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Yesterday, the finalists for the Best Translated Book Award were announced, and I have to say I was slightly surprised to find among the title Diego Marani’s New Finnish Grammar (Nuova Grammatica Finlandese, 2000; tr. from the Italian by Judith Landry, 2011). Its placement in the list of finalists seems to cement my status as an outlier here. When I finished the book I went searching online to see how others felt about it, and, well, most of the reviews I read were very positive. In New Statesman, even Gabriel Josipovici, whose good opinion seems to be very difficult to attain, had the following (is it faint?) praise: ”Yet what he has produced is still a cut above what passes for serious fiction in this country” (he does call it a “remarkable” novel earlier) (click here for the review). In The Independent, Rosie Goldsmith called it a “beautifully written, intelligent novel” (click here for the review). A bit closer to my home, at The Complete Review M.A. Orthofer gave the book a B+, which is high marks there (click here for the review). And, giving the highest praise I found, at The Guardian Nicholas Lezard had this to say: “Deep and rich, did I say? That isn’t the half of it. I can’t remember when I read a more extraordinary novel, or when I was last so strongly tempted to use the word ‘genius’ of its author” (click here for the review).
So, yes, I am an outlier on this one, so take this review — as always — with a grain of salt.
And it isn’t that I didn’t like New Finnish Grammar. I actually agree with most of what the above-referenced reviews have to say about it. I’m usually a big fan of any book that examines memory, language, or identity, and this book examines all three and, better yet, examines how they intersect.
The book begins with a short prologue written by the Finnish neurologist Petri Friari. Though born in Finland, by World War II Friari was an expatriate working for the German Navy. In 1943, his ship comes upon a soldier who has been severely injured. The wounded man has no memory, no language, and, for that matter, no identity — not to others and not even to himself. A label on the injured man’s jacket, though, leads Friari to believe the man is Finnish; indeed, that the man’s name is Sampo Karjalainen. Friari undertakes to reteach “Sampo” Finnish and, eventually, even sends him on his way to Finland with a letter, hoping the familiar sights, sounds, and smells might help him to fully recover.
We know right from the prologue, though, that something went terribly wrong. Friari has realized that he made a mistake, leading the injured man to an awful fate. All he has now is a manuscript Sampo wrote, trying to explain his story, though he never gained control of Finnish. That manuscript makes up the better part of this book, though Friari has taken the liberty to, uh, clean it up a bit:
My knowledge of the facts which lay behind this document has enabled me to reconstruct the story that it tells, to rewrite it in more orthodox language and to fill in some of the gaps. I myself have often had to intervene, adding linking passages of my own to tie up unrelated episodes. Adjectives left in the margins, nouns doggedly declined in the more complex cases of the Finnish language, all traced the outlines of a story which was well-known to me. In this way I have been able to coax these pages to yield up something that they were struggling in vain to tell.
This may have been one area where I struggled with the book. It’s an interesting concept that Friari creates yet another degree of removal by cleaning up Sampo’s scribblings (in the process changing who knows what), and I probably should take that for what it’s worth. I feel, though, that this cleansing actually hindered my connection with the world and with Sampo. Perhaps that is the intended effect, though; still, the entire book came off as “beautifully” written (despite the quotes, I mean the book is beautifully written) because it all seems to be from one voice, detracting, for me, from the problems of identity it wants us to grapple with.
Putting that issue I had aside, there is a genuine sense of intrigue when Sampo arrives in Finland and attempts to find himself. Everything, though, is completely foreign, giving Marani an opportunity to examine the process of language building, of myth-making, and of creating a national identity and well as an individual identity. For all the good intentions behind his fraudulent repatriation and the clean slate you’d think the forces of the Finnish language had to work on, Sampo is prevented from integrating into this culture and language.
We had mingled but not totally bonded, Finland and I; something in me remained untouched by this mingling, as though deep down some buried identity was refusing to be wiped out and was struggling furiously to rise to the surface.
And the book is very sad. There is a real Sampo Karjalainen and he has real parents, and, of course, they know the Sampo who eventually visits them is not their son. So this Sampo is alone, and even the Finnish language is against him. As Friari says at one point, “A language’s prescriptive baggage comes into being less to facilitate its comprehension, than to prevent foreigners’ access to it.” Sampo doesn’t know what he’s lost, but he’s struggling to find it. On the other hand, Friari has too good a memory and cannot get away from his own past. To make matters worse, now he has the fate of the injured Sampo to deal with.
It really is all quite interesting, and no doubt others will love every page of this book. For me, though – whether because everything, even the broken Finnish, is filtered by Friari, or because Marani allows the plot to be overtaken by Finnish mythology and cultural history — the book was a bit hard to engage with directly. Indeed, there were many times while reading that I drifted away. Of course I realize that this is often my own fault, and the good opinions of others indicates I’m at fault here; despite that, I’ve gone through the book again since finishing it and have to say my experience with large portions of this fairly short book was the same.
All of that said, I’m still very happy that I read this book and thank the Best Translated Book Award for bringing it to my attention.
