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art.” It is worth noting that very few of the writers of recent works of reality-based fiction are as wholeheartedly against the traditional novel in the way that Shields can sometimes appear to be (e.g. Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be?, Francisco Goldman’s Say Her Name, Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station). It is tempting to add My Struggle to the list of contemporary fiction/nonfiction hybrids, the most epic version yet of the novel-from-life.

But somehow Knausgaard’s work displays a less playful attitude towards the division between fiction and reality, as if he is off working in his own mad dimension that paradoxically feels closer to the real. Though Knausgaard’s series was originally published in Norway and other European countries with the word roman on the cover, in Britain and North America it is more often referred to as an epic memoir. In many ways, My Struggle perfectly enact Birkerts’ definition of the genre. While “this really happened is the baseline contention of the memoir,” Birkerts writes, the true “fascination of the work . . . is in tracking the artistic transformation of the actual via the alchemy of psychological insight, pattern recognition, and lyrical evocation in a contained saga.”

Archipelago has wisely decided to publish My Struggle without a genre label. What ultimately matters is the magnitude of Knausgaard’s investment in his project, the sense that here is a man writing to save himself, writing to survive, writing because these things mean so much to him. Somehow, he is able to make them mean almost as much to us. Like all great art, whatever the genre, one leaves these books with a renewed feeling for what life and art can be.

Birkerts also stresses that it is the juxtaposition of multiple timelines, “the now and the then (the many thens) . . . that creates the quasi-spatial illusion most approximating the sensations of lived experience, of recollection merging into the ongoing business of living.” Knausgaard has taken this technique to new heights, returning again and again to his themes, with new insight:

Throughout our childhood and teenage years, we strive to attain the correct distance to objects and phenomena. We read, we learn, we experience, we make adjustments. Then one day we reach the point where all the necessary distances have been set, all the necessary systems have been put in place. That is when time begins to pick up speed. It no longer meets any obstacles, everything is set, time races through our lives, the days pass by in a flash and before we know what is happening we are forty, fifty, sixty . . . Meaning requires content, content requires time, time requires resistance. Knowledge is distance, knowledge is stasis and the enemy of meaning. My picture of my father on that evening in 1976 is, in other words, twofold: on the one hand I see him as I saw him at that time; on the other hand, I see him as a peer through whose life time is blowing and unremittingly sweeping large chunks of meaning along with it.

The overall effect of the first two My Struggle books, despite the seriousness of the subject matter, is both liberating and exhilarating. In any one book, so much has, of necessity, to be pared away. The magnitude of Knausgaard’s project allows him to shine a light on hitherto unknown aspects of being, indulging in immense, 234 page-long digressions into the past. But when we return to the present, it is with a renewed knowledge and understanding of the characters and their situations.

And yet, despite its allegiance to reality, Knausgaard’s art is still an art: it still employs form and illusion. For all its breadth, the writing still only seems to include everything. In reality, it casts its net only over what has come through the author’s mind in the process of writing. Gradually, as Book Two progresses, we move back round to the subjects and questions of Book One: alcoholism, death, paternity. We come to see that death and love are bound up together in myriad ways. But perhaps, with his particular brand of intuitive energy, Knausgaard was setting us up for this all along, right from the very first sentence of Book One:

“For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can.”

—Eric Foley

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Eric Foley holds an Honours BA in English and Literary Studies from the University of Toronto and an MFA from Guelph University. He has been a finalist for the Random House Creative Writing Award, the Hart House Literary Contest, and the winner of Geist Magazine and the White Wall Review’s postcard story contests. His writing can be found online at Numéro Cinq and Influencysalon.ca. He lives in Toronto and divides his time between his writing and teaching at Humber College.

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

In the Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation: “The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.”↵

Laundromats, Lucky Charms and the Labors of Herakles | Review of Anne Carson’s Red Doc> — Richard Farrell

Apr 082013

Much is misnomer in our present way of grasping the world.

—Anne Carson

Red Doc>^[1]
Anne Carson
Alfred A. Knopf
164 pages, $24.95

“A conversation is a journey, and what gives it value is fear,” writes Anne Carson in “The Anthropology of Water.” Extrapolating only slightly, it seems appropriate to view the larger body of Carson’s work as one long conversation across literature, a discourse that picks up where the Greeks left off and continues across the millennia. (We’ll return to the alluring aspect of fear later.) Her latest book, Red Doc> (Knopf), continues a conversation Carson has been having throughout her long and storied tenure as a poet, translator, essayist and novelist or, most often, as an alloy of all four.

Carson lays claim to the title of trans-genre laureate, a writer who blurs lines so adeptly that librarians and booksellers must spend grueling hours contemplating shelf space for her books. Red Doc> is neither a novel nor a poem nor a Greek tragedy, but rather some recombinant heterotopia, a space where ideal forms of genre exist only as fragments and echoes of the whole. It unfurls like a tapestry, colored with neoclassical heroes, albino musk ox, ice bats, homicidal cucumbers, choral interludes, oracles, madmen and quacks. Carson has returned to a subject clearly near and dear to her, the refiguring of Greek mythology, specifically the story of the red-winged monster Geyron and his lover-cum-nemesis Herakles. This is familiar territory for the Canadian writer who teaches at the University of Michigan; her earlier (and more accessible) Autobiography of Red was a coming-of-age story for Geyron and Herakles, star-crossed swains who played out their sad destinies against a contemporized setting.

In Red Doc>, Geyron, now called G, lives alone in a hut near a freeway overpass, tending to his sickly mother and prized herd of musk oxen. In the original Greek myth, Herakles must journey to Erytheia and slaughter Geyron’s herd in order to complete his tenth labor. Carson’s adaptation brings the battle-weary Herakles, now called Sad, home safely from the front lines. “I had a tan when I came home no wounds no cuts.” But Sad suffers from symptoms clearly meant to resemble PTSD. Early on, the former lovers are joined by Ida, a mysterious woman who meets Sad in a therapist’s office:

You a Tuesday appointment like me / I guess / always writing in that book / not writing drawing / drawing what / my sunny

self / got a name / Ida / I’m Sad / why / no it’s my name Sad But Great capital S capital B capital G people call

me Sad / that some type of indigenous name / army / army make you have a certain name / make you have a

certain everything / how / orders / but your name is your fate can’t take orders on that / no / no

Carson pits simple, everyday language against atypical formatting. She elides common punctuation (commas and question marks are anathema) and eschews dialogue tags in favor of back-slashes and stanza breaks. She subverts formal expectation, squeezing most of the book’s text into newspaper like columns or using elements borrowed from concrete poetry. Yet the story remains compelling at the same time. The reader is flummoxed, intrigued, pulled along and, above all, curious about what’s coming next.

Minimalist details, playful wit and unorthodox typography control not only the pacing of the story, but also the perspective and characterization of its players. Carson reveals things about these characters—relevant history, details, backstory, yearnings—but she refrains from spelling out meaning or purpose. As Carson told the Paris Review:

I think a poem, when it works, is an action of the mind captured on a page and the reader, when he engages it, has to enter into that action. And so his mind repeats that action and travels again through the action, but it is a movement of yourself through a thought, through an activity of thinking, so by the time you get to the end, you’re different than you were at the beginning and you feel that difference.

Carson asks us to think deeply as we read; to travel, to feel, to change. She generates offbeat and peculiar storylines. The language and form charm us like potions, drawing us further into this strange world. Trying to make explicit sense of the ‘events’ only gets in the way of appreciation. Far better to be enchanted than to understand.

In Sam Anderson’s recent (and rare) New York Times profile, Carson quotes Simone Weil by saying that “contradiction is the test of reality.” So it’s hardly surprising to find an abundant trove of contradictory devices in Carson’s work. Her lucid, lyrical prose mesmerizes at times, but her mannerisms can feel evasive and recondite. Though a plot (of sorts) exists in Red Doc>, a traditional design does not bind things together. The story moves in seemingly random jumps, forward and backward across time and space, at times blithely ignoring cause and effect. Instead, it’s Carson’s intricate, carefully nuanced use of layered images and repeated words that give rise to story structure. A reader expecting a linear narrative will be sorely disappointed, but a careful reader, one willing to pay attention and reread, will be rewarded.

For reasons not made entirely clear, Sad and G embark on a desultory journey to the north, leaving Ida behind to watch G’s herd. “Crows as big as barns rave overhead. Still driving north. Night is a slit all day is white.” They get lost. Though, how one can actually get lost without a destination poses an amusing question. Eventually they disappear into a glacier, whereupon G falls into a hole in the ice and Sad abandons him.

Twice in the story, G must take decisive and heroic actions. In both instances, he uncovers his wings—which usually remain hidden beneath his clothes—and flies. Carson reserves some of her finest imagery for the two instances where G takes flight.

He is rising. Air grabs his knees. Out of black nothing into perfect expectancy—flying has always given him this sensation of hope—like glimpsing a lake through trees or that first steep velvet moment the opera curtains part—he is keening down the ice fault. Soul fresh. Wings wide awake. Front body alive in a rush of freezing air.

Carson soars too, above the tedious complaints of her critics who say she’s not poetic enough to be a poet and nor focused enough to be a novelist. Heretical, inventive, daring and dazzling, Carson challenges the settled principles that try to define literature, and in so doing, pushes her vision forward into uncharted worlds. And she does all this while maintaining a sharp sense of humor. As G rises out of the glacier and flies off, he muses sadly, “Am I turning into one of those old guys in a ponytail and wings?”

Guided by ice bats, G touches down at a psych clinic/auto repair shop run by the inquisitive doctor/mechanic named CMO. Carson’s playful use of acronyms as abbreviated identities forms one of many leitmotifs, along with recurrent themes of abandonment, jealousy, and grief. Sad comes to clinic too, as though the clinic was always the destination. Sad reconnects with 4NO, an old war buddy who is a patient. 4NO is the scene stealing prophet, a loveable but deranged oracle who can see five seconds into the future. G asks him what it’s like: “all white all the time / what do you mean / I mean the whole immediate Visible crushed onto the frontal cortex is nothing but white without any remainder.”

These are beguiling, bumptious characters. They are wild and sad and wonderfully complex. Ida robs a laundromat, nearly gets caught, flees the police and drives to the clinic, whereupon she has sex with Sad in the laundry room beneath G’s bed. G learns the details of Sad’s “pesky traumatic memories,” which involved shooting an unarmed woman 75 times in the head. They are also literate folks. G reads Proust, Emily Bronte and the Russian Absurdist Daniil Kharms. Sad reads self-help books and Christina Rossetti. 4NO is staging a one-man adaptation of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, renaming it Prometheus Rebound.

On the night of the play, a near riot ensues when Sad attacks Ida in a mistaken combat flashback. A patient dies in the melee. Ida, Sad, G and 4NO then drive away from the clinic, Sad bound in a straight jacket. Unknowingly, they are driving straight into the lava flow of an erupting volcano.

In the defamiliarized landscape of Red Doc>, the reader must stay alert for uncanny reversals, choral interludes from the Wife of Brain, the sudden appearances by Hermes in a sliver tuxedo, and Carson’s delightfully bizarre aphorisms. “If the army is issuing your Luck in the form of Charms it’s already gone,” CMO says, explaining why soldiers never ate the Lucky Charms provided in their field rations. Of course, Sad did eat the cereal, and then brutal violence ensued.

What Carson accomplishes in her writing is an upheaval of expectation. She pulls at meaning, at definitions, at connotations and denotations of words, at the very fabric of language, unraveling that wonderful tapestry she sets out to create. As Lt. M’hek, the officer on Sad’s Warrior Transition Team, tells G: “at the bottom of the ocean is a layer of water that has never moved this I heard on BBC last night fresh idea to me.” Above, at the ocean’s surface, it’s easy to imagine Carson pressing down on the waves, hoping to eventually force that still water to move.

And make no mistake, reading anything by Carson is a journey, fraught with peril, difficulty and, yes, a hint of fear. “What is the fear inside language?” she asks in “The Anthropology of Water.” By excavating ancient myths, by reconfiguring monsters and villains and gods into contemporary characters, Carson reminds us that literature may not possess answers. Mere words may not comfort us from our fears, but they can help us ask the big questions. The British writer and critic Gabriel Josipovici picks up a similar idea in his What Ever Happened to Modernism? “And novels, (William) Golding tells us, are projections of our imagination on reality; but they are not meaningless projections. They have a purpose: to protect us from the reality of our deaths.”

Like Prometheus, it’s easy to feel chained to the stone of routine and habituation, reading the same book (or variation of it) over and over again, our livers gnawed continuously by the eagle of market forces and bestseller lists. When do our deepest questions get addressed? The real joy of reading Anne Carson is that she perpetually engages with these questions. Though there may not be definitive answers, at least there is room to contemplate, to reflect, to query the void as we barrel ahead toward the lava flow of our own extinction. What will save us? Prophets? Poets? The wisdom of the ages? Or maybe we are beyond saving, and can only learn to dance a little as we approach the end.

Decreation is an undoing of the creature in us. That creature enclosed in self and defined by self. But to undo self one must move through self, to the very inside of its definition. We have nowhere else to start. This is the parchment on which God writes his lessons. (from Decreation)

Carson’s not writing poems or novels, she’s dancing a tango on the page. Uncertainty and language are her partners. The Ineffable twists and turns with the Great Span of Words.

In the end, the heroes survive. G’s mother dies and the chorus sings. A funeral ushers the sad story towards its conclusion. “Rain continuous since the funeral a wrecking rattling bewildering Lethe-knuckling mob of rain. A rain with no instructions.” Perhaps this is the great wisdom: there are no instructions, only a bewildering cleansing, a rain of words to obscure the tears. Carson leaves us alone to ponder the mystery. She offers no answers, only provides the glorious space for that pondering.

Caution is best. Luck essential. Hope a question. Down the street she notices a man in his undershirt standing looking up at the rain. Well not every day can be a masterpiece. This one sails out and out and out.

—Richard Farrell

Richard Farrell is the Creative Non-Fiction Editor at upstreet and a Senior Editor at Numéro Cinq (in fact, he is one of the original group of Vermont College of Fine Arts students who helped found the site). A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, he has worked as a high school teacher, a defense contractor, and as a Navy pilot. He is a graduate from the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. He is currently at work on a collection of short stories. His work, including short stories, memoir, craft essays, interviews, and book reviews, has been published or is forthcoming at Hunger Mountain, upstreet, A Year in Ink Anthology, Descant, New Plains Review and Numéro Cinq. He lives in San Diego.

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

“…(that angle-bracket is, yes, a part of the title: “Red Doc >” was the default name Carson’s word-processing program gave to the file, and she stuck with it).” “The Inscrutable Brilliance of Anne Carson” Sam Anderson, NY Times, March 14, 2013↵

Laughing at Despair: Review of The Fun Parts by Sam Lipsyte — Benjamin Woodard

Apr 042013

(Photo: Robert Reynolds)

The Fun Parts
Sam Lipsyte
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
224 Pages, $24.00
ISBN 978-0374298906

About halfway through Sam Lipsyte’s comical, prickly new story collection, The Fun Parts, comes “The Worm in Philly,” a narrative wound around the nameless junkie son of a sportswriter and his desire to pen a children’s book about the middleweight boxer Marvelous Marvin Hagler (“Why Marvelous Marvin Hagler?” he ponders. “Why not?”). The story contains all the Lipsyte standards—absurdity, crudeness, punchy dialogue, and a strange, underlying sweetness. It also weaves two elements of the author’s personal life into the text: the well-known sportswriter/children’s author father (Lipsyte’s dad is Robert Lipsyte), and the moment when the narrator realizes nobody has any interest in pursuing his project:

“What about the book?” I said.
“The book.”
“The advance?”
“The advance,” said Cassandra. “Here’s your advance.”
She pulled bills from her bag, tossed them on the table.

Lipsyte’s first novel, The Subject Steve, suffered from an unfortunate publication date, September 11, 2001, and flopped so badly with the general public that when he completed his follow-up, Home Land, he couldn’t acquire US distribution. And though things eventually worked out—Home Land finally found paperback publication, and the author has since released another novel, 2010’s The Ask—this brush with failure seems apt, in a way, for an author whose stories repeatedly provide toeholds for similar situations. Dating back to his 2000 collection, Venus Drive, Lipsyte’s strong understanding of those existing on the fringe allows his narratives to crackle with an uneasy vigor. As such, the struggles of has-beens and never-weres flood The Fun Parts. Tovah D’Agostino, the part-time preschool assistant in “The Climber Room,” is a failed poet. The male mother’s helper in the witty “Wisdom of the Doulas” finds himself marginalized by his employer to the point where he takes desperate measures to regain his stature. And the namesake of “Ode to Oldcorn,” once a famous shot-putter, now rolls into town to party with a bunch of teenagers, declaring, “I want all the beer in your town … And I want teen poot, if that’s available.”

While the thirteen stories in the collection are not intentionally linked, like in the aforementioned “The Worm in Philly,” most find a thematic spine in their exploration—both closely and peripherally—of family bonds. In these tales, parents often come across as aloof, cruel, or manipulative. Doctor Varelli, the father of the title teenager in “The Dungeon Master,” calls his children “puppies,” and fawns over them as if a fanatic, rather than an authoritarian. Similarly, the parents of an overweight boy in “Snacks” pressure him to lose weight while simultaneously neglecting to help him achieve said goal. And, returning to “The Climber Room,” the character of Randy Gautier, adoptive father to Tovah’s young student, Dezzy, uses his power and money to influence the world around his daughter, controlling the schedules of daycare employees by dangling the carrot of an annual donation in front of their faces.

This parental scheming slinks into the relationships between Lipsyte’s adult characters and their aging progenitors, as well. “Nate’s Pain is Now,” one of the book’s strongest stories, chronicles the day-to-day of a once-popular author of drug memoirs:

I had a good run. Bang the Dope Slowly and its follow-up, I Shoot Horse, Don’t I?, sold big … My old man, the feckless prick, even he broke down and vowed his love. But as a lady at a coffee bar in Phoenix put it, what goes up can’t stay up indefinitely because what’s under it, supporting it, anyway?

Realizing his star has faded, the author bums around the city and finds nourishment in the faxes sent to him by his father, which begin “Dear Disappointment.” This, of course, is often quite funny. Still, at a later visit, the following transpires:

“Why don’t you drink a pint of lye and get it over with?” my father said. “Why don’t you have yourself a nice little lye-and-hantavirus smoothie? That’ll fix you up good, you piece of shit.”

My father flung himself across the table, flapped his hand in my face. It’s true he never hit me. A father need not hit. His coughs, his smirks, are blows. Even a father’s embrace confers a kind of violence. Or so I once pronounced on public radio.

Though clearly aiming for a laugh with the final line in this passage, Lipsyte’s own words argue a truth behind the contrasting ideas of love and violence within family. For even the few healthy relationships within The Fun Parts contain pointed edges. “Deniers,” concerning a recently clean woman, a man looking to escape the prejudices of this past, and her Holocaust-survivor father, presents a man who loves his daughter, yet rarely speaks to her from his nursing home bed. He’s lost in his memories of WWII, his own dementia, and in the middle of a conversation, asks her, “How’s the whoring? You make enough money for the drugs? You let the scvartzers stick it in you?” Though she replies with a clever retort, she looks up at her father’s attendant for “some flicker of solidarity.” A similar reaction occurs in “The Republic of Empathy,” where young Danny, a boy convinced he’s “the narrator of a mediocre young adult novel from the eighties,” waxes poetic during a drive with his father:

I generally want to hand it to him, and then, while he’s absorbed in admiring whatever I’ve handed to him, kick away at his balls. That’s my basic strategy.

Despite the fact that the surface relationships between these characters appear stronger than those in the collection’s other stories, they are still quite fragile. Verbal and physical violence, humorous or not, simmer under a thin façade. Such emotion, like the individuals who possess them, quivers on the fine line that divides success from failure.

This is not to say that The Fun Parts loiters in misery. If anything, the collection finds some of its finest moments laughing at despair. And much of this success comes from Lipsyte’s terrific use of language. A student of Gordon Lish, the author borrows liberally from his mentor’s literary toolbox, frequently employing Lish’s idea of consecution to his writing. As defined by Jason Lucarelli in his essay “The Consecution of Gordon Lish,” consecution is, “about continually coaxing action, conflict, and interest out of prior sentences by bringing out what is implied or suggested in what has already been written.” This technique includes the use of image patterning, alliteration, repetition, and parallel construction, among others, to construct strong, momentum-building narratives.

As an example, “The Climber Room” contains two repeated images: Jesus Christ and penetration. One, in a way, implies the other, and yet they transpire separately within the narrative. The first image echoing Christ occurs when Tovah is at a market checkout counter. “You didn’t die for my sins, lady,” the register employee tells her. “So don’t go building a cross for yourself.” Later, Tovah thinks about a past moment of comfort and equates it to “the way Jesus must have worked.” When she then considers having a child of her own, Jesus returns with the quip: “You couldn’t be pregnant if you hadn’t been laid in three years. A devout Catholic could still hope, but not Tovah.” And, finally, Jesus Christ makes an appearance in a panicked curse, when Randy exclaims, “Jesus fucking Christ.”

Similarly, the image and concept of penetration begins its patterning when Tovah suffers from a stomachache so painful, it is as if “a miniature swordsman flensed her gut with his foil.” In the next paragraph, her fountain pen is said to have “impaled” a pillow. This pattern continues throughout the story, from reference made to a heroin addiction, to “sharp” dollar bills and gold-digging implements “edged enough to carve.” And the ultimate payoff is the story’s final image: that of Randy standing in front of Tovah with his penis exposed, ready for sex, the ultimate penetration.

The two repeated images in “The Climber Room” create a kind of thematic consecution, providing, as defined in Lucarelli’s essay, “a deeper level of coherence and unity to a story with passages that offer insight into story meaning.”

Lipsyte also employs alliteration to add a bouncy depth to his narratives. The pregnant couple in “The Wisdom of the Doulas” is described as the type lost without “their antique Ataris and sarcastic sneakers.” Within the first two pages of “The Climber Room,” parents are called “crypto-creepy,” and Dezzy is complimented on her “sparkly shoes.” Talk of Dezzy’s sparkle shoes then leads to the memory of a home, which is called “dizzying.” Dezzy, sparkly, dizzy. Likewise, Lipsyte finds strong use for parallel construction in these stories. The boy at the beginning of “Snacks,” in considering the perks of losing weight, mentions the possibility of receiving “blow jobs,” “hand jobs,” and “all the jobs” from his sister’s friends. And when Tovah in “The Climber Room” meets an old flame for dinner, the third person narration notes: “The shock about Sean was his shock of white hair.” This playfulness creates action at the base level of sentence, and in turn strengthens the overall work.

In the end, though, what makes The Fun Parts such a joy to read is Lipsyte’s commitment to creating environments and situations that are often left in the shadows of contemporary American literature. In a 2010 interview with Paris Review, the author said, “I write what I want. I try to write what I’d like to read. I think about not wasting a reader’s time, my own included.” This personal enjoyment is evident in his stories, where the losers find a voice, even if they continue to stumble toward obscurity.

