Click 
The winner of Three Percent’s Best Translated Book is Gail Hareven’s The Confessions of Noa Weber, translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu and published by Melville House.
If it’s better than Ghosts and The Tanners, two of my top ten books of last year, then it’s a must read. And as Melville House is one of my favorite publishers (in fact, my next review will be a Melville House book), I wonder why I know next to nothing about this book. Click here for Three Percent’s announcement where you can find links to the press release.
I was wary of Penelope Fitzgerald. I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s something about an author publishing her first four novels in four years. But to offset that, this outburst of fiction (The Golden Child, 1977; The Bookshop, 1978; Offshore, 1979; and Human Voices, 1980) began when she was sixty years old — and those were some exceedingly cultivated sixty years. These books were well received, and she has the good opinion of many discriminating critics. So, perhaps she published her first four novels in four years, but when I think about it, there is something miraculous in her literary career: in eighteen years toward the end of her life, she published nine books of fiction. If this was a true artistic explosion and not just someone who tacked together a working formula, it couldn’t be missed. I decided to start by reading Offshore (1979; Booker Prize).
I love how the book begins, such a sly attention grabber:
‘Are we to gather that Dreadnought is asking us all to do something dishonest?’ Richard asked.
Dreadnought nodded, glad to have been understood so easily.
It turns out that Dreadnought is one of several houseboats in Battersea Reach on the Thames. Its owner is Willis, a sixty-five-year-old painter, and he has plans to sell his boat and move to land where he can live with his widowed sister. However, the boat is old and not worth much — but, perhaps it could be worth a bit more . . .
Richard, captain of the boat Lord Jim, is the de facto leader of the small community set in Battersea Reach. It probably goes without saying that Fitzgerald’s characters are people living on the fringe of society. Living neither on the land nor on the sea, these are characters who don’t fit well in society. Besides Dreadnought and Lord Jim (and others), this community also includes Maurice and Grace. Maurice lives on Maurice (the boat used to be named Dondeschipolschuygen IV, but Maurice renamed it when he found out everyone referred to each other by their boat’s name). Maurice’s male clients are there most of the night, but it’s the man who stores his merchandise on the boat that causes the most fear. Nenna lives on Gracewith her two young daughters, Tilda and Martha. When Nenna’s husband, Edward, returned from South America a failure, his wife’s situation on the boat was still below him.
Offshorerevolves around these strange, basically lonely characters. They frequently encounter each other, they are friendly, they do form part of a community, but the loneliness, the separateness remains. And that is all due to Fitzgerald’s wonderful prose. The following quote, for example, says so much about Nenna and her two daughters. On the surface, it sounds somewhat hopeful, as they like to see their situation. But there’s a desperation beyond the obvious. There’s an intimation into what could happen when Martha and Tilda grow up a bit more.
Martha and Tilda were in the position of having no spending money, but this was less important when they were not attending school and were spared the pains of comparison, and they felt no bitterness against their mother, because she hadn’t any either. Nenna believed, however, that she would have some in the spring, when three things would happen, each, like some melting ice-floes, slowly moving the next one on. Edward would come and live on Grace, which would save the rent he was paying on his rooms at present; the girls, once they were not being prayed for at the grotto, would agree to go back to the nuns; and with Tilda at school she could go out herself and look for a job.
Nenna is, in many ways, the central character. The other characters have their unique stories, but more time is spent on Nenna, which is proper. Not only is Nenna’s story intriguing but Fitzgerald has given her a fabulous interior dialogue:
. . . Nenna’s thoughts, whenever she was alone, took the form of a kind of perpetual magistrate’s hearing, in which her own version of her marriage was shown as ridiculously simple and demonstrably right, and then, almost exactly at the same time, as incontrovertibly wrong. Her conscience, too, held, quite uninvited, a separate watching brief, and intervened in the proceedings to read statements of an unwelcome nature.