Today the ten finalists for the Best Translated Book Award were announced, whittling away at the longlist of twenty-five (click here for the longlist). Here they are:
- Lightning, by Jean Echenoz, tr. from the French by Linda Coverdale (New Press)
- Upstaged, by Jacques Jouet, tr. from the French by Leland de la Durantaye (Dalkey Archive)
- Kornél Esti, by Dezsö Kosztolányi, tr. from the Hungarian by Bernard Adams (New Directions)
- I Am a Japanese Writer, by Dany Laferrière, tr. from the French by David Hormel (Douglas & MacIntyre)
- New Finnish Grammar, by Diego Marani, tr. from the Italian by Judith Landry (Dedalus)
- Stone Upon Stone, by Wieslaw Mysliwski, tr. from the Polish by Bill Johnston (Archipelago Books)
- Scars, by Juan José Saer, tr. from the Spanish by Steve Dolph (Open Letter)
- Kafka’s Leopards, by Moacyr Scliar, tr. from the Portuguese by Thomas O. Beebee (Texas Tech University Press)
- In Red, by Magdelena Tulli, tr. from the Polish by Bill Johnston (Archipelago Books)
- Never Any End to Paris, tr. from the Enrique Vila-Matas (New Directions)
Since the longlist was announced on February 29, I have been trying to get through a number of the books, and to date I have read eleven. Of the seven finalists I’ve read to now, the only one on this list that I’m a bit surprised by is Upstaged, which was fun but . . . well, I must have missed something of the Republicanism or something. I also didn’t particularly care for New Finnish Grammar, but I can see why others like it.
Here are links to my reviews:
- Lightning (click here)
- Upstaged (click here)
- Kornél Esti (click here)
- New Finnish Grammar (click here)
- Stone Upon Stone (forthcoming)
- Scars (click here)
- Kafka’s Leopards (click here)
- In Red (forthcoming)
- Never Any End to Paris (click here)
Click here to read the abstract of the story on The New Yorker webpage (this week’s story is available only for subscribers). Colum McCann’s “Transatlantic” was originally published in the April 16, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
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Okay, I’ve come back to the top of my post after writing my thoughts on “Transatlantic” below. So I now preface those thoughts with a plea: warn me if it seems I’m just becoming a finicky reader who cannot be pleased, because my unusually negative reactions to last week’s story and to this week’s story have made me wonder. It doesn’t help that I’ve just finished Eric Chevillard’s fantastically fun Demolishing Nisard (review to come), a novella about an obsessed man who wants to do all he can to destroy a nineteenth-century critic — Nisard – whose conventional, narrow, life-sucking views on literature have tainted everything. Of course, in this obsession, the narrator himself becomes fairly life-sucking and bitter and worries about his own Nisardification. Please warn me if I, too, am becoming unbearable and unopen, like Nisard.
The inclusion of this “short fiction” in The New Yorker ticked a couple of the wrong boxes for me. First, according to the interview McCann did with Deborah Treisman (click here), this is an excerpt from a novel in progress. In “Transatlantic,” for me more than usual, it is obvious its inclusion had little to do with its qualities as an independent, cohesive piece of short fiction. It’s advanced advertising in the guise of short fiction, something award-winning authors can depend on from time to time from The New Yorker. I have nothing against these writers. This is good for their work, but I believe it is bad for readers. Yes, this advanced advertising sometimes works on me, I know. For example, I was very excited to read Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad after reading the excerpt ”Ask Me If I Care” (click here for my thoughts on the short story and here for my thoughts on the novel); in fact, that excerpt is the only reason I rushed to read that book when it came out rather than wait. And by far the best part of Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! was the excerpt published in The New Yorker, “The Dredgeman’s Revelation” (click here for my thoughts on the short story and here for my thoughts on the novel). I’m also not under the illusion that publishing excerpts of upcoming works is something new; William Maxwell, the esteemed fiction editor of The New Yorker for forty years who helped bring us the brilliant short work of John Updike, John Cheever, J.D. Salinger, Alice Munro, among others, even had an excerpt from his own novel published in the magazine (click here for my review of that novel — one of my absolute favorites).
The other wrong box: timeliness. It’s hard not to look at this piece — “Transatlantic” — and not think it was included in this week’s issue primarily (solely?) to mark the centenary of the tragic transatlantic journey of the Titanic. Indeed, the transatlantic journey recounted here took place in 1919, albeit by plane. Ahh, perhaps I’m just being silly. I’ll move on.
“Transatlantic” tells the relatively unknown story of the first non-stop transatlantic flight, accomplished by John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown. The two took off on June 14, 1919, from St. John’s, Newfoundland, and landed in Clifden, Ireland. I’m sad to say that that is just about all this story does. It’s not that a historical story is not worth writing or reading, but this one was dry, straightforward, and simplistic. I actually really enjoy similar short stories that take on the zeitgeist of scientific discovery and adventure, such as those by Andrea Barrett, but this one was dull. Here is how it begins:
The Vickers Vimy. A modified bomber. All wood and linen and wire. She’s wide and lumbering, but Jack Alcock still thinks her a nippy little thing. He pats her each time he climbs on board and slides into the cockpit beside Teddy Brown. One smooth motion of his body. Hand on the throttle, feet on the rudder bar, he can already feel himself aloft.
What he likes most of all is rising up over the clouds and then flying in sunlight. He can lean out over the edge and see the shadow play on the whiteness below, expanding and contracting on the surface of the clouds.
Brown, the navigator, is more reserved — it embarrasses him to make such a fuss. He sits forward in the cockpit, alert to whatever clues the machine might give. He knows how to intuit the shape of the wind, but he puts his faith in what he can actually touch: the compasses, the charts, the spirit level at his feet.
It could be that my misgivings with “Transatlantic” began with the first three sentences. I’m not a fan of serial sentence fragments to begin with, but I really couldn’t figure out the reasoning behind starting this piece out in such a stuttering manner. The remainder of the section simply introduces and contrasts Alcock and Brown, but they’ll be contrasted throughout the entire piece, so for me this entire section, introductory as it was, did not accomplish much other than to defer my entrance into the story.
Alright, I need to stop for a moment. My feelings for this piece are obvious now, but I don’t attribute its failures to McCann. I cannot understand why a story in this state would be published in a magazine known for high editorial standards. Or, rather, I suspect I understand it: advanced advertising and timeliness were given prominence over quality. My complaints against the story are really complaints against Treisman who, in my opinion, should have been a more vigilent editor. For example . . .
