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While growing up I often heard about the fighting in Lebanon, though I was too young to understand just what that meant. It occupied a large part of my young imagination, but when I was older and learned the basics of the conflict, I never bothered to look into specifics. One great thing about a good book: it makes you want to learn more about whatever its talking about. Elias Khoury, who lived through the civil war, wrote White Masks (Al-Wujûb al-baydâ, 1981; tr. from the Arabic by Maia Tabet, 2010) right in the midst of it.
Incidentally, this is one of the best constructed books I’ve had the pleasure to hold. It is a nice, practically square hardback with a sharp-edged binding. The paper is exquisite to touch. Good books should be packaged well.
When I say good book, however, I don’t necessarily mean enjoyable, at least, not enjoyable in the way I would typically use that word. I found White Masks a very difficult book to wrestle with due to a mixture of evasive writing and boring writing. Though I’m glad I stuck through it, I knew throughout that if I put it down for long I might not return to it. Well, more on that in a minute, because the book wasn’t always a struggle. The book begins with a great little introduction.
This is no tale. And it may not be of particular interest to readers, as people these days have more important things to do than read stories or listen to tales. And they’re absolutely right. But this story really did happen.
This is how we meet our nameless narrator (though he won’t always be our narrator). He is a young, though he has already left journalism school behind. Still, he has the urge to chase down stories:
One morning, I saw in the paper a short piece entitled “Dreadful murder in the UNESCO district” and, don’t ask me why, but whenever I see the word “dreadful,” the word “wonderful” springs to mind.
The victim is Khalil Ahmad Jaber, but there seems to be no reason for his murder. For one thing, he is just a simple civil servant, hardly worth the trouble of what appears to be a very brutal, deliberate assault. But even more peculiar is the fact that Jaber is the father of one of the young men killed in the war. The young man being a martyr, all honor to the parents. The mystery called to our narrator.
The murkier the story got, the greater my interest grew. Thanks to a variety of sources I was able to contact, as well as my daily perusal of the papers, I was able to collect a vast amount of information pertaining to the murder, which, according to medical reports, took place on the morning of April 13, 1980.
The narrator interviews many people with even a slight connection to the victim. The result is a series of oral histories, somewhat reminding me of The Good War by Studs Terkel. The narrator steps back and, almost without inserting his own voice, allows the speaker to tell a story.
As each speaker begins his or her story, the victim and the murder often go into the background and the speaker becomes the subject. In fact, one of the longest stories is told by one of the men who found the body. This man had only a few minutes with the victim, and he never knew him alive. However, in these digressive narratives, though the war seems like incidental backstory, there is a lot of subtle criticism.
In the wife’s story, for example, we watch as the Jaber, before his death, goes about hanging up posters of his son the martyr. (Here is a great link to the American University of Beirut Jafet Library that shows a few of these martyr posters.) He does this compulsively. Years pass, people think the war is over, yet he is still going around hanging up posters. His madness continues to develop as he pastes up the propaganda for the cause that killed his son. And in his madness the only support he and his wife receive is from the party’s martyr stipend.
This madness and the posters are a fascinating theme throughout, especially when Jaber begins to use erasers to erase the posters, all amidst his own commentary that the posters erase the wall (probably a partially destroyed wall thanks to the bombs) they are plastered on.
Still, these digressive narratives became, for me, too much of a maze. I admit that pages would go by where I just didn’t know how what I was reading fit into the greater narrative. I’m sure my ignorance is partly to blame. But also, I suspect that meandering could have been part of the point, a way to show that these characters were in control of their story and wouldn’t deviate despite the narrator’s prompts and despite reader expectations.
The reader could just refer to the forensic pathologist’s report and dispense with all the attendant detail; alternatively, he might find it sufficient to read the wife’s statement or those of the municipal workers — they were the ones to discover the naked corpse dumped on the roadside. Indeed, the reader might even regard this introduction as adequate, and leave it at that. Every one of us has a story, after all, and that’s more than enough. We have no need of other people’s.
And in the end, the narrator offers some more commentary on his search for the mystery behind the murder:
I find myself completely baffled: the author feels he doesn’t really know what happened in his story and that he is not in full possession of the facts . . .