— Benjamin Woodard

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Benjamin Woodard lives in Connecticut. His reviews have been featured in Numéro Cinq, Drunken Boat, Hunger Mountain, Rain Taxi Review of Books, and other fine publications. His fiction has appeared in Numéro Cinq. You can find him at benjaminjwoodard.com.

Our Hideous Decorum: A Review of Stig Sæterbakken’s Self-Control — Jason DeYoung

Feb 052013

Self-Control is a disquieting novel of Beckettian stasis that simmers in that prolonged “state of emergency that answers to the name of Humankind.” Its narrator, inexplicably possessed by sadistic thoughts, off-putting desires, and weaknesses, lives in a constant state of dissatisfaction in a world that seems to take little notice of him. He is man intoxicated by his own pain, an agony that has dulled him to the point of despair, and throughout the novel we witness his (initial?) efforts to confront his reality only to have them thwarted either by those closest to him or by his own self-control. —Jason DeYoung

Self-Control
Stig Sæterbakken
Translated by Seán Kinsella
Dalkey Archive Press, 2012
$13.50
154 pages

In response to the question how can we enjoy something sad, Stig Sæterbakken writes in a short essay titled “Why I Always Listen to Such Sad Music”:

I believe disharmony and asymmetry correspond to a disharmony and an asymmetry within us, because we ourselves are not whole, or complete. Because we are never fully and completely ourselves. Because our lacks, our weaknesses, and our fears make up an essential dimension within us. Because our wounds are meant not only for healing, but also the opposite, to be kept open, as part of our receptivity to that which is around us and within us. And because there is also relief in this, not to be healed, not to be cured, melancholia satisfies us by preventing us from reaching satisfaction, it clams us by keeping our anxiety alive, it gives us peace by prolonging the state of emergency, the state of emergency that answers to the name of Humankind.^[1]

Self-Control is a disquieting novel of Beckettian stasis that simmers in that prolonged “state of emergency that answers to the name of Humankind.” Its narrator, inexplicably possessed by sadistic thoughts, off-putting desires, and weaknesses, lives in a constant state of dissatisfaction in a world that seems to take little notice of him. He is man intoxicated by his own pain, an agony that has dulled him to the point of despair, and throughout the novel we witness his (initial?) efforts to confront his reality only to have them thwarted either by those closest to him or by his own self-control.

Influenced by writers such as Poe, Celine, and Georges Bataille, Stig Sæterbakken doesn’t write pretty books nor does he write novels that close with an upstroke of sweetness. Instead, his novels remind us that there are fates worst than death, namely life—long, horrifically normal life, in which people do not know you and you do not know yourself. Life in which we cannot find congruence with one another, even though that is what we yearn for the most.

Before he took his own life in 2012, Stig Sæterbakken was renown as one of Norway’s best living novelists—as well as one of its most infamous. As a writer, Sæterbakken insisted “that literature [be] a free zone, a place where prevailing social morals should not apply…[that] literature exists in a space beyond good and evil where the farthest boundaries of human experience can be explored.” His novels investigate much of what is unflattering about human behavior—evil, which he called “the most human condition of all.” ^[2]

This exploration of evil bled over into his professional life as the Content Director of the Norwegian Festival of Literature in 2008, when he invited the controversial author and Holocaust denier David Irving to be the keynote speaker for the 2009 festival. The Norwegian press demanded Sæterbakken disinvite Irving and even Norway’s free speech organization Fritt Ord asked that their logo be removed from all of the festival’s publicity. Sæterbakken refused. He called his colleagues “damned cowards.” Although reviled by some as a stunt, the David Irving invitation has been seen by others as within keeping with Sæterbakken’s examination of evil.^[3]

For all this talk of evil, however, Self-Control is not an evil novel—or I do not perceive it to be—but it does delve into unattractive human behavior, specifically our indifference to the pain of others. Self-Control is the second novel in Sæterbakken’s S-trilogy, so called because the title of each book starts with an “S”. The trilogy starts with Siamese, which Dalkey Archive Press published the first English translation of in 2010, and concludes with Sauermugg (not yet available in English). The S-trilogy novels are linked by their exploration of male identity problems, and a “disgusting descent into the hell of human flesh”^[4]

Outraged by the complete indifference and self-centered behavior of the people around him, Andreas Felt, the narrator of Self-Control, begins a series of deliberate actions to defy the social norms he sees as the barriers between us. His rampage (of sorts) starts with a lie he tells his daughter that he and her mother are divorcing, a lie that is spontaneous, meant to puncture the “cool…arrogant attitude” his daughter has adopted. Only briefly does his daughter seem touched by this news.

During the second scene of the book, Andreas carries his rampage into his boss’s office. His boss is a man “five to ten years” his junior, and Andreas thinks to himself that their whole relationship is built upon formalities: “we only need to leave the premises and go to another place…in order to see how ludicrous…how implausible” it all is. He walks into the office and without provocation calls the man a “little shit” and a “miserable bastard.” He tells him that he is “one of the worst imaginable types of creeps that crawls on the surface of the earth,” reminds him that he got his job through fraud, and that he “probably couldn’t put two words together if someone came up and asked what it is we actually do here.”

Andreas expects dismissal or some sort of reproach. Instead his boss says simply: “My wife is very ill.” His boss wants to discuss his wife’s illness, not Andreas’s tantrum. As with his daughter, Andreas’s expectations are rebuffed, this time by an exchanged of one outpouring of pain for another. A quick search through this slim novel (154 pages) reveals that the word “expect” shows up fourteen times, and its close cousins “usual” and “usually” appear fourteen times and sixteen times respectively. Self-Control is a novel that shows how our lives are ruled by the “familiar” (a word that appears eleven times), by “habit” (a word that appears eight times), by route and routine (a variation that appears six times). Granted it is a translated text—but this is a novel of spurned expectations.

What Andreas wants is for our usual, familiar, habitual behavior to go away—a full extirpation of all our hideous decorum. Of a houseguest, Andreas says: “His discretion has always irritated me.” He imagines leaping upon this man and biting his nose; this thought he says, “cheered me up.” As Georges Bataille writes: “Society is governed by its will to survive…and based on the calculations of interest… it requires [savages] to comply with…reasonable adult conventions which are advantageous to the community.” ^[5] In Self-Control, characters are govern by social norms, and will not tolerate Andreas. Where he breaks with custom, others rebuke with conventionality.

Reappearing like a compass heading throughout the novel is the disappearance of a sixteen year-old girl. The girl goes missing on the same day as the novel begins and lends a sense of imminent tragedy to the narrative. But the presiding sense of doom in the novel also manifests in Andreas’s almost worshipful attitude toward disaster and catastrophe. When observing his colleague Jens-Olav, who has lost his wife and house and most of his possessions in a recent fire, Andreas thinks: “I didn’t know if it was compassion or envy I felt most. Grief like that…I couldn’t imagine to think of it as anything other than liberation, liberations from all the trivial things that otherwise have such power over you.” At other times, he lies in bed fantasizing about living through war. He also desires misfortune on others: “I thought that if I could only mange to find out who [carved an obscene word into the lavatory wall at work] then that person would undergo a transformation, right before my eyes, and it would be a lasting change.” But his obsession with tragedy is part and parcel with his desire for change. Late in the novel while watching a movie in a theatre for the first time in years, he thinks:

I didn’t want it to end. I wanted a new beginning. Everything over again…fresh and unfamiliar…without any clues as to how it was going to go…what was going to happen…no end. Only beginnings. One after the other. That was the way I wanted it. To know that everything was in front of me. That nothing was decided.

Andreas covets his own sovereignty, but he is fearful of taking real action toward obtaining it. Instead he longingly looks upon tragedy as a source of freedom—“It was as though I was close to exploding with joy over something that in reality was dreadfully sad.” This promise of tragedy invades his decision making as he put faith into chance occurrences: “if [the traffic light] changes to green while I can still see it then a disaster is going to take place” (page 12); “if a taxi drives by the department store next…then I’ll call [home]” (page 86); “if the next person who goes by the window has a hat on I’ll make the call” (page 90); “if a female newsreader comes on the radio at the top of hour I’ll leave [my wife]” (page 153). When he finally sees someone who has what he wants it is a bum seated a few table over from him, farting:

[T]he power in the eyes of a man who has given up on everything…at least that was what I thought I’d seen in them…one who has nothing left to lose…who has no interest in the workings of the world…and so take people for what they are, not for what he wants them to be… a look so pure and hard and clear that I felt it in the pit of my stomach. Inferior, I felt completely inferior… I felt like a fool, like someone whose development has been at a standstill since his youth and has never been corrected, who’s never been made aware of the grotesque disparity between reality and his perception of reality.

For all his desire to “freshen” life, to be “transformed,” to change the “usual” course of things, Andreas is a man boxed in by self-control, too. If the reader stops listening to Andreas’s flat, rather monotone torrent of thought for a moment, and thinks about his actions, what we discover is that he is really very similar to those around him. After he rants to his boss, his boss confesses that his wife is ill. Andreas can’t show any compassion toward the man, who so clearly desires it, but he does asks “politely” what’s wrong with her, and many of the other “usual” questions one perfunctorily asks when told such news. During a diner party, Andreas’s guest so plainly wants to enliven the mood. Andreas refuses to play along. After a meal in a restaurant, where Andreas over tips the waitress, the waitress begins to go on and on about how hard her work is, and she wants to show Andreas the kitchen, which is a terribly confined space, where a sick person, wrapped up like a larva, lingers in a corner. Again, the social norms are tested—what he seems to want—but our flummoxed narrator retreats.

I’m resisting the urge to spoil Self-Control, because there is a profound silence in it—an important character who doesn’t speak. What I will say is that the final sentence of this novel reveals that one of the worst tragedies that can befall a person has already happened to Andreas, and the end of Self-Control blossoms with complexity only suggested on the previous pages. It is a line that attacks and shakes you from compliancy in Andreas’s nightmare. It is testament of Sæterbakken’s great skill as a writer, too, that he manages to withhold its information for so long and uses it to obliterate our perception of his narrator, to show how insidious Andreas’s stasis is and perhaps how impossible to overcome.

—Jason DeYoung

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Jason DeYoung lives in Atlanta, Georgia. His fiction has appeared most recently in Corium, The Los Angeles Review, Numéro Cinq, and The Best American Mystery Stories 2012

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

“Why I Always Listen to Such Sad Music” by Stig Sæterbakken. Literature & Music. Vol. 1, Fall 2012.↵
“Stig Sæterbakken—Between Good and Evil” by Gabriella Håkansson, Transcript.↵
I am not trying to defend Sæterbakken’s decision or ethics here, but to give a sense of his character. He does seem to be a person who lived by a code near to Terence’s “I am a human and consider nothing human alien to me.”↵
“Stig Sæterbakken—Between Good and Evil” by Gabriella Håkansson, Transcript.↵
Literature and Evil, Georges Bataille. Trans by Alastair Hamilton. Marion Boyars, 1988.↵

Beasts Without Pedigree: A Review of George Singleton’s Stray Decorum — Jason DeYoung

Dec 042012

In George Singleton’s new sly collection of short stories, Stray Decorum, strays take human form—from a paranoid gambler to a kinky sociologist, from a braless hippie to a down-on-his-luck basket weaver and other manner of humans in between—especially those we love and fight. With his fathers and wives, inventors and barflies, Singleton reminds us over and over that not just the lesser animals can be strays, but we too can be just as shiftless and discarded as the wooly mutt digging in the garbage. —Jason DeYoung

Stray Decorum
George Singleton
171 pages
Dzanc Press, 2012
$15.95

“Your good, heroic characters are mixed-breed, lovable, loyal mutts adopted from The Humane Society. Your antagonists are AKC-registered purebreds with all the quirks, limitations, and personality flaws inherent to such inbreeding.”^[1] Such is George Singleton’s aphoristic writing advice. Such are Singleton’s sympathies for strays.

What’s a stray? A domestic animal wandering at large or lost, right? In George Singleton’s new sly collection of short stories, Stray Decorum, strays take human form—from a paranoid gambler to a kinky sociologist, from a braless hippie to a down-on-his-luck basket weaver and other manner of humans in between—especially those we love and fight. With his fathers and wives, inventors and barflies, Singleton reminds us over and over that not just the lesser animals can be strays, but we too can be just as shiftless and discarded as the wooly mutt digging in the garbage. And what of the actual dogs in this collection? They are all strays, beasts without pedigree, sired by men without direction, raised by women of grit.

George Singleton has published a total of eight books—two novels, five collections of stories, and one book of writing advice. While his novels make for outstanding reading and his book on writing is one of the funniest how-tos I’ve read, it’s Singleton’s short fiction that always leaves a mark on me. Most of the stories in Stray Decorum were originally published in such journals as The Georgia Review, Oxford American, and Ninth Letter. Stray Decorum is the first half of a longer series of short stories, and Dzanc Press plans to publish the second half in 2014 in a book titled No Cover Available.

Although born in Anaheim, California, George Singleton was raised in Greenwood, South Carolina, and he is a Southern writer who understands his rural characters well: “For the record, I would rather be in a bar with a possible gun toter on the loose than with a drifter book critic.” And his fiction brings to mind the work of Barry Hannah, Tom Franklin, and William Gay.

Singleton graduated from Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, with a degree in philosophy and attended the University of North Carolina at Greensboro for his MFA. He currently teaches at the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts & Humanities. In 2009, he was a Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2011 he was awarded the Hillsdale Award for Fiction by The Fellowship of Southern Writers. (By the way, you can go here to hear Singleton tell his Rube-Goldberg-like beginnings as a writer.)

Stray Decorum leads off with a story called “Vaccination.” Here are the opening few sentences:

My dog Tapeworm Johnson needed legitimate veterinary attention. It had been two years since she received annual shots. I read somewhere that an older dog can overdose on all these vaccinations, and I have found—I share this information with every dog owner I meet—that if you keep your pet away from rabid foxes, raccoons, skunks, bats, and people whose eyes rotate crazy in their sockets, then the chances of your dog foaming at the mouth diminish drastically. I also believe that dogs don’t need microchips embedded beneath their shoulder blades…

Wry, opinionated, suspicious first person narrators dominate this collection (though there are a few stories in the third person). Within these stories the reader is secluded with a narrator who is convinced of certain concepts or views that are askew from those around him. Most of the time, their world-view derives from isolation, as in “Vaccination,” the narrator’s only companion is his dog, Tapeworm Johnson. Of course, the madcap conflict of the story comes from him meeting another isolated, off-kilter person: “What should a divorced basket weaver do when tempted by a microchip-believing hippie woman intent on drinking before noon?”

With his narrative sensibilities grounded in Samuel Becket and the Romanian playwright Eugène Ionesco, many of George Singleton’s stories are predicated on absurd themes and he locates his narrative pathos beneath the humor in human misery. In “Durkheim Looking Down,” a pair of couples try to hide their proclivities and eccentricities from each other, only to have their deepest fears revealed during one drunken night—spoiler, the couple that wear the no-bark collars to bed turn out to be the normal ones. Absurdity takes fuller shape in “The First to Look Away,” when a father conscripts his son’s fifth grade class to dig a moat around the family’s log cabin. He tells his son’s teacher that the children are there to “dry mine” for rubies. The Mao-quoting school principal cheers the children from the moat’s edge: “‘To link oneself with the masses, one must act in accordance with the needs and wishes of the masses.’” Digging disinters several of the father’s childhood dogs, and as the father grieves afresh for his losses, his son sees his father’s humanity for the first time.

Excess absurdity gets toned back in some of these stories, and we see Singleton’s talent and sensitivity for writing finely textured works about human misfortune and spirit. In “What Are The Odds?,” the narrator goes out searching for his missing dog sitter who has stolen his social security card and driver’s license. Unemployed, addicted to playing the lottery, unhappily married the narrator wonders, “What are the odds of someone wanting to steal my life?” And in “Perfect Attendance,” the best story in the collection, a boy who has never missed a day of school his whole life takes a second look at his loser father and the podunk community he grew up in and realizes that perhaps they are not as bad as his mother would have him believe, that always doing “right” and getting your pats on the head aren’t what living is about.

For all of its deadpan humor, non-sequiturs, and oddities, Stray Decorum is overall a collection about feeling that often-overwhelming desire to be accepted and understood. And the final story in the collection, “Humans Being,” may contain the best paragraph in the whole book that clearly defines the stray’s vision:

I could see, for once, in the future, where I’d drive around in my truck with this great dog who would be loyal and trusting. We’d cruise around the entire country, erasing what young men and women thought necessary to exclaim, or about their territory, or unrequited love. I would tell Tennessee to stay on the bench seat, and she would. We’d go through drive-through windows and I’d buy her hamburgers without onions or condiments, plain hot dogs, the occasional stand of French fires. I envisioned our taking a vacation together and driving to the coast where she could chase gulls and dig for whatever mollusks relished living underground.

Here, we get the humor and compassion that defines Singleton’s fiction. In this story the narrator’s wife has left him, and he’s living in a house full of his ex-brother-in-law’s stuff. He is without. Not shelter, per se, but loyal companionship. In the story, a woman comes to his house under the pretenses of looking for her runaway dog, but she is really there to get something that belongs to her from the boxes filling the narrator’s home. The dog returns, but it’s clear that she has no strong love for this animal. The narrator sees something of himself in this dog who has the “eyes of a good nun, of a grieving Appalachian widow, of a disappointed vintner.” He trades the woman her gold panning equipment for this downtrodden pooch. It’s a symbolic trade—wealth for loyalty. He fantasizes early in the story something like this could happen between him and the woman, but as she reminds him in a sentence that takes on double meaning—“It’s you and me against the Humans.” And that is what binds these stories together: the restless need we feel for wanting to be found. The wisdom of this collection is that we can find a home amongst the strays.

—Jason DeYoung

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Jason DeYoung lives in Atlanta, Georgia. His fiction has appeared most recently in Corium, The Los Angeles Review, and The Best American Mystery Stories 2012.

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

Pep Talks, Warnings & Screeds, George Singleton. Writer’s Digest Books. 2008.↵

The Love Gap: Review of Emily Perkins’ The Forrests — Erin Stagg

Oct 312012

The book is a gentle rhythmic meditation on life, on youth and adulthood, on loneliness and the constant struggle to keep it at bay. Bright, colorful descriptions abound; the reader can almost smell Auckland in the spring, can feel the sky high and cloudless above. If nothing else this novel seduces its reader into the world Perkins builds with words, physical, lonely and yet absolutely beautiful. — Erin Stagg

The Forrests
By Emily Perkins
340 pages, Bloomsbury Circus, $15.00
ISBN 978 1 4088 0923 5

From the first page of The Forrests Emily Perkins immerses the reader in a world overwhelmed with the sensual experience of living. Colors abound. Bodies swell and diminish. The characters are constantly kissing, caressing and rejoicing in physical contact. Even inanimate items such as sidewalks and movie cameras bulge and undulate. Emily Perkins uses this carnal imagery to tie her novel together, creating continuity throughout. But Perkins also uses physical imagery to insulate her main character Dorothy Forrest from the ugliness and difficulty of death, poverty and loss, thus creating tension.

Emily Perkins is a New Zealand writer who spent her youth waiting tables and trying to carve out a career as an actress. In 1993, however, she studied creative writing at The University of Victoria Wellington, and three years later she published her first collection of short stories. Since then she has lived in London, moved back to New Zealand, and won various international awards including the Buddle Findlay Frank Sargeson Fellowship and a Montana Book Award in 2009. The New Zealand Herald has referred to her recently “the darling of New Zealand literature.” She now lives in Auckland where teaches writing and hosts a evening literary TV Program called The Good Word. Since the publication of her earlier novel, Novel About My Wife, Perkins has established herself as one of the most popular writers working currently in New Zealand.

The Forrests recounts the life of Dorothy Forrest from childhood to old age. The novel opens with Dorothy’s father filming her and her siblings as they play in the back garden with a cardboard box. The family has recently moved from New York to Auckland, New Zealand, so that, as their father puts it, “they can live in a cloudless society.” Throughout the novel Dorothy’s family ebbs and flows around her. Her four siblings come and go, moving across the world and coming back to New Zealand again. Her connection to them strengthens and then weakens again. She becomes sexually and emotionally involved with Daniel, a boy who moved in with the family at thirteen and effectively established himself as a sort of adopted sibling. But Daniel leaves to travel the world and Dorothy’s sister Eve follows. Her parents return to New York, taking the youngest sister Ruth with them. Michael distances himself from Dorothy and they lose contact. Eve passes away. And so Dorothy fills the gap, “the love gap,” with babies of her own.

Yet her family continues to come and go from her life. She sees Daniel at a high school reunion but then he disappears again. As part of a therapy program Dorothy gets back in contact Michael and helps him come to terms with his failed company and lonely existence but he moves away to a commune. Her parents die. Her children move away and her husband Andrew divorces her. And so Dorothy is left entirely alone as she dips towards old age. She survives her solitude as she has everything else, by insulating herself with the physicality of the world around her, its smells and colors and tactile pleasures. The novel follows the course of Dorothy’s life chronologically, although spotted with memories that serve as backfill, and is written in the third person point of view, staying mostly close to Dorothy although there are chapters in which Perkins moves the narration to Eve.

Perkins uses references the body to create continuity into the novel. She writes about her characters’ hair, how it is done up and how it changes. Dorothy, for instance, gets gum caught in her hair on her first day of school and her “long blond new-girl American hair” must be cut. Eve cuts hers to match.

Their mother slowly sobered as the haircut progressed. In the small bathroom, Evelyn, still wheezing, watched with solemn interest. When it was done Dot looked like a windblown pixie, and without stopping to study the effect Lee gathered the clippings in a sheet of newspaper and went to make dinner. Eve picked up the scissors from the windowsill, turning their flashing points in the afternoon sun. She bumped Dorothy out of the way of the mirror, lifted a strand of her own hair and began to snip, pausing every now and then to cough. When she’d gone round the front she handed the scissors to Dorothy. ‘Do the back?’ The amount of hair felt alarming in Dot’s hands, but she did it. Eve covered her smile with her palm, and looked at Dot in the mirror, her eyes glazed with croup and anarchy. The room orbited slowly around the scissors. When Eve was well they would go to school together and then look out.

The imagery of hair appears and reappears throughout the novel, tracking and identifying the changes the characters have undergone or are in the process of undergoing. Hair is constantly being cut, clipped, combed, touched, held and dyed pink. When Eve returns from Canada, recently abandoned by Daniel, Dorothy observes her “tawny hair, the energy rising off her like tendrils of smoke, her undeniable fuckability and said, ‘Do you regret coming back?’”

Change is everywhere in this novel. Perkins uses the images of hair, and of the body, to show her characters changing as they live. Dorothy’s ever-changing body grows out of childhood into womanhood and then swells with motherhood, driving the novel forwards.