Its structure, a series of fairly short segments, though primarily chronological still managed to come off as unorganized. It was like McCann had written a bunch of segments and, rather than fit them together and allow them to build off one another, just placed them side by side. This is certainly how it felt when I got to the segment on the experiences of Alcock and Brown during World War I. Even this segment, short and lifeless, felt like it was there simply to provide a redundant contrast of these two men: Alcock is a bit wild, gets off on the thrill, while Brown is cautious and deliberate — we get it.
Moving away from the structure to the characterization, it’s even a bit more frustrating that these personalities are reduced to a contrast when — without the help of the story — we know that Alcock dies in a plane crash just months after this flight and Brown dies thirty years later by overdosing on Veronal. None of that is in this story. Such facts, of course, don’t need to be here, but shouldn’t the story suggest more depth to these two than can be incorporated by the binary of making one reckless and one cautious?
And so the story moves on through these segments. There’s preparation, a scan of the newly-developing publicity machine, and finally we get to the takeoff. My goodness, even the takeoff is boring, hampered as it is by those serial fragments, by poorly chosen words (“attends”), and by badly divided sentences (“There will, later, be a good moon.”):
A strong wind attends takeoff. Arriving from the west in uneven gusts. The fog has lifted and the long-range weather reports are good. No clouds. The initial wind velocity is worrying, but will probably calm to about twenty knots. There will, later, be a good moon. They climb aboard to scattered cheers, secure their safety belts, check the instruments yet again. Contact! The swing of the starting handle. Alcock opens the throttle and brings both engines to full power. He signals for the wooden chocks to be pulled clear from the wheels. The mechanic leans down, ducks under the wings, armpits the chocks, steps back, throws them away. He raises both arms in the air. A cough of smoke from the engines. The propellers whirl. The Vickers Vimy is pointed into the gale. A slight angle to the wind. Uphill. Go now, go. The incredible engine roar. The waft of warming oil. Speed and lift. [. . .]
In that mountain of detail where we watch the mechanic remove the chocks in slow motion, the best detail is one we’re about to get to: “They say nothing.” But then it reverts to the what we’ve had before — “Hang on, hang on.” To be fair, I did get excited when the journey was underway. They’ll be flying above icebergs, flying blindly through clouds, but the story never quite transcends above its simplistic trajectory, and we go on about like that until we land in Ireland –
Ireland.
A beautiful country. A bit savage on a man all the same.
Ireland.
That’s the end, and it’s also the only time in this story that we really hear about Ireland, so to understand why Ireland is set up with repetition and that ominous line about being both beautiful and savage one has to go to the interview to find out more about McCann’s book. As it stands, it’s like the author just threw it in there.
So, for me a very dry skim on a transatlantic voyage. What have I missed?
The work of translation is fascinating to me, and I know so little about what these people do who dedicate their time to bringing us important works of literature from around the world (without their efforts, I’d be missing out on my favorite books), so the opportunity to pose a few questions to translator Margaret B. Carson gives me great pleasure. Last year Open Letter published Ms. Carson’s translation of Sergio Chejfec’s My Two Worlds (my review here). Currently My Two Worlds is on the longlist of the Best Translated Book Award. The finalists will be announced this Tuesday, and I wish Ms. Carson and Mr. Chejfec the best. I’ve read ten of the twenty-five finalists, and I’d put My Two Worlds in the top-tier of those two handfuls.
A “walking” book, when I finished My Two Worlds I wrote, “It’s meandering (obviously), sometimes feels pointless (deliberately), and takes longer than one would expect to go a such a short distance (which works perfectly with the book’s plot).” It’s a slow-burner, but in the time since I finished it has only grown in my esteem. My Two Worlds is only just over 100 pages, but it took me some time to read because of the many layers and switch-backs not just in the global structure of the book but also in each sentence. The translation is a marvel.
Q: How long have you been translating, and what are some of your prior translating projects?
A: For about twenty years off and on, mostly short stories, poetry and plays from Latin America. Before translating My Two Worlds, I translated a little-known novel by the 19th-century Mexican author José Tomás de Cuéllar for Oxford University Press (The Magic Lantern, 2000). I’ve also translated poetry by the Argentine poet, Mercedes Roffé, which is mostly published on-line or in chapbooks. For a few years I seemed to be only translating Cubans — Virgilio Piñera’s play Electra Garrigó, poetry by Nancy Morejón and Alberto Rodríguez Tosca, and essays by the theatre critic Vivian Martínez Tabares — but now I’m mostly centered in Argentina.
Q: What attracted you to the work of translating in the first place? Was this planned, or did you just happen upon it?
A: While living in Madrid for a few years in the 1980s, I hung out with English-speaking artists whose Spanish was fairly rudimentary. I wanted to share my readings with them, especially a story written by Ignacio Aldecoa, “Un buitre ha hecho su nido en el café,” which was set in a café almost identical to the one we used to frequent, El Café Comercial on the Glorieta de Bilbao, an archetypical Old World café with marble-topped tables and mirror-lined walls. Looking back, I see that it’s a fairly conventional story, but one aspect really fascinated me — its description of the mise-en-abyme effect of the mirrors. I really loved figuring out how to carry this over into English as my friends were trying to capture the same effect in their drawings. Back in the United States, I became more serious about literary translation and took a few workshops while doing my master’s in English at the City College of New York. Through people I met in the workshop, I became more connected to what seemed back then to be small world of literary translation, with few venues for publication. Now, almost twenty years later, with the Internet and many new independent publishers and online journals, the landscape has changed completely.
Q: What led you to Chejfec’s work, and how did you come to translate it for Open Letter?
