in lieu of a field guide

Stoner (John Williams)

2012-01-29T19:37:00.001+08:00

Stoner by John Williams (New York Review Books, 2006)

"Every man contains within himself the entire human condition," says David Shields (quoted by Tim Parks in a recent post in NYRblog). William Stoner, a professor of English literature, proved that statement. In the novel after his name and in which he lived like a true human being, novelist John Williams portrayed his character as entrenched in quiet and world-changing upheavals. World-changing because Stoner's experiences shaped him and changed him along the way, and a reader could sense the world of conflicts silently residing in a human heart.

Stoner came from a poor family. He was given a chance to study agronomy at the university to eventually help his parents with farm work. But the allure of another subject caught him unawares. He "fell in love" with the written word.

It was as simple as that. He was aware that he nodded to Sloane and said something inconsequential. Then he was walking out of the office. His lips were tingling and his fingertips were numb; he walked as if he were asleep, yet he was intensely aware of his surroundings. He brushed against the polished wooden walls in the corridor, and he thought he could feel the warmth and age of wood; he went slowly down the stairs and wondered at the veined cold marble that seemed to slip a little beneath his feet. In the halls the voices of the students became distinct and individual out of the hushed murmur, and their faces were close and strange and familiar. He went out of Jesse Hall into the morning, and the grayness no longer seemed to oppress the campus; it led his eyes outward and upward into the sky, where he looked as if toward a possibility for which he had no name.

This epiphany—"a kind of conversion, an epiphany of knowing something through words that could not be put in words"—occurred to him right after his teacher Archer Sloane told him that he was destined to be a teacher of literature. The hypersensitively observed details (imagining the feel of "the warmth and age of wood", "the veined cold marble" seeming to "slip a little beneath his feet", the closeness and strangeness and familiary of students' faces, etc.) were signs and symptoms of "love". This love carried all its manifestations within it: the love of literature, the love of life, and the love of a woman.

Many years later, after enduring various circumstances that tried and tested his life, he will look back on this momentous realization and feel anew the same "tingle", the same profound force of feeling.

Suddenly it was as if she were in the next room, and he had only moments before left her; his hands tingled, as if they had touched her. And the sense of his loss, that he had for so long dammed within him, flooded out, engulfed him, and he let himself be carried outward, beyond the control of his will; he did not wish to save himself. Then he smiled fondly, as if at a memory; it occurred to him that he was nearly sixty years old and that he ought to be beyond the force of such passion, of such love.
But he was not beyond it, he knew, and would never be. Beneath the numbness, the indifference, the removal, it was there, intense and steady; it had always been there. In his youth he had given it freely, without thought; he had given it to the knowledge that had been revealed to him—how many years ago?—by Archer Sloane; he had given it to Edith, in those first blind foolish days of his courtship and marriage; and he had given it to Katherine, as if it had never been given before. He had, in odd ways, given it to every moment of his life, and had perhaps given it most fully when he was unaware of his giving. It was a passion neither of the mind nor of the flesh; rather, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance. To a woman or to a poem, it said simply: Look! I am alive.

He was alive, and in the novel's pages he lived not a perfect life, but a perfect existence. We comprehended Stoner's lifetime of loving as it was dragged and weighed down by personal challenges a man in his position could face—an unhappy marriage, difficulties at work, problems with students and colleagues, teaching, infidelity, raising a child, and (even if they were waged in the far distance) world wars exacting tolls on the mind.

Stoner was a work of restraint. Its flashes of feelings and quiet devastation were wrought in the controlled and leisurely rhythms of a mindful prose. It was the kind of writing that evaluates and explores personal ideas even as the characters were drawn in situations of truths and consequences. The plot moved its characters as they carry kindling to the fire, until the fuel wood runs out and one is forced to observe the last flickers of a life.

The precision of its writing reminded me of the stories of Peter Tayor (A Woman of Means, A Summons to Memphis, "Dean of Men"). Like Taylor, Williams dispensed insights and visions that allow his characters to recognize the predicaments they found themselves in and the general sense of futility surrounding them. And also like Taylor, Williams could capture in a single luminous sentence or in a short passage the whole of the novel's breadth and reach.

