Review copy courtesy of New Directions.

It begins peacefully:

The last day before Christmas had passed.  A clear winter night had come; the stars peeped out; the moon rose majestically in the sky to light good people and all the world so that all might enjoy singing kolyadki and praising the Lord.

That peace doesn’t last long.  Within a couple of sentences a witch has taken off and is stealing all of the stars from the skies.  To make matters worse, the devil steals the moon.  Such is anadolu yakasi escort bayan the setup to a type of romantic comedy.  The town blacksmith, Vakula, is in love with Oksana, who, “like a beauty, was full of caprices.”  Oksana’s father, Tchub, doesn’t like Vakula – not at all.  But he does like Vakula’s mother, Soloha (who happens to be the witch).  Unfortunately for Tchub, the devil also desires Soloha.

No one has an easy time with these relatioships.  Soloha actually does desire Tchub (not the devil), but everyone is after her.  Furthermore, if Vakula manages to wed the shallow Oksana, that will make it impossible for Soloha to wed Tchub (custom prohibits the parents of the young couple from wedding themselves).  Not that it’s likely Vakula will be able to win Oksana’s heart.  For one thing, she does not love him.  For another, to make it impossible, Oksana has said that the only way she’ll marry Vakula is if he brings to her “the very slippers the Tsarita wears.”

Surely we can see where this is all going.  Now that Vakula’s interests are aligned with the devil’s, they manage a way forwad.

The Night Before Christmas is a lot of fun.  No, it’s not much more, but it is certainly worth the short time it takes to read it, even if holiday cheer doesn’t necessarily ring through it.

Merry Christmas to all!

When I read A Splendid Conspiracy, I was thrilled by his fantastic talent as a writer, but I had a bad taste in my mouth due to Cossery’s ”elevation of idleness to an art form” (that’s from The London Times), particularly as that idleness, in order to thrive, seemed to depend chiefly on taking advantage of others, often women.  It was funny, and certainly a lot of it was tongue in cheek, but I didn’t feel good joining in on the mirth.  Despite my initial feelings toward A Splendid Conspiracy, The Colors of Infamy has convinced me to keep reading Cossery.  This little book was fabulous.

Review copy courtesy of New Directions.

Written 25 years later, when Cossery was almost 90 years old, The Colors of Infamy had many of the same ideas floating around that I found in A Splendid Conspiracy – anti-materialism, anti-capitalism, subversion of authority, a deliberate refusal to become another cog in a wheel — but I found the presentation of these ideas much more palatable.  For one thing, the central characters, as similar in some ways as they are to Teymour in A Splendid Conspiracy, have some kind of awareness that stretches beyond their self-satisfaction.  As before, they feed off of the corrupt system and find their joy in observing the ridiculousness of it all, finding male camaraderie.  However, the men in The Colors of Infamy are not held above reproach, which I felt was the case in the earlier novel.  Consequently, I was able to enjoy the incredible wit and irony without flinching.

Like most of Cossery’s novels, this one is set in Cairo.  As we begin, in fact, our central character, Ossama, is observing, with fascination (and a bit of gusto), the crowd around Tahrir Square, moving around in a strange state.

Resolutely circumventing every obstacle, every pitfall in their path, the people, discouraged by nothing and with no particular goal in mind, continued their journeys through the twists and turns of a city plagued by decrepitude, amid screeching horns, dust, potholes and waste, without showing the least sign of hostility or protest; the awareness of simply being alive seemed to obliterate any other thought.  Every now and then the voices of the muezzins at the mosque entrances could be heard emanating from loudspeakers, like a murmuring from the beyond.

Ossama is 23 years old, and, “More than anything, Ossama enjoyed contemplating the chaos.”  He grew up incredibly poor.  Unfortunately, he had a relatively healthy body with no wounds or malformations, so he could never compete properly with other beggars.  One day, as he’s waiting to throw himself under a cart large enough to ensure a quick death, he meets Nimr, the master thief.  Nimr is impressed with Ossama and takes him under his wing, training him in the art of theft.  At 23, he is excelling at his craft.  Here is how Cossery introduces him:

Ossama was a thief; not a legitimate thief, such as a minister, banker, wheeler-dealer, speculator, or real estate developer; he was a modest thief with a variable income, but one whose activities — no doubt because their return was limited — have, always and everywhere, been considered an affront to the moral rules by which the affluent live.

But Ossama has found out a way perform his craft with minimal risk.  He has “instinctively grasped the flaw of a society based on appearance.”  When we meet him, he is dressed very well because “by dressing with the same elegance as the licensed robbers of the people, he could elude the mistrustful gaze of a police force that found every impoverished-looking individual automatically suspect.”  One evening he is at a nice party and he hones in on one particular large guest.  Expertly, he gets the man’s crocodile wallet and a letter.  As it turns out, the letter is evidence of bribery and corruption in the ministry, and now Ossama just needs to figure out what to do with it.

It’s an interesting dilemma.  On the one hand, Ossama (to be a proper Cossery protagonist) isn’t particularly interested in the money he could earn.  Furthermore, he understands, with the help of some trusted friends — Nimr and Karamallah, a man who lives in his family mausoleum – that this sort of corruption is expected and forgiven.  It’s not like he can actually start a revolution, if such a thing were desirable.  No, the real predicament is how he can use the letter to get the best entertainment, which is interrogating and witnessing the absurdities of the system first-hand.

It’s a funny story, full of that wit that has given Cossery the title “the Voltaire of the Nile.”  However, in the middle of the comedy there’s a bit of seriousness.  Before Ossama has even nicked the fat man’s wallet he is found by Safira, a 17-year-old prostitute who has fallen in love with him.  She finds him honorable and considers him a thief like Robin Hood.  While he’s had sex with her, and was surprised by how little she charged him, he is not attracted to her and finds her a threat to his trade.  Still, as badly as he treats her, a bit of compassion prevents him from being truly cruel, much to his chagrin:

In truth, his compassion for the girl prevented him from viewing her through his usual prism of ridicule and condemned him to seeing a reality whose tragic aspect he normally actively denied.

This was the sort of awareness that I felt A Splendid Conspiracy lacked.  I’m still not convinced that Cossery’s ideal world could ever exist, or that it would be all that it’s cracked up to be if we managed it, just as he’s not convinced business can exist without “corrupt networks,” but at least in this novel there was, for me, a bit more heart behind the ideas.  Furthermore, it seemed to leave some of the ideas open-ended, giving room for thought.  As Ossama, Nimr, and Karamallah, figure out how to best handle the letter, the discussions they have make this a novel of ideas and not a polemic.

Finally, as a piece of entertainment — as someone who advocates not taking life too seriously, Cossery wants us to enjoy his book — it is wonderful.  With the relative absence of derision toward the females (which really prompted me to take A Splendid Conspiracy too seriously for its good), I was able to sit back and drift pleasantly along with the prose.  In fact, though I said above this is a novel of ideas, the ideas are light and presented mostly for our amusement — which perhaps makes them all the more poignant.

Between Parentheses is a large catch-all.  It purports to collect “most of the newspaper columns and articles Roberto Bolaño published between 1998 and 2003.”  There’s no quality control, then, and that has upset some people.  Of course, there are those (and I’m one of them) who wouldn’t have it any other way.  Bolaño, even when writing off-the-cuff about things he may know little about, is at his worst still full of infectious energy.  Further, most of the pieces here are very short and can be quickly skimmed or skipped altogether if necessary.

The date span, 1998 – 2003, is the approximate span of time when Bolaño was a living literary superstar.  He’d published books and won some minor awards before 1998, but that was the year The Savage Detectives was first published.  Between then and 2003, when he died at fifty, what he thought mattered, and he was basically given free rein to write for various publications on various topics.  And here they are.

The book isn’t arranged by chronology but rather loosely by theme in six parts: 1. Three Insufferable Speeches, 2. Fragments of a Return to the Native Land, 3. Between Parentheses (Bolaño’s column in Chile’s Las Últimas Noticias), 4. Scenes, 5. The Brave Librarian, and 6. The Private Life of a Novelist.  Within are speeches, interviews, long essays, brief thought bubbles, sketches for books, book reviews, etc.  All the stuff we’d expect the author to have been involved in within the literary world that could be written down.

I have two favorite parts.  First, the book reviews and author portraits Bolaño wrote for his column.  He writes about writers as diverse as Jonathan Swift, Turgenev, Philip K. Dick, and Thomas Harris.  Some of my favorites were short but insightful pieces about a few of my favorites: César Aira (“an exceptionally perceptive chronicler of mothers (a verbal mystery) and fathers (a geometric certainty)”; you can read my reviews of Aira books here), and Horacio Castellanos Moya (“[His book El asco's] acid humor, like a Buster Keaton movie or a time bomb, threatens the hormonal stability of the idiots who, upon reading it, feel an irresistible urge to string the author up in the town square.  Truly, I know of no greater honor for a real writer”; you can read my reviews of Castellanos Moya books here).  The number of authors brought up in these pages, under praise or high criticism, is large.  I don’t know it, but it’s enough to keep one reading through life.

My other favorite parts are the little tidbits that give insight into Bolaño’s strange and unique work.  If you haven’t read Bolaño, some of this may not make much sense, but in a piece on exile Bolaño discusses “the photographic negative of an epiphany, which is also the story of our lives in Latin America.”  I cannot think of a better way to describe his work and the sensation upon finishing — “the photographic negative of an epiphany.”

Bolaño also discusses his experiences in the early 1970s when as a twenty year old he was in Chile during Pinochet’s coup.  Afterwards, Bolaño was arrested and spent eight days in captivity in a schoolhouse (an event recounted a few times in his fiction).  He succinctly relates how those days after the coup felt: “full days, crammed with energy, crammed with eroticism, days and nights in which anything could happen.”  If finishing a Bolaño book feels like looking at the photographic negative of an epiphany, reading one feels like how he describes this time in his life: “The experience of love, black humor, friendship, prison, and the threat of death were condensed into no more than five interminable months that I lived in a state of amazement and urgency.”  That condensing: that’s his literary work.

Bolaño’s work is powerful, and it can be powerfully confusing and off-putting.  One thing I’ve learned, though, is that, while I can admire (greatly) individual pieces in his oeuvre, Bolaño’s project was greater than any single work, and each work built up toward his lofty ideas.  Between Parentheses is a great companion piece, essential, I think, to anyone who really wants to dig in.  It’s not that it adds up to greater comprehension (though I think it can); it’s that it continues to rearrange the puzzle pieces in interesting ways.

Review copy courtesy of New Directions.