A: I met Sergio at a poetry event in New York a few years ago, not too long after he moved here from Venezuela, where he’d been living since the early 1990s, and we struck up a conversation. That led to Sergio sending me some of his books, which I read and admired. It took me a while to ponder the next move, but since I’d done some freelance translation for BOMB magazine, an arts and culture quarterly in New York, I decided to pitch the idea of translating something by Sergio for an upcoming issue. The editor said sure, we’ll take a look. My initial idea was to translate a short story, but Sergio had just sent me the manuscript for the as-yet-unpublished Mis dos mundos. After reading it, I suggested that I translated an excerpt for BOMB, and Sergio agreed. Open Letter Books came into the picture after the excerpt was published. I happened to be reading Three Percent, Open Letter’s blog, and Chad Post, the editorial director, was wondering aloud who Sergio Chejfec was. I emailed him right away and attached the translation, and a few months later we had a contract with Open Letter for My Two Worlds.
Q: This is the first work by Chejfec to be published in English, but he’s been publishing in Spanish to some acclaim for years. Was there any pressure involved in bringing an established writing to a new audience? If so, how did you overcome that pressure and move forward?
A: It’s true that Sergio is a well-regarded author in Argentina, but before My Two Worlds came out, I don’t think many English-speaking readers had heard of him, except for specialists in contemporary Latin American literature — something that’s changing, I hope. The biggest pressure I felt was to do justice to this incredible novel and to deliver it to Open Letter Books in a reasonable amount of times. It’s fairly short, only 103 pages, but instead of the four to five months I anticipated, the translation took almost a year of steady work.
Q: What were some of the particular challenges of translating Chejfec’s work?
A: What sets Chejfec’s work apart from other fiction I’ve translated is the density and complexity of his sentences. There’s no coasting along; every sentence demands an intense scrutiny and a parsing through of meanings and possible translations. When I was working on My Two Worlds, I had to ask Sergio a million questions, to the point where a gloss on the book could be made from the Q&As in the emails that went back and forth
At the same, I noticed how crucial the “little” words were in qualifying the narrator’s ruminations, such as “I can’t be sure” or “anyhow” or “whatever,” the whole panoply of verbal stutters in English that express doubt or hesitation. Even these formulaic expressions needed to be sorted through and weighed in the English translation.
Q: Some of the pleasures?
A: The biggest one? That was when I reached a certain moment in the revision and could read long stretches of the novel as a novel, I mean, I could step back and enjoy the scenes as if it were any book I’d just picked up. You then flash back to an earlier stage when your draft was a mess, full of brackets around those phrases or sentences that resisted translation . . . So it was utterly gratifying in the end to feel myself being gripped by the story as would any other reader.
And throughout the project, it was a real joy to work with Sergio Chejfec. As I said, Sergio spent an enormous amount of time answering my questions, either in emails or in person. I don’t think he ever imagined his novel would be subject to the kind of microscopic scrutiny it underwent. I asked him once about what it was like to be translated and he said it was like a parable by Kafka; he had to offer his explanation to the Guardian of the Other Language so that the door would open. If that was the case, I loved my Kafkaesque role in this endeavor!
The response to My Two Worlds has been amazing. It’s the first translation I’ve done that’s made a perceptible ripple. Chad Post and the staff at Open Letter Books have done an exceptional job at getting the novel out there to the right readers, and it’s a thrill for me to read reviews or commentaries that quote from the translation itself.
Q: And now, for translating in general, what are some of the particular challenges of translating?
A: When I start a new project I feel as uncertain and hesitant as the narrator in My Two Worlds. And I never know when I’ve finished a translation. You can tinker with them endlessly.
Q: What are some of the pleasures?
A: Working intensively in the English language and discovering again and again that it has all the variety and nuance you need to catch any idiosyncrasy in the language you’re translating from.
Q: When you meet aspiring translators who have yet to begin their first project, what advice do you give?
A: My advice: only translate what you’re enthusiastic about. Be willing to write an introduction or translator’s note about the author and the work. You’re often the best person to do this and you’ll also gain visibility as a translator. If the work isn’t in the public domain, be sure to obtain permission to publish your translation (by contacting the author or his or her publisher). And send your translation around.
I’m an active member of the PEN Translation Committee at the PEN American Center in New York. We meet often to discuss general issues concerning the business of translation. A few resources for translators are available on our webpage at the PEN site, including a recently updated model contract that translators should look at (click here).
The American Literary Translators Association also has a helpful website (click here).
Q: What are some translator’s tools that you cannot work without?
A: On-line resources such as bilingual dictionaries, monolingual dictionaries (OED, el Diccionario de la Real Academia Española, wikipedia, google books) Roget’s thesaurus, Words into Type, Webster’s 3rd (Unabridged), my MacBook Air.
Q: How do you determine what project to work on next?
A: Since translation isn’t my main source of income, I can often decide what I’ll work on. I’ve also been contacted directly for translation projects, and if I’m not too busy I usually accept them.
Q: And, if it’s not too much to ask, what are you working on next?
A: I have a few translation projects on hold right now, so they’re likely to be the next. One is to complete the translation of a sequence of poems by Mercedes Roffé. I’d also like to start writing reviews of books in translation.
More long-term, I’m hoping to do maybe one or two other novels by Sergio, but at present I’m only thinking of short-term projects. Happily, Sergio’s fans can look forward to seeing two more of his novels, both from Open Letter, in translations by Heather Cleary: The Planets, which will be out in a few months, and The Dark, which will be published next year.
Q: What are some of your favorite authors who work has not yet been published into English?
A: I think my favorite authors have already been translated, at least in part, into English. But even the most highly-regarded writers have important works yet to be translated. Most of Virgilo Piñera’s plays, for example, are unknown in English.