For glorious pages Nenna is interrogated by this judge as her husband, the plaintiff, sits in the background. Though this goes on for pages, Fitzgerald doesn’t overdo it. This technique doesn’t take over Nenna’s personality, and it still allows Nenna’s sad story to be told.
Though short, this book actually took me quite a bit of time to read. The story and the characters are complex. Though Fitzgerald’s sentences hold this complexity well, they are intricate and complex in and of themselves and take some time to digest. The book demanded time. But it was time so well spent. I loved this book.
An interesting part of going through old issues of The New Yorker is seeing how the stories dealt with the then-current events. The last Clock at the Biltmore – Christopher Isherwood’s ”I Am Waiting” – featured the anxiety of 1939 when World War II was about to begin; there the character goes five years into the future and looks for answers about the state of the world in 1944.
Irwin Shaw’s ”Preach on the Dusty Roads” was published on August 22, 1942, less than a year after the United States entered World War II. I didn’t know it when I started reading the story, but its primary concern is World War II. In fact, more than “I Am Waiting,” which was kind of a satire, “Preach on the Dusty Roads” threatens to be a sentimental call to action. Another interesting part of going through old issues of The New Yorker? Looking at the cover art through the century. You pretty much always know what part of the century you’re in:
Click for a larger image.
Irwin Shaw published nearly three dozen stories in The New Yorker between 1937 and 1955. I selected one from roughly the middle, though I was tempted by “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses.” It’s easy to see why he was so often published. “Preach on the Dusty Roads” begins beautifully. I have marked almost the entire section as material I should find a way to quote here. Of course, I won’t do that, but it is hard to pick out what to pull. Well, here’s the first paragraph:
Nelson Weaver sat at his desk and wrote, “Labor . . . Bridgeport plant . . . 1,435,639.77.” Then he put his sharply pointed, hard pencil down among the nine other sharply pointed, hard pencils arrayed in severe line on the right side of the shining desk, below the silver-framed photograph of his dead wife.
We already have a good idea about Nelson Weaver’s personality, and Shaw helps us feel the tedium and melancholy with a few well chosen details placed side by side in a long sentence. Nelson is an accountant in some Manhattan firm. He takes some time out of his work to look out his window. Below him are a few buildings that sit between him and the Hudson River. When I read the story, I was sitting in my own Manhattan office, which overlooks the Hudson. I was, in fact, taking a break from reading accounting reports (thankfully, I don’t prepare them). I wonder who could describe my life and demeanor in such a succinct sentence. And, after reading this next passage, I wondered how a masterful sentence about my own work would sound; the rhythm here is superb, the tedious job changed into an art:
The tax sheets for Marshall & Co., Valves and Turbines, were nearly done. He had sat at this desk for thirty-five days, working slowly and carefully, from time to time deliberately putting down a number on a page, like Cézanne with his six strokes a day on a water color, until the huge, elaborate structure of Marshall & Co.’s finances, which reached from bank to bank and country to country, from Wilmington, Delaware, where it was incorporated, to Chungking, China, where it sold electrical equipment to Chiang Kai-shek — until all this sprawling, complex history of money paid and money gained and credit offered and rejected and profit and loss, palpable and impalpable, was laid bare and comprehensible on five short pages of his clean accountant’s figures.
The already energetic prose — surprisingly energetic considering we are reading about a hyper-organized accountant just finishing up a tax report — builds with intensity as Nelson keeps looking at the clock. It turns out he is waiting for Robert to come along. We get a report at 10:35. A few paragraphs later we get to 10:40; then 10:43. And if we didn’t already feel sorry for Nelson, Shaw starts to let us see just how this job has affected him:
10:47. No Robert yet. Nelson put down the paper because the figures were beginning to jump before his eyes. More and more frequently, he found that happening to him. Well, along with the waistline that grew an inch a year and the tendency to wake at five in the morning and his lack of shock at overhearing people calling him a middle-aged gentleman, that had to be expected of a man who had led a quiet, rather unhealthy life at a desk and was now over fifty . . .