 This is how this trilogy begins: “One should never tell anyone anything.”  Over 1,000 pages later, it ends with Your Face Tomorrow, Volume 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell (Tu rostro mañana, 3 Veneno y sombra y adiós , 2007; tr. from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa, 2010).  Obviously, there’s a lot this narrator has to say, and he has many many different ways to say it.  This final volume is a wonderful culmination of the themes of language and power (my review of volume one here; of volume two here). 

This review will not reveal any significant spoilers about this book or the prior ones, but I do want to bring up one of the central events in book two, Dance and Dream.  In that book, Jaime Deza, our narrator, spends a substantial amount of time telling us, from every angle imaginable, about the night he and his boss were entertaining a foreign dignitary and his wife at a dance club.  Deza and Tupra, remember, are employees of a secret agency that has as its inception the great wars of the twentieth century.  It may have even once been an official government agency, but it is now private; Tupra doesn’t really know who sits at the top of the agency, yet he uses his incredible skills of deduction and induction to interpret people — people like foreign businessmen or politicians — for their clients.

As the night progressed at the dance club, a cocky man dances a bit too, uhm, harshly with the foreign dignitary’s wife.  The man is a creep with a ponytail, and Deza doesn’t hesitate when Tupra tells him to get the man into the handicapped bathroom.  When they three of them get to the bathroom, Deza is surprised and disgusted when Tupra wields a sword and threatens to decapitate the man.  For dozens of pages Deza narrates the frightening moment when it looks like Tupra is going to kill the man (it doesn’t — or didn’t to me — get boring).  As it turns out, Tupra doesn’t kill the man, though they leave the man badly injured.  Deza leaves the club disgusted and tells his boss as much.  This third volume picks up about there.  Tupra tells Deza to come to his home; he wants to show him something and defend himself:

You criticize me for some trifling, unimportant thing that I did, but you live in a tiny world that barely exists, sheltered from the violence that has always been the norm and still is in most parts of the world, it’s like mistaking the interlude for the whole performance, you haven’t a clue, you people who never step outside of your own time or travel beyond countries like ours in which, up until the day before yesterday, violence also ruled.  What I did was nothing.  The lesser of two evils.  And it was your fault.

What Tupra shows Deza leaves him even more shocked than the episode at the night club.  I suppose it would be possible to criticize this angle in the book as something a bit trite or moralizing, but it doesn’t come off that way.  We may get a glimpse at the horrors otherwise decent people do to maintain their power, but this books really delves into the different ways someone can manipulate others — or himself — with language.  For example, here is how Deza responds after he sees what Tupra has to show him:

[. . .] the images slipped inside me like a foreign body that caused me immediate pain and a sense of oppression and suffocation and the urgent need for someone to remove it (‘Let me sit heavy on thy soul’), but you cannot root out what enters through the eyes, nor what enters through the ears, it installs itself inside you and there’s nothing to be done about it, or else you have to wait some time in order to be able to persuade yourself that you did not see or hear what you did see or hear — there’s always a doubt or the trace of a doubt — that it was the imagination or a misunderstanding or a mirage or a hallucination or a malicious misinterpretation [. . . ]

Deza has never been entirely comfortable with this job.  Really, he took it because two of the people he most respects in the world, Toby Rylands and Peter Wheeler, were a part of it their whole lives; in fact, for all Deza knows, Rylands and Wheeler started the whole thing.  Still, these revelations with Tupra lead Deza to repulsion.  When he really starts looking into the evil the program is trying to grapple with, it is a poison entering into him.

To me, all of this was fascinating, but then Marías takes the book to an entirely different level.  In my prior reviews of this trilogy I mentioned the fact that some of my favorite passages dealt with Deza’s estranged wife.  She is hardly a character in the first two volumes, though her impact on Deza is felt all over the place.  This is her volume, and all of the themes come together in a very personal way as Deza struggles to fight what he now knows he’s capable of while he saves her from an abusive relationship that she may, in fact, be welcoming.  I loved it.

Review copy courtesy of New Directions.

First things first: I’m happy to say that once began, the single paragraph thing wasn’t a hurdle at all.  The first section of the book is simply amazing and I was pulled into the book and propelled forward, even though it was late at night and I was just dabbling with the idea of starting the daunting book.

It begins on a train platform.  The train is late, and Krasznahorkai shows how such a thing can bend our perceptions, making it “reality, only more so.”  The tension builds nicely, much as it does when you’re waiting for a late train and a bit of unwelcome chaos disconcertingly enters the day.

To tell the truth, none of this really surprised anyone any more since rail travel, like everything else, was subject to the prevailing conditions: all normal expectations went by the board and one’s daily habits were disrupted by a sense of ever-spreading all-consuming chaos which rendered the future unpredictable, the past unrecallable and ordinary life so haphazard that people simply assumed that whatever could be imagined might come to pass [. . .].

Is that exaggerated?  I’m not so sure.  On the platform stands Mrs. Plauf, one of the unfortunate victims of the late train, and she accutely feels the threat.  She’s at a strange platform simply trying to get home, and this train is going to get her there uncomfortably late at night.  That is, if it comes at all.

It’s such a familiar event, the delayed train, yet Krasznahorkai goes underneath the surface and shows just how familiar the physical anxiety (that we tend to forget once the event is past) is as well, how a late train, particularly at night, takes someone out of their daily reality into some threatening altered reality.  The concept is nice, and Krasznahorkai brings it out in exceptional prose, filled with long sentences and digressions that force the sentence to pivot and either tighten or loosen up, taking the familiar and bending it.