Williams had a way with descriptions. His writing was never dry, even while detailing the quirks of minor characters, the words were always game for descriptive reinvention.

Rutherford was a slight thin gray man with round shoulders; his eyes and brows dropped at the outer corners, so that his expression was always one of gentle hopelessness. Though he had known Stoner for many years, he never remembered his name.

---

He was a thin young man, intense and pale, with slightly protuberant blue eyes; he spoke with a deliberate slowness, with a voice that seemed always to tremble before a forced restraint.

"Gentle hopelessness", "forced restraint"—priceless expressions, especially given their droll context. These fine descriptions accumulated in the novel, accompanying momentous discoveries and transformations of self. Discoveries that, to stretch the original idea, reflected the human condition and would equal the discovery of the world or of the transformative role of individuals in it.

The book was particularly lovely for its elliptical and allusive nature. Its themes circled around, returning to look at ideas in another way. For example, Shakespeare's "Sonnet 73"—reproduced in full in the book when Stoner's teacher, Sloane, recited it—carried a resonance throughout the novel.—

In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourisht by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

These lines were echoed when Stoner visited the burial grounds of his parents, keeping in mind that they devoted their years to tilling the land for a living: "Now they were in the earth to which they had given their lives; and slowly, year by year, the earth would take them. Slowly the damp and rot would ... consume the last vestiges of their substances. And they would become a meaningless part of that stubborn earth to which they had long ago given themselves."

A key incident in the novel concerned a cripple student named Walker(!) who attended Stoner's lectures and with whom he had some problems in class and during an oral examination. The scenes with Walker were some of the most powerful in the book. Stoner was opposed to accepting Walker as graduate student as the latter represented for him the kind of duplicity and pretension that must not be allowed to prosper in a university.

"He said—something about the University being an asylum, a refuge from the world, for the dispossessed, the crippled. But he didn't mean Walker. Dave would have thought of Walker as—as the world. And we can't let him in. For if we do, we become like the world, just as unreal, just as . . . The only hope we have is to keep him out."

This idealistic belief that the schoolroom is a place to be shielded from the "unreal" in the world contained Stoner's academic ethic. In a brilliant rejoinder to the notion of the individual as world, Stoner admitted to his lover (when he was forced to break up the affair after being found out by university officials) that they were not exempt from this category: "So we are of the world, after all; we should have known that. We did know it, I believe; but we had to withdraw a little, pretend a little ..."

Every person contains within him the entire human condition because he is a world unto himself. This person conducts wars inside of him every time he made consequential decisions that affect his future and the future of those who depend on him. Stoner, whose life was given up to literature, is the imperfect, fallible world. The richness of his experiences enabled him (and the reader) to perceive his life as undeniably, inescapably, of this world.

The Savage Detectives

2012-01-28T11:36:00.000+08:00

Mexico, 1975. We are reading the diary entries of one Juan García Madero, 17 years old, law student, budding poet, and frequent attendee to poetry workshops. García Madero's narrative is conversational, self-conscious, sympathetic, almost unreliable, and frequently courting the cliché.

What happened next is hazy (although I have a good memory): I remember Álamo laughing along with the four or five other members of the workshop. I think they may have been making fun of me.

...

What happened next was a blur, but at the risk of sounding corny, I'd say there was something miraculous about it. Two visceral realist poets walked in and Álamo reluctantly introduced them, although he only knew one of them personally; the other one he knew by reputation, or maybe he just knew his name or had heard someone mention him, but he introduced us to him anyway.

The voice is honest, sincere, even if full of assumptions and self-confessed forgetfulness ("what happened next is hazy", "what happened next was a blur", "If I'm remembering right (though I wouldn't stake my life on it)", "Maybe she mentioned it, although I may have just made it up."). In fact, it was not only García Madero who could not be relied on 100% in his reminiscences here. The characters in the novel constantly alluded to their sketchy recollections of the past, their half-remembrances and hazy memories.

Translated by Natasha Wimmer, these diary notes began and closed The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño, which appeared in translation in 2007. In 1998, five years before his death and six years before the posthumous publication of his other masterpiece 2666, Bolaño published Los detