{"id":7032,"date":"2012-03-21T15:55:19","date_gmt":"2012-03-21T19:55:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=7032"},"modified":"2016-07-12T12:26:12","modified_gmt":"2016-07-12T16:26:12","slug":"moacyr-scliar-kafkas-leopards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2012\/03\/21\/moacyr-scliar-kafkas-leopards\/","title":{"rendered":"Moacyr Scliar: Kafka’s Leopards<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
Kafka's Leopards<\/strong><\/em><\/span>\r\nby Moacyr Scliar (Leopardos de Kafka<\/em>, 2000)<\/span>\r\ntranslated from the Portuguese by Thomas O. Beebee (2011)<\/span>\r\nTexas Tech University Press (2011)<\/span>\r\n96 pp<\/span><\/pre>\n
This novella is precisely why I love the Best Translated Book Award.\u00a0I 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\u00a0Kafka’s Leopards<\/em> is\u00a0wonderful, at once charming and sad.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The book opens in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, in 1965\u00a0with a police report\u00a0on 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.\u00a0The paper has a few dozen words in\u00a0German and, “[b]elow the text, the signature of a certain ‘Franz Kafka.'”<\/p>\n
These policemen in the 1960s are not the only people in this story to\u00a0suspect that\u00a0this 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\u00a0is a young man, wheening\u00a0himself 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\u00a0is just a nickname, not a codename. It seems there is little Mousy\u00a0can do in this small village\u00a0to realize his dream of helping the revolution, but one day his friend Yossi\u00a0returns from a meeting with Leon Trotsky himself, and\u00a0Yossi\u00a0has come back with a secret mission. Mousy\u00a0is perhaps a little jealous, but such is his love for Trotsky and the revolution that\u00a0his prevailing\u00a0sentiment is one of gratitude that he can be even this close to the action. Before he can embark, though, Yossi\u00a0falls ill and, fearing death, passes the mission on to Mousy.<\/p>\n
Thus begins a series of misadventures.\u00a0The\u00a0first step in the mission is to go to Prague\u00a0to find\u00a0a man and retrieve a coded text.\u00a0Along with some tickets, money, papers, and a copy of\u00a0The Communist Manifesto<\/em>, Yossi\u00a0gives Mousy an important envelope that contains the\u00a0name of\u00a0contact and\u00a0the key to\u00a0deciphering the coded text.<\/p>\n
Apparently the coded text will unveil the name of\u00a0“the target”\u00a0as well as another contact who will tell Mousy\u00a0what to do to the target. We never even come close to getting that far, though. The trip to Prague is disorienting, and, just when\u00a0he is starting to feel a bit more confident in his role as true revolutionary,\u00a0Mousy\u00a0loses 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\u00a0knowledge is that the man\u00a0he was supposed to meet is a writer and a Jew like himself and Yossi. By talking to a rather gossipy\u00a0shammes<\/em>\u00a0at\u00a0the synagogue where the Golem is buried, Mousy eventually hear’s Kafka’s name. “Sort of an oddball . . .” says the shammes<\/em>. “An oddball. That seemed promising to Mousy.”<\/p>\n
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?<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
At this time, Kafka was working at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute. Mousy\u00a0is 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\u00a0asks Kafka for “the text,” Mousy\u00a0receives a small piece of paper with a few German words, as well as Kafka’s signature — a clumsy move, Mousy thinks.<\/p>\n
And so Mousy\u00a0receives from Kafka one of Kafka’s famous super short stories, part of the Z\u00fcrau Aphorisms, “The Leopards in the Temple.”<\/p>\n
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.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
We get several very fun pages of Mousy\u00a0trying to\u00a0interpret this\u00a0code. Does Prague even have a zoo? What does Trotsky have against leopards — who\u00a0could the leopards stand for? Why is a revolutionary writing in such an obfuscated way? Mousy\u00a0grumbles 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\u00a0tries to execute what he believes is the coded plot, and eventually we end up in Rio Grande do Sul.<\/p>\n
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\u00a0we interpreted it in literature class, as a statement\u00a0about art,\u00a0about 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?\u00a0In any context, the parable has some application to this book.<\/p>\n
As the book enters its final phase, a lot of terrible things have happened to Mousy\u00a0— it’s no longer funny, and we may yearn for the simpler days when Mousy\u00a0was just setting out on his silly\u00a0adventure. 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.<\/p>\n
Now, I need to find some more Moacyr\u00a0Scliar.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Trevor reviews Moacyr Scliar’s Kafka’s Leopards<\/em>, translated from the Portuguese by Thomas O. Beebee. Read the full post<\/u><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7033,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"libsyn-item-id":0,"libsyn-show-id":0,"libsyn-post-error":"","libsyn-post-error_post-type":"","libsyn-post-error_post-permissions":"","libsyn-post-error_api":"","playlist-podcast-url":"","libsyn-episode-thumbnail":"","libsyn-episode-widescreen_image":"","libsyn-episode-blog_image":"","libsyn-episode-background_image":"","libsyn-post-episode-category-selection":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_thumbnail":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_theme":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_height":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_width":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_placement":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link_text":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_custom_color":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-explicit":"","libsyn-post-episode":"","libsyn-post-episode-update-id3":"","libsyn-post-episode-release-date":"","libsyn-post-episode-simple-download":"","libsyn-release-date":"","libsyn-post-update-release-date":"","libsyn-is_draft":"","libsyn-new-media-media":"","libsyn-post-episode-subtitle":"","libsyn-new-media-image":"","libsyn-post-episode-keywords":"","libsyn-post-itunes":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-season-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-type":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-title":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-author":"","libsyn-destination-releases":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-enabled":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-input-enabled":false,"libsyn-post-episode-premium_state":"","libsyn-episode-shortcode":"","libsyn-episode-embedurl":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[800,313],"tags":[965,880,563],"coauthors":[505],"class_list":["post-7032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-moacyr-scliar","tag-965","tag-2000s","tag-portuguese"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/03\/Kafkas-Leopards.jpg?fit=328%2C530&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pqqvZ-1Pq","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7032"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7032\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19325,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7032\/revisions\/19325"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7033"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7032"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=7032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}