Anyway, the train does arrive, and the tension deflates a bit, though Krasznahorkai doesn’t let go of the bewilderment, doesn’t allow us to forget that something is amiss.

[. . .] they all relapsed into a jokey indifference, the dull insensibility that ensues when one has been forced to accept certain facts, which simply goes to show how people behave when, having failed, infuriatingly, to understand something, they try to suppress the fear caused by genuine shock to a system which seems to hvae been overtaken by chaos, the nerve-rackingly repeated instances of which may be met with nothing but withering sarcasm.

Mrs. Plauf, slightly relieved, but, as the passage above shows, still shocked, takes her seat on the train.  It only gets worse.  On the crowded train, one man in particular has his eye on her.  I won’t go into details, but it’s a terrible train ride home for Mrs. Plauf — everyone is tired and on edge, and some things happen she can hardly believe — but it’s a superb section for the reader. 

I began this review with this section of the book for a couple of reasons.  Obviously, this is how the book begins, so it seemed appropriate (as usual) to start the book review there too.  However, this train ride is not necessarily essential to the narrative we’re about to read.  In fact, the narrative we’re about to read can be summarized almost more succinctly than the train ride.  On its most simplistic level, this book is about a small Hungarian town that is put on edge when a tiny circus comes to visit.  The circus’s main attraction is a giant, dead whale.  The circus also brings with it a gang of rabble, drawn on by The Prince, a member of the circus crew who quietly speaks gibberish that is then translated by a factotum.  The residents are afraid, but one in particular, Mrs. Eszter, sees an opportunity, provided there are hostilities. 

Mrs. Eszter is an truly an awful character, wonderfully rendered here.  One of the first scenes with her shows her first having sex with the chief of police and then, when he’s gone, simply sleeping.  We spend a few pages watching the room around her ugly form as she sleeps, completely out of control, completely out of character, a harmless human lump completely inert. 

We’ve spent quite a bit of time in the book by now, and a lot of time in this review, without actually introducing two of the principal characters: György Eszter, Mrs. Eszter’s estranged husband who has retired completely from society, and Valuska, the “terminally lunatic” son of Mrs. Plau.  We will follow Eszter and Valuska’s perspectives through the largest section of the book, “The Werckmeister Harmonies.”

Valuska is the village idiot.  He’s known best for his emotional treatises on the sun and moon, for the beauty he finds in their order, and for the confidence he has in beauty and purpose.  Eszter comes from the other side; he once directed the music school and has since completely given up on any idea of order or harmony.  He and Valuska are unlikely friends, each trying, kindly, to convert the other. 

There is so much to discuss, so best if we move along.  The whale.  It echoes Moby-Dick (my review here); it is unknowable, you can’t see it all at once, etc.  That much is explicit.  But even more, the whale brings to mind The Leviathan, Hobbes’s treatise on anarchy and central power.  We know it’s coming; soon the rabble becomes uncontrollable (perhaps The Prince uttered a command — but The Prince doesn’t command) and the whole town is overtaken by anarchy.  There’s a powerful passage where one of the rabble describes their chasing a man, his wife, and their daughter through the town.  They delight when they see the scared man begin to doubt his fear (they wouldn’t do anything to him and his family), but they delight even more in not completely allowing his fear to subside.  It’s awful, and reading it is a visceral experience of the highest kind.

The anarchy is inexplicable, even to those creating it: “however we looked for it, we could not find a fit object for our disgust and despair.”  Much of the book is self-contradictory.  It often baffled me, but not in a bad way; after all, being baffled is part of the point. 

Beyond the ideas, beyond the long, fantastic sentences, there are the unforgettable images.  I mentioned that terrible train ride, but we later walk home with Mrs. Plauf as she sees the dirty streets and a sign announcing the arrival of the whale.  We looked briefly at Mrs. Eszter sleeping; we later see her eating brandy soaked cherries.  That might not sound like much here, but in context it is certainly memorable.

Review copy courtesy of New Directions.

Why do I love reading Aira?  Well, his books are incredibly immediate.  We get the sense (and we’re right on the money) that Aira is writing these events on the fly, as if he’s watching the events occur as he dramatically narrates them to us.  There’s so much energy behind his scenes.  I’ve mentioned it here before, but it’s worth remembering Aira’s writing process.  He sits down in a cafe in the morning and writes whatever comes to mind, even allowing the events in the cafe to invade the story (like a fly, or a drunk man).  In this way, his story is not only a story but also a record of its own production.  He’ writes himself into puzzles and then writes himself out of them the next day, refusing to make things easy on himself by allowing extensive revision.  Not just anyone can pull this off, by which I mean that few writers following this method could come up with something anyone would want to read, but somehow Aira does it, creating something not simply entertaining and certainly not simply interesting because of the method of its production; besides this, he comes up with something meaningful and thoughtful, often something haunting.

On to The Seamstress and the Wind.  I just mentioned how Aira writes in a cafe and includes whatever is going on in the writing; well, here we open the book to find Aira in a cafe in Paris, writing about what he’s thinking about as he writes in a cafe in Paris.  It’s the new book:

These last weeks, since before coming to Paris, I’ve been looking for a plot for the novel I want to write: a novel of successive adventures, full of anomalies and inventions.  Until now nothing occurred to me, except the title, which I’ve had for years and which I cling to with blank obstinacy: “The Seamstress and the Wind.” 