With the first baby Dorothy had been small enough to fit inside the cot too, to curl up and comfort Grace when she wouldn’t stop crying, and then she got bigger and bigger until now so much of herself pressed against the cot sides while she leaned down that it’s bars creaked and scraped against the wall. A little rubbed line was appearing in the paint.

But these changes are not only physical, in fact the physical change is merely a superficial means of showing the deeper, growing changes that occur within the character’s minds. The changes are the main focus of the tension in this novel, people growing apart and close again, always yearning for someone to keep loneliness away, someone to fill “the love gap.” The only character who welcomes change seems to be Daniel, the wandering, semi-adopted brother who disappears and returns to Dorothy’s life with a tidal consistency.

Nothing out of the ordinary occurs in this novel. Its beauty, perhaps, is that Perkins uncovers the extraordinary in the ordinary. The book is a gentle rhythmic meditation on life, on youth and adulthood, on loneliness and the constant struggle to keep it at bay. Bright, colorful descriptions abound; the reader can almost smell Auckland in the spring, can feel the sky high and cloudless above. If nothing else this novel seduces its reader into the world Perkins builds with words, physical, lonely and yet absolutely beautiful.

—Erin Stagg

—————————————

Erin Stagg is a freshly-minted graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing Program. She grew up in Taos, New Mexico, studied Spanish at Wellesley College in Massachusetts and now lives in New Zealand where she teaches skiing in the winter and works in retail in the summer. She was awarded the 2002 Wellesley College Johanna Mankiewicz Davis Prize for Prose Fiction. Her short fiction has also appeared in The Battered Suitcase.

Fucked up and Beautiful: Review of Shane Jones’ Daniel Fights a Hurricane—Jason DeYoung

Oct 182012

It’s a novel reminiscent of Don Quixote, some stories in the Christian Bible, and accounts of other eccentrics, but it’s remarkable on its own merits for breaking with narrative orthodoxies while uncovering what is soulful and heartbreaking about its characters. And, yes, it has that hallucinogenic combo of being fucked-up and beautiful. — Jason DeYoung

Daniel Fights a Hurricane
Shane Jones
209 pages
Penguin USA, 2012
$14.00

“The cry of terror called forth by the unfamiliar becomes its name.”
—Max Horkheimer & Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment

“Beauty in novels is important to me,” Shane Jones says in a recent BOMB interview. “I really don’t care for novels that have an agenda, a political statement, a sassy take on contemporary society. Give me something fucked-up and beautiful.” Wistful yet playful, Shane Jones’s novel Daniel Fights a Hurricane wrings out an unsettling story about madness and suffering for love. It’s a novel reminiscent of Don Quixote, some stories in the Christian Bible, and accounts of other eccentrics, but it’s remarkable on its own merits for breaking with narrative orthodoxies while uncovering what is soulful and heartbreaking about its characters. And, yes, it has that hallucinogenic combo of being fucked-up and beautiful.

Daniel Fights a Hurricane is Shane Jones’s second novel. His first novel, Light Boxes (2009), is one of those rare books first published by an indie press (Publishing Genius Press out of Baltimore) and subsequently purchased and reprinted by a “big house” (Penguin Books, in this case). I’ve long admired Penguin for taking chances on gifted writers who don’t fit the mold, and Light Boxes is not standard big publisher fare. It’s about a town—perhaps imaginary—under siege by February, who might be the author of the novel Light Boxes. February is punishing the townsfolk for flying hot-air balloons. The townies, along with a group of rogue balloonists known as the Solution, go to war with February. It’s bonkers. But it’s a deeply felt novel about depression and hope, with characters emoting genuine reactions to their odd circumstances. Along with Light Boxes, Jones has published two other books: A Cake Appeared, a book of poems; and The Failure Six, a novella

While Daniel Fights a Hurricane (Daniel) shares some spirited similarities with Light Boxes, it is a more fleshed-out novel. Daniel tells the story of a husband and a wife—Daniel and Karen—and it splits narratively between two different worlds. One is the “real” world, a reality where Daniel works on an oil pipeline. The other is Daniel’s imagination, an imaginary world slowly taking over, perhaps because he wants it to, as he says, “[it] is haunting, but so beautiful that I want to live [it].” When Daniel is fired from his job, his imagination grows larger, and he further removes himself from reality by living in a tipi in the woods.

Shane Jones says this about Daniel’s structure:

[O]ne part of the book, containing the sections with Daniel, is a tree. The tree is growing straight up into the sky. In this part, I can do whatever I want, I have total freedom in creation. The tree is uncontrollable and just insanely growing. The other part of the book—the one with Karen—is based on reality, and is like vines growing around the tree. The vines and the tree are separate but every once in a while, they cut into each other, and you have this intersection of the parts with Daniel and the parts with Karen.

So let’s start first with that uncontrollable imagination, which become more like hallucinations as the novel progresses.

In his dreamscape, Daniel is assembling a different sort of pipeline from the one he’s hired to build in reality. The fantasy pipeline is meant to go to the ocean to provide water for his imaginary town. Daniel is “responsible for the pipeline” and the town is thirsty; just the other day a baby died. True, you can’t survive on seawater, so one doesn’t know how this is going to help those parched children, so it’s best not to question Daniel’s dreamscape too much. Though sequence and consequence exists, his realm of pure imagination runs primarily on free association and self-suggestion.

Within his dreamscape a number of misfit characters help to build this pipeline. There is Iamso, a poet man-child, who writes poems to tell Daniel how he feels. There is the Two-Second Dreamer, who sleeps for two seconds and dreams for anyone who needs a new dream. There is the Man with the Tattoos, who is covered in tats of Daniel’s imagined town. And then there is Peter, who is also known as the World’s Most Beautiful Man with the World’s Worst Teeth. These characters beg for a Freudian or Jungian reading, especially with Iamso’s eventual take over. (I am so. Get it?) But, in fact, Daniel has this intoxicating feel of endlessness to it, and the novel as a whole contains such a mysterious arrangement of metaphor and contrast that it’s ripe for many readings and interpretations.

Pipeline construction, however, is just an impediment to Daniel’s search for his imaginary wife, the novel’s primary thrust. In the real world, Karen Suppleton is Daniel’s estranged wife, who after years of dealing with his mental breaks from reality, has had enough, and has recently left him. But, in the dreamscape, Helena is Daniel’s wife, and she has inexpiably disappeared.

Throughout the novel, Daniel has near misses with Helena, while other characters see her and point him in her direction. Daniel’s psychosis will not allow him to be happy. In an effort perhaps to regain some dominance over his dream, Daniel decides to “take” a new Helena, yet his imaginary friends (side kicks? minions? gremlins?) concoct a ceremony in which Daniel closes his eyes, they spin him twice, whereupon he opens his eyes and the new Helena is gone: “Go and find her… She’s somewhere around the mountain,” says Iamso. This doesn’t just make for a good way to nudge the plot along, but gets to something at Daniel’s core. If his strongest desire is to live in his fantasy world—a world he finds so beguiling—then he has to remain unfulfilled. As Norwegian novelist Stig Sæterbakken once wrote: “We want to hold onto our strongest desires. We want to remain unfulfilled. We want to be alive.”[*]

Along with this cast of friends, what also keeps Daniel unfulfilled is the Hurricane. Even at the slightest hint of a breeze Daniel begins to worry. What is the Hurricane? “It’s my fear. It’s the fear,” Daniel says. Since childhood, the Hurricane has churned his madness. But it isn’t a storm as we might think of it (though an actual hurricane does appears late in the novel). The Hurricane of Daniel’s imagination morphs, taking on different incarnations. At times it’s a garbage collector, a pack of wild children, a sky beast with claws, a faceless storm that “scream[s] ocean” and breaks “the sky in odd angles”—but no one knows. Mid-way through the novel, one of Daniel’s imaginary friends creates more confusion by writing a list of what the Hurricane might be—“black magic, Godlike spirit, the horizon moving, everyone’s vision of death combined, optical-illusion hologram, mountain growing.” Whatever it is, it is usually a manifestation of something primal and terrifying.

Admittedly, I’m writing about the imagination section in broad strokes. It’s a dream, a hallucination, a fantasy and its velocity is as such, turbulent, moving fast, taking odd turns, sometimes lighthearted, sometimes dark. And it’s quite astounding how much adventure Jones packs into such a slim novel, taking his reader on a frenzied ride through Daniel’s imagination, which includes battles with the Hurricane, searches for lost loves, the invention of graffiti, identity switches, menacing spinsters, a man who calls himself a villain, and on and on, ever surprising:

“My skin sprouted dogs that ran from the beach.”

“The Hurricane throws a handful of mashed-together birds past the bedroom window.”

“I stayed up all night thinking about what’s real and what isn’t. Sometimes I can’t tell the difference.”

As the tree of Daniel’s imagination reaches greater heights, the vine of Karen’s story coils the tree. Karen broods through much of the novel. She sees their estrangement as her betrayal, and she is as tormented by her disloyalty as Daniel is by the Hurricane. She searches within herself for the strength to go find Daniel, to save him from fantasy. As the novel progresses, her plot and Daniel’s become essentially the same. While Daniel is in his dreamscape looking for his lost wife, Helena, Karen is in reality searching for her lost husband, Daniel. It gives the novel a finely tuned double-arced symmetry.

Not just the plots mirror, but imagery reverberates, too. When Karen goes to the grocery, she experiences the marketing spectacle of boom and mist as the spray system in the produce department freshens the vegetables. During one of her soul-searching scenes, she meditates on the bubbles in spring water, while in the dream Daniel nearly drowns in seawater fighting the Hurricane. Even their mental states echo, as they both share moments where they try to grasp their identities:

“My name is Karen Suppleton. And my ex-husband, mind [is] unraveling somewhere in a forest…”

Later:

“My name is Daniel. My wife is missing…”

These statements work two ways. First they are a reminder to the reader of the individual plots, but they also give the two plots a kind of cohesion. They are heartbreaking moments, when Karen and Daniel are separately trying to steady themselves within the chaos.

When the two finally reunite, they do not recognize each other. Daniel has been living in his tipi in the woods for some time, hallucinating his heroic quest to find Helena. When Karen approaches him, he sees her though the gauzy fever-dream of a starved man. It’s a story that can’t end happily, and moments later the only “real” hurricane in the book hits and pulls them apart once again. As Daniel has done repeatedly in his imagination, Karen now has to fight to survive the hurricane, ironically named Hurricane Daniel.

For as complex as this novel is the prose and storytelling are sparklingly clear. Jones weaves skillfully between the two worlds, keeping the logic and sense of both. A different writer might have opted for odd or tortured sentence constructions to tell this story, but Jones has wisely chosen to keep things straightforward and unadorned:

I see the Hurricane as a monster who walks on water and bumps his head on the sky. He stops and unhinges his jaw. Underwater villagers put ladders up to his mouth. They climb up with burlap bags of salt slung over their shoulders and empty the knife-cut bags onto his tongue. When he’s had enough, the Hurricane walks again. The ladders fall away, and the villagers dive, splash, into the ocean. Clouds of salt dust fill the air that the Hurricane runs to gobble up, his feet smashing against the ocean in steel-drum echoes.

But Jones doesn’t mind tinkering with font size and presentation. Lists and poems appear throughout the book along with glyph-like drawing which accompany the text. During one of the search party scenes near the end of the novel, an entire page is given over to the word DANIEL which appears six times, each in a different size font, each with a different letter repeated to denote the elongated intonations of Karen’s calls. On the other hand, the font might decrease a few picas when characters whisper. In such an expressionistic novel as Daniel, these visual tweaks never feel gratuitous or strained. Instead, they’re used to great effect as a pianist might play keys softly or righteously bang out a note. Additionally, Jones proves the notion of sticking to a singular point-of-view bogus by collaging first and third person with agility.

As in Light Boxes, there’s something extravagant about Daniel with its unabashed mythmaking, fantastic imagery, and whimsical plot turns. Daniel’s imagination is an electrifying and vast place, filled with exotic animals and pipelines, origami and strange weapons; it’s a place of curious freedom to indulge everything quixotic. Daniel’s story is rich with odd yet sympathetic characters, too, which makes for engrossing reading and doesn’t diminish the fact that it’s imaginary. Though paradoxically it’s all a work of the imagination. The densely twined dreamscape vs. reality puts the story of its “real” people—Daniel and Karen—in sharp relief. Their story—about a man who doesn’t get the help he needs, and his wife’s betrayal and search for redemption—is quite different. Daniel Fights a Hurricane is a trying and conflicting novel, at once beautiful and fun in its construction and storytelling, yet an astonishingly serious and sad story at its core.

[*] Stig Sæterbakken, “Why I Always Listen to Such Sad Music.” Music & Literature. Issue 1, Fall 2012. Tran. by Stokes Schwartz.

—Jason DeYoung

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Jason DeYoung lives in Atlanta, Georgia. His fiction has appeared most recently in Corium, The Los Angeles Review, Numéro Cinq, and The Best American Mystery Stories 2012.

Blessed With Memory: A Review of Richard Ford’s Canada — Benjamin Woodard

Sep 282012

Ford has concocted a remarkable, controlled tale from the many themes on which he has based his career. The novel is one that feels, like the yarn Dell shares, meditated upon for years and years, perfected in a way that only comes with age and experience. When Dell cops, “I am blessed with memory,” late in his story, one can’t help but believe the same can be said for his literary creator. — Ben Woodard

Canada
Richard Ford
Ecco ($27.99)

(Author photo: Laura Wilson)

Richard Ford has made a healthy living dealing tragic narrative blows to the residents of Great Falls, Montana. In his brilliant story collection Rock Springs (1987), as well as the short novel Wildlife (1990), fathers brawl and kill, mothers sleep around, and families dissolve amongst the city’s flat panorama. To Ford, Great Falls is a place where bad things happen to regular people, where children are left to fend for themselves, and where the line between good and evil ever trembles. Canada, the author’s latest Montana venture, finds the author comfortably exercising these principles while simultaneously dazzling the reader with detailed, rich prose. A story of desperate parents and the consequences of their poor judgment, the novel is heartbreaking, calculated, and nothing short of a masterpiece.

Canada unfurls through the mouth of Dell Parsons, a retired English teacher looking back to the spring of 1960, when he is fifteen-years-old and living with his parents and fraternal twin sister, Berner, in Great Falls. Dell speaks in a confessional tone and wastes no time in divulging the crux of his narrative, declaring:

First, I’ll tell you about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later. The robbery is the more important part, since it served to set my and my sister’s lives on the courses they eventually followed. (3)

This announcement is reminiscent of Ford’s story “Optimists,” from Rock Springs, which opens with a similar flair:

All of this that I am about to tell you happened when I was only fifteen years old, in 1959, the year my parents were divorced, the year when my father killed a man and went to prison for it, the year I left home and school, told a lie about my age to fool the Army, and then did not come back. (Rock Springs, 157)

Yet while young Dell initially seems analogous to that of Frank Brinson, the narrator of “Optimists”—he’s friendless, concerned about school, and coping with an unstable family—the forty years of careful introspection provided by Dell’s older voice adds a dramatic heft that separates the character from his less seasoned literary cousin. As Dell speaks, one senses both nostalgia and experience alive on his tongue. While mapping out the elder Parsons’ foray into lawlessness—his father Bev’s involvement in a flawed stolen meat scam leaves the clan owing $2,000 to a group of Cree Indians—Dell frequently pauses to consider his family’s fate. “It seems possible, I suppose, to look back at our small family as being doomed, as waiting to sink below the churning waves, and being destined for corruption and failure,” he muses early in the novel. “But I cannot truly portray us that way, or the time as a bad or unhappy time, in spite of it being far out of the ordinary.” (31-32) His is not merely a recounting of events, but rather a chronicle that reads as if meditated upon for decades.

This contemplation continues once the elder Parsons are captured for their crime. Berner runs away from home and Dell finds himself jettisoned to Saskatchewan in an attempt to escape the clutches of social services. Left in the care of Arthur Remlinger, a hotelier and the brother of a family friend, the boy is assured safety from the troubles lingering in Montana. But within days of his arrival, Dell wonders if Remlinger and his right hand man, the uneasy Charley Quarters, pose to him an even greater threat. “… Arthur Remlinger had seemed like a different person each time I made contact with him—which naturally confused me and made me feel even more alone than I would’ve otherwise,” the aged Dell recalls. (309) And as Remlinger slowly incorporates Dell into his business and personal life, the discomfort between the two grows. Sitting at a café, Dell listens in befuddlement as Remlinger rambles on about Canada, Tolstoy, and the Bronze Age before finding himself locked in the following exchange:

“Do you think you have a clear mind, Dell?”

I didn’t understand what that meant. Possibly a clear mind was the opposite of unsteady. I wanted to have one. “Yes, sir,” I said. I’d ordered a hamburger and had begun to eat it.

He nodded and moved his tongue around behind his lips, then cleared his throat. “Living out here produces a fantasy of great certainty.” He smiled again, but the smile slowly faded as he looked at me. “People do crazy things out of despair when their certainty fades. You’re not inclined to do that, I guess. You’re not in despair, are you?”

“No, sir.” The word made me think of my mother in her jail cell—smiling and helpless. She’d been in despair.

Arthur took a sip of his coffee, holding the cup around its rim—not by its little curved handle—blowing on the surface before he sipped. “That’s settled then. Despair’s out.” He smiled again. (312-13)

This chat, a sort of test on the part of Remlinger, pulls Dell closer to the underhanded dealings of his keeper (as well as the “murders” mentioned in Dell’s opening monologue), yet it also illustrates Ford’s masterful understanding of the power of conversation. In this moment and throughout Canada, the author’s sporadic employment of dialogue—most of the novel’s exchanges are told in summary—works wonders. These scenes are lean and spare, filled with indirect, seemingly distracted comments that, upon hindsight and context, speak volumes and drive the narrative to a higher level of excellence. They leap from the page and leave the reader spellbound by how much can be said in so few words. And as the story chugs toward its spiraling finale, the muscle of these conversations hang in the air like ghostly informants, warnings that tried their best to prime Dell and his cohorts for the horrors that wait for them in the cold Saskatchewan night.

In a recently published interview with The Daily Beast, Richard Ford was asked about his return to Great Falls as setting in Canada, and after touching on the city’s “dramatic landscape” and how he initially “just liked the name Great Falls,” Ford turned reflective, much like his character Dell. “I’m—I guess—by nature a writer who returns to subjects,” Ford said. “It must be I think that each time [I] write about something (Montana, New Jersey, real estate, families in distress) I open opportunities for later, even fuller consideration.” This “fuller consideration” is evident in Canada, for here Ford has concocted a remarkable, controlled tale from the many themes on which he has based his career. The novel is one that feels, like the yarn Dell shares, meditated upon for years and years, perfected in a way that only comes with age and experience. When Dell cops, “I am blessed with memory,” late in his story (416), one can’t help but believe the same can be said for his literary creator.

— Benjamin Woodard

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Benjamin Woodard lives in Connecticut. His reviews have been featured in Drunken Boat, Hunger Mountain, Rain Taxi Review of Books, and other fine publications. His fiction has appeared in Numéro Cinq. You can find him at benjaminjwoodard.com.

Tragically Disproportionate: A Review of Jon McGregor’s This isn’t the Sort of Thing that Happens to Someone Like You — Debra Martens

Sep 202012

It is as if something bubbling under the murk is about to erupt [in Jon McGregor’s stories]. The bullies in “Looking Up Vagina,” the little bastard firebug, the dad with an injunction on him to keep away from his family in “Keeping Watch Over the Sheep,”…the collection as a whole is disquieting – rather like listening to the dark albums of one of McGregor’s favourite bands, Pulp. — Debra Martens

This Isn’t The Sort Of Thing That Happens To Someone Like You
Stories by Jon McGregor
Bloomsbury 2012, hardcover, 258 pages. U.S. paperback $16.00

I heard U.K. writer Jon McGregor read from his latest book, the collection of short stories This isn’t the Sort of Thing that Happens to Someone Like You, at the Bloomsbury Institute in London last April during an event for their Year of the Short Story. This was just two months before lightning struck and he won the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his novel Even the Dogs, published two years before.

That night the soft-spoken McGregor read a couple of short shorts, including “She Was Looking for this Coat,” which represents his work in several ways. The story speaks in the voice of a first person narrator (a clerk at the public transport office in Lincoln), talks about an unnamed character “she”, and builds the story with an accretion of visual detail (“Herringbone was a word she used.”). The narrator hints “she” is suffering an anxiety beyond the loss of her father’s coat: “The way she was talking, I felt like asking her if she needed to sit down.”

In his first novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, the characters are not identified by name but by the tag of a physical description: “Next door, at number eighteen, the young man with the blinking eyes leans out of his window and takes some final photographs of the street….” Half of the novel is told through this kind of description, through short passages that focus on inhabitants of a street by using both the scene frame and the zoom lens. The other half of the novel is told through the first person voice of a young pregnant woman, who is thinking back to that last day of summer while also moving forward into a new relationship. “And sitting here now, waiting, trying to be calm, all these things are rattling around inside my head, like coins set loose in a tumbledryer.” This novel is so good that I can’t believe it is his first.

McGregor continues to experiment in his second novel, So Many Ways to Begin. He builds the story through a catalogue of artifacts that are important to David, a museum curator – a brilliant blend of form and character. This accretion of story through short scenes is again used in his powerful third novel, Even the Dogs. In it, McGregor uses short sections within a section with great effect, giving us the various points of view and disjointed thoughts of those who knew Robert before his death. In all three novels, then, McGregor uses detail to open up a scene, and he prefers to keep his scenes short.

Of the 30 stories in This Isn’t The Sort Of Thing That Happens To Someone Like You, half are under 1,000 words, and of those, six are under 500 words. The collection includes nine stories at the other end of the spectrum, from 3,000 to 9,000 words. The shortest story is “Fleeing Complexity” and it goes: “The fire spread quicker than the little bastard was expecting.” This story is more complex than its length suggests. There is the situation, worrying us into wondering if the fire burns down a house or… There is the tough guy voice talking about “the little bastard.” What does the owner of that voice do to the little bastard? There is the title, which in turn was used as the name of a Granta competition for one-line stories, judged by none other than McGregor, who explains “what I’m looking for in a piece of fiction as short as this is something that gestures very simply towards a much larger story.” (Click here for his winning pick.)

What I look for in the short short story is the delivery of the Dave Eggers/McSweeney style punch. Like the opening story, “That Colour,” a two pager that conveys years of marriage in a bit of dialogue, and turns on the words that a character doesn’t say. She chatters about the autumn leaves; he asks her why she is surprised by something that happens every year. She says “It’s just lovely, they’re lovely, that’s all, you don’t have to.” And that is when the he of the story stops washing the dishes and comes to her, looks at the leaves and holds her hand. This is the same hopeful note that ended McGregor’s second novel, So Many Ways to Begin, the note that sounds our human imperfections and accepts them.