Robert, it turns out, is Nelson’s son. He comes into Nelson’s office wearing his new lieutenant’s uniform. Most of the remainder of the story describes their travel to Grand Central Station where, sometime after noon, Robert is going to get on a train that will begin his journey into the war where he will command five medium tanks. The son has performance anxiety:
“Thirty tons apiece, with a crew of four men. They represent an investment of God knows how many hundred thousand bucks. And I’ve got to tell them to start, stop, go here, kindly demolish that hot-dog stand to the left, would you be so good as to put six shells into that corset-and-lingerie shop five blocks down the street. It was easy enough in maneuvers. But in the real thing . . .” he grinned widely. “The faith the U.S. government has in me! I’m going to develop a beautiful case of stagefright.”
While waiting for the train, father and son sit down to eat. Again we get a glimpse of honorable and yet how pathetic Nelson is, even in the eyes of his son.
“When I was your age,” Nelson said, “I ate just like that.”
And suddenly Robert had looked at him very soberly, as though seeing his father twenty years old — and loving him — and seeing the long years that came after with pride and pity . . . .
It isn’t that Nelson has done anything wrong in his life. He’s a hard worker. He’s successfully raised a family. He’s dedicated. His son looks up to him and sees some great strength. What creates the pity, what underlies the whole story, is the great sense of loss when we consider Nelson’s life in that office overlooking the Hudson. It’s a remarkably well-written peace. Even if the general topic is simple (and it has been done more creatively in Cheever’s brilliant “The Swimmer”), the way Shaw puts it together is nuanced and nice to read — I only thought of “The Swimmer” afterwards. But then comes the final section where a roar of fury erupts from Nelson, and we move away from the general theme to how the immediacy of the war interacts with the hours in the office. Here’s a snippet:
I worked, and it wasn’t easy, and I was poor for a long time, and only the poor know how hard it is to stop being poor . . . . I worked . . . . Nonsense! I’m guilty . . . . I should’ve been out stopping this . . . . I am nearly the same age as Hitler. He could do something to kill my son . . . .I should’ve been doing something to save him.
It’s still great writing on a sentence level, but the problem now is that it’s hard to know whether it’s Nelson or Shaw whose doing the speaking. At the end of a subtle story we get this rant which fits with the character only slightly. Nelson’s son’s departure is brought up in the rant, as you see, but only as a means to bring about this worry, this fit of indignation, and it doesn’t feel quite genuine. This is more a bit of preaching — or, actually, condemning — from Shaw himself. I’m definitely a reader who doesn’t like a message to be conveyed that pretends to be universal, and its even worse when the writer abandons the story to purvey it. I like to take my characters and their stories as individual cases, individual explorations of humanity. I believe fiction should seek to enrich, not to prove. If I feel reproved, good — but let it be because of how the story itself affected me and not because the writer was preachy. Here Shaw seems to have diverted from his character to prove a point. Unfortunately this renders the character false because it appears that the character was derived from the predetermined ending of the story and not the other way around.
Perhaps I was feeling overly sensitive since I could easily relate to Nelson’s worklife. The truth is, I see value in that viewpoint — believe me, I’m very sympathetic to the idea that there are important things to do out there that I and many others are not a part of because work demands we engage with things as seemingly silly as recording depreciation and amortization. I could have come to that conclusion on my own from the subtleties and conversations introduced in the first 4/5ths of the story.
I’m not sure if this award is on your radar. It wasn’t on mine until recently, and in fact I missed the announcement by a longshot (it was February 14). It’s only a few years old, but I like how it was formed. Basically several bloggers who wrote about children’s and YA literature wanted to form a sense of community and highlight what they considered to be the best books in those categories of that year. Despite its humble beginnings, one shouldn’t assume this isn’t a great award. I’ve been pleased with my samples from it in the past, particularly in the children’s books.
Because I see great things happening in YA and children’s literature, and because I’m pleased to present it to my own children, I want to bring it to your attention.