It’s a little tricksy, sure, but writing about whatever he’s doing also serves to introduce one the issues he plays with in this book: memory; or, rather, forgetting, losing, maybe never having.  We find out that the title he clings to is the result of a dream he had.  It was a brilliant dream, a vivid story, a marvel he couldn’t wait to write down, and it had something to do with a seamstress and the wind.

However, when I woke up I had forgotten it.  I only remembered that I had had it, and it was good, and now I didn’t have it.  In those cases it’s not worth the trouble to wrack your brain, I know from experience, because nothing comes back, maybe because there is nothing, there never was anything, except the perfectly gratuitous sensation that there had been something . . .

So the story itself is gone, if it ever was there.  Aira knows it’s pointless to try to remember, but he resists letting it go “and in that resistance it occurs to me that there’s something else I could rescue from the ruins of forgetting, and that is forgetting itself.”  Aira goes on to explain how this “taking control of forgetting” is “consistent with my theory of literature.”  He expresses a perhaps hypocritical disdain for writers who rely on memory and says, “Forgetting is richer, freer, more powerful.” 

Which leads Aira to a childhood memory that has its moment of loss and forgetting.  He is playing with his friend Omar near a truck’s trailer.  Aira is startled to find his friend has disappeared.  He’s shocked.  Omar was there and now he is not.  Aira wanders home and finds out that it is much later than he thinks.  Everyone is, in fact, worried about him – he had disappeared, and now he cannot remember the afternoon.  He has no idea what happened to that time (even now), but the fact that so much time has passed causes him even more anxiety.  After all, he has arrived, and Omar is still missing: “It wasn’t me, they were wrong . . . it was Omar who’d disappeared!  It was his mother who had to be told, a search for him that had to be undertaken.  And now, I though in a spasm of desperation, it would be much more difficult because night was falling.  I felt responsible for the lost time, whose irretrievable quality I understood for the first time.”

Omar’s mother is Delia Siffoni, the local seamstress.  She’s working on a wedding dress for the pregnant school teacher when she hears Omar is missing.  She freaks out, takes her sewing kit and the wedding dress, jumps in a car and tells it to go!  She’s certain that her son is in that trailer and on his way to the abyss — Patagonia.  “What else could she do?”

Now, this is where the story gets whacked, and I mean that as a technical term.  Coming home to find his wife missing since she’s fled to find their missing son, Ramón Siffoni takes off too.  And then someone else takes off after them, and it’s a mad race to Patagonia.  There’s a wreck, flight, a monster child, and the wind eventually falls in love.  To be frank, it was a bit magical and, for me, incoherent.  That’s not to say it isn’t fun, but I admit that it left me a bit baffled at times, and not in a good way.  It’s says a lot for the book, then, that I came away still feeling I’d been through something powerful.

There’s a moment with Delia: ”Then this is Patagonia? she said to herself, perplexed.  And if this is Patagonia, then what am I?”  Indeed.  Who is she?  What is any of this?  I don’t know if there is a symbolic meaning to the monster child or the wind or any other of the strange things we encounter in this book.  But there’s the forgetting, the loss, and the chase, and Aira doesn’t leave those alone, and they become a powerful look at his own childhood experiences and, perhaps, into the Argentina of his childhood.  What was threatening?  What was forgotten?  What was lost, that perhaps never was?  I will close with a passage I loved from early in the book that I think shows that, despite the whimsy, Aira is talking here about something more serious.  The passage shows peace, a near surety of peace, yet a peace threatened by something, perhaps only something imagined but that, imagined, is becoming real:

How could we get lost in a town where everyone knew each other, and almost everyone was more or less related?  A child could only be lost in labyrinths and they didn’t exist among us.  Even so, it did exist if only as a fear, the accident existed: an invisible force dragged the accident toward reality, and kept dragging at it even there, giving it the most capricious forms, reordering  over and over its details and circumstances, creating it, annihilating it, with all the unmatched power of fiction.

Review copy courtesy of New Directions.

Two of Krasznahorkai’s books are available in English from New Directions, and another is due out later this year.  However, I haven’t read them yet.  That’s a big yet there; so much did I enjoy what I found in Animalinside that I’m sure I’ll be reading The Melancholy of Resistance and War & Warvery soon.  Still, I’m writing this post as a reader who has, on the one hand, no experience with Krasznahorkai I can use to engage with this little book; on the other hand, I also no preconceptions about Krasznahorkai’s work and can say that, if you haven’t read him either, that shouldn’t stop you from reading this one.

On the topic of reading Animalinside: this is a limited edition.  Only 2,000 copies are out there.  I’m sorry; I will be keeping mine and keeping it safe.

Back to when this book arrived in the mail and I didn’t know what to make of it.  After the short preface by Colm Tóibín I find a strange picture of a simple three-dimensional space.  Hulking there is a solid black, two-dimensional beast (it’s not the armless one above yet); it stands in the room at some strange angle that is all wrong.  Under the image is the first section, and I give the first few lines a skim:

He wants to break free, attempts to stretch open the walls, but he has been tautened there by them, and there he remains in this tautening, in this constraint, and there is nothing else to do but howl, and now and forever he shall be nothing but his own tautening and his own howling, everything he was is no more, everything that could shall never be, so that for him there is not even anything that is.

I was certainly intrigued, but also a bit wary.  Is it going to be a bit too artsy for my tastes?  Would this abstract text accompanying the (fantastic) abstract images open up for me?  Is this going to be a run-on rant? 