I’d also like to see more essays, diaries, letters, and cross-genre works in translation. The main focus among publishers seems to be fiction and poetry.
Q: Finally, what are three books you’d recommend we all read?
A: In keeping with the theme of translation:
Two books are by the German-born American poet Rosmarie Waldrop, who’s devoted a considerable part of her work to the translation of Edmond Jabès and to the translation and publication of many contemporary French and German innovative poets. In Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès, Waldrop reminisces about her long friendship with Jabès and her experiences as his translator. Her collection of essays Dissonance (if you are interested) also includes many superb pieces on the poetics of translation.
And I recommend Writing Beckett’s Letters by George Craig. It’s a delightful account of Craig’s meticulous work on transcribing and translating into English the letters written by Samuel Beckett in French, which are published in Volume Two of Cambridge UP’s The Letters of Samuel Beckett.
Click here to read the story in its entirety on The New Yorker webpage. Jonathan Lethem’s “The Porn Critic” was originally published in the April 9, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
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How is it that after weeks of not even posting brief thoughts on a story from The New Yorker do I already have this one up this morning. Well, work has been terribly. So terrible, in fact, that I haven’t left the office yet. I had a bit of a lull in the middle of the night and decided to jump ahead of the curve here. If my thoughts are a little strange, well, I’m no Varamo.
Or maybe I am too tired, because it took some time for the meaning of the opening sentence to settle on me:
Kromer couldn’t operate hedonism but these days it operated him, in the way that a punctuated cylinder operates a player piano.
Or wait, after writing it, I’m not so sure the meaning of it has settled. I’ll welcome anyone’s opinion because of my aforementioned state-of-mind, but I really got nothing here.
It’s the 1990s, and the “uncooperative world” was “slouching through a new propriety under Clinton.” The main character Kromer is first introduced as a clerk. It doesn’t take too long, though, even for a short story, for us to find out that he works at a porn shop called Sex Machines. In fact, he writes the Sex Machines’ newsletter. In his home he has towers of VHS cassettes filled with porn, and this gives guests the wrong impression.
And that’s about all I got out of the story, even after reading the equally opaque interview on The New Yorker website. I felt the story was uninteresting and any payoff at the end — which was certainly intended — nonexistent.
Also, maybe it’s just the series of all-nighters and I’m really missing things, but does this make sense to anyone: “The permanent mystery was how much you seemed to know before you knew anything at all. Or maybe the permanent mystery was how stupid you could be and yet how you clung to evidence that your stupidity knew things you didn’t.” I’m happy to be convinced otherwise, but for me this was a bunch of false cleverness and profundity.
So I didn’t like the story, but from a “glass-half-full perspective” with the title of the post, the hits on my blog should go up quite a bit.
Click here to read the abstract of the story on The New Yorker webpage (this week’s story is available only for subscribers). Victor Lodato’s “P.E.” was originally published in the April 2, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
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I don’t believe I’d ever heard of Victor Lodato before, but he’s a Guggenheim Fellow, a poet, an author of thirteen plays (by my count), and his first novel was published by FSG in 2009, so he comes to the pages of The New Yorker quite accomplished. I hope to see more, as “P.E.” went down very smoothly indeed.
Lodato’s skills as a playwright are definitely on display as he captures the voice of his narrator perfectly and uses that voice not simply to show some pizzaz but also, importantly, to lend texture and shadow to an already interesting story. Our narrator is a large man in his late twenties, a man who became very large, suddenly, in his late twenties (“There are miracles in this world — I absolutely believe this. But I also believe that they’re not always progressive. Some miracles, sadly, are destructive.”).
When we first meet him, he is waiting at the Tucson airport for his father. The first few paragraphs really pulled me in:
The night my father came in from New Jersey, or wherever the hell he was living, his plane was two hours and twenty-seven minutes late. I hadn’t called to check on the flight, and so I ended up waiting at an airport coffee kiosk, absorbing greasy pumpkin loaf and chasing it down with a triple-shot white-chocolate latte. When I went up to the counter to order a second slice of bread, the girl didn’t bat an eye. But three pieces was clearly too much for her. At that point, she hesitated, like she wasn’t sure if she should give it to me. I mean, what did she think I was doing — making a bomb out of the stuff? To look at me is to know that, obviously, I was eating it. I’m a large man, as my G.P. likes to say. But people at airports are all about suspicion.
“Don’t call security,” I said. But smiling, you know, with good cheer.
“Why would I call security?” she said. Now she looked even more nervous.
“I don’t know. All the bread.” And then I sort of laughed.
We sense from the narrator’s first sentence that he may not be particularly fond of his father, but when his father arrives it’s obvious there has been a major rift. It can be chalked up to the weight gain, but his father doesn’t even recognize him and they don’t touch until a bit later when the narrator touches him “lightly” on the arm. His father is ragged, an ex-junky (probably ex-), and the narrator doesn’t even know if he lives in New Jersey or just had a flight from Newark. They stand around the luggage carousel, and a nice bag comes by. The narrator wishes the bag were his fathers, “[j]ust like in an alternate reality I’m thin and wear a wedding ring.” However, the narrator actually believes in these alternate realities — he’s a member of “Parallel Energetics.”
Using P.E. techniques, you learn how to initiate a dialogue with your other selves and then ultimately you can draw aspects of their energy matrix into your own life. Of course, you’d only bring in the energy matrix of an alternate self that is better (“more evolved”) than your current reality. Because some of your other selves are actually worse off than you, and that can be pretty depressing, especially if you meet like three of them in a row.