Cybils Awards for Children’s and Middle Grade Books
- Picture Book (Fiction): All the World by Liz Garton Scanlon; illustrated by Marla Frazee
- Picture Book (Non-Fiction): The Day-Glo Brothers by Chris Barton; illustrated by Tony Persiani
- Easy Reader: Watch Me Throw the Ball! (An Elephant and Piggie Book) by Mo Willems
- Early Chapter Book: Bad to the Bone (Down Girl and Sit) by Lucy Nolan; illustrated by Mike Reed
- Poetry: Red Sings from Treetops: A Year in Colors by Joyce Sidman; illustrated by Pamela Zagarenski
- Graphic Novel: The Secret Science Alliance and the Copycat Crook by Eleanor Davis
- Fantasy & Science Fiction: Dreamdark: Silksinger (Faeries of Dreamdark) by Lani Taylor
- Middle Grade Fiction: Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson
Cybils Awards for Young Adult Books
- Non-Fiction: The Frog Scientist by Pamela S. Turner; illustrated by Andy Comins
- Graphic Novel: Gunnerkrigg Court: Orientation by Tom Siddell
- Fantasy & Science Fiction: Fire by Kristin Cashore
- Young Adult Fiction: Cracked Up to Be by Courtney Summers
The only one I’ve read is Watch Me Throw the Ball!, and I’m telling you, these Elephant and Piggie books are wonderful and charming. Chains was a National Book Award finalist in 2008.
I started reading The Twin (Boven is het stil, 2006; tr. from the Dutch by David Colmer, 2008) a couple of different times in the last few months. I had a hard time getting beyond the book’s first few painful pages. There Bakker highlights, with subtle but excruciating prose, a son’s cruelty to his aged father (at least, that’s how I read it at the time). I would read a few pages, become entranced by the prose, but then feel the need to put it down for a while — I just wasn’t in the mood (perhaps it was the darkening days of winter, perhaps it was workload) for that kind of blow-to-the-gut pain, no matter how well rendered. But I always knew I’d return to it.
Review copy courtesy of Archipelago Books.
The setting to this book is a very quiet Dutch farm, one that hasn’t changed in years: “‘Look at this farm,’ he said to his friend, a redhead with freckles and sunburnt shoulders, ‘it’s timeless. It’s here on this road now, but it might just as well be 1967 or 1930.’” The narrator, Helmer van Wonderen, lives on this quiet farm, and the year is actually around 2005. In his fifty-five years, Helmer has never moved away from the house he grew up in. Since his mother died over a decade earlier, Helmer has lived alone with his father, who is now ailing. Though there’s been little change in the house through the decades, there is a big change shown on the first page:
I’ve put Father upstairs. I had to park him on a chair first to take the bed apart. He sat there like a calf that’s just a couple of minutes old, before it’s been licked clean: with a directionless, wobbly head and eyes that drift over things. I ripped off the blankets, sheets and undersheet, leaned the mattress and bed boards against the wall, and unscrewed the sides of the bed. I tried to breathe through my mouth as much as possible. I’d already cleared out the room upstairs — my room.
“What are you doing?” he asked. “You’re moving,” I said.
“I want to stay here.”
“No.”
There’s a cruelty in Helmer’s curtness, born of guilt and resentment towards his father. In the laconic prose there is a fatigue caused by years of carrying weighty bitterness and disappointment. But the passage continues, showing the father a bit more and suggesting some intimacy, perhaps even some strained tenderness, between the father and son.
I let him keep the bed. One half of it has been cold for more than ten years now, but the unslept side is still crowned with a pillow. I screwed the bed back together in the upstairs room, facing the window. I put the legs up on blocks and remade it with clean sheets and two clean pillowcases. After that I carried Father upstairs. When I picked him up off the chair he fixed his eyes on mine and kept them there until I was laying him in bed and our faces were almost touching.
“I can walk,” he said, only then.
“No you can’t.”
Through the window he saw things he hadn’t expected to see. “I’m up high,” he said.
“Yes, that’s so you can look out and see something other than just sky.”