Quickly, though — very quickly, despite a bit of wariness – I was taken in, propelled forward by the text and the images on the page.  It’s a beautiful nightmare; a very unique experience.

Before I had any idea what was really going on (and I admit, it’s not necessarily all clear to me even now), I was simply enjoying the imagery and the prowling menance that, at first, is locked up in that room.  The first section is told in the third person, but soon the beast is speaking, and he’s speaking to the reader, speaking right to the reader’s disorientation.

[. . .] you know nothing, nothing, but nothing, about anything, because you don’t even know that you’re thinking about me, because you don’t even know if you should be afraid now or not, or if you should be terrified or if you should be anxious [. . .]

It’s important to remember that all of this is accompanied by images that are themselves disorienting.  There’s a calm surface, but details and just the strangeness of the images subvert any calm to build up, initially (before it gets downright terrifying in its imagery), a slight anxiety.  We don’t hear the creature howling, whether in mourning or to threaten, but how can we look at the image and not imagine it.

Krasznahorkai’s text does not necessarily remain abstract.  This beast is threatening absolute destruction, and not just physical: ”no verb at all shall ever be heard again[ . . .]”

But that’s just the narrative.  It’s how Krasznahorkai (with Neumann) gets to that ultimate destruction and what we see there when we get there that makes this book a work of art and not just an accomplished post-apocalyptic image.  The short segments are filled with repetitions, in the best sense.  Apparently Krasznahorkai told his translator, “There are many repetitions in the text, and this is very important; repeat everything exactly as it is in the original regardless of what the English language WANTS.”  I’d say it was successful; even in translation, there’s a rhythm throughout that intensifies or retreats slightly, depending on the moment. 

Animalinside is also filled with contradictions, and these supply what to me is the most interesting and worthwhile substance here.  At first the beast is ranting because he’s imprisoned somehow, in the next he covers infinite space — and he’s coming!  And in one moment he’s coming from the outside, in the next he’s already inside us.  There, he’s predicting the end of all things and then here he is lamenting infinity.  Finally, we get that last section when “no verb at all shall ever be heard again.”  Of course, he’s speaking and we are listening, so what has really been lost?  What is the significance?  And that is the frightening answer.

I don’t believe Animalinside will be for everybody, though I think it’s one of the more interesting books I’ve read (and looked at) this year, and I’d certainly recommend it even to those wary of it.

Review copy courtesy of New Directions.

The book takes place in the provincial setting of Progrody, a town deep in the Russian interior where there is no sign of anything that could be called a body of water.  There lives the renowned coral merchant Nissen Piczenik, a man completely devoted to his trade.  Somehow, his corals are richer and more refined than others.  He employs several girls who thread the coral; one of these is his wife, though to him she’s just another threader who, after ten years of marriage, is less attractive than many of the others.  They have no children; consequently, he sees little point in their relationship.  But where he focuses his energy we find a magical result:

As you see, then, Nissen Piczenik didn’t have a shop as such.  He ran his business from home, which meant that he lived among the corals night and day, summer and winter, and as all the windows in his parlor and kitchen opened onto the courtyard and were protected by thick iron bars, there was in his apartment a beautiful and mysterious twilight that was like the light under the sea, and it was as though corals were not merely traded here, but that this was where they actually grew.  Furthermore, thanks to a strange and canny quirk of nature, the coral merchant Nissen Piczenik was a red-haired Jew with a copper-collored goatee that looked like a particular kind of reddish seaweed, which gave the man a striking resemblance to a sea god.

Nissen Piczenik might even believe he is some kind of sea god in exile.  Certainly he resents the land-locked setting of Progrody.  Despite his love of the ocean and of corals in particular, he has never seen the sea.  That large body of water (any sea is the sea) is mythic; he’s a firm believer in many superstitions about the sea and its effects on people.  In particular, he believes in — he has seen — how coral effects and is affected by the women who wear it:

Only there, on the fine, firm white throat of a woman, in close proximity to the living artery — sister of the feminine heart — did they revive, acquire luster and beauty, and exercise their innate ability to charm men and awaken their ardor. 

Another myth he believes in is the Leviathan itself:

Not, the ancient god Jehovah had created everything, the earth and the beasts who walked upon it, the sea and all its creatures.  But for the time being — namely, until the coming of the Messiah — he had left the supervision of all the animals and plants of the sea, and in particular of corals, to the care of the Leviathan, who lay curled on the seabed.

In a fantastic passage where Nissen Piczenik follows a young sailor around town during the sailor’s leave (Hofmann hints of homosexuality in the afterword, showing how much this book contains) begging him to tell him any stories at all about the sea.  In a stroke of luck, Nissen Piczenik finds himself invited to travel to Odessa with the sailor.  He barely mentions this to his wife and eventually ends up staying in Odessa for three weeks, hating the thought of going home and leaving the sea air. 

When he does return home, much has changed.  The story is set in the early twentieth-century and modernism brings to a neighboring town a new coral merchant with — if it’s possible — even better coral.