It’s easy to see why an alternate self with a worse life would be pretty depressing for our narrator — his life has never been and isn’t now going all that well. P.E. is the only thing that’s kept him from buying a gun and committing suicide. Our narrator genuinely believes in P.E., and it’s led to some interesting side-steps from reality:
I know now, for example, that the childhood I remember is not the only version that exists, and so this allows me to be more accepting and forgiving or whatever. Salvatore, my mentor, always says, “Choose your past, choose your path.” [. . .] He means be careful how you remember stuff, because it influences the shape of your future. So I’m trying to be open-minded about what I remember.
There are many great works that examine memory and its faults, but I find it interesting here to find Lodato examining a character accepting that his memory is only one version — there are better versions out there, so why not take those? As the narrative progresses, we develop a distinct sense of our narrator’s tenuous hold on reality — he even has a hard time controlling the story:
I need to stop here.
This isn’t right. This is, wow, this is practically backwards.
This is not about food, and the fact that it keeps going there makes me want to vomit. Literally. This story isn’t really even about my father. The thing is, though, you put him in something like this and he just takes over. He’s like a narrative virus.
There’s one moment, though, when we see precisely why our narrator accepts that he has alternate selves and why he tries to flee his memories (which, on this occasion, despite the playful revision of memory, is clear and tender):
He loved women, all makes, all models. Let’s just say, my mother became depressed. I didn’t know that word then. Then I would have just said she was quiet. Actually, I probably wouldn’t have said anything. I would have just done what I always did: tug at her hand, like at the string of a talking doll that had ceased to function.
It’s a sad story and, as the story continues to develop the threads above, quite virtuosic in its conclusion.
The winner of this year’s PEN/Faulkner was announced this morning.
- The Buddha in the Attic, by Julie Otsuka
The winner gets $15,000. I have this book on hand and have been meaning to read it since it was also a finalist for the National Book Award back in November. It’s short enough I just need to get to it.
Here are the other finalists, each of whom receive $5,000 (making it a good week for Don DeLillo and Steven Millhauser who also took home some money for The Story Prize).
- Russell Banks for Lost Memory of Skin
- Don DeLillo for The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories
- Anita Desai for The Artist of Disappearance
- Steven Millhauser for We Others: New and Selected Stories (my review here)
For the official press release, click here.
This past week the winner of The Story Prize was announced, and I couldn’t be happier with the result.
- We Others, by Steven Millhauser (my review here)
I loved this collection, and I’m glad Millhauser walked away with the $20,000 winnings. The other two finalists (who each get $5,000) were Binocular Vision by Edith Pearlman and The Angel Esmeralda by Don DeLillo. I haven’t paid much attention to this relatively new award before, but I will be from now on. I’ve added a page to follow it here.
I’d only heard the name Nescio whispered here and there over the past few years (and I’m pretty sure I’d never heard of him at all before that). A Dutch master, well-known in his own country, 2012 marks the first time any of Nescio’s work is available in English, even though three of his major works were written before 1920. Then again, as Joseph O’Neill points out in his introduction to this edition, “It seems extraordinary that Nescio should have any reputation.” That’s because this short book (155 pages) contains all of his major work, published and unpublished. Amsterdam Stories (tr. from the Dutch by Damion Searls, 2012) is all we’re going to get, and knowing that this slim collection is the foundation for Nescio’s huge reputation set my expectations pretty high.
Review copy courtesy of NYRB Classics.
Nescio means “I dont’ know” in Latin, and it’s as if this is the response to all of the questions raised in his work (“And so everything takes its little course, and woe to those who ask: Why?”). Nescio is the pseudonym of Jan Hendrik Frederik Grönlof, a very successful director of the Holland-Bombay Trading Company. From the stories, I’d never guess Grönlof and Nescio were the same person; I would rather suspect that Nescio was one of Grönlof’s employees and that Grönlof was the model for one of the despised bosses in Nescio’s stories, one of those “important gentlemen” who knocks the youth right out of you.
And for much of his life, Grönlof may indeed have been that boss. He wrote so little one can hardly say he lived the life of a writer. His four major works — major both because they form the basis of his reputation and because they are the longest pieces he published – are short stories: “The Freeloader” (thirty-one pages in this edition), ”Young Titans” (twenty-eight pages), “Little Poet” (forty-two pages), and “Insula Dei” (twenty-five pages). The remaining five pieces in this collection are tiny, ranging from a paragraph to a couple of pages; some are just excerpts of works in progress that never moved beyond the first burst of inspiration (but the burst is impressive). Though not voluminous, what Nescio did put on paper are some beautiful passages about that brief period in life when one arrives at the threshold of adulthood, filled with vague dreams and hopes for the future, that time when one realizes time is suddenly running out. This is a favorite theme of mine, nicely expressed recently by Steven Millhauser in “Getting Closer” (though there the unfortunate epiphany strikes a boy of only eleven) (my thoughts on “Getting Closer” here).
As fondly as Nescio looks back on this time period when one can still put up a decent, if illusory, fight against the future, Nescio doesn’t romanticize it as we might expect. It was beautiful, sure, but a life spent dreaming by the sea or chatting the evening away with friends in coffee shops, waiting to change the world, is untenable. For one thing, there’s the need for money. And vague dreams cease to fulfill (“Who can spend his life watching these things that constantly repeat themselves, who can keep longing for nothing?”). Of course, the tragedy of it all is that when we do start working to realize our dreams, time continues to move forward and we run out of time; furthermore, perhaps the very effort we expend to realize a dream becomes the toxic to the dream itself.