So even knowing that the digressions and evasiveness are deliberate, it made for some very frustrating reading. At times it made me think of my experience with Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, which was also frustrating in its evasiveness and digressions. However, in 2666 I was never tempted to put the book down. The writing was powerful and visceral, and the story, as pointless as its point may be, was fascinating. Thankfully, after finishing White Masks I was glad I’d been through it. The writing is not Bolaño’s (and I never wanted it to be), but it is strong, the voices are interesting, and some of the conceits are illuminating. It is a worthwhile book, but make sure you have the energy to grapple with it.
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.
This will be a short review. I have two excuses: 1) the book that is the subject is very short; 2) this review is almost a follow-up to one of my recent reviews.
A few weeks ago I posted about Jacques Poulin’s Spring Tides . I actually first read Translation Is a Love Affair (La Traduction est une histoire d’amour, 2006; tr. from the French by Sheila Fischman, 2009). However, when I put down this short book I had the unsatisfying feeling that I’d missed something, that there was, as I put it earlier, some layer I failed to penetrate. Thus, the book didn’t work for me, yet I had glimpsed enough to know that something was there. Turns out reading Spring Tides before reviewing this little book was the best thing to do. To me, Spring Tides worked alone, but Translation Is a Love Affairworks better as a variation on a theme or even a revisioning of a theme written nearly thirty years earlier. If you’ve read my review of Spring Tides, you will remember the strong allegory running through that text. The last chapter in Translation Is a Love Affair is entitled “The Earthly Paradise.”
Review copy courtesy of Archipelago Books.
Here the primary character is a woman named Marine. She works as a translator, sometimes “tormented by the groundless fear that [she is] living the life of a parasite.” She has recently met and began translating the work of Monsieur Waterman, an older and very established French Canadian writer. He has given her a place to live while she works on his translations.
If there was a way to get close to someone in this life — of which I was not certain — it might be through translation.
One thing I enjoyed about this book is that the love it is talking about is not necessarily romantic love. And that seems to be Poulin’s point, too. Marine has been a guilty wanderer for years. As in Spring Tides, this novel is very quiet. We know little about Marine’s past, and what we do know is vague. This is a potential flaw in the novel. Marine sometimes says things like, “The only rules I accept are the rules of grammar.” But there’s not much here to make me believe that, let alone feel that. She’s just not that way in the time period this novel moves through. I read the book twice and still had a hard time believing that Marine used to be anything but the slightly lonely yet loving woman we meet on page one when she tenderly describes her fat cat walking around.
This book has a very significant plot line, however, that stands out much more than Marine’s translation job. A new cat wanders into Marine’s yard one day, and eventually Marine finds this note tucked away in the collar:
My name is Famine. I am on the road because my mistress can’t take care of me, . . . . . The final words, after the comma had been erased.
After some sleuthing, Marine and Monsieur Waterman discover that the words after the comma compose a sort of SOS. Throughout the remainder of the book, these two very different people try to find a way to help the person who wrote the note and abandoned the cat. Running along underneath this narrative is the relationship between Marine and Monsieur Waterman, between author and translator. It’s a very intriguing story and a perspective on love and translation that I never before have encountered.
We have to go further, pour ourselves into the other person’s writing the way a cat curls up in a basket. We must embrace the author’s style.
Though my estimation of Translation Is a Love Affair went up after reading Spring Tides I consider this a lesser work that does little to inform a reading of the greater work. That said, it is a quiet little book full of tenderness and sadness. It is not slight and for anyone who has read Spring Tidesthis might be a nice revisit to Poulin’s strange world of men, women, cats, and translators.
Though I haven’t posted my review of it yet, I have read Jacque Poulin’s novel Translation Is a Love Affair, forthcoming from Archipelago Books. For some reason, I don’t think I penetrated a layer with that book; something just didn’t click even though I was enjoying it the whole time. Rather than review that book straightaway, I decided I should go back a bit and read Poulin’s older novel (also presented to us in beautiful fashion by Archipelago Books) Spring Tides (Les grandes marées 1978; tr. from the French by Sheila Fischman 1986). I had read that Poulin’s books, while independent of each other, can illuminate one another. I’m glad for this approach. The two books are incredibly different, but certain things were similar enough that reading Spring Tides helped me establish a bit better where Poulin was going with Translation Is a Love Affair. That review will be posted in a week or two, after I’ve read the book (a shortie) again.
Review copy courtesy of Archipelago Books.
A quick note on the cover: isn’t it beautiful? The texture and the unconventional shape make these books feel just right.