At the other extreme, the longest story (approximately 8,700 words) is also told in the voice of a tough guy. “I’ll Buy You a Shovel,” set in Marshchapel, is about two ex-cons who have been hired by a woman called Jackie to provide on-site security and maintenance. What they are working on, or not working on, is a ditch to improve a murky pond that its owners call a fishing lake. Beyond their caravan and ditch, there are two major events unfolding: a wedding celebration at the Stewart house and garden, and the preparations for war as shown by the increase of bombs being dropped on the Sands by the Tornados flying overhead.

The short sections in this long story cut between the present (the two guys going over to crash the wedding) and their pasts. The narrator talks about Jackie’s son Mark dying at war in a desert, that he and Ray knew Mark when they were young, when they were starting to do jobs that involved “the thing with the wires,” about the death of the narrator’s mother while he was in jail. As the wedding progresses and the Tornado bombings escalate, as the two men sit by a fire and drink while waiting for the right moment to crash the wedding, their anger bubbles up to the surface. There is a flatness to the narrative voice, that at once parallels the flat landscape (“Whoever called it Hilltop Farm must have had some sense of humour, round here.”) and mirrors the men’s emotions. It is as if they are cut off from the world and from themselves and the only emotion they know, can feel and express, is anger. Here is the narrator, finishing up his little story about his mother being buried in the wrong place.

Ray thought it was funny. The idea of moving someone like that, once they were dead. The idea of anyone giving a shit where they were buried once they were dead, was what he said. What he said as well was he’d buy me a shovel himself. That was when I told him to shut up. He said I will I’ll buy you a shovel. I said Ray, leave it. He said don’t worry about fucking legal process, I’ll buy you a shovel and you can dig up your mam. I said Ray fucking leave it, and I put him on his back and he stopped laughing then. p. 241

It is this flat narrative that puts a chill into such sentences as “Ray made sure he knew not to tell anyone.” Or when the narrator repeatedly says, on the wedding day, “Just the drinks, I say. Nothing else.”

I’ve been puzzling over why this story comes at the end of the collection. Each story is subtitled with a place in Lincolnshire and environs, on the southeast coast of England. Some of the stories take place in the fens, or marshlands that have been drained for agricultural use, a landscape cross-hatched by raised roads and ditches, by names like Sixteen Foot Drain. So, for example, the first long story in the collection, “In Winter the Sky,” features ditches and the use of a shovel by a man who is so unlike Ray and his friend that it hardly seems fair that his life is so affected by one wrong night. In this story, the wife’s poem runs on one side opposite the narrative, emphasizing the flatness of the landscape. An earlier version of “In Winter the Sky” was published in Granta as “What the Sky Sees.”

Apart from the obvious similarities, however, the collection as a whole is disquieting – rather like listening to the dark albums of one of McGregor’s favourite bands, Pulp. (He talks about his influences on his blog and in this Guardian article.)

It is as if something bubbling under the murk is about to erupt. The bullies in “Looking Up Vagina,” the little bastard firebug, the dad with an injunction on him to keep away from his family in “Keeping Watch Over the Sheep,” who is unable to understand that he is the one causing his daughter to look “pretty tearful and scared and what have you.” The angry neighbour in “What Happened to Mr Davison,” who does not regret what he did but admits “Clearly the eventual outcome of the resulting chain of events was tragically disproportionate.”

Nor is it only the men who simmer. The wife in “Which Reminded Her, Later” and “Years of This, Now” is angry with her vicar husband for years, because he doesn’t listen to her, because he is married to his work, and her eruption is all the more surprising. Because of this distancing anger, you cannot read “Wires” without feeling you are being mildly electrocuted. At face value, this is a simple story about Emily Wilkinson thinking she is about to die as a sugar beet comes through her car windshield. You read and you chuckle with her thoughts. And then it turns. She pulls over to the side of the road and two men come to her aid. Except that these two men could well be Ray and his friend. According to McGregor’s blog, the story borrows the title of a Philip Larkin poem about electric wires teaching cattle not to stray.

But the book is not only about angry people roaming around. There are other elements at work – such as rain. In “If it Keeps on Raining,” a modern day Noah prepares for the flood, while at the same time nursing his resentful thoughts at being separated from his children. “Supplementary Notes” is about refugees and “The Last Ditch” (playing on ditches of the fens and a last ditch effort) is a copy of civilian plans for disaster with commentary by the military. Finally, the last story is called “Memorial Stone,” and is a list of place names – perhaps those that will be flooded by the rising waters of climate change. Or as the narrator in “Shovel” puts it, “National emergency crisis or whatever…” And what he is telling us is that if we wear our anger at world inaction over climate change as a heavy coat that muffles our emotions, and take inappropriate action too late, then we could end up like Ray, burning our future for the stupidest of reasons.

Read more about Jon McGregor’s life and work on the British Council website. Here is coverage of the Impac prize.

Here him reading from his collection here or here.

—Debra Martens

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Debra Martens writes at Canadian Writers Abroad. Her story publications include “A Change in the Current” in The New Quarterly (2006) and “The End of Things” in Grain, a winner of the 2002 Postcard Story Prize. Her story, “Waitress,” is forthcoming in Room. She lives in London.

Heart Breaks/ Beauty Rescues: Review of Paula Bohince’s The Children — Emily Pulfer-Terino

Sep 102012

Each poem in The Children is alternately spare and dense, delicate and obsessive as filigree or tatted lace. “The heart / breaks its crochet,” she writes in “Snowy River Visions,” alluding to the intricate psychological fabric—handiwork or “white threads / like bandages”—painstakingly made and painfully undone in the course of each poem. — Emily Pulfer-Terino

The Children
by Paula Bohince
Sarabande Books
Paperback. 72 pages. $14.95

In a culture infatuated with irony, Paula Bohince’s poetry distinguishes itself for its subtlety and its acute attention to a world at once beautiful and ravaged. Four years after the release of her stunning debut collection, Incident at the Edge of Bayonette Woods, published by Sarabande Books, The Children, (also by Sarabande), explores nostalgia and the ache of the lucid present in a rural landscape reminiscent of the Pennsylvania countryside where Bohince grew up. Where attention to multiplicity and contradiction could manifest in wry evasion, off-the-cuff colloquialism, and hyper-intellectualism, the imagination in these poems works delicately and relentlessly to make sense of the rift between ideas about the world and the world itself. Bohince tells it slant (to borrow Emily Dickinson’s phrase) only when there is no other way to tell it.

The book is lean and shapely, a collection of forty-two poems divided almost evenly into three sections. Demarcated by Roman numerals, these divisions emphasize thematic links among poems and lend the volume an implied chronology. While these poems are lyrics in free verse, a formal sensibility underlies the collection. For their lapidary precision and for the subjective, accessible “I” delivering each poem, this work feels born of the confessional tradition. Still, poems in The Children are fresh and surprising in their conception, paying homage to Bohince’s predecessors while establishing their own set of rhetorical moves and imaginative leaps. Bohince nods to literary, artistic, and historical figures: Mark Rothko, Virginia Woolf, Amy Clampitt, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, and even Christ; invoking a sense of shared personal struggle. The Children articulates myriad forms of witness, addressing themes of childhood, fraught family circumstances, marriage, solitude, and decaying rural communities.

Bohince’s allegiance to beauty functions both as a characteristic and as a subject of the work. Each poem in The Children is alternately spare and dense, delicate and obsessive as filigree or tatted lace. “The heart / breaks its crochet,” she writes in “Snowy River Visions,” alluding to the intricate psychological fabric—handiwork or “white threads / like bandages”—painstakingly made and painfully undone in the course of each poem. Later, in “Froth of the Tides and Further Out,” she claims, “beauty rescues,” then wonders “Is that true?” This work asks what the function of the aesthetic can be in a world marked by loss. The first poem in the collection, “Pussy Willow”, begins:

Faint as flame-in-wind,
I was born, cupped inside a fist
and carried everywhere

even to the formidable river
so that I may see the stones
of the riverbed.

Introducing the essential act of attention at the core of this work, it concludes with a meditation, “Virus in my heart. Branches / salted with buds, soft- / eyed on the sill,” invoking, too, the repose and tenderness to follow. Later in the book, in dazzling strokes, bees are discussed in terms of “the shantung / of them: breathless forms / shuttling through sunlight.” A robin’s egg is “bejeweled on all sides / by goldenrod.” Yellow leaves “become portraits/of fecundity: watercolor / of wanton // against discriminate.” Effulgent phrases offer a complex, excruciating beauty, acting as abrasion and salve at once.

In the title poem, rural, post-rave melancholy is elevated to lyric emblem where “ecstasy lowered to ache” hums at the core of each stanza. Pithy, Anglo-Saxon diction drives a series of propositions and ruminations towards a conclusion equally satisfying and irresolute.

If the wind had been less gutsy
in its unbindings, we’d know them better,
the children

or the afterimage of them,
the teenage couple rapt inside the field
after the rave has died

and dispersed into corn, into cars, into
the trashed curfew.
We’d know them, the two who lay here,

ecstasy lowered to ache
and dull grin, glow sticks faded against
colorless weeds.

If the wind had been less federal,
sweeping anew the corn dust, and the clouds
that kept them starry for hours,

now passive against the noon sky:
if only they’d lasted.
If we’d been given more distinct evidence

beyond the condom listing against milk-
weed, the fox prints, the warmth
of glow sticks in our hands—

neutral again, broken of their magic.
Those dirty pacifiers we suck. Their whistles
we put to mouth and sound.

Plain idiom interacts with decisive formal gestures, lending the subject a surprising elegance and a sonorous elegiac quality. Tercets composed almost entirely of enjambed lines contribute a sense of momentum and also of containment, establishing the writer’s concern for the poem as crafted object while mimicking the energy with which the speaker bares witness to the scene. While none of the lines is end-rhymed and the internal rhymes are subtle as those inherent in colloquial speech, the language is rife with assonance and alliteration. Even in the first sentence, “couple,” “rapt,” “corn,” “cars,” “trashed,” and “curfew” establish a sonically arresting pattern of hard consonants and internal slant-rhymes that continues into the next sentence with “ecstasy lowered to ache.” The poem is built essentially of three propositions: “If the wind had been less gutsy”, “If the wind had been less federal”, “If we’d been given more distinct evidence”. Only the first resolves in a complete sentence; the following are fragments, expressive of incompletion and futility. The “we” who would know them better is literally suggestive of the community from which they are alienated. At the same time, the speaker and the reader are the “we” who know the “afterimage” of the children only through a set of lyric gestures. The poem is itself the afterimage, ghostly and particulate. Here distinctions among the man-made and the natural, the young and the dead, the beatific and the pathetic, collapse in quiet spectacle, acutely observed. The teenagers’ final whistling, which reads as half-habit, half-outcry, lends the poem the luster of ars poetica as writer herself scans the ruin, turning it into song. This work is as much about the ordinary world as it is about our efforts to withstand it.

Bohince unabashedly exalts the quotidian, exposing and even, at times, announcing her ambition. In “The Peacock,” for example, “Dreams feather the pillow and make bearable / the day…” in which dailiness—children’s’ aimless play, a working father’s depression—are juxtaposed with the bird’s “gorgeous body.” The poem turns its attention to the peacock until peachicks flock around the bird and, in a bold flourish, Bohince writes:

The day is finding its Breughel moment—
wine and sapphire and verdigris. His black hair
with sunlight on it.

A miracle. Something to recall
as beautiful, in the future. As the sewer was
in summer. Little childhood river.

Through the poem’s shift of attention from the pedestrian to high art to the sewer, dailiness is transformed, (or the poet announces her desire to transform it), wrought and iridescent. The world in this poem is as much imagined as it is observed, affirming one of the book’s central concerns: the relationship between perception and invention. As is the case with Elizabeth Bishop’s sublime, overwhelmingly lyrical passages are expressive of both affliction and delight.

An acute ambivalence characterizes the collection. In several poems, a subject is both itself and another, tilting and transforming. Beavers damming a stream are conflated with the rope-swinging teenaged boys the speaker used to marvel at. A mother’s frenzied consciousness is likened to birds, a “tonic of quail,” the mind “a cloud of quail…huge / as buckshot / when it balloons down, / scribbling earth/with its landings.” A hornet’s hive is a “collapsing universe” in which the speaker recognizes her own loneliness and collapse. An owl is “embodied psychosis,” “homeless, forever.” A rabbit in a winter field is discussed in the same terms as the speaker’s mother is.

A profound poem of leave taking, “Hare In Snow” responds to Mark Rothko’s vibrant, juxtaposing planes of color and his pulsing nuances. Built of two solid strophes whose rhetorical unfolding is almost identical, the poem reads as a kind of diptych imbued with the symmetry of reflection and of palindrome.

She sits in stately dress; she is all White. Slur of landscape.
In the birches’ breach, she waits: recompense for January’s deadly
beauty; rapid heart beating the downy body. Flaw
in the opal of field. Not-yet blood festival. To be as still
is to protest. Don’t go, I think, half-dozing at the window, when
she goes. Her shaming wakefulness. The poise of long feet
come to use. The adults look babyish all their lives.
It’s Nature’s trick, to feign innocence. Any intelligent thing
rejects the unhappy present. The thought of her alone would be
pretty, were she not true. And cruel as the feminine mind. Gone,
the mist she releases I interpret as Mother’s Hairspray.

She wears her fur, my mother. Pink-cheeked, she is
the landscape. Its cold eternal sunrise. Young and handsome
as my birth month. How rapidly we rushed toward each other
then. How we are the flaw in the other. Her blood slows
down. To be as quiet is to protest. Don’t go, I think, waving
goodbye from my car window. I go, and her waving
shames me. Though she bends, in mirror, in her sweeping,
she will always be younger than I am. It’s a mother’s trick,
to be loved as a lifelong daughter. The thought of her alone
will not do. She is pretty, and true. And cruelty flies into wind-
borne snow. Into the mist my mouth drinks now as milk.

Each dense stanza is built of a series of statements, sentences and sentence fragments, which addresses its subject with alternately literal and imaginative attention. The rabbit in the first strophe arrests the speaker where she sits, drowsy by a window, thinking, “don’t go” as the creature disappears into woods. But the speaker considers the animal’s presence before it runs away, making incisive claims about the natural world that read as philosophical and socio-political as well: “The adults look babyish all their lives. / It’s Nature’s trick, to feign / innocence. Any intelligent thing / rejects the unhappy present.” The poem hinges on this inventing mind, on the speaker’s consciousness that analyzes “any intelligent thing” and that “interpret(s)” the mist of snow as her “Mother’s hairspray,” again juxtaposing the natural and the artificial, the current and the recollected.

The introduction of the speaker’s mother at the hare’s escape prompts further consideration of “Nature’s trick.” Now the mother occupies the space, imagined and actual, that the hare had. She “wears her fur.” She is “young and handsome/as my birth month. How rapidly we rushed toward each other / then,” considers the speaker in a tone redolent with loss, “how we are the flaw in the other.” Again she thinks, “don’t go”, this time as she herself drives away, shamed by the image of her mother waving in the rearview mirror. “It’s the mother’s trick, / to be loved as the lifelong daughter,” she asserts, yoking safety and shame, love and anger, nurturance and dependence, in a set of relationships that throb like Rothko’s planes of color. Mother and daughter are both indistinguishable and achingly separate. The “cruelty” that “flies into wind- / borne snow,” then, is both the speaker’s and the mother’s; it is the pain inherent in parting and reunion. The form—two stanzas rhetorically similar but imaginatively divergent—amplifies the marked and expressive ambivalence informing the poem and so much of this book.

Paula Bohince’s poems delight and hurt. In spite of, or perhaps because of, the complex and palpable struggle informing this collection, The Children is an intricate and distinct pleasure. Shapely and plainspoken, austere and effulgent, this work rewards repeated reading with subtly inventive language and an earnestness that feels unaccustomed and even bold in contemporary poetry. The intellect and the heart are inextricable in this writing that promises to be enduring and influential.

—Emily Pulfer-Terino

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Emily Pulfer-Terino grew up in Western Massachusetts, where she lives and teaches English at Miss Hall’s School, a boarding school for girls. She holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. More of her work is published or forthcoming in Hunger Mountain, Numéro Cinq, The Southeast Review, Poetry Northwest, Stone Canoe, The Louisville Review, The Alembic, Oberon, and other journals and anthologies.

Unmeasured Depths: A Review of Steven Heighton’s The Dead Are More Visible — Richard Farrell

Sep 032012

The Dead Are More Visible (Stories)
By Steven Heighton
Alfred A. Knopf, Canada
ISBN 978-0-307-39741-6

“The virtue of good prose,” writes Steven Heighton in Workbook: memos & dispatches on writing, his meditative collection of aphorisms and memos on art and writing published in 2011, “lies mainly in this dishabituation: it triggers conceptual stammers in the mind, momentarily rerouting hard-set neural circuits, even laying the ground for new ones.” These conceptual stammers, echoes of what the Russian Formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky called defamiliarizaton, lie at the center of Heighton’s latest collection of stories, The Dead Are More Visible.

From wrathful lesbians to lonely widows, from aging track stars to angsty teen-agers, Heighton pulls off a literary hat trick: he tells spellbinding stories in aching, melodic voices that demand to be read again and again. A female boxer falls in love with her sparring partner; a heroic fireman rushes back into a burning building to rescue a bag of snakes; a recovering drug addict wanders the Sonoran Desert pursued by a mythical, oxycontin peddling hallucination; these are just some of the stammering citizens of Heighton’s fictional universe.

Heighton is a prolific novelist, essayist and poet. With a dozen books already published, it should come as no surprise that his short stories resist easy labels. In his fiction, Heighton interrogates the liminal borderlands of prose and poetry, walking the fine line between lyrical richness and good old-fashioned yarns. Yet never do the intricate textures of his language get in the way of clear-minded, narrative straight-forwardness, a linearity born not of simplistic formulas but out of a long and careful examination of form and structure.

The Dead Are More Visible contains sad stories with happy endings, simple stories with complex themes, and ineffable mysteries of being told from the perspective and language of common folk.

One of the more heartbreaking stories in this collection is “Heart & Arrow,” a twenty-four page, third person story that hinges on the fallibility of memory. On the occasion of his sister’s fortieth birthday party, Merrick thinks back to when he was ten and he would drink alone in his parents’ long-neglected basement bar. He remembers the loneliness of that bar with its “kidney-shaped counter of faux marble with a brown buttoned vinyl fronting, set at the head of a low, half-finished rec room.” His parents drink upstairs and his sister, Laurel, is almost always out with her friends. Desperately isolated, Merrick tries to act grown up by mimicking them. He wants to recreate an imaginary social life with booze and stale mixers. Instead, he creates his own personal hell.

And now he reminds her of that ironic reversal, to encourage her, he thinks, to cheer her up. Or is it to punish her instead? And what is it that’s pushing him to guide her back down that long-demolished stairway into their childhood rec room, the basement bar where he first tried to drown his childhood self and play the hardened, hard-drinking grown-up, while she already seemed set to inherit the only earth that mattered then: a feral frontier of contraband mickeys and smokes, death’s head roach clips, classes skipped with a shrug, creatively varied expletives, first lays in junior high. Stoners, they were called, nobody sure if that honorific referred to the state they were always said to be in or to the flooded limestone quarry where they hung out and smoked up and chugged beer and threw themselves naked off the cliffs.

Condensed into a series of tangible objects imperfectly recalled, this paragraph works like a narrative map. Every image counts. The rec room and dope, the cliffs and quarry, the drinking, sex, and partying—none of these are throwaways. Neither is the reliability of memory itself. Like Chekhov’s gun, each image carries weight. All repeat again and again throughout the pages that follow, forming rich and complex visual and acoustic layers which grow and harmonize as the story progresses. Heighton is thrumming along, patterning images and splintering them off only to bring them back. And the reader is lost in a wonderful miasma of sight and sound, fully captivated and awake.

With a Heighton story, only the essential is conjured. There’s an efficiency in his writing, along with a sign posted at the door: No shaggy dogs allowed. But to call a writer efficient these days might imply some mechanical coldness—the latest anointed hipster, brimming with pocketfuls of detached irony and urbane wit. Heighton’s efficiency, however, is anything but sparing. His prose is lush, melodic and carefully cadenced. Note the alliteration in the above passage, the internal rhymes and the precise pacing of Merrick’s memory of his sister’s social life: “a feral frontier of contraband mickeys and smokes, death’s head roach clips, classes skipped with a shrug, creatively varied expletives, first lays in junior high.” Yet the musical quality of the words balances with abundant, honest and empathetic characters. The stories in The Dead Are More Visible operate with the efficiency of nature, like the recycling of energy and matter in ecosystems, a churning, vital antidote to the sleek, mechanistic packaging of our entertainment culture.

She came from a side of town where most women thickened dramatically in their thirties and before long outweighed their men. The men thinned to sinew, their faces got a wrinkled, redly scoured look as if the skin had been worked with sandpaper, their eyes grew raw and haunted. Ellen had been spared the puffy moon face of her older sisters, only to see her features grow meaty and masculine while her body consolidated, almost doubling itself, like a hard-working farm wife of another era.

In “The Dead Are More Visible,” the lonely Ellen works the night shift, flooding a local park in order to form an ice skating rink. Nearby, a deranged man stares at a twenty-five foot obelisk and channels the dead—once buried there but moved to make way for the park. One night, a menacing group of three men approach. “They had the Grim Reaper look—slumpy, faceless, in layers of dark, baggy hooded sweatshirts.” The men begin to harass, first the deranged man, then Ellen. One of them, Shane, is strikingly handsome, something that Ellen notices in spite of the danger. He casts insults and threats, but she stands her ground. They want to rob her, possibly rape her, and she knows it, but she continues to provoke them. When Shane lunges at her with ice picks, Ellen defends herself with the only weapon available, the hose head in her hand, “a half foot of steel tapered to a flanged hole an inch and a half in diameter.” Ellen impales Shane with the hose head, and rips out his eye. The rest of the story becomes a farcical search for the de-socketed eyeball on the ice rink.

But what happens after such a violent set up is quite remarkable, and I’ll not spoil the ending, except to say that a simple compassion returns to offset the gore. Along the way, Heighton reveals the hardscrabble reality of life in a modern big city, invites the reader to experience a lonely woman’s heroic stance, and, just for good measure, he treats us to the strange, quasi-mystical figure of the deranged man and the obelisk.

It is this deranged man, a seemingly irrelevant character (he has no agency, really, on the page) who serves as the story’s deeper consciousness. “The dead are more visible than we are,” the deranged man tells Ellen, referring not just to the literal dead—the displaced graves once buried below the park—but also to our own existences run down by mortality, progress and the inevitable sweep of time. His voice provides the story its chilling resonance. The reader perceives that this story is about more than just violence and a lonely woman flooding an ice rink. In Workbook, Heighton describes this layering effect as vertical resonance.