The plot, with its mystical and questing elements, sounds like a moral fable, and it can be read that way, but there is more to it than that.  First, there was much to love about the depictions of provincial Russian life in the early twentieth century.  It’s brief, but in quick sentences Roth brings his characters to life.  There is also the fact that this story contains a great deal in such a short amount of space.  Hofmann brings this up in his afterword and I’d like to put it here: “It is set at the edge of an empire, and on the cusp of an age, even though most of its personnel are innocent of both.  It accommodates an outbreak of diphtheria, a coma, a run on the bank, emigration, the imputation of homosexuality (with “young Komrower” — or is that a shameful thought?), the modern sales techniques of Jenö Lakatos, the end of a marriage in sexual indifference and alcoholism and overwork, a false product, and a true death.”  Indeed, if read as a fable, most of these elements would be glossed over; in fact, they are the heart of the story about this remarkable coral merchant who would like to live his life on another plane but is stuck with the one he’s been given.

Review copy courtesy of New Directions.

I was putting off reading this book because I have yet to tackle the third volume of Marías’s Your Face Tomorrow Trilogy.  I have a stack of his books at home, unread because I feel I should finish what I’ve started first.  Why haven’t I read the third book of a trilogy I highly recommend?  Because it’s a big book, and I do most of my reading on a train.  I still haven’t figured out how to pack it around with me.  I’m sure, though, that once I begin it I won’t be sorry.  Just as I wasn’t sorry when I finally opened up this Pearl due to its placement on the Best Translated Book Award longlist.

It was delightful to read the first lines and find myself back in Marías territory.  An as yet unnamed narrator jumps into the action head first.  How?  By iterating and reiterating around a slightly abstract concept.  In this case, wrath and fear of revenge.

No one knows what it is to be hunted down without having lived it, and unless the chase was active and constant, carried out with deliberation, determination, dedication and never a break, with perseverance and fanaticism, as if the pursuers had nothing else to do in life but look for you, keep after you, follow your trail, locate you, catch up with you and then, at best, wait for the moment to settle the score.

. . . vengeance is extremely wearying and hatred tends to evaporate, it’s a fragile, ephemeral feeling, impermanent, fleeting, so difficult to maintain that it quickly gives way to rancor or resentment which are much more bearable, easier to retrieve, much less virulent and somehow less pressing, while hatred is always in a tearing hurry, always urgent.

Before we get even a sense of who’s speaking or why, Marías gives us around 5 pages of this delightful meandering.  Of course, we may not know who is speaking or why, but all the time we’re getting a nice look at this speaker’s mind.  For some time he has been running from someone whose sole purpose — he thinks — is to avenge some foul deed.  From the title we know that this deed probably took place in Mexico . . . with Elvis.  Soon, our suspicion is confirmed.

It all happened because of Mr. Presley, and that is not one of those idiotic lines referring to the record that was playing on the night we met, or to the time we were careless and went too far, or to the idol of the person who caused the problem by forcing us to go to a concert to seduce her or just to make her happy.  It all happened because of Elvis Presley in person, or Mr. Presley, as I used to call him until he told me it made him feel like his father.

It isn’t a spoiler to explain a little bit about the mishap in Mexico, though I completely understand if some readers simply intrigued about the prospect of Marías writing about Elvis in Mexico want to turn their eyes here.  For the others, this gives a glimpse at one theme Marías is playing with: the power of words, the power (or ills) of translation.

Elvis is making a movie, at least a part of which will be filmed in Mexico.  However, Elvis “says he found out they pronounce the letter c differently in Spain and that’s how he wants to pronounce it.”  Since our narrator happens to be the only person from Spain employed by the movie studio, he goes along to help Elvis with his accent (he’s going to sing one of the songs entirely in Spanish — err, but he hopes without the Mexican accent) and to act as a translator.

One night in a cantina, there’s a scuffle between Elvis and some shady characters.  Our narrator gets caught in the middle:

“¿Qué ha dicho?” now it was Roland César’s turn to ask me.  Their inability to understand each other was enraging them, a thing like that can really grate on your nerves in an argument.

“Que quién es usted para decir que nos vayamos.”

“Han oido, Julio, muchachos, me pregunta el gachupín que quién soy yo para ponerlos en la calle,” Montalbán answered without looking at me.  I thought (if there was time for such a thought) that it was odd that he said I was the one asking who he was: it was Presley who was asking and I was only translating, it was a warning I didn’t pay attention to, or that I picked up on too late, when you relive what happened, or reconstruct it.

Bad Nature is funny (I hope that is apparent), but it is also surprisingly intense and psychologically acute.  Marías trademark, nearly obsessive analyses are a part of that.  Also, I think it is important to note that, for this reader, Esther Allen’s translation didn’t stand in the way at all.  The prose flowed perfectly, allowing me to satisfy my craving in one sitting.  I recommend this to any and all.

Review copy courtesy of New Directions.

Kornél Esti begins with one of the most fascinating opening chapters I’ve read in a long time.  The first-person narrator, a writer, is around forty years old.  Ten years earlier he severed his relationship with one of his closest and most constant companions, Kornél Esti.  But, in a line echoing the opening to The Inferno, the narrator thinks enough time has passed.

I had passed the midpoint of my life, when one windy day in spring, I remembered Kornél Esti.  I decided to call on him and to revive our former friendship.

Before we meet Kornél Esti, who is also around forty — in fact, he is the exact same age as the narrator — the narrator takes us briefly to his childhood with Kornél Esti.  One wonders why he would ever want to revive this friendship.  The narrator was a well-raised boy, calm and controlled; but not his friend: “There were no two people on the planet more different than Kornél and myself.”  This only led to trouble for our narrator:

Once Uncle Loizi was coming toward us, an old friend of my father’s, whom I had always liked and respected, a three-hundred-pound magistrate.  Kornél shouted at me:

“Stick your tongue out.”  And he stuck out his own till it reached the point of his chin.