Spring Tides won Canada’s Governor General’s Award for Literary Merit for fiction in the French language (the same year Alice Munro won it for the English language with Who Do You Think You Are?), yet Poulin is apparently not widely read. I can see one reason for that: this book is very quiet, running the risk of seeming like a straightforward allegory (the problem I had with Translation Is a Love Affair at first). The book does not force the reader to come to terms with it, and the prose is so deceptively simple that a reader might miss the deeper complexities.
The central character in this book is the otherwise nameless Teddy Bear, a nickname derived from T.D.B. “And T.D.B. come from Tradecteur de Bandes Dessinées, because I translate comic strips.” Here is how this book starts; I think you’ll catch the allusion.
In the beginning he was alone on the island.
Teddy Bear likes his solitude and works consistently to have his translations done each week when the boss’s helicopter comes to collect them and drop off new ones. His main companion is his cat Matousalem and a tennis machine. The island is the boss’s, and he gave it to Teddy Bear hoping it would bring a bit of happiness (“It isn’t heaven on earth, but it’s a pleasant spot,” he said.).
Happiness is the ellusive beast in this book. The boss’s main goal seems to be to ensure that Teddy Bear experiences happiness. Though lonely (dictionaries and reference books “took the place of the friends he didn’t have”) and apparently content in his solitude, Teddy Bear obviously was missing some communication, something he was never good at anyway:
He started thinking about his brother Theo. He never heard from his brother, but he must be somewhere in southern California, and as the weather got warmer on the Pacific coast, he would surely be preparing to return to San Francisco. . . . Teddy was thinking about someone else too: a girl. She didn’t exist in reality, but her features and appearance were beginning to take shape in his mind.
Then, as if by miracle, a girl appears. One day during the spring tides, the boss drops off Marie:
“. . . My dream is to make people happy. That’s why you’re here on this island. And it’s why I brought Marie here too. Obviously I don’t think I’m God the Father and I didn’t tell myself, ‘It is not good that man should be alone’ or anything like that, but I thought you’d have a better chance of happiness if there was someone here with you. . . .”
I enjoyed this part of the novel more than any other part. Teddy Bear and Marie enjoy an uncomfortable friendship on island, though they live on opposite sides. She tries not to interfere with his work, and he tries not to interfere with her swimming. In a revealing and comic part, Teddy Bear decides to make Marie dinnner, but an unwelcome voice comes:
“I’m sorry,” he said, for his brother’s benefit.
“Quit behaving like a zouave and read the recipe like a normal person,” he told himself.
“What’s got into you?”
“Don’t make me laugh with that ‘intrusive presence’ nonsense. You’re only turning fine phrases to forget she’s a girl. Did you notice her eyes, at least? Have you ever seen such beautiful black eyes in your whole career as a translator?”
“Never.”
“And what about the rest?”
“How do you expect me to read the recipe like a normal person if you keep talking about that girl?” he complained. “It’s ten after four and did you read what it says on the box? ‘Allow to cool at room temperature for three hours before serving!’ Do you konw what time that means we’ll be eating supper?”
Though there are two people on the island, it still feels like a pleasant solitude. This is interrupted again when the boss drops off his own wife so she can enjoy a few days (which turn into months) on the island. Then the boss brings more people, and more still, until the island is a minor community. Each person or couple comes with the spring tides, like the debris on the island. Teddy Bear’s work is becoming harder amidst the distractions, but he’s getting better at it. Then all is suddenly shattered.
The plot introduction above seems to me to focus primarily on the allegorical side to this novel. That’s hard to miss, actually, and it’s hard to summarize a plot like that without it showcasing how contrived it is. However, to me the allegory was incidental and unnecessary, even if it cast some of the themes in a deeper relief. To me the most fascinating and maybe central part of the novel was the aspect of communication, of a connection between us. This is hardly a novel theme, but here, with the biblical references and the work of translation, it is dealt with in a novel (and pleasantly lonely) manner. If you find the above plot summary unsatisfactory (as I do) take heart that when I’m thinking back on the individual episodes, isolated from the larger contrived plot, I love this book. Here is a central line, not Poulin’s but Vincent Van Gogh’s:
There may be a great fire in our soul, yet no one ever comes to warm himself at it, and the passers-by see only a wisp of smoke coming through the chimney, and go along their way.
That’s heartbreaking to think about, and Poulin succeeds in this novel-length rumination on just that quotation.