Vertical resonance means a downward echoing, the potential for soundings into a textual subconscious, the swimmer’s thrilling sense, when crossing a mountain lake, of unmeasured depths in the dark below the thermocline.

Like the swimmer crossing the lake, we feel only the forward narrative movement, the stroke-and-kick, what-happens-next stimulus of plot. But what differentiates literature from schlock is precisely this deeper, textual subconsciousness. We read along and enjoy the surface story, but something else is happening. The reader slowly becomes aware of a chilling depth, an awareness of the gap between the habituated, day-to-day routines and the deeper, more meaningful qualities of life. The well written story bewitches us this way, deriving power from its ability to wake us up, to shake us out of an automated existence. Or, as Shklovsky once wrote, it makes the stones feel stony again. When it works, and it works quite often within Heighton’s stories, we submit to what John Gardner described as the vivid continuous dream, that phantasmagorical wonder that is reading a well made book. Plot becomes story. Metaphor becomes meaning. We become, in Heighton’s own words, more intensely alive.

Perhaps Heighton’s greatest gift as a writer is a relentless commitment to variety. His readers need never fear boredom. In the collection’s eleven stories, Heighton employs first, second and third person points of view. He has female and male narrators, old and young, innocent and experienced. From sprawling, almost-novella length tales to compact, twelve page stories, Heighton shifts often. Don’t look for thematic unity here. Don’t look for simple structures or stereotypes. Instead, expect to be pulled and pushed in ways that will baffle and befuddle but never fail to satisfy.

The last story in the book, “Swallow,” swells to almost 50 pages, yet it reads—thanks to tight pacing and careful construction—like a story half that length. A Greek-Canadian woman, Roddy, breaks up with her boyfriend, loses her waitressing job and refuses to move home again. To earn money, she signs up for a weeklong human drug trial. The drug she will be taking is an unnamed sedative.

The clinic is a hangar-like structure, cinderblocks and green corrugated siding, on the edge of an industrial park in the wind-scavenged steppes of outer Scarborough. At the park’s entrance the bus drops you along with two women in matching peach parkas over grey sweats. A sunny sub-arctic afternoon. No sidewalks. Snowless lawns hard as Astroturf. Up the middle of the road the matched pals tow dark, wheeled suitcases as big as wolfhounds. You have only a daypack, yet they edge ahead, their trainers flashing, heads down, shoulders high and tight—the slapstick, puffin shuffle of Canadians in winter. You don’t mind the wind’s bee-sting assault on your skin. You haven’t felt so awake in weeks. Neither do you mind the industrial park, finding something here that mirrors your inert inner world, so that for now—for a change—you don’t feel out of place.

Suburban Ontario transforms into a kind of wasteland, yet somehow stays homey too. The puffin shuffle, peach parkas, the wheeled suitcases like wolfhounds, these details accrete. What should be cold and arresting becomes an object of curiosity. The reader, while filled with trepidation, is also called forward.

Bleak and dismal, with drug trials and female subjects locked inside a forbidding building, it’s reasonable to expect Solzhenitsyn, or at least some sort of Orwellian dystopia. But in “Swallow” the mood remains more tantalizing than terrifying. Through a series of drug-induced scenes, we grow closer to Roddy. (The use of a second person narrator is rarely done this well.) We come to feel a community forming between the other women and the providers in this strange place. A sort of humanity arises despite the setting and the fact that these women are being poked and prodded and filled with poisons.

Once again, the conceptual stammers begin to fire. Heighton plays against the expected. Rather than sedating, the experimental sedatives become portals into Roddy’s world. The grim setting and the unusual concept create opportunities for a rich, meaningful experience. It is, in many ways, a sort of cockeyed celebration, a party of misfits who seem somehow enlarged by their very entanglement. This is not what the reader might expect.

But then each of the eleven stories in this collection surprises and delights. Heighton blends structural complexities with a linguistic opulence into a dazzling array of styles. The Dead Are More Visible is a master performance of art and storytelling from a significant writer who has honed his skills to a sharp edge. “[A] yen for transcendence,” Heighton advises himself in Workbook, calling upon the younger writer he once was (and, perhaps, by extension, other writers and readers) “to surmount one’s inborn pettiness and laziness, to be worthy of life’s wonder and better able to frame it in the right words, rightly arranged.” Thankfully, he follows his own advice. The dead are indeed more visible here. The right words are rightly arranged. With neural circuits rewired, habitual concepts stammered, deep lakes crossed and soundings taken, the reader surmounts pettiness and gazes anew at life’s wonder.

—Richard Farrell

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Richard Farrell is the Creative Non-Fiction Editor at upstreet and a Senior Editor at Numéro Cinq (in fact, he is one of the original group who helped found the site). A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, he has worked as a high school teacher, a defense contractor, and as a Navy pilot. He is a graduate from the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. He is currently at work on a collection of short stories. His work, including fiction, memoir, craft essays, and book reviews, has been published at Hunger Mountain, Numéro Cinq, and A Year in Ink anthology. His essay “Accidental Pugilism” (which first appeared on Numéro Cinq in a slightly different form) was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He lives in San Diego with his wife and children.

Unwrapping Miss Frost: Time & Structure in John Irving’s In One Person — Jacob Glover

Jul 262012

The novel begins exactly where it will end: with Miss Frost. Miss Frost is the moral core of the novel. She lives as a woman though she has a penis and breasts. She is sexually and romantically attracted to men but does not have a lover. In a world in which almost everybody is either hiding or unaware of his sexual eccentricities, Miss Frost is confident and stable as herself.

In One Person
By John Irving
Simon & Schuster.
425 pages. $28.

John Irving’s new novel, In One Person, is about the life of a bisexual man from his early teens till his middle-age. It’s not so much a coming-out or a coming-of-age story but the story of coming home. The hero/narrator Billy Abbot begins his sexual life confused and feeling alone, but he finds himself, at the end of the novel, surrounded by people who love him as he is and are willing to defend him as he is.

In One Person divides into three parts: high school, life after high school before AIDS, and the AIDS epidemic and assorted deaths. In boarding school Billy has a friend named Elaine who will stay his friend his whole life. Billy and Elaine share a crush on Jacques Kittredge who is the quintessential jock-bully. (In the ultimate moment of poetic justice, Kittredge grows up and has sex-change surgery — it turns out he was probably abused by his mother). Kittredge gets Elaine pregnant and harasses Billy about being effeminate. The reader also learns that Billy’s father was probably gay but not out of the closet. After Billy’s birth he ran off with a man he’d met in the Navy. But his whereabouts are unknown.

Billy’s stepfather, Richard, directs Shakespeare plays at the boarding school, and Billy is in most of them, along with Kittredge. Shakespeare becomes a grand motif throughout the novel. The novel’s title itself is from a line in Richard II: “Thus play I in one person many people/and none contented.” The idea of living as yourself as opposed to acting for the world is important throughout the novel. And the parallels between the plays and the characters in the novel rarely go unremarked. Consider that Richard casts Billy as Ariel in The Tempest with Elaine as Miranda and Kittredge as Ferdinand. Irving often treats us to mini-essays about the literary works he mentions. Richard, for example, talks about the way he understands the “the continuum from Caliban through Prospero to Ariel — a kind of spiritual evolution.”

During this period, Billy has intercrural (between thighs) sex with Miss Frost. Just before Billy graduates Miss Frost reveals that she earlier attended the same high school under the name Albert Frost, or Big Al, one of the best wrestlers the school ever had. Though they only spend a couple of nights together and Miss Frost never explicitly reciprocates the emotion, Billy will love Miss Frost with the most romantic fervor of anyone in his life.

After high school Billy spends the summer in Europe with his first boyfriend, Tom Atkins, but the two are not meant for one another, and they drift apart. Billy moves to New York City to study German before spending a year in Vienna at the Insitut Für Europӓische Studien. In Vienna he hooks up with his first girlfriend, Esmeralda, an American and an aspiring opera singer, and Lawrence Upton, a lover and one of his lifelong friends. Larry is a poet who teaches at the institute. Like the Shakespearean director, Richard, Larry is one of the novel’s commentators, a voice of literary evaluation or criticism. Both play a paternal part in Billy’s life though, in Larry’s case, only after he and Billy are no longer lovers.

After college, Billy moves to L.A. with a woman, breaks up and moves back to New York to be with Elaine and Larry who are both living in the city. His mother and aunt die in a car accident, and Elaine and Billy return to their hometown of Second Sister, Vermont, for the funeral where Billy’s uncle, who is terribly intoxicated, lets slip that Billy’s father is living in Spain. (Ironically, the father and his lover seem to have the most stable romantic relationship in the novel.)

We move now into the death and AIDS section of the novel. This part includes some of the most poignant scenes. Irving describes the dying men with a chilling accuracy. But he tamps down the melodrama by including a lot of medical jargon. Tom Atkins, the young man with whom Billy traveled in Europe after high school, ends up married with children. But like many of the characters in the novel, Atkins has kept his homosexuality a secret and contracts AIDS during an affair. Larry’s lover dies of AIDS in his arms. Billy’s Grandpa Harry shoots himself in the bathtub. (Grandpa Harry is a wonderful character. He participates in many of the local plays and almost always takes the role of a woman. It’s unclear if Grandpa Harry is gay, but it’s probable that he is just a straight man who likes to dress in women’s clothing. He is among the kindest and sweetest people Billy knows.) Larry eventually dies cradled in Elaine’s and Billy’s arms. Miss Frost is beaten to death by a group of rowdy sailors at a bar — but not before sending several of them to the hospital. Kittredge dies of natural causes at fifty-four, but, as Billy says, “What ‘natural causes’ can kill you when you’re fifty-four?.”

Billy moves back to Second Sister and into the house he grew up in. He becomes a teacher at the high school where he went as a boy. It is now co-ed and there is a large LGBT community. Billy’s books are all about sexual identity and confusion, and he begins to mentor a young student who is a boy becoming a girl. Billy assumes the role of teaching and directing Shakespeare. The book ends when Kittredge’s son comes to the school to confront Billy. The scene is slightly ridiculous but somehow apt. The boy accuses of Billy of contributing to his father’s gender issues by publicly trying to normalize alternate sexualities. More importantly, he tries to categorize Billy by calling him bisexual. Billy retorts by quoting Miss Frost and thus encases the novel in her morality.

The skeletal story structure which I just described is in chronological order; this is the major narrative arc of the book. But the novel is not set up in chronological sequence. Irving uses a reminiscent first person narrator which means this novel is a memory being fleshed out not a story being told toward an ending. This is an important distinction. The ending, though crucial, is not the point of the novel because the ending is just another moment in Billy’s life. The ending of the novel isn’t even the end of Billy’s life; there’s actually more to the story. What is going on here then? What drives this novel?

Irving does not drive his narrative toward a conclusion. He bobs and weaves his way through a web of thematic and semantic memory association (loosely guided by linear movement of time but not constrained to it) until he lands at a moment in which we have come full circle. The novel begins with Billy saying he is going to tell the reader about Miss Frost and ends with him quoting something she once said to him. “My dear boy, please don’t put a label on me—don’t make me a category before you get to know me!” This ending is not so much circular as a constant presence. The novel itself has a constant awareness of the ending. In fact, the narrator (Billy) says to the reader very early in the novel: “But I’m getting ahead of myself; alas it’s what a writer who knows the end of the story tends to do.”

Thus we have a Billy-of-the-main-narrative, who is unaware of the ending, and the Billy-as-the-narrator, who is wholly aware of the ending, and the way Irving constructs the novel leaves the reader in between the two.

One of the temporal disruption techniques Irving uses is what I call the side-story. He inserts little side-stories throughout the novel which interrupt the main narrative and are always out of their chronological place. Usually the stories are future events (that is future relative to the present of the main narrative). Billy uses something from the main narrative as an associative link or springboard and then launches into the side-story after which he settles back into the main narrative as if nothing had happened. These side-stories serve to give the readers glimpses of the future which the Billy-of-the-main-narrative doesn’t know about yet. They create tension between the three perspectives, the three levels of knowledge at work; Young Billy knows the least and the reader knows more than Billy does but less than the narrator.

The chapter “Leaving Esmeralda” is a good example of the side-story technique. The chapter begins in 1960 with Billy in high school. A few pages in, Billy is talking to a woman whom he feels is rather dominant, but he likes that. Then there is a line a break, and Irving jumps ahead to when Billy and Larry are lovers and living together. Irving ties these two sections together with thematic material about Billy being dominant or submissive in relationships. As in, the first time Larry picks Billy up he shocks him with the question: “Are you a top or bottom, beautiful Bill?” Irving floats forward in time to the seventies in New York to another conversation between Billy and Larry “still seeing each other but no longer living together” which is followed by a flashback to rehearsal for The Tempest when there was a conversation about Ariel’s gender and then a time reference bringing us back to Billy in high school.

Irving makes an interesting move now. There is a line break and then Billy calls himself out: “It’s revealing how I have skipped ahead to my junior year abroad in Vienna, choosing to begin that interlude in my future life by telling you about Larry.” The narrative here is conscious of its erratic movement but only in an analytical way. Billy remarks that he probably skipped ahead and didn’t start with the story of his first girlfriend because he wanted to tell the readers that it is hard to come out as a teenager. Either way, what follows is a miniature essay about being bisexual and dealing with confusing feelings. Right after that there is another line break and then we get the story of Esmeralda which is also the story of Billy’s year abroad. Keep in mind, the main narrative is paused somewhere in high school while Irving wanders down this detour of the future.

But let’s examine more closely the movement here. What we should notice is the intersecting themes, i.e. the way these disparate parts relate to one another. This is all outside the plot, the chronological narrative arc, of the story, but it has to do with Billy’s eventual coming-to-terms with his sexuality. So the chapter begins with the dominant/ submissive dyad; then we have Larry who mistypes Billy for a bottom (submissive) when he is a top; and then Billy remarks on the difficulty of coming out. The paragraph before the Esmeralda story is about Billy not feeling ashamed of being bisexual, of being attracted to women, but he notices that many of his gay friends find this “suspicious.” These thoughts and sentiments are all playing on the theme of a man trying to understand his sexuality, i.e. what he likes; what he doesn’t like; how what he likes makes him and others feel.

This progression of self-analysis is logical and Irving tracks it by telling stories which relate to each step in the analysis until landing on the longer story of Billy’s time with Esmeralda. Curiously, though the chapter is mostly about being with Esmeralda, the title of the chapter is about leaving her. It is interesting that before we are even aware who Esmeralda is, we know that Billy will leave her. The ending of the chapter is in its title. It is as if the ending of this chapter or story is the story itself.

What stands out is that Irving structures the narrative as of Billy were working through memories based on association. Billy is looking back on his life (reminiscing) and picking out idea lines and following them until they lead back the story of his life. The side-story is not meant to press the plot forward but to take a break from the progression. The side-story exemplifies through experience and memory the idea is Billy is thinking about, i.e. when he thinks about being attracted to women he tells the story of his first girlfriend. In this instance, the narrative progresses thematically rather than along a plot line or time line. It creates a novel founded more on the organic nature of thought and memory than the strict linear movement of cause and effect or chronology.

Irving plays with time in other ways besides using side-stories. He quotes snippets of dialogue from disparate times in the novel thus further squishing together the two time-perspectives. For example: “Miss Frost was always making me move to a chair or a couch or a table where there was better light. ‘Don’t ruin your eyes, William. You’ll need your eyes for the rest of your life, if you’re going to be a reader’” (42). This is an interesting example because not only is Irving quoting dialogue that never occurs in a scene in the book, he also implies a number of scenes that did take place. The reader’s understanding of Billy and Miss Frost’s relationship is exponentially richer, deeper and quicker than if Irving had tried to deliver whole scenes.

Irving uses the imperfect tense here which means that the action was never completed, i.e. never perfected. There is this sense then that Miss Frost is always and continuously looking out for Billy. In this off-hand description of an imperfect scene that “always” happened, there is the implication that Miss Frost said these words multiple times and that she will continue to say them.

Sometimes there is no lead-in to the implied scene. Irving drops a quote into the text as its own paragraph. On page 57 there is an example of this:

“Nymph,” Kittredge’s nickname for me, would stick. I had two years to go at Favorite River Academy; a Nymph I would be.

“It doesn’t matter what costume and makeup do to you, Nymph,” Kittredge had said to me privately. “You’ll never be as hot as your mother.”

I was conscious that my mom was pretty and—at seventeen— I was increasingly conscious of how other students at an all boys’ academy like Favorite River regarded her.

These dropped-in-quotes imply scenes that must have happened without giving full descriptions of them. Thus, like the earlier example and like the side-stories, they create a more complete picture of Billy’s life without delving into each specific moment. Interestingly, we don’t arrive at these quotations in a sequential way but the connection is always associative, like memory.

Irving’s use of the reminiscent narrator offers up an interesting way to explore how memory can drive a novel. The reminiscent narrator is not a new structure, but the way Irving leaps from moment to moment semantically (i.e. relating events out of chronological order through ideas) is closer to a memory than just a simple re-telling. We store memories in webs of idea-relationships. And the reminiscent narrative Irving uses to tell the story of Billy Abbot coming to terms with himself is an unwrapping of the idea that is Miss Frost. Miss Frost is an ideal; the person in the novel most at home with herself. Irving begins with her as the kernel idea and then the rest of the book is meant to unpack her, that is: what it means to be her.

We finally land, at the end of the novel, back where we started, and Billy repeats something Miss Frost had said to him, the line: “My dear boy, please don’t put a label on me—don’t make me a category before you get to know me!” We have come full circle and Billy now understands more clearly who Miss Frost was and what she had meant by this line. In One Person is about remembering and understanding. Irving jumps from one time to another taking advantage of the fact that memory has a fluidity in association that breeches temporal boundaries. While remembering we are not constrained by chronological ordering. We have, as the author does, the entire story in front of us at every turn.

— Jacob Glover

Jacob Glover is a Philosophy & Classics student at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is a frequent NC contributor of essays, reviews and poems.

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Sanctuary from Cliché: A Review of Geoff Dyer’s Zona — Jason DeYoung

May 142012

Part of the genius of Zona is Dyer’s skill at taking art and turning it on himself and his reader to reveal the exquisite longing of the heart. Dyer does what all great writers do: he makes you interested in his subject matter, he makes you excited to learn more. — Jason DeYoung

Geoff Dyer
Zona
Pantheon, 2012
$24.00, 228 pages

Geoff Dyer is a British-born essayist and novelist. While he has written a number of smart novels—probably his best being Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi—his nonfiction (written mostly as book-length essays) is thought of as especially original and brilliant. Dyer’s broad intelligence and charm make the work addictive. He has a gift for putting oddly diverse cultural touchstones—Hakim Bey to Wordsworth, Thievery Corporation to Miguel De Unamuno—together with his own offbeat insights to create keys to contemporary culture (and personal understanding).

In a recent Bookforum interview Dyer was asked if was fair to say that his work is written in part “against clichés of genre, clichés of convention.” Here’s what he said:

Oh, indeed. Absolutely. That’s one of the reasons why I’ve drifted away from fiction as a reader as well as a writer…[S]ome novels can actually be conceived at the level of cliché. The whole idea of what we want from a novel sometimes is for it to conform to a very familiar set of conventions.

Dyer’s nonfiction often falls within two categories. While he has written books on serious subjects such as The Missing of the Somme (about World War I) and the Ongoing Moment (about documentary photography), he also has a cannon of playful and irreverent books such as Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It (a collection of travel writings) and Out of Sheer Rage (a quasi-memoir devoted to Dyer’s own desire to write a “sober academic study” of D. H. Lawrence —he never does; he just writes one about wanting to write one).

Zona—a book devoted to writing a gloss on Stalker, a ’70 Russian art-house film—seems to belong somewhere in that whimsical column. With his trademark wit and whine, Dyer humorously summarizes the rather humorless Stalker, lovingly interpreting it through a combination of autobiography, literary theory, and cultural criticism, opening up a rather difficult film so that even non-cinéastes can find pleasure and meaning in it.

Stalker, released in 1979, is Andrei Tarkovsky’s sixth full-length movie, and it’s loosely based on Roadside Picnic, a science fiction novel written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. As the opening caption of Stalker sets things up: something has happened—a meteorite crash or alien visitation(?)—which has led to the creation of the Zone, a place “troops where sent in and never returned.” The boundaries of the Zone are now outlined with barbed wire and cinderblock walls and militarized. The movie depicts an illegal expedition lead by the eponymous Stalker who guides two characters simply known as Writer and Professor into the Zone.

Somewhere within the Zone there is a room that that will fulfill your most deeply held wish. The Writer and the Professor want to go to this room. The Professor and Writer both want something like greatness. Writer, in particular, wants inspiration, and Dyer can’t help but identify with him:

[Writer] is washed up. Finished. Maybe by going to the Zone he’ll be rejuvenated. Man, I know how he feels. I could do with a piece of that action myself. I mean, do you think I would be spending my time summarizing the action of a film almost devoid of action—not frame by frame, perhaps, but certainly take by take—if I was capable of writing anything else? In my way I’m going to the Room—following these three to the Room—to save myself

Reading Zona is not unlike being with a friend who talks excitedly over movies. The actual pages are often halved with the top half occupied by Dyer’s “take by take” summary and with the bottom occupied with an abundance of footnotes—which cannot be dismissed and have equal prominence. In Zona, Dyer keeps hitting the metaphorical pause button to tell about his childhood, the movie, his insights into it, its history, Tarkovsky himself, or share bits of cinematic-lore, such as how Mick Jagger remarked that Godard was such a “fucking twat,” speaking of the experience with the filmmaker on the documentary Sympathy for the Devil. It’s all very noteworthy and compelling. As Dyer writes: “In a sense this book is a catalogue or compendium of proposals for potentially interesting studies.”

After a journey through a landscape that is “completely weird and completely ordinary,” the three characters arrive at the Room’s door. At the entrance, Stalker tells Writer and Professor to think back over their entire life. Writer seems to be the one who’ll enter first. But he stops. He cannot go. Why? Donno. Even Tarkovsky confesses in a 1980 interview that he didn’t know why*. In fact, neither Writer nor Professor can enter the room. (Note: I’m not spoiling the movie here.)

For Tarkovsky the existence of the Room “serves solely as pretext to revealing the personalities of the three protagonists.” And as a person who is following these three characters in the movie, Dyer stands at the door, too. Unable to make a decision whether to enter, Dyer meditates on desire, faith and belief: “Is one’s deepest desire always the same as one’s greatest regret?” Is this why Writer and Professor cannot enter the Room, since they will have to face their true selves? As Tarkovsky puts it: the Room fulfills “a hidden vision lying deep within the heart of each person” because they don’t ask the Room for what they want, the Room will just know. At the Room’s threshold, Dyer bares his own desires and begins to question their validity.