He was a cheeky boy, but interesting, never dull.

He put a lighted candle in my hand.

“Set fire to the curtains!” he urged me.  “Set fire to the house.  Set the world on fire.”

He put a knife in my hand too.

“Stick it in your heart!” he exclaimed.  “Blood’s red.  Blood’s warm.  Blood’s pretty.”

I didn’t dare follow his suggestions, but I was pleased that he dared to put into words what I thought.  I said nothing, gave a chilly smile.  I was afraid of him and attracted to him.

Yes, their friendship could have led to many bad endings.  It was still pretty bad.  For one thing, the narrator and Kornél Esti were uncommonly alike in appearance.  Even if the narrator didn’t follow Kornél Esti’s urgings, he was often maligned, and sometimes just by association and sometimes due to mistaken identity.  It almost cost the narrator all he had.

I paid.  Paid a lot.  Not only money.  I paid with my reputation too.  People everywhere looked at me askance.  They didn’t know where they were with me, whether I was right or left of center, whether I was a patriotic citizen or a dangerous rabble-rouser, a respectable family man or a depraved voluptuary, and altogether whether I was a real person or just a dream figure — a drunken, double-dealing, lunatic scarecrow who still flapped his ragged, cast-off gentleman’s coat whichever way the wind blew.  I paid dearly for our friendship.

All that, however, I instantly forgot and forgave on that windy spring day when I decided to call on him.

The author seeks Kornél Esti at a hotel at which he’s rumored to be staying.  At first, he cannot find his old friend, but soon Kornél Esti appears, standing in front of the mirror.  Though it is never explicit, the reader has known for some time that Kornél Esti is a clear double to the author (and to Kosztolányi), but if anything this makes all we’ve read more interesting, particularly the near suicidal urges.  It’s a great opening to the book and a fine introduction to Kosztolányi’s keen observations, which he packs into lively prose.

At the end of the first chapter the author and Kornél Esti decide, “Let’s write something, together.”  Kornél Esti will come up with the stories, exaggerated vignettes from his own past, and the author will put them down in writing.  Together they will edit for style.  And, in a final bit of play, Kornél Esti suggests:

“You put your name to it.  And my name can be the title.  The title’s in bigger letters.”

I was in.  Unfortunately, this virtuosic opening didn’t lead to the type of novel I was expecting (and I’d like to read this again without the expectations).  With the play between the author and alter-ego I was expecting some great ancestor to Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock (review to come) or The Counterlife.  Rather than continue to examine the relationship between the author and Kornél Esti, the book goes into those vignettes from Kornél Esti’s life, any one of which has little to do with another.  I was, sadly, disappointed that an interesting concept led to a series of disconnected episodes, and that affected my overall view of this book (I’d rate Skylark above it).  Still, I have to wonder if I’d read it with a different frame of mind whether I would have ended up loving this one.  Most of the vignettes, after all, are striking.

For example, I loved the first one.  Kornél Esti is six years old; it is his first day at school and he’s terrified.  One of my favorite scenes in all of literature is when Stephen Dedalus goes to boarding school in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man.  It came on the page as if it were my own memories (though I never went to boarding school).  I have to say that here Kosztolányi nearly matches it, particularly when Kornél Esti’s mother leaves him alone at the classroom door.  His terror and his desire to be back with her, to not be left alone, are viscerally felt, as is the profound transformation of his fear:

He could see children, more children than he’d ever before seen in one place.  It was a crowd, a crowd of completely unknown little people like himself.

So he wasn’t alone.  But if it had previously plunged him into despair that he was so alone in the world, now an even more alarming despair seized him, that he was so very much not alone in the world, that all those other people were alive as well.

In another vignette, in which we may see some of the inspiration for Skylark, Kornél Esti is a nineteen year old, leaving his home town for the first town, travelling by train.  In the car with him is a mother and her young daughter.  Kornél Esti is fascinated by the mother.  Then, suddenly, he takes in the daughter, an unfortunately ugly girl: ”his soul wandered around those two souls, glancing now at the mother, now at the girl.  What sufferings, what passions must tear at them.  Poor things, he thought.”

In another we also find Kornél Esti on a train.  This time, he’s travelling through Bulgaria.  He knows not a word of Bulgarian, but he’s challenged himself to have a full conversation with the Bulgarian conductor without ever letting on that he cannot communicate.

Though that vignette is perhaps not believable, others are obviously fictitious, such as the one where Kornél Esti travels to a town that is completely honest.  The advertisements are self-deprecating, explaining that in their food products they use substandard ingredients and you’re probably better off buying from someone else.  The mayor himself admits he doesn’t have the citizens’ interests at heart.  As it turns out, everyone is happy, and even the businesses disclosing the worst are thriving.  No one expects much, so things turn out to be great. 

A few other vignettes aren’t even about Kornél Esti, like the one involving a young love affair (“If a girl jumps into the well, she loves somebody.”) that ends in marriage and tragedy.  One thing all of the stories have in common: a strangeness mixed into the normal tones of a conventional narration.

Kornél Esti has its longueurs, and, as I said, it doesn’t necessarily live up to the promising first chapter, but it is a lively book, a delightful read, and the work of a master I hope to get to know better.