The first stories in this collection — “The Freeloader” and “Young Titans” — are my two favorites. They were finished in 1910 and 1914, respectively, when Nescio himself was passing into his early thirties. He had begun working at the Holland-Bombay Trading Company in 1904, was married in 1906, and already had three of his four daughters by 1910 (the fourth came along in 1912). This is the atmosphere in which he ruminated on the never-to-return carefree days of early adulthood (or late childhood). These two stories are narrated by Koekebakker (“cookie baker”), which was apparently Nescio’s first choice as a pseudonym, but it looks like the first magazine he published in objected (cookie baker is synonymous with ineptitude).
In “The Freeloader” Koekebakker tells about the most peculiar person he’s ever met (well, “[e]xcept for the man who thought Sarphatistraat was the most beautiful place in Europe.”), a freeloader named Japi. Koekebakker has a small group of young friends who, like him, are just starting out. They have little money and are already taking life seriously. But into their midst comes Japi, whom one of the friends met by the sea, having seen Japi sitting by the sea so much, it didn’t seem he ever left: “Then Japi had to laugh and he said, ‘I do sit by the water a lot, but “always” is a bit much. At night I lie in bed, I need an hour to get dressed and eat breakfast, I eat lunch for half an hour and at six I have to eat again. But I do sit by the water a lot.’”
Japi refuses the world of responsibility. His goal is to be nothing (“going places and thinking are only for stupid people”). Of course, the only way Japi can survive is by taking whatever he needs from others. He has tried work himself, but he’s not very good at it. Indeed, once when thinking about applying for work Japi even says that he thinks his soul is too big (Koekebakker thinks to himself “Can you believe it? That sponger!”). Yet, though selfish and naïve, what Jopi says is probably true — for all of us, but we shrink into routine office jobs anyway.
The story takes us through the years, and we see these boys turn into relatively successful men, no longer struggling to make money, but no longer certain they’ve ever done anything worth doing. Japi himself becomes, for a time, a very hard worker. There’s simply no other way around this life. But, though Koekebakker recognizes this tragedy, it hits Japi most severely, and later in life he reflects on the passage of time and — why?
And then, with a few variations, he repeated his old reverie about the water, how it flowed eternally to the west, out toward the sun every night. In Nijmegen there was a doctor who had taken the same walk at the same time every morning for fifty-three years — over the Valkhof hill and down the north side and up the Waalkade to the railroad bridge. That’s more than 19,300 times. And always the water flowed to the west. And it didn’t mean anything. It must have flowed like that for a hundred times fifty-three years. Longer. Now there’s a bridge over it. Every year is 365 day; ten years is 3,650 sunrises. Every day is 24 hours, and every hour more goes through the heads of all those constantly worrying people than you could set down in a thousand books. Thousands of worriers who saw that bridge are dead now. And still, it’s only been there a short time.
“Young Titans” goes over similar ground, but it still felt fresh to me (I read it right when I finished “The Freeloader”). Here’s how it begins; Koekebakker (or a version of him) is still our narrator:
We were kids — but good kids. If I may say so myself. We’re much smarter now, so smart it’s pathetic. Except for Bavink, who went crazy. Was there anything we didn’t want to set to rights? We would show them how it should be. “We”: that meant the five of us. Everyone else was “them,” the ones who didn’t see it, didn’t get it. “What?” Bavink said. “God?” You want to talk about God? Their pot roast is their God.” Other than a few “decent fellows” we despised everyone — and secretly, I still think we were right. But I can’t say that out loud to anyone. I’m not a hero anymore.
Here are five friends we met in “The Freeloader,” but they are either slightly varied or this is before Japi came along (he never shows in “Young Titans”) because when “Young Titans” begins the five young men are still in the early phase of the transition to responsibility, still fairly certain the pathway they’d take through life would somehow stay as free as they then felt. Not that they understood that freedom.
No, we didn’t actually do anything. We did our work at the office, not all that well, for bosses we despised — except Bavink and Hoyer, who had no bosses, and who didn’t understand why we went in to see ours every day.
But we were waiting. For what? We never knew.
“Young Titans” again move us through the years. Some of the friends become very successful “important gentlemen,” running offices now. Koekebakker may be the only one aware enough to see the transition occur and who looks back on that time with what might be suspicion as much as longing. The seaside where they watched the waves is still there, the waves still coming to shore. The hope and contentment they felt was theirs seems to be just an illusion that many had before and many will yet have:
It was a strange time. And when I think about it, I realize that that time must still be happening now, it will last as long as there are young men of nineteen or twenty running around. It’s only for us that the time is long since past.
And if the peace and contentment of youth passes away time and time again, and the world doesn’t do anything about it — indeed, doesn’t seem to notice (“We were gloomy about all the things that had passed, and about our lives, which would end while these things continued to exist.”) — then what is it all for?
Amsterdam Stories is organized chronologically, and “The Freeloader” and “Young Titans” are the earliest works. There are a few short segments before we get to his next major work (and his longest), “Little Poet,” written in 1917. While I missed Koekebakker and his friends, it was also nice to see Nescio move to a different cast of characters to work out his themes, this time including love and lust. It felt darker and a bit more sinister than his earlier work, but it also had some moments of brilliant levity, such as the time when Nescio addresses the reader directly. See, the Little Poet’s wife recopies his work, as does Nescio’s, but the Little Poet’s mind has become unfaithful:
It’s strange, in other stories she reads she doesn’t think things along these lines are that bad. I think it’s because I’m the one who wrote this story. Of course, she knows there’s a difference between the author and Mr. Nescio himself, but to her that’s splitting hairs. It’s a difficult situation. My domestic bliss is somewhat troubled — but still I’ll keep going.