There is such sincerity and allure in Dyer’s prose that the reader ends up following him to the Room as well, and his interpretation of the film leaves a lasting impact. As the author questions his wants, you can’t help but to question the faith you have in your own desires, and if obtaining them will make you happy. And this is part of the genius of Zona, Dyer’s skill at taking art and turning it on himself and his reader to reveal the exquisite longing of the heart.

Dyer does what all great writers do: he makes you interested in his subject matter, he makes you excited to learn more. Tarkovsky is a difficult filmmaker—in pacing and in image—and his films demand thoughtful viewing and patience, something that’s becoming increasingly more difficult—even for Dyer—because of our diminishing attention span. But he laments, “a lot of what’s being shown on the world’s screens—television, cinemas, computers—is fit only for morons.” I cannot say whether it’s a good idea to see Stalker first or read Zona first. I saw the movie before reading Zona, and it helped me to hold the thread of Dyer’s synopsis while reading the footnotes. But I wonder what it would be like to experience the book without knowing the movie, experiencing Zona as “book” instead of something like companion piece, because there’s something so dreamy in how Dyer describes his personal vision and experience of watching Stalker, and entering his Zone, a “place of refuge and sanctuary. A sanctuary…from cliché.”

— Review by Jason DeYoung

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Jason DeYoung lives in Atlanta, Georgia. His work has recently appeared in Corium, The Los Angeles Review, The Fiddleback, New Orleans Review, and Numéro Cinq.

*All quotations by Andre Tarkovsky come from Andre Tarkovsky: Interviews, ed. by John Gianvito, University Press of Mississippi, 2006.

We Are All From The Camps: A Review of Oksana Zabuzhko’s Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex — Brianna Berbenuik

Feb 222012

Sexual life belongs almost entirely to that “invisible part” of our existence—I’d say it constitutes our “third life,” along with the daily, conscious one, and with the one we conduct in our dreams. So, what particularly tantalized me while working on the book was to examine precisely how that massive, dark, and powerful mainstream of history affects, quite surreptitiously, people’s most unconscious behavior, words and gestures produced in bed. — Oksana Zabuzhko

Oksana Zabuzhko
Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex
Translated by Halyna Hyrn
AmazonCrossing, 2011
164pp; $13.95

Since the it was first published in 1996, Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex has become one of the most controversial and best-selling novels in Ukraine in the last twenty years. Oksana Zabuzhko is a poetic genius (and she is foremost a poet), and Fieldwork reads as if it were one long poem. The novel is not divided into conventional chapters. Instead serpentine, run-on sentences fluidly slide into side-thoughts contained in brackets and small passages of verse, so the reader enters and re-enters the book in an endless series of apparently chaotic yet somehow seamless stream-of-consciousness thoughts.

Fieldwork, finally published in English last year by AmazonCrossing, Amazon’s new in-house translation imprint, has largely been heralded as an autobiographical novel by critics, though Zabuzhko maintains it is anything but autobiography. The protagonist, a clever, highly talented and nameless poet, does echo Zabuzhko herself (for example, the poet narrator travels from Ukraine to America as Zabuzhko has done), but that’s where the similarities end. On the surface, the plot is very simple: the narrator tells the story of her recently ended relationship with a Ukrainian artist. However the text becomes more complex, swells and spreads like a bruise, as the poet delves into the abuse she suffered as well as the love she felt during the relationship. She struggles to come to terms with her complex grief, and as she does so she begins to unravel also the intricacies of her Ukrainian identity. The history of the affair is mapped out in the context of the history of the Ukraine, and the cartography of cultural influence and identity is perhaps more clearly revealed than the successes and failings of the relationship itself.

Zabuzhko blends the art of writing a novel with the art of poetry in a manner reminiscent of Michael Ondaatje’s also poetic novel Coming Through Slaughter. The unconventional form of the poetic novel may turn off some readers as it is more intensely intimate, difficult, captivating and implicating than the popular conventionally realistic novel. Experiencing Fieldwork is not an exercise in reading for entertainment but rather reading for discovery, reading for a sensual feeling of pain and proximity, and reading to learn about and hold the immediacy of contemporary Ukrainian culture and language and its historic burdens.

Zabuzhko has said, “…poets are and will always remain the guardians of a language, which every society tries to contaminate with lies of its own. Unlike novelists, who may be pigeonholed as opinion-makers, poets are seldom interviewed by media on political and moral issues, yet in the end it’s they who remain responsible for the very human capacity to opine. They keep our language alive.”

Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex is about keeping a language and culture alive — one the narrator desperately tries to revive, to heal as if it is a diseased body. The ramifications of the state of Ukrainian culture play out on the narrator’s body, a fractured body – pieces of her immediate self are referred to in the third person; her own body, read as metaphor for her country, is like a strange, alien “other” that she must try to revive over and over despite the history and trauma that encroach on her and try to consume her.

To read Zabuzhko’s Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex is to be constricted and devoured by a serpent. Beautiful, shining scales and the soft, rippling muscle of the snake surround you, slide against your skin, light refracting like off gasoline on water, and suddenly the crushing weight of remembered cultural history is upon you and unbearable, and you can feel yourself collapsing into it, devoured by it, and truly becoming a part of it — Ukrainian history and cultural identity eats you alive, because after all, “Ukrainian choice is a choice between nonexistence and an existence that kills you.”

Ukraine has a long history of being divided and re-united again and again. Parts of modern-day Ukraine were once considered, by turns, Russian and Polish and German. Ukrainian language after the demise of Soviet rule was nearly dead — a complication for many when, after independence, it was suddenly made the official language once more. Ukraine has been called “the bloodlands,” the slaughterfield between Hitler and Stalin in WWII. More recently it has become known as a radiated wasteland after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.

As a woman born into a Soviet-ruled Ukraine and who watched the fall of the USSR and the birth of Ukrainian independence, Zabuzhko’s undertaking in analyzing what it means to be Ukrainian through her novel is both excruciating and stunning. The analysis is largely accomplished via metaphor; the narrator’s overriding concern is her tumultuous, passionate and abusive relationship and her final escape from her Ukrainian male lover. Her narrative style is unconventional — Zabuzhko slides between first, second and third person narratives throughout, a tactic that echoes the fragmented self and fragmented identity of every Ukrainian. The three points of view also mirror the id, ego, and superego of Freudian psychology — and this is a psychological novel.

Zabuzhko is highly aware of this psychological aspect, the dark and repressed parts of Ukrainian history and identity, and yet she is equally aware of a the transformative potential. Culture, after all, is always subject to change even when burdened with the weight of a past. In an interview with Ruth O’Callaghan in Poetry Review, Zabuzhko said :

I argue that telling the truth — bringing to the spotlight of people’s consciousness what’s been previously in shadow, whatever it may be — has been, and will always be, a risky job, for as long as human society exists: if only because, in pronouncing certain truths for the first time, you inevitably attack the whole set of psychological, mental, and verbal stereotypes which were disguising it.

Of course, many Ukrainian critics have vilified Zabuzhko for her assault on the subconscious dark side of Ukrainian identity, but others all but canonized her. Fieldwork has been called a Ukrainain Feminist Bible (Zabuzkho has been called the Ukrainain Sylvia Plath). But Zabuzhko herself has said she prefers to not differentiate her readers along gender lines. Her approach in the novel, although undeniably from the perspective of a woman and certainly bleeding with feminist thought, is broader in scope. “What I attacked,” she once said, “was, basically, a system of social lies extending to the point of mental rape, and affecting both men and women.”

The narrator’s abusive love affair reflects the abusive nature of historical cultural norms and imposed values in Ukraine. It symbolizes a generation’s struggle to free itself from the past, to forge its own identity, and yet hold onto the best parts of the former identity, the traditions and historical moments that made independence worth fighting for despite years of being suspended between wars, languages, identities, and hostile neighbours that would crush, assimilate or extinguish them. Thus the narrator reflects on the tenderness and love that was present in her relationship as much as the painful parts, the destructive parts, and the unbearable and everlasting scars that remain.

So much of the novel is frantically looking for an exit, some way to escape a collective cultural past by turns shameful and exhilarating. Zabuzhko’s narrator, like the reader, ultimately discovers a home in her culture and language despite its lethality:

…obviously her mother tongue was the most nutritious, most healing to the senses: velvety marigold, or no, cherry (juice on lips)? strawberry blond (smell of hair)? …it’s always like that, the minute you peer more closely the whole thing disintegrates into tiny pieces and there’s no putting it back together; she hungered for her language terribly, physically, like a thirsty man for water, just to hear it — living and full-bodied with that ringing intonation like a babbling brook at at distance…

The way language is described here — as sensual nourishment, as healing, and yet fragmented and longed for — is typical of the novel as a whole. The longing for something loved and dangerous is at the book’s core. And yet are not all cultural identities like this? Do they not all have their destructive, oppressive and damaging histories that we must embrace and attempt to transform?

Fieldword opens a wound within the reader. Suddenly, the historical trauma passed down from generation to generation becomes clear and inescapable. Although the word “Gulag” is only used twice, in one of the small snippets of poetry peppered throughout the novel, the vast system of Stalinist concentration camps is present, quiet and ghost-like, throughout the narrative.

We are all from the camps. That heritage will be with us for a hundred years.

And, though the crux of the novel is Ukrainian identity, the book is not exclusively about being Ukrainian. It’s about being on your knees under the weight of any culture. The narrator wryly observes the same struggle in America. “… the Great American Depression from which it seems that about 70 percent of the population suffers, running to psychiatrists, gulping down Prozac, each nation goes crazy in its own way…”

This is a novel that digests its reader; you feel as if you are becoming fluid — dissolved into something at once more complete and yet more disjointed. The novel consumes you until it is fat with you, until you become subsumed in its pain and sensuality and it is about to burst with you (and not the other way around) — because it is rich with poetry and consciousness and what it means to be human. The effect is not pleasant completely, it is intense, a half-surrender to something, a journey or a quest for a meaning you can’t find and don’t understand.

—Brianna Berbenuik

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Brianna Berbenuik is a 20-something misanthropist and student of Slavic Studies at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. She is an avid fan of kitschy pop-culture, terrible Nic Cage movies, the philosophy of Slavoj Zizek, and Freud. You can find her at Love & Darkness & My Side-Arm on her twitter account where she goes by ukrainiak47. She wishes to express her gratitude to the poet Olga Pressitch and Serhy Yekelchyk, who both teach at the University of Victoria in the Department of Slavic Studies. for their tutelage and passion about Ukrainian history, language and culture. “Without their courses I wouldn’t have a grip on half of what I do when it came to this particular review, and Olga is the reason I wanted to read the novel in the first place.” Also the book you see in the photo, the bottom one, called Ukraine, is a comprehensive history written by Serhy.

Born in the Western Ukrainian city of Lutsk in 1960, into a Ukraine under the rule of the USSR, Oksana Zabuzhko grew up Kyiv and went on to study philosophy at Shevchenko University, graduating in 1992 (a year after the collapse of the Soviet Union). She spent time in America teaching at Penn State University and won a Fulbright Scholarship in 1994. She has lectured in the United States on Ukrainian culture at Harvard and the University of Pittsburg.

Halyna Hryn is a lecturer in Ukrainain Culture and Language at Yale University since 1996.

My Search for Jesus Hardwell, Profile & Interview by Ian Colford

Jan 172012

We all know the excitement of discovering a hitherto unknown (to us) writer “who dazzles and beguiles.” This happened to Halifax author Ian Colford when he read Jesus Hardwell’s story collection Easy Living. But instead of just looking Hardwell up on the web and leaving it at that, Ian went after the man, tracked him down and interviewed him and wrote this beguiling profile/review/interview (dare I add: detective story). Would that we could all have this level of response to a book.

My Search for Jesus Hardwell

By Ian Colford

It is a still mid-morning, the ides of July, and hot as Hades. Detective weather, I tell myself, craving a beer. I reconnoiter. There’s not much to see. The house is ordinary: a modest bungalow on a tidy corner lot in a residential section of Guelph, Ontario. The lawn is healthy, the shrubbery tended with a meticulous hand. Not a blind pig in sight, not even a hooker. In other words, not what I expected. I know, William Burroughs wore a three-piece suit; but this grass looks vacuumed. Where’s the topiary? I’m half relieved, half disappointed.

What am I doing here?

It started with a book.

Everything Starts With Language: Review of Gary Lutz’s divorcer — Jason DeYoung

Dec 232011

Everything Starts With Language: Gary Lutz’s divorcer

A Review by Jason DeYoung

Gary Lutz
divorcer
Calamari Press, 2011
117 Pages, $13.00

Gary Lutz’s seven stories in divorcer are preposterous—in the best possible way. They disobey logic, scorn common storytelling technique, and frolic with destabilizing off-plot descriptions that are at once powerful and confounding. Yet Lutz never loses sight of his character’s emotions and how they squirm to “get around to” their lives. He respects his characters—despite the grim maze of humiliations he puts them through—by giving them some of the best writing out there to take breath in. Built from an intense, ferocious vocabulary, Lutz’s fiction decries the mere functionality of language. Each unnerving story uproots expectations and delights with showing the reader the sun of a new approach in sentences that range from the overgrown to the monosyllabic to the fill-in-the-blank.

divorcer is Gary Lutz’s third full-length collection of stories (Stories in the Worst Way from Calamari Press and I Looked Alive from The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square are the two others, and A Partial List of People to Bleach is fourth collection, which was published as a pamphlet from Future Tense Books). Lutz lists Barry Hannah, Sam Lipsyte, Christine Schutt, and F. Scott Fizgerald as influences, and he is a former student of Gordon Lish, who published many of Lutz’s early stories in the legendary The Quarterly, the avant-garde journal Lish ran between 1987 and 1995 (publishing (and introducing) such writers as Don Delillo, Nancy Lemann, Thomas Lynch, Tim O’Brien and Numéro Cinq’s Capo di tutti capi Douglas Glover).

The In-Between Generation: A Review of Kazushi Hosaka’s Novel Plainsong — Brianna Berbenuik

Dec 132011

The In-Between Generation

A Review of Kazushi Hosaka’s Novel Plainsong

By Brianna Berbenuik

Plainsong
Kazushi Hosaka
Translated by Paul Warham
Dalkey Archive Press
176 pages; $17.95

Kazuchi Hosaka’s first novel Plainsong is full of characters who read like Japanese versions of Bret Easton Ellis’s narcissistic, directionless young Americans.

They seem trapped in limbo, on an aimless pursuit while an older generation overtakes them. They suffer from what you might call premature nostalgia, a Quixotic expectation, an empty yearning for something that doesn’t exist for their generation but was ever-present for generations before.

Hosaka’s characters are like ghosts; they are never quite fully fleshed out and remain incomplete – an eerie transience, in a sense trapped in the plight of their generation. None of the characters is particularly rebellious, though perhaps the more eccentric ones, like the jobless and outwardly childish Akira, think of themselves as rebels. They are, after all, an “in between” generation.

Hosaka was born 1956 within the same decade as two better-known Japanese authors: Haruki Murakami (IQ84 and Kafka on the Shore) and Ryu Murakami (Almost Transparent Blue and Coin Locker Babies). Haruki Murakami established himself as a literary giant with a distinctive style often aligned with magic realism (in Plainsong the nameless protagonist mentions that he once wrote an article about Haruki Murakami); Ryu Murakami writes about sex, drugs and the disenfranchised youth of Japan; Kazushi Hosaka, in contrast, has taken on the subtle and quiet themes of everyday people, exploring relationships with a delicacy and sensitivity that gives his writing a “naked” feel without being too revealing.

Hosaka’s prose is sparse and minimalist. His slender novel is a meandering journey, almost dream-like despite the plain, everyday details. The action takes place in 1986 (when Hosaka would have been thirty). The nameless narrator’s girlfriend has just left him; he suddenly finds himself accumulating a steady stream of strange house guests. The novel allows you to watch the characters through the eyes of the narrator, but does not allow you intimate access to their thoughts or feelings. They are passing acquaintances; simple, transient people entering and exiting the reader’s field of view in the course of the novel. At the end, they are easy to let go. Like a passing satellite view – you’re there, then you’re gone and over different terrain.

Peering over the Precipice: A Review of Fall Higher by Dean Young — A. Anupama

Nov 252011

Peering over the Precipice

A Review of Fall Higher by Dean Young

By A. Anupama

Fall Higher
By Dean Young
Copper Canyon Press
96 pages; $22
ISBN-13: 9781556593116
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Trying not to be one to judge a book by its cover, I opened Fall Higher to skim the table of contents and immediately laughed. The title of the first poem in the collection is “Lucifer,” which struck me as the opposite direction I was expecting the collection to take, given its title. This first moment, its instant detonation of my assumptions, was a good preface to the rest of the experience of reading this newest collection by Dean Young.

This particular concoction of poetry manifesto, imaginative integration of tradition, and lyric exploration exposes Young’s passion for the art of poetry and his technical skill in this, his ninth collection. But amazingly and tellingly, just days before the book’s publication, Young underwent heart transplant surgery, which was a triumph for the poet after over ten years with a life-threatening degenerative heart condition. Many of the poems in Fall Higher peer over the precipice of that struggle. In the poem “Winged Purposes,” for example, he describes falling higher as “voices hurtling into outer space, Whitman / out past Neptune, Dickinson retreating / yet getting brighter.”

Young is among the very accomplished in contemporary American poetry: he currently serves as the William Livingston Chair of Poetry at the University of Texas at Austin, and his collection Elegy on Toy Piano (2005) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He has been awarded Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, among other honors. Young was born in Columbia, Pennsylvania, in 1955, and received his MFA from Indiana University. His poetics are self-described as being influenced by the New York School and the French surrealists, and in this most recent collection the influences come from many other corners of the poetic tradition.

Young’s engagement with the themes, devices, and specific works of the Western canon are rendered as a kind of dispersed ode running through the collection. He plays with rhyme in some poems, sometimes embedding them deep within the lines instead of at the ends.

Since the book begins with Lucifer, evoking the traitors of Dante’s Inferno, my first guess was that betrayal would be a major theme in Young’s lyric. This guess, at least, was right on. The poem “Elemental,” is one of those heartbreakers. Young leans toward the pantoum with characteristic four-line stanzas and a heavy dose of repetition, but within the lines and every which way. So the form is evoked for beauty, but the emotion has its willful way within the poem, refusing to acknowledge the form’s rules of repetition:

Walked into the burning woods and burning
walked into me. One day we’ll wade
into the sea and see. Your coming
won’t summarize your leaving

nor waking sleep, sleep our dreams,
fireflies over wet grass, ice
settling in an abandoned glass. Winter
can’t summarize that summer, your body

in my hands won’t summarized be
by your body far from me.
Already you’re in the air
and my hands are nowhere,

my dreams mostly water.
This end won’t summarize our forever.
Some things can be fixed by fire,
some not. Dearheart, already we’re air.

In the poem “Madrigal” Young uses end-rhymed lines throughout, saying

You feel like something fallen from its shelf,
a yo-yo with a busted string, chipped ceramic elf
because all you can think about is not there,
the eyes not there, not there’s hair.

Here, the poem cops an attitude of disregard for contemporary poetry’s aversion to rhyme. But, at the end of the poem, Young pulls the form away and leaves us the unrhymed fragment “detonating with laughter.”

With the poem “Non-Apologia” Young makes a deliberate gesture of defying the craft of poetry by writing a poem about it. He begins “Maybe poetry is all just artifice, / devices, hoax, blood only there / to rhyme with mud.” He goes on to defend the way that meaning and symbol keep escaping back into words, he defends metaphor and the way that poetry offers delight. He ends by saying “Soon shadows are all that’s left, / that’s why poetry is about death.” He’s broken the secret rule about not saying what poetry is about. He’s broken the standard rule of creative writing instructors: “show, don’t tell.” The arc of contradictoriness instead of conclusions, however, makes the poet’s point by showing the way.

In the poem “The Decoration Committee” from the collection Strike Anywhere, Young has this to say about lyric poetry:

I know of no studies concerning and in how many cases
the lyric poem eases heartache by initiating 1.
the beloved’s return, the door flies open,
the bra unstrapped, the moose dappled
with dew and/or 2. a getting-over-it
happiness at just having written/read the poem
which is about misery in the old way
but also in a new way and then noticing
the pretty barmaid…

Young is tracking something more than relief from heartache in his lyric. The odes in Fall Higher have a lyric sensibility in them, especially “Infinitive Ode,” but Young seems to use these poems to explore the disjunctions in the human experience of time and space. “Irrevocable Ode” presents a litany of images of moments that can’t be repaired or taken back and the resulting experience of regret. The poem concludes lyrically, referring to careless betrayers, “maybe you’ll search and petition / and wander until you’re heard from no more.” “Omen Ode” gives the opposite perspective of everything connected: “Maybe a million strings connect / tomorrow to now.” In “Infinitive Ode” the cleverness of using the infinitive itself as the object of praise is immediately tempered by the dark superimposition of imagery: “To see the pile of skulls Cezanne sketched / as practice for his painting of hovering peaches” and “To see in the pantomime of invalids / the corps de ballet.” Theories break down, and the end of the poem illuminates the inquiry:

To preserve the dream under the tongue
all day, not garbling a word. To wash
with cold water. All the way to the ground
the sky comes, just lying down we’re flying.

In Young’s recent book on the craft of poetry, The Art of Recklessness (Graywolf Press, 2011), he writes, “The poet is like one of those cartoon characters who has stepped off the cliff only to remain suspended. But while the cartoon character’s realization of his irrational predicament brings about its fall, for the poet imagination sustains this reckless position over the abyss; it is what extends the view. As readers, we are charmed by the postponement of our plummeting even as we are made aware of its inevitability.” Fall Higher does exactly this, vastly opening up the view.

–A. Anupama

Book of Raunch: A Review of Nicholson Baker’s House of Holes — Steven Axelrod

Nov 172011

Book of Raunch

A Review of Nicholson Baker’s House of Holes

By Steven Axelrod

House of Holes
A Book of Raunch
By Nicholson Baker
262 pages; Simon & Schuster; $25.

House of Holes, Nicholson Baker’s new “Book of Raunch,” as he calls it, is an impish, jaunty circus of sex, a porn film directed by Jacques Tati, a Broadway extravaganza devised by Kenneth Tynan and Julia Taymor – with puppets!

In a world where sex is either furtive, tracked along the deleted search histories of internet porn, crudely commodified in the sterile ardor of beer commercials, or simply forbidden and demonized (abstinence education in school), or else lost in the dray horse drudgery of daily life; where even commercials for sex performance drugs show couples in separate bathtubs, or men alone solving other intractable problems (broken sailboats and mud-locked horse trailers), this book has a revolutionary message: sex is fun, sex is funny, sex is the essence of living and we spurn it at our peril.