This is not the life Helmer wanted. It is not the life his father wanted. While a teenager, Helmer was attending a university, studying Dutch language and literature. His father made fun of him for working hard to “learn big words,” but to Helmer these were simply routine jabs to his ego – really his father didn’t care what Helmer was up to because at that time Henk, Helmer’s identical twin brother, was still alive.
Henk was the farmer. Henk was Father’s son. What he was supposed to make of me or what I was supposed to make of myself were questions he could ignore.
Henk was supposed to take over the farm, which is just what Father wanted. Knowing this, there are some fascinating family dynamics at play. On the one hand, Father doesn’t care what Helmer does because Henk is there. Helmer, knowing this, does all he can think of to spite his father, to emphasize that he is indeed not his son. His father uses each available opportunity to cut Helmer down.
On April 19th, 1967 I was halfway through the third term of the first year of my Dutch language and literature degree. I think I was the hardest working student in my year, not because of any ambition or drive of my own, but to show Father. I wasn’t eligible for a grant because he had too many assets. That was what it said in the rejection letter from the Ministry of Education and Science, Board of Study Grants, and he and I both knew what those assets were: land, buildings, cows and machines. “Am I supposed to sell cows to send youto university?” said Father, when I showed him the letter. He didn’t wait for an answer but crumpled the letter up without another word and, since there were no bins to hand, threw it in the kitchen sink. If he’d had a lighter or matches on him, he would have set fire to it. Henk was standing in the kitchen too and didn’t know ho to look at me from under his dark eyebrows. Mother retrieved the letter from the sink and tried to smooth it out, then put it in the bin after all.
I love that Father threw the letter into the sink because their was no bin around. What a great image to capture the showy, ridiculous jabs he took at his son. Now that Father is an invalid, Helmer can pay back. Here is one of the more disturbing scenes to me:
After milking, I eat half of the pound of eel on bread. I drink a glass of milk with it. When I’ve finished I go upstairs with an apple. I turn on the light in his room. He is lying on his back with his eyes wide open, the blanket pulled up to his nose. He gives off almost no warmth, the bottom of the window is covered with frost flowers. Maybe he’ll freeze to death in the coming night.
“I’ve got an apple for you,” I say.
“Cold,” he says.
“Yes, it’s freezing.” I lay the apple on the bedside cabinet and leave the room. It’s only on the stairs that I think of a knife. I’m not going back up again, not to take him a knife and not to turn off the light either.
A few pages later (Bakker is great at pacing this book out, letting us linger in pages of silence):
The frost flowers in Father’s bedroom have slid off the window, there’s a pool of water on the windowsill. He ate the apple. I don’t know how he managed it. He must have been very hungry.
Helmer and his father’s relationship was apparently never anything either highly valued. But it was when Henk died, on that April day in 1967, that their lives became linked. Father demanded Helmer stop going to school. Experiencing his own immense grief of losing half of himself, Helmer obeyed.
But this is all just the first bit of the book. The book, while staying controlled and well balanced, is much more complicated. When Henk died, he had a young girlfriend named Riet. In fact, it is her fault Henk died. Nevertheless, after the funeral, Riet passed her days at the van Wonderen household. At the same time that Father told Helmer he wouldn’t be going to school anymore he also told Riet to leave and never come back. Now that decades have passed, Riet finally gets in touch with Helmer. Assuming Father is dead, she’d like to come for a visit. Helmer tells her that, yes, Father is dead. She arrives and, at the end of the visit, says that she’d like it if Helmer allowed her son to work on the farm. Her son is named Henk.
This might sound contrived, but it plays out wonderfully. Bakker is not playing with body doubles here. He is not even, not really, playing with redemption of any kind. These are damaged, tired people. As painful as it is, it’s a wonderous experience to dwell with them for a time.
There’s something ominous in the original Dutch title that doesn’t come across in the completely different title The Twin. Boven is het stil means “It’s quiet upstairs.” Father never makes a racket. But we feel that silence constantly despite whatever is going on downstairs.
Recent Comments