A few weeks ago I was fortunate enough to stumble upon Archipelago Books, a non-profit publishing house based in Brooklyn that specializes in literature in translation. I always like finding those! I was especially interested in their production style — their books are all published in an almost square format (though the dimensions of their books are not uniform from book to book); the covers are lovely in their simplicity, usually showcasing a piece of art or photography; the covers are nicely textured (you can see a bit of that in the image below). All in all, the books are unique in a way that highlights the high standards of the publishing house. If you’re interested in supporting Archipelago books with a donation (remember, they are a non-profit organization), you can click here and go to the donation page. If you’re interested in supporting them by becoming a subscriber, you can click here, and you will receive their books as they come off the press for the duration of your subscription (they have an attractive frontlist). They are about to publish their fiftieth book, and I hope there will be many many more.
My first Archipelago book happens to be the first book by Dominique Fabre available in English: The Waitress Was New (La serveuse était nouvelle, 2005; tr. from the French by Jordan Stump, 2008).
Review copy courtesy of Archipelago Books.
This book is told by Pierre, a fifty-six year-old barman working in Le Cercle, a café that sits close to the Seine. It begins on a day much like any other he’s lived for several years except for one thing:
The waitress was new here. She came out of the underpass and hurried down the sidewalk, very businesslike, keeping to herself, as tall as me even in flat-heeled shoes. Maybe forty years old? That’s not the kind of thing you can ask a lady. She had a sort of flesh-pink makeup on her eyelids, she must have spent a long time getting ready. I didn’t look closely at her shoes, the way I usually do to size someone up, because I had a feeling she’d seen some rough times, and there was no point overdoing it. And I’ve seen some rough times too, I tell myself now and then, but I’m not even sure it’s true.
The new waitress is stepping in to fill the spot temporarily vacated by Sabrina, a single mother of two who has gotten ill. This first paragraph introduces not only the story but also the deferential, observant Pierre, who is quietly trying not to interfere in anybody’s life and who doesn’t expect anyone to wish to interfere with his (though he probably wouldn’t mind).
I’ve slept alone for too long. I’ve never even had a chance to try Viagra, which apparently works wonders, and ends lots of marriage, from what I hear in the café.
Pierre has been working at Le Cercle for several years now, and he has come to know his boss’s foibles well despite a lack of any real friendship. After the new waitress shows up, the boss leaves inexplicably. For a while now Pierre has noticed his boss getting unsettled. This has happened before — the boss is just passing middle age — but usually he comes back soon enough and things are better than ever. Pierre has a feeling it might be different this time. The boss’s wife comes down to help work at the cash register, and as the hours pass without her husband’s return she gets increasingly nervous. It’s even worse that his leaving coincided with Sabrina’s. The book proceeds to tell what happens over the next few days as the boss remains absent and all who work at Le Cercle struggle to maintain the café’s regular schedule serving the regular clientele (of which there are several interesting and compassionately described individuals).
Pierre’s narration stays quiet, despite the commotion going on around him. When he describes his loneliness, though, he almost betrays too much — but he usually stops himself from divulging, content to relate the lives of others to his readers rather than his own. Consequently, what we get is one of my favorite stylistic feats: the narrator who says much about himself by talking about others.
Pierre does divulge that he was married once, long ago, and it ended in divorce. He’s pretty nonchalant about it at this point in his life, his most recent relationship having ended three years ago. Still, in spite of his compassion and empathy (or, perhaps, because of his compassion and empathy), he harbors a biting cynicism about long-term love:
The young couple finally left, they seemed very much in love, the way people are when it’s part-time, if you don’t mind my saying.
It would be easy to say that his bitterness comes from personal knowledge — he’s witnessed destructive relationships in his own life and he’s observed it every day in his job — but I’m not sure that’s the right answer. At times he betrays what could be the real reason: the bitterness that accompanies loss of something so desired. At fifty-six he’s thirteen and a half trimesters from receiving a full pension, but quantifying this (and also the number of trimesters he’s already worked) makes him realize how much of his life has been protected behind a bar and how soon that will all be over (indeed, how soon it all will be over). Pierre is a unique individual, one living on the periphery of what could be considered a larger story, but his voice — a nice juxtaposition of cynicism and empathy — pulls us into his story, a story he doesn’t want to tell us and that he himself doesn’t want to consider in too much detail.
Some days I’d rather not have to come out from behind my bar at all, but there’s no getting around it, life is still on the other side.
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