Slithering through pin holes and the back of industrial washing machines and any other orifice the physical world provides, the characters in Baker’s book travel from the chilly world of dating and day jobs where sex is rarely even discussed to The House of Holes, a bizarre carnival world where no one talks about anything else. Even the tradesmen are sexual: the ass-infused wooden bowl makers and collectors of wet dream memories

The Perplexing Other, A Review of Dorianne Laux’s The Book of Men — A. Anupama

Oct 112011

The Perplexing Other

A Review of Dorianne Laux’s The Book of Men

by A. Anupama

The Book of Men
By Dorianne Laux
W. W. Norton
96 pages, $24.95
ISBN 978-0-393-07955-5

“It was the title. I admit, I thought that maybe Dorianne Laux was giving us the answer key right here in her new collection of poetry, The Book of Men. I ran to get a copy. Well, I didn’t actually. I downloaded mine on a reading tablet, I admit, which I don’t like to do with poetry books, but I was in a hurry to take a look. Luckily, Laux’s book isn’t the sort of visual poetry that loses some of its elegance in the tablet. Even so, I dislike the way mine breaks a poem on the screen or shifts to landscape when I shift the tablet to the side, as when I lie on the couch to read. It is different, something to get used to, and it reveals my own expectations of the experience of reading as I adjust settings so that it annoys me less, or contemplate upgrading to a newer model. It just added to my experience of Laux’s theme—the struggle to read our perplexing others, to reveal to ourselves our expectations of love and life.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that this wasn’t the “answers” book I had imagined, but rather a place for Laux’s questions to flourish, seeding our own questionings. Some of the poems are personal ones, about past lovers and friends. She also picks out a few of the “gods” of the Sixties, men whose art defined her generation: Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Mick Jagger. She takes her attention to them, with questions, requests, awe, and dismay. Her personal reactions and observations are rendered with humor and vulnerable honesty.

In the poem titled “Bob Dylan,” the epigraph is taken from his song “Father of Night,” which is a stark contrast to Laux’s poem. Dylan’s song lyrics are almost hymn-like in their tone of reverence to the Father. Laux’s poem’s Father is asleep on a bench somewhere; he is someone who has abandoned the speaker of the poem, a speaker who says things like “I knew there was no mercy but me.” The image of the ant in the middle of the poem is Laux’s portrait of Dylan:

one, without a leg, limped
in circles, sent two front legs out to stroke
a crooked antenna, a gesture
that looked to me like prayer. I knew
it wasn’t true.

Her doubt sends her “on with my empty plate, / like everyone else, calling, calling.” I considered too, that Laux might have meant the poem to be read as a persona poem, in which case, the ant would be one of the regular folks of Dylan’s songs, and the old man is the Father of that song, but changed into a vagrant “his sack of clothes beneath his matted head.” What a change from the Father in the Dylan song, who builds rainbows, teaches birds to fly. This one is “twitching in dream. One hand clutching / the bald earth, the other waving me down.” It is strange and ambiguous. I wondered when I read this–is this a good thing? The birds in this poem are not flying. The ants are not praying. But the speaker has gotten down on knees and has noticed the dreaming old man’s waving, beckoning.

The question “is this a good thing?” came up again for me at the end of the poem “The Beatles.” Laux lambasts them with her sarcastic hypothesizing on why the band broke up. Was it love? Was it greed? Was it a damaged sense of reality? Laux’s last stanza suggests an answer:

Maybe they arrived
at a place where nothing seemed real. A field
bigger than love or greed or jealousy.
An open space
where nothing is enough.

If nothing itself could be enough, that’s the answer isn’t it? If nothing is enough, then desire itself is frustrated to the point of annihilating itself—isn’t that a good thing? Or, is desire the only eternal thing for our cultural gods who, by singing from the heart, have gorged themselves with wealth and fame by creating insatiable desire—Beatlemania and the reverence of fans even today? The multiplicity of meanings in Laux’s one-line punch is remarkable for the cascade of new questions it sets off. I found myself examining the post-Beatles activities of its members, mulling over the possibilities of what the answer could be. It brought me up short at the present, with McCartney writing a romantic opera for the New York City Ballet and Starr’s official website displaying a photo of him in a gesture of two fingers up for peace and love. I couldn’t really place a value on the merits or sincerity of these projects. And that seems to be Laux’s brilliant point. Her sarcastic tone evaporates into uncertainty, seeding questions.

The poem “Men” is a deliberately crafted statement, but a statement with subtle lies in it. So the questioning starts again. Laux begins with

It’s tough being a guy, having to be gruff
and buff, the strong silent type, having to laugh
it off—pain, loss, sorrow, betrayal—or leave in a huff

Every line of the poem ends in the “f” sound, except the penultimate line.

Son, brother, husband, lover, father, they are different
from us, except when they fall or stand alone on a wharf.

The word “different” frustrates the pattern of the poem, emphasizing its presence in a way that sets off questions again. There is this doubt. If one were to reverse all the adjectives and metaphors in this poem to make it “easy being a girl,” would the poem say the same thing? And what about the word “lover” in the middle of that same penultimate line? Every other word in the line can only be used to refer to men. The placement makes “they are different” seem ever so slightly like a lie. The final image stating that men and women only seem alike when in suffering or solitude seems ambiguous after that. The question again–is that a good thing?

Interestingly, in the second section of the book, Laux questions her mother, her mother’s friend, her niece, a pregnant mare, Cher, a female neighbor, a female friend, Emily Dickinson–a lot of people who are not men! And there’s a poem about a dog howling at the moon who “has one blind eye, the other one’s looking up.” A poem about gardening, “pulling stones like tumors up,” and another about gold, “Color of JCPenney’s jewelry, trinket / in a Cracker Jack box…” Laux’s collection makes a meandering progress from questioning the gods, to questioning her companions, to questioning the animals and the inanimate objects in our lives. She arrives at the last poem, which is a meditation on trees overlooking water, essentially a nature poem. Here she compacts the questions, so elegantly, in the stark comparison between the pine tree leaning from a cliff over the ocean and the “blossoming cherry growing up over / the shed’s flat roof,” dropping petals into a pond. In this poem, she embraces the passion and desire in human experience at the beginning, and at the end gives us a haunting image of our mortality:

and a few bright petals settle
onto the black pond. They float only a moment
before the moon-colored carp finds them
with his hairy ancient lips, and one by one
carries them down.

The Book of Men as a whole does this, and this final poem mirrors the brilliant movement of the collection from its beginning to end.

Charles Harper Webb’s article about Laux’s poetry in the most recent issue of The Writer’s Chronicle (October/November 2011) focuses of the power of her work. Webb offers some insight into technical elements in her poems, but he concludes that the success of her poetry comes from her willingness to allow her personality to blaze strongly in a way that is accessible to the typical reader. The result is that the enduring quality of human emotions illuminates her poetry. I agree, and I would add that she has let her wisdom blaze here in The Book of Men with her willingness to enter into her own questions unwaveringly.

—A. Anupama

Immersed in Mystery: A Review of Joseph McElroy’s Night Soul and Other Stories — Jason DeYoung

Oct 072011

Immersed in Mystery

Joseph McElroy’s Night Soul and Other Stories

Reviewed by Jason DeYoung

Night Soul and Other Stories
By Joseph McElroy
296 pages, Dalkey Archive Press, $14.95
ISBN-10 1564786021
ISBN-13 9781564786029

Night Soul and Other Stories comprises twelve short stories, each dynamic, powerful, and original. But be forewarned, these stories are not coin-operated narratives that payoff with an oh-so-satisfying clear resolution. No, these stories are more like sophisticated, homemade devices, buzzing and wooly with wires, transmitting a multiplicity of signals—patterns of meaning that confuse as they compound. Often harried by warped syntax, convoluted time, and the chaos of the narrator’s (or character’s) mind at work, they’re not typical well-made short stories. McElroy will not tolerate the prejudice that fiction needs to bow to Clarity. He is the type of writer who will ask, Why can’t a story be an expanding fractal-like mediation on the mysteries of a single event or question? And then asks, why stop there? In short, McElroy’s fiction is difficult.

Joseph McElroy is a long-standing member of the Society of Fat Books (a phrase used by William Vollman). His masterpiece is Women and Men, a novel that clocks in at over a thousand pages, and he is often compared to William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, and, more recently, David Foster Wallace. Night Soul is McElroy’s first collection, and the stories date from early in his career up to the present, allowing a thirty-year perspective on his writing. Though the chronology of when these stories were written isn’t made clear in Night Soul (aptly McElroy-ian), you can see how he has stayed focused and interested in certain concepts, or how he replays a technique to different effect. Throughout the collection there are stories that dovetail thematically and share variations on plot and image.

Most of the central characters are lonely men, at a point of transition. Their lives are often times inverted from those around them, and this eccentricity informs (deforms?) their personalities—“[D]id it matter who he was, going to work when others are going home?” McElroy’s character asks in “Silk, or the Woman with the Bike.” In the same story, the main character says, “I’m in materials,” which is another commonality these characters share—their deep interest in things. They obsess with wood, plastics, bicycles, canoes, and the everyday detritus of living. A character in “Silk” maintains a list of things found on the floors of subway cars. These men, however, present tidily enough to the outside. They enjoy working, which helps ground them in a world they find incomprehensible.

Over and over characters grasp for meaning, but invariably it slips away. In the story “Character,” for instance, the narrator retells a boyhood summer during which he holes up in a toolshed, where he carves a whaleboat. At the beginning, the narrator warns us that this “isn’t a story maybe” and “part of something else.” And he’s right. The real story is that his father, a famous anti-war activist, might have to serve jail time, and the boy’s mother is cheating on the father with one the family’s neighbors. Instead of following this action, we follow the boy’s frictional encounters—as they relate to his carving—with the reality outside the toolshed. When alone he is certain the carving is a whaleboat, over which he works and worries the wood, rhapsodizing descriptions of it. When a dull-witted neighbor interrupts the boy’s whittling, it becomes a “hunk of wood…wasn’t a boat any more.” When he talks to his father about it, the boy doesn’t know what the carving is or will be, but he recognizes its power: “In my palms I was making more than a boat. I think now, What could be more than a boat or more than me? I felt what I was making must be more than a boat. Or must turn into more. I was stuck, and responsible, and doomed, but excellent, no more than I deserved.” When the neighbor’s daughter visits, it transforms into a “pretty amazing little hull.” Finally, when the mother’s lover looks at it, he say there is “hard and soft maple, both of them hardwood….[the model boat] was the soft variety.” The boy’s meaning, or its potential meaning, is dispelled by the lover calling the boat what it is. And this outcome reminds me of a Gilbert Sorrentino story in which the narrator decries we’re surrounded by optical illusions (“Pastilles,” The Moon in Its Flight).

The characters’ search for meaning is generally sought in parallel to their desire for human connection. And language, they believe, is the key to connection. We see this in the title story. A father begins to note of his infant’s babbling. Every eh, uh, gree, ih becomes important to him. He yearns to communicate with the child. It becomes almost a duty. McElroy writes: “He is going to know his son’s language. It is a son’s language. You can do that much.” In another story, “The Man with the Bagful of Boomerangs in the Bois de Boulogne,” the narrator desires to communicate with a boomerang thrower in the famous Pairs garden. He wants to ask the thrower how he got started, but he doesn’t “possess” the French to “accost” the thrower. Instead of learning French in any kind of reasonable way, he dreams (invents) a second thrower, one he can practice his French on. He invents a fiction to confront his reality—a kind of test-drive for how to handle real-life. And in the dream, he finds the “French with which to accost the person” he’s made up just as someone knocks at his door and wakes him. The stilted conversation the narrator eventually has with the actual thrower is rather dull and inconclusive.

And “inconclusive” might be the most accurate words to describe these stories. They are troubling and unsettling in their inconclusiveness, which is the overall take away from this book; if Night Soul is united by anything, it’s by its message that life is uncertainty. In an interview (available on YouTube) McElroy defines difficult as “corrugated and complex, perhaps a more adequate image of the life we’re living.” Elsewhere he writes: “Writing isthinking. Getting somewhere. Even into ignorance.” (“Socrates on the Beach: Thought and Thing“—this is a must read for writers, by the way.) And he portrays this particular vision throughout Night Soul. In “The Unknown Kid” a daughter asks her father repeatedly why he bothered to have her. She receives only a mildly satisfying answer. The father, meanwhile, is puzzled by his daughter’s homework: “math where you didn’t really get right or wrong answers.” In “No Man’s Land,” one of the more political stories in the collection, the puttering lead character constantly wonders, “what is my job.” Uncertainty takes hold in the punctuation of “Mister X.” Many sentences tie up with a baffling “(?).”—“Plavix against heart attack and stroke (?).” And a few of these stories read like the monologue of a person in distress, re-explaining or over-explaining an event, but they can’t quite find the will to shut up about it, mainly because they keep discovering that the more they talk, the more words they use, the more their meaning doesn’t exist when it comes in contact with reality. As one character says: “All this really happened, and I am trying to get it right.”

This is not to say that the book isn’t playful or darkly humorous. In “Mister X,” a punctured bike tire sends the main character to an acupuncturist. “Annals of Plagiary” tells the transactional nature of language as a hydrologist’s (inaccurate) flourish of metaphor in a report written early in his career becomes the inspiration for a mixed media artist’s riverside “installation” of garbage. And in “Particles of Difference,” McElory sets up a conflict between Vic and Flyet, who “buzzes” be let in Vic’s apartment, but he’s “not somebody you let inside your house.” I don’t know if it’s a stretch to conjecture whether McElroy was inspired by the Victor flytraps but I love thinking that he was.

McElroy’s writing is big. The prose in Night Soul is stuffed to the point of exploding with insights and minutiae that showcase both a meticulous eye and an encyclopedic mind. These stories contain multitudes. Dipping into this collection is like putting one’s ear up to a radio that’s slipping its station. You hear nitwit rock, nattering wonks, scratchy Mussorgsky and then something in between; you sense something odd and beguiling in the mix of static, words, and music. Of course, it’s gone before you can make heads-or-tails out of it. I know it sounds like I’m complaining, but I’m not. I really enjoyed these stories for their challenge and for all their strangeness, which inspires. They have what Viktor Shklovsky says art should have—texts that makes the familiar strange, which allows the reader to experience the world afresh. “The shock of the new.” And though I often felt like Homer watching Twin Peaks while I reading Night Soul, I’m okay, happy even, to put my ear up to the radio speaker and immerse myself in the mystery of what I’m hearing.

———————————-

Jason DeYoung lives in Washington, DC. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Fiddleback, Los Angeles Review, New Orleans Review, Harpur Palate, and Numéro Cinq, among others.

James McElroy author photo by Peter Chin.

The Formalist Reformation | Review of Viktor Shklovsky’s Bowstring: On the Dissimilarity of the Similar — Bruce Stone

Jul 082011

But we should remember that Shklovsky attributed a deeply humane and benevolent purpose to the virtuosic machinery of literature: he argued that, by unhinging our habits of cognition, literature refreshes human perception, revitalizes the experience of being alive. —Bruce Stone

Bowstring: On the Dissimiliarity of the Similar
By Viktor Shklovsky, Translated by Shushan Avagyan
468 pages, Dalkey Archive Press, $16.95
978-1-56478-425-4

Viktor Shklovsky’s name has become synonymous with the Russian Formalist movement that he helped to found in the early decades of the 20^th century. With a series of landmark papers, he taught generations of readers that, in the art of literature, content simply doesn’t matter. Form, rather, is where it’s at—the defining feature of the literary work and the singular determinant of its status AS art. He showed us that Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, for example, is structured as a series of elaborate digressions, which sabotage the narrative momentum—a principle he called retardation. He analyzed Cervantes’ Don Quixote, not to expose its roots in 17^th century Spain, but to uncover its concatenating plot, with each of the Don’s new adventures linked tenuously to the preceding, something like a chain of cut-out-paper figures holding hands. He revealed the manner in which Tolstoy rendered familiar concepts, like property ownership, unfamiliar by narrating events from the vantage point of a horse: this technique he dubbed estrangement. For Shklovsky, literary works were not documents of social history or human psychology; they were neither comedies nor tragedies. Instead, they were best understood as language experiments devised to tactically derange our notions of life and of literature. To everyone except writers of fiction and poetry, this position sounds distressingly inhuman, painfully mechanical, regrettably ahistorical, perhaps even philosophically bogus. And indeed, these are some of the very charges that have been leveled against Formalist poetics from the start. But we should remember that Shklovsky attributed a deeply humane and benevolent purpose to the virtuosic machinery of literature: he argued that, by unhinging our habits of cognition, literature refreshes human perception, revitalizes the experience of being alive.

For many North American readers, this is the Shklovsky we know, a Shklovsky we remember, a literary insurrectionist who resides, under lock and key, in a narrow chamber of the past. As it happens, history has contributed to Shklovsky’s temporal incarceration. Born in 1893, Shklovsky’s intellectual coming of age coincided with the sparking of the Soviet revolution, and the Party politics of the era proved hostile to the subversive, cheerfully antisocial poetics of the Formalists. Although Shklovsky lived through both World Wars, endured two periods of punitive exile, and survived into his nineties—working steadily all the while—he essentially disappeared from view. Much of his work sat relatively idle for years, awaiting publication outside the Soviet Union. For all intents and purposes, Shklovsky has remained under intellectual quarantine, marooned on an island gulag, a casualty of Cold-War power politics that essentially retarded the course of his career and limited his role on the world stage of literary criticism and theory.

No longer.

Dalkey Archive Press has undertaken the project of publishing, for the first time in English, much of the maturing Shklovsky’s output: Knight’s Move (2005), Energy of Delusion (2007), Literature and Cinematography (2009), and now Bowstring: On the Dissimilarity of the Similar (2011) have all been published in the last decade. And we greet the arrival of these works with joy, gratitude and some trepidation, as if we were welcoming home a family member long absent due to calamity, presumed dead: an Odysseus, an Elle, a Crusoe.

Bowstring was first published in 1970, and the Shklovsky writing this work bears a passing resemblance to the one we remember. But deep changes have been wrought in the man, and the book reads as a revision, inclining to a recantation, of several of his most influential ideas. The text is strange: encyclopedic in scope, promiscuous in genre, willfully disjunctive and aphoristic in style, often frustrating and intermittently scintillating. Reading Bowstring isn’t always a thrill ride. However, for anyone interested in the legacy of Formalism—which includes everything that we conceive of as craft instruction in creative writing—the publication of this book is profoundly consequential. It shows us the evolution of Shklovsky’s thought, a momentous instance of theoretical rapprochement, reconciling the Formalist vision with the views of skeptics. Further, in aggregate, the work is a manifesto of sorts—a little wistful, a bit opaque—about the purpose and processes of literature. This alone suggests that readers of every stripe should consult Bowstring. The book allows us to take the measure of latter-day Formalism, and, like all great books, it takes the measure of us.

LITERARY SOLITAIRE

Shklovsky tells us directly what he’s up to in Bowstring, but he does so haphazardly, often ambushing readers with summations of purpose. In the course of a chapter titled “The Unity of Structures,” he remarks, “I am writing this book to refute the very convincing and ingeniously articulated idea of art censorship carried out by Tolstoy, and to refute his relationship and methods of crossing things out.” Never mind, for the moment, the problem of unpacking the sense of the last clause (his relationship?). Shklovsky doesn’t tell us that he is referring here, presumably, to Tolstoy’s own manifesto, “What is Art?” (1897), in which the writer cites the capacity for emotional communion as the defining feature of literature. Perhaps Shklovsky feels that clarification is unnecessary, but he also chooses not to prosecute this disagreement in a linear and explicit fashion. Rather, Shklovsky counters Tolstoy (whom he reveres, naturally, as an artist and countryman) by indirection; he mounts a cumulative assault that emerges as he careers idiosyncratically through the annals of world literature. In fact, the entire first half of the book feels evasive—it’s hard to follow the thread, despite these nudges from the author. But in the second half of the book, the fireworks start to fly, the cannons boom, and we better understand the rhyme and reason of Bowstring. Very near the end, Shklovsky writes, acknowledging the text’s chaotic nature, “I am trying to remain within the limits of a single work, but the purpose of my book is an attempt to grasp the mobility of the literary work and the multiplicity of its meanings.” We come to see that this is exactly what Shklovsky has wrought.

To capture the “mobility of the literary work,” Shklovsky casts a wide net, touching—at times glancingly—on everything from the epic of Gilgamesh to John Updike’s The Centaur, from Rabelais and Cervantes to Dostoevsky and Thomas Mann. He discusses fairy tales and parables, Shakespeare and Pushkin, ancient Hindu sacred narratives, and he also comments on techniques in painting and cinema. On occasion, we’re privy to the jotted marginalia of V.I. Lenin, reading Hegel, and of Tolstoy, on Shakespeare. It’s a dazzling array of material, all of which is relevant to his task, certainly. Yet the sheer variety and abundance of Shklovsky’s interests gives you a taste of the scattershot method of the book. The course of a page might span centuries and continents, and thus, the writer often articulates his conclusions arcanely, and not always convincingly. In Bowstring, you will encounter more one-sentence paragraphs than perhaps in any other work of literary theory since Friedrich Schlegel’s Fragments, and such paragraphs, as a rule, cohere only loosely and implicitly. For example, in a chapter on Shakespeare, one of the book’s weaker moments, Shklovsky says this about Othello:

The astonishing thing for Shakespeare is not that Desdemona fell in love with he Moor, but why the Moor didn’t trust her love. Why did he believe in Iago’s words, blindly accepting the petty rumor and its intended malevolence, yet didn’t believe in simple love?

This new meaning of inequality is Shakespeare’s own discovery.

Shylock is a villain to Shakespeare.

In this run of paragraphs, Shklovsky skips from Othello to The Merchant of Venice to, eventually, Romeo and Juliet, only grazing the evidence that shores up his assessment. To be fair, the surrounding pages help to flesh in some of the support for Shklovky’s conclusions; however, Shklovsky does very little of this explanatory work for the reader. His compositional method is one of willful juxtaposition, strategically withholding the connective tissue that binds the observations together in the manner of a conventional argument.

Astute readers will notice already that the humanistic tenor of Shklovsky’s analysis bears little resemblance to the mechanistic cerebrations of hard-core Formalism (simple love?!). For now, suffice it to say that, with regard to the book’s argumentative armature, Shklovsky knows exactly what he’s doing; he takes the trouble to “lay bare” his chosen device (a phrase Shklovsky coined) as he discusses the technique of cinematic montage, drawing on the work of Sergei Eisenstein. The montage, with its atemporal juxtapositions and its implicit logic, is exactly the figure for Shklovsky’s method in this book. He stacks his observations side by side, rapidly shifting the focus, often requiring readers to infer the connections—rather like a man laying out cards in a game of Solitaire. Conveniently and quite brilliantly, this method reflects the writer’s newfound vision of literature. For example, Shklovsky finds the technique of “vertical montage” at work in Crime and Punishment (he sketches a list of competing thematic conflicts), and he also arrives at the conclusion that what is true of the internal components of a single work is also true of the body of world literature. Near the end of Bowstring, he summarizes his position plainly: “I think that every work of art, as a link in a self-abnegating process, is juxtaposed against other works of art.”