There are a few more short pieces between “Little Poet” and Nescio’s final major work “Insula Dei,” which he wrote in 1942. But for the most part, the 1920s and 1930s were fallow years. Nescio became director of the Holland-Bombay Trading Company in 1926 and retired in 1937 (“I’m free, after forty years I’m free, and I can cut my hair whenever I feel like it and let it grow too if I want”). Certainly if at nineteen or twenty Nescio had the dream to live the life of the mind, he recognized what it was like to sacrifice that for a life of making money for a family, though he lamented this fact later in life:
My life is too short, I can’t go any faster, my work is a cathedral and I need a long time, centuries. And how much longer do I have?
It’s as if Nescio himself ran out of time, as if he thought he’d be able to write plenty through life but work came and then death brought a stop to it all. Fortunately for us, his work is available, and though the water is still flowing to the west, we can remember the work Nescio did.
This novella is precisely why I love the Best Translated Book Award. I hadn’t paid much attention to this little book put out by Texas Tech University Press as part of their “The Americas” series, so, were it not for its placement on the longlist, I doubt I would have read it, which would have been a real shame because Kafka’s Leopards (Leopardos de Kafka, 2000; tr. from the Portuguese by Thomas O. Beebee, 2011) is wonderful, at once charming and sad.
The book opens in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, in 1965 with a police report on the arrest of an alleged radical, the young man Jaime Kantarovitch. There is little of note on his person, but one small piece of paper catches the interest of the police. The paper has a few dozen words in German and, “[b]elow the text, the signature of a certain ‘Franz Kafka.’”
These policemen in the 1960s are not the only people in this story to suspect that this short German text is some kind of code used by radicals. After the short police report, we step back in time to 1916, to a small village close to Odessa, Ukraine, where Jaime’s uncle, Benjamin Kantarovitch is a young man, wheening himself of the Torah in order to take up the revolutionary cause. Benjamin is also known as Mousy, and though he desperately wants to be a revolutionary, Mousy is just a nickname, not a codename. It seems there is little Mousy can do in this small village to realize his dream of helping the revolution, but one day his friend Yossi returns from a meeting with Leon Trotsky himself, and Yossi has come back with a secret mission. Mousy is perhaps a little jealous, but such is his love for Trotsky and the revolution that his prevailing sentiment is one of gratitude that he can be even this close to the action. Before he can embark, though, Yossi falls ill and, fearing death, passes the mission on to Mousy.
Thus begins a series of misadventures. The first step in the mission is to go to Prague to find a man and retrieve a coded text. Along with some tickets, money, papers, and a copy of The Communist Manifesto, Yossi gives Mousy an important envelope that contains the name of contact and the key to deciphering the coded text.
Apparently the coded text will unveil the name of ”the target” as well as another contact who will tell Mousy what to do to the target. We never even come close to getting that far, though. The trip to Prague is disorienting, and, just when he is starting to feel a bit more confident in his role as true revolutionary, Mousy loses the all-important envelope. Desperate, he determines not to fail and tries to figure out what the missing envelope might have held. Of course, it’s all guess-work; his only knowledge is that the man he was supposed to meet is a writer and a Jew like himself and Yossi. By talking to a rather gossipy shammes at the synagogue where the Golem is buried, Mousy eventually hear’s Kafka’s name. “Sort of an oddball . . .” says the shammes. “An oddball. That seemed promising to Mousy.”
A rebel. Yes, this was interesting. Behind the rebel, the revolutionary might be lurking. Must be lurking. Only the person who doesn’t conform, who doesn’t accept things as they are, who never feels entirely comfortable is capable of changing society. And the name . . . Kafka seemed to him like a good name for a revolutionary: the echoing of the “k” sound suggested determination, tenacity. Like the “t” in Trotsky, whose name, he recalled, also had a “k” in it. Only an impression, of course, but what else did he have to go on except impression?
At this time, Kafka was working at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute. Mousy is confused by the ornate building: “Yes, one expected a revolutionary to have contact with workers — but not through an institution like this one.” Well, maybe Kafka is a mole and this job gave him the opportunity to find men who are no longer useful at the factory but may still be able to hurl grenades. Yes, Kafka must be the man. And, sure enough, when Mousy asks Kafka for “the text,” Mousy receives a small piece of paper with a few German words, as well as Kafka’s signature — a clumsy move, Mousy thinks.
And so Mousy receives from Kafka one of Kafka’s famous super short stories, part of the Zürau Aphorisms, “The Leopards in the Temple.”
Leopards break into the temple and drink up the offering in the chalices; this happens again and again; finally, one can predict their action in advance and it becomes part of the ceremony.
We get several very fun pages of Mousy trying to interpret this code. Does Prague even have a zoo? What does Trotsky have against leopards — who could the leopards stand for? Why is a revolutionary writing in such an obfuscated way? Mousy grumbles to himself, “Simple village Jews are human beings too, comrade, they also need books. Practice some self-criticism and think of them next time you’re writing something like your ‘Leopards in the Temple.’” The pages of trying to interpret the text move into a period when Mousy tries to execute what he believes is the coded plot, and eventually we end up in Rio Grande do Sul.
It’s a very fun book, but it also has a darker side. I don’t know exactly how to interpret “The Leopards in the Temple.” There’s the way we interpreted it in literature class, as a statement about art, about the interpretation of texts (there’s plenty of that here), about the outsider coming in. Are the leopards revolutionaries who come in an disrupt the status quo (only to eventually become part of it)? Or are the leopards symbols of the terrible things that disturb our lives but that we eventually accept and even make an integral part of our lives? In any context, the parable has some application to this book.
As the book enters its final phase, a lot of terrible things have happened to Mousy – it’s no longer funny, and we may yearn for the simpler days when Mousy was just setting out on his silly adventure. As an old man in the 1960s, doing his best to watch out for his young nephew Jaime, Mousy is resigned to life’s tragedies. Despite this, when I finished the book I had a smile on my face. It’s that kind of book.
Now, I need to find some more Moacyr Scliar.
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