This stylistic agenda yields a work that is disjunctive, sharply contrapuntal, even giddily discontinuous. However, readers are richly compensated for their pains as virtually every page of Bowstring contains a radiant apothegm, a one-sentence koan of arresting power. Of the fairy tale, he writes, for example, “The heroes of folklore are strewn with ashes of sorrow, they are sprinkled with the salt of difficult paths—journeys in the sea.” These accesses of poetry are also evident in the book’s Prologue and Epilogue, passages of terse, descriptive lyricism that disclose, in microcosm, something of the writer’s grand vision:

Nightingales sang below my window, or maybe they weren’t nightingales at all.

They don’t care that they have been exhausted in poetry; they don’t know that they’ve been refuted.

Then spring comes. Trees bloom one after the other, nightingales sing and crows caw.

Someone even heard the blackbirds. They imitate other birds.

The nightingales are still on their way.

THE FORMALIST REFORMED

Shklovsky’s sympathy for those outmoded nightingales reveals a deep vein in Bowstring, its concern with the persistence of the past. But Shklovsky himself acknowledges that this is hardly new, and in fact, Bowstring ultimately proffers conclusions that seem eerily familiar. For example, Shklovsky cites Heraclitus, offering a glimpse of his position regarding the interpretation of individual works: Many readers “do not understand how that which differs from itself is in agreement: harmony consists of opposing tension, like that of the bow and the lyre.” Here, we feel the resonance of Bowstring’s title: the power, the beauty, the functionality and the very existence of literary works depend upon conflict and contradiction, a tension between opposing elements. And later, Shklovsky writes, “Let me remind you of this book’s subject: it is trying to prove that at the basis of every artistic work, every stage in artistic construction, lie similar principles of revealing the contradictions, that the artistic processes of various epochs and nations are universal in this phenomenon and hence comprehensible to us.” This premise sounds a lot like party-line New Criticism, the British and American critical movement most closely linked to Formalism both historically and ideologically. In “The Language of Paradox,” Cleanth Brooks outlines a virtually identical set of conclusions about literary structures and their universality; he argues that irreducible contradiction (or paradox) is the structural principle that organizes all great works of art. Shklovsky and Brooks are unlikely bedfellows, even now, and Shklovsky does add some new wrinkles to this theoretical position. But since Shklovsky never cites Brooks, or references New Critics, it remains possible that he’s simply unaware of the proximity of their vantage points.

What’s new in Shklovsky stems from the remnants of his rehabilitated Formalism and his emphasis on genre conventions. Shklovsky argues, albeit obliquely, that art evolves through a process of generic mutation: genre conventions eventually grow stale, and new writers explode those conventions through a process of comparative juxtaposition. And this is the upshot of Bowstring’s subtitle, On the Dissimilarity of the Similar: new works of art preserve the outmoded genre conventions, even as they subvert them—“The similar turns out to be dissimilar.” Perhaps the clearest snapshot of Shklovsky’s revised interpretive method arrives in his analysis of Alexander Pushkin’s short poem “I Loved You Once.” Shklovsky offers a long quotation from Roman Jakobson’s Formalist reading of the poem, a paragraph dense with linguistic jargon that says virtually nothing about the poem’s ostensible content. To this interpretation Shklovsky remarks, “It seems that this analysis didn’t bring the poem any closer to the reader.” And Shklovsky goes on to show how the poetic “content” inevitably bleeds into Jakobson’s analysis, ultimately leading Shklovsky to deal more fully with the poem’s theme, its content, and its relation to matters of form and technique. He notes the way the love poem draws on the conventions of classical rhetoric to find its form, producing an unusual combination, a linguistic fusion of the public and the private, the impersonal and the personal, the high and the low, the old and the new. Shklovsky summarizes his assessment: “The poet’s forceful, imageless and as if unfinished address to the woman is an example of a unique negative form, which in this instance becomes especially powerful.”

In Bowstring, Shklovsky seriously modifies, and in some cases disavows, many of the core principles that constitute Formalist theory. Of the one-time divorcing of form and content, Shklovsky now writes, “We mustn’t separate the plot-evental structure of the work from its verbal structure. They don’t coincide but they are correlated.” Elsewhere, he puts the matter more bluntly: “A long time ago I declared something rashly. I said that a work of art is the ‘sum total of its devices.’ I said it so long ago that I can only remember the refutation.” What is this if not a direct recantation of the traditional Formalist distinction between fabula (plot-evental structure, or content) and suzhet (verbal structure, or form)? It’s a little like Prometheus renouncing the gift of fire.

Similarly, Shklovsky speaks of “the notion of estrangement,” a central tenet of Formalist theory, as if it belonged to another time: “There used to be an old term—ostranenie or estrangement.” Granted, he doesn’t turn fully or consistently apostate on this or other points. For example, he still considers the literary character—and the writer him or herself—as a “person out of place,” a person with a strained perception of the world, alienated from the ordinary, essentially estranged. And old-school Formalism still informs his analyses; at one point, he describes the plot structures of “realist” narratives as approximating a “dashed line”—that is, containing gaps in the chronology to omit irrelevant intervals (very few narratives are strictly continuous). And he sounds very much like his old self, paraphrasing his insights in “The Resurrection of the Word” (1914), when he remarks on the artistic project of poets like Pushkin, “It’s true, they use only words, but those are extraordinary words that are felt through the mouth, that renew thought and disrupt the sclerosis of concepts.” The similar and the dissimilar coexist here, too.

However, Shklovsky discusses very candidly the faulty premises on which he had founded his interpretive house. On the matter of defamiliarization, or estrangement, which he had said restores the sensation of life, he writes, “I should have asked myself: what exactly are you going to estrange if art doesn’t express the conditions of reality? Sterne, Tolstoy were trying to return the sensation of what?” In this regard, Bowstring is truly jaw-dropping. Shklovsky reflects on his early work and renders an unequivocal verdict: first-wave Formalism was terminally, almost comically, flawed.

CONTENT AND CONTEXT

In large part, the recuperation of fabula and the modification of estrangement require Shklovsky to account for the historicity of literary texts, their relations to their immediate historical contexts. And this he does. He discusses Don Quixote, in part, as a period piece: “the difference between the actions of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza is social.” Elsewhere, he invokes (repeatedly) a quote from Albert Einstein that asserts the primacy of experience over language, as if we can know the world and its phenomena firsthand, unmediated by words and forms. These are huge, perhaps heretical, concessions from a card-carrying Formalist, and though Shklovsky consistently writes, in this fashion, with hat in hand, his heart sometimes appears to be elsewhere, not engaged in the work. He often deals with history in the most cursory and brittle fashion, offering sweeping generalizations about places and eras. Even so, it seems that, in the English-speaking world, Formalism can never really be the same in the wake of Bowstring’s publication.

The tendency to historicize and contextualize is evident not just in Shklovsky’s textual analysis; it’s also woven more thoroughly into the fabric of Bowstring. Among the layers of Shklovsky’s textual montage, he veers twice into biography, narrating the lives and deaths of two colleagues: Boris Eichenbaum, who wrote a famous paper “How Gogol’s Overcoat Is Made,” and Yuri Tynjanov, who wrote the less-well-known Archaists and Innovators. Eichenbaum, we learn, died under absurd circumstances, immediately following the delivery of a lecture that flopped (he expires in his chair in the audience). Tynjanov died progressively of multiple sclerosis, an eerie revelation if we recall Shklovsky’s pronouncements on poetry.

In both cases, the biographies include descriptions of the Petersburg environs, of landscapes and architecture, of the exigencies of politics and war (the Decembrist uprising, the siege of Leningrad), of the city’s evolution over time. And one gets the sense that Shklovsky is here explicitly linking his theory of literature to the convulsions of history: the two domains behave analogously. Of both the literary work and the city of Petersburg, he writes that it is composed of “systems of systems.” And he might be referring both to texts and to people when he writes, “We live simultaneously in multiple temporal realms.” In the same historicizing spirit, Shklovsky frequently slides into autobiography and sketches something of the root causes that led to his revision of Formalist theory: his own experiences as a writer of fiction and memoir seem to have contributed to his change of heart. He confesses, “Back then I used to say that art had no content, that it was devoid of emotion, while at the same time I wrote books that bled, like A Sentimental Journey and ZOO.”

And it is the merging of life and art, history and textuality, that results in one of Bowstring’s most powerful and beautiful passages. Shklovsky begins the chapter “The Road into the Future and the Past (An Unfinished Story)” by summarizing a manuscript that Tolstoy had abandoned. It’s the story of a military man, a major Verein, riding toward his post on a rainy night, his overcoat “reeking of soap from wetness.” Verein envisions his ideal future, a place with “a wife in a white bonnet, children playing in front of the balcony and picking flowers for papa.” At length, Verein nods off and awakes to find himself residing in the future he had imagined. He enters his house where his wife, out of temper, insists on nursing their two-year-old child (who is too old for such nursing). Then, in a startling turn, without segue or comment, Shklovsky leaps from the story to autobiography, writing,

I have lived a long life, I have seen crowds, been on many roads, and I know what a wet overcoat smells like.

I live simultaneously in the old world and the new.

I have been reading books by Structuralists with interest, difficulty and benefit. I am getting acquainted.

I’m not surprised to appear in the middle of a conversation. Everything is interesting, but forgive the man who has long been absent from theory.

In an instant, we recognize that Tolstoy’s story is an analogue of and proxy for Shklovsky’s own experience. And Shklovsky presses this relation farther; he writes,

Here, as before—forty years later—they are still primarily analyzing the poem; of course now they have applied mathematics to it, as it was expected a long time ago.

They still haven’t weaned the child from the breast and she’s already grown! The weather is pleasant, but everyone is walking dressed up in academic clothes.

The characters and conflicts of Tolstoy’s story supply Shklovsky with a poignant metaphorical vocabulary for describing his own plight as a theorist. The method, here, is less rigidly juxtapositional than searingly prismatic; instead of side-by-side comparison, shimmering palimpsest. And though this chapter concludes, typically, with another rapid and seemingly incongruous turn—as Shklovsky summarizes another tale, this one by Jules Verne—the strategy retains its power. The Verne story illustrates the point that human beings, including literary theorists, are bound to discover that “ideas repeat”; on voyages of discovery, without immediately recognizing the fact, we find ourselves retracing our own footsteps. The past and the present, like texts and contexts, are densely interwoven, impossible to disentangle.

NET GAME

Shklovsky’s ambivalent relationship to time helps to explain a comical turn in Bowstring. In a run of short chapters, he prosecutes, almost fifty years too late, a disagreement with Vladimir Propp on the structures of folkloric narratives. Even so, this impulse to grind old axes leads to perhaps the best sustained analyses in the book, as Shklovsky spars impressively with Mikhail Bakhtin and his Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics and Rabelais and His World. Ironically, the same charge that Shklovsky levels against Bakhtin’s work might well be leveled at Bowstring: “Bakhtin possesses the attributes of a discoverer and an inventor, but the scope of his generalizations sometimes turns into a sea, engulfing the already-found specificities.”

In the long view, Bowstring delivers joy and pain in nearly equal measure. Among its many beauties, this book shows us something of Shklovsky’s humanity, a kind of avuncular self-consciousness, given to lapses into faux-naif autocommentary: of one of the book’s long block quotations, Shklovsky observes, “I decided to end the quote at the ellipsis—it’s too long, anyway.” But finally, he arrives at conclusions that, while more sound, seem less riveting than those flawed propositions of his radical youth. (Sometimes being right is simply the less interesting alternative.) It might have been enough for him to conclude, as Tzvetan Todorov does when defending Structuralist poetics against the (posthumous) ire of Henry James, that the distinction between form and content, suzhet and fabula, can be a useful fallacy. It allows us to concentrate our attentions in new ways on literary works, to see new facets of their construction, and perhaps this remains the necessary first step before we can synthesize the two poles once more.

Further, in a long chapter on the failings of Thomas Mann’s monolithic Joseph and His Brothers, Shklovsky seems to break character, disappointing our expectations, as he formulates his criticisms in flimsy terms: he says of one episode that it “is treated rather conventionally. It’s inaccurate. It has been needlessly prolonged and it lacks in emotion.” More broadly, he quibbles, “the descriptions in Mann’s novel are too wordy and the characters are too eloquent”—a statement that he follows, bafflingly, with the assertion “Every epoch has its conventions of representation that must be followed.” This sentence, in isolation, is difficult to reconcile with his argument that those conventions are refreshed through subversion and violation.

Perhaps most distressingly, in the book’s penultimate chapter, titled “Return the Ball into the Game,” Shklovsky stakes out a position that is all too familiar to any fiction writer. He bemoans novelists who would write about novel-writing, poets who would write about composing poems—that is, those who make fabula of suzhet, content of form. Shklovsky compares such writers to the characters in Antonioni’s Blow-Up who play tennis without a ball. These writers, the conventional wisdom goes, sap the life from art. There is wisdom in this injunction, naturally, but coming from Shklovsky, it feels like a confession elicited under bare-bulb duress, a defeatist compromise struck between his revolutionary ideas and the precepts of Socialist art.

In the end, the publication of Bowstring is a major literary event. This book radically alters the legacy of Russian Formalism and contains abundant rewards for anyone with a vested interest in the art of literature. And it’s a testament to Shklovsky’s achievement that his own words, on Mann and his multi-volume boondoggle, best summarize the experience of reading Bowstring: “Sometimes [the book] succeeds, other times it fails. Occasionally it is hard to turn the pages. But the path that Mann chose is the path of a person who carries with him not objects but ideas, who does not want to lose the magnitude of the past.”

—Bruce Stone

Bruce Stone is a Wisconsin native and graduate of Vermont College (MFA, 2002). In 2004, he served as the contributing editor for a good book on Douglas Glover’s fiction, The Art of Desire (Oberon Press). His essays have appeared in Miranda, Nabokov Studies, Review of Contemporary Fiction and Salon. His fiction has appeared most recently in Straylight and Numéro Cinq. You can hear him talk about fiction writing here. He teaches writing and literature at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside.

Summoning Eternity: Review of Ingrid Winterbach’s The Book of Happenstance — Jacob Glover

Jun 172011

Author Photo by Val Adamson

The Book of Happenstance
Ingrid Winterbach
Open Letter Books
Paperback, 254 pages, $11.95
978-1-934824-33-7

Though Ingrid Winterbach sets her novel, The Book of Happenstance, in contemporary South Africa, a country dominated by a history of racial oppression, the book is not about race or the inheritance of Apartheid. The Book of Happenstance is about memory and death, yet paradoxically so, for the novel is ebulliently alive, ironic and smart. The characters seem hyper-linked to Google and Wikipedia; the book is full of spontaneous eruptions of intelligence, and that is fun to read.

Winterbach (who wrote earlier works under the pseudonym Lettie Viljoen) lives in South Africa with her husband and two daughters. She has a degree in Afrikaans—one of the main characters of the novel is an expert in Afrikaans. She is also a visual artist and has won all kinds of awards for her work in her native land including the W. A. Hofmeyr Prize, the M-Net Book Prize (for the book in hand), the University of Johannesburg Award, and the Hertzog Prize. The new English version of The Book of Happenstance, just out with Open Letter Books, was co-translated by Winterbach herself and Dirk Winterbach (I checked but was unable to pin down the relationship).

The novel is about a middle-aged woman, Helena Verbloem, hired on a research grant to help compile a dictionary with the scholar Theo Verwey. One night thieves break into Helena’s house, steal her sentimentally priceless sea shell collection, and shit on the floor. When the police appear uninterested in helping her recover the shells, Helena starts investigating the robbery herself. Some of the missing shells have turned up at the feet of a recent suicide, a man who killed himself by hanging.

The shell investigation trajectory involves two visits to a town a day’s drive away where the suicide (and his family) lived. Helen and her girlfriend Sof meet the locals in bars, disguise themselves as members of a Bible group delivering pamphlets, take pictures of the suicide house, question family and friends and come up with precisely nothing. In fact, what they learn is that the shells are gone, who knows where, and that her house had been broken into by accident by men looking for drugs. At one point Sof quotes the opening lines of Kafka’s The Castle: K has just arrived, the Castle is hidden in mist and fog, the village shrouded in snow, gazes up into “seeming emptiness.” Of course, the passage is even more enigmatic because it’s quoted in Afrikaans.

The shell plot is comic and Kafkaesque and ends in apparent inconsequence. The novel’s parallel plot belongs to Theo and Helena in the museum—less action than the quasi-investigation plot but many delightful scenes. The work scenes go like this: Theo and Helena sit in an office organizing words into alphabetical order, Helena fantasizes, talks about books, sometimes she asks Theo about a word and he—a human dictionary—answers with comic completeness in little essays like entries in an etymological database. Helena is obviously attracted to Theo, but the attraction is an intellectual crush not so much a romantic longing and certainly not lust.

Slotted between the interwoven main plots are a series of recurring but unplotted scenes in a tea room, more often than not Helen and another museum friend drinking, yes, tea and discussing the origin of life and evolution. These scenes are comic, exasperating—Helena’s naïve and ingenuous questions prompting lengthy, erudite answers which she seems to ignore half the time (inserting lengthy parenthetical scene commentary in the middle of the explanations). Helena’s interest in life no doubt evolves out of the context of death that surrounds her. Already, as novel begins, Helena’s parents and sister are dead, her brother estranged, she herself is divorced, her daughter is out of touch.

The novel is written in the first-person present tense. The present tense conveys immediacy and a kind of spontaneous propulsion that more conventional past tense Freitag-ular narratives don’t. In other words, Winterbach’s novel didn’t happen it keeps happening, throwing itself forward with a kind of whimsical blind hopefulness, a summoning of eternity.

In the first two sentences Winterbach announces the time frame of the novel: March to October—in March Helena starts working on the Afrikans dictionary with Theo Verwey, and by October Theo is dead. At the outset, we know the parameters, we know the course of the novel; Winterbach seems to splice the story out of the larger reel of time and in the same act warrant its significance, as Walter Benjamin suggests in his essay “The Storyteller.” “Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.”

Much of the novel consists of memories and reflections. When writing the memories Winterbach steps in and makes a stylistic choice. She writes a number of the memories in the past tense and some in the present and, a few times, seems to mix the two. The weaving of tenses together seems to add to the eternal bracket around the novel. Winterbach wants Happenstance to break out of linear time and rest securely in the present. Therefore, even the memories, past events, occasionally happen in the present. There is, I think, an ironized search for the eternal in the novel. The shells in their way seems to represent something beyond time to Helena, considering “their beauty restored [her] trust in all of creation” (59). At one point Helena’s friend Sof says, “I’ve just read and interesting article… All writers are actually pursuing a single ideal, namely the universal.” To which Helena replies dryly, “I’ve always thought the universal to be suspect.” (130). But her denial rings with irony.

Happenstance is a terrific read. It is consciously intellectual without being pretentious or didactic. It is smart and knows it but the irony runs deep. Against the etymology, we have Helena obsessing over the shit on her carpet; she associates the lingering smell of aftershave in her apartment with crime, so that she qualifies every clean-shaven man with the thought: Could he have shat on my rug and stolen my shells? And then there is the whole Sof/husband subplot: Sof’s hatred for her husband and her desire to have an affair with a crippled pediatrician. Even Theo’s funeral has a comic aspect: a member of the museum staff, nicknamed Sailor, shows up drunk, wearing a natty white suit, and tries to jump into the grave with the coffin.

Finally: Why happenstance? The title of the English translation seems to refer the coincidental nature of the crime, the shell-robbery, perhaps the Kafkaesque and coincidental nature of all life. The novel forces the death of Theo Verwey and the loss of Helena’s shells together, but their juncture is conditional, fleeting and evanescent, means almost nothing except in the pleasurable connection of words, obsession, human affection, and our ultimate end (itself likely to be comic). It is all happenstance.

(Read an excerpt from the novel here.)

—Jacob Glover

Jacob Glover is studying Classics & Philosophy at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His work has been published previously on Numéro Cinq: essays (on Kierkegard, Montaigne, and Spinoza), translations, and poems.

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This Ancient World: Review of Mathias Énard’s Zone — Mary Stein

May 082011

This Ancient World
A Review of Mathias Énard’s Zone
by Mary Stein

Zone
By Mathias Énard
Translated by Charlotte Mandell
Open Letter Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-934824-9

I am lucky enough to have experienced the horrors of war only indirectly in the form of newspaper articles and television newscasts. I remember small blue-on-black explosions of sparkling shards arching through Iraq’s sky, ticker tape reeling across the bottom of the screen attempting to quantify casualties like stock market quotes. But in 1991 during the First Gulf War, a series of wars began tearing Yugoslavia apart—a nation splitting at cultural and political seams—and in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Montenegro, people were faced with an entirely different wartime experience: Instead of watching dim explosions on the television, they found war erupting in their cities, backyards, homes and bodies.

Translator, Charlotte Mandell

Zone, Mathias Énard’s fourth novel (of five), his first novel translated into English is an attempt to articulate the experience of the Balkan wars from the inside. Charlotte Mandell’s deft translation from French highlights Zone’s lyric quality, conveying the retroactive point of view of a narrator who condenses the personal and cultural impact of the Yugoslav wars along with historical war crimes, genocides and ethnic cleansings dating back to Troy.

Zone’s narrator, Francis Servain Mirkovic, is a French-born Croat, a former soldier who fought “…for a free and independent Croatia, a free and independent Herzegovina and finally for a free and independent Croatian Bosnia…,” thus, in his own mind, straddling the boundary between victim and perpetrator. In the present story of the novel, Mirkovic is a spy for French intelligence collecting stories of war crimes “…like someone who becomes a referee having been a boxer and himself no longer touches the faces that explode beneath fists, he counts the blows…”

Under the influence of alcohol and amphetamines, Mirkovic has just boarded a train from Milan to Rome intending to sell the Vatican another “sad piece of the past in an entirely ordinary plastic suitcase wherein is written the fate of hundreds of men who are dead or on the point of disappearing…” Using the identity of a childhood friend, Yvan Deroy, as a cover, Mirkovic finds himself “lost now with an assumed name between Milan and Rome, in the company of living ghosts.” A bizarre interaction with a stranger further unhinges Mirkovic, inciting a state of post-traumatic stress. As Mirkovic’s train crosses city boundaries, his erratic mind wanders, and he finds himself unable to separate his own trauma-tainted memories from the stories and names of the dead that fill his suitcase.

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LITERARY SOLITAIRE

THE FORMALIST REFORMED

CONTENT AND CONTEXT

NET GAME

This Ancient World A Review of Mathias Énard’s Zone by Mary Stein

Zone By Mathias Énard Translated by Charlotte Mandell Open Letter Books ISBN-13: 978-1-934824-9

This Ancient World
A Review of Mathias Énard’s Zone
by Mary Stein

Zone
By Mathias Énard
Translated by Charlotte Mandell
Open Letter Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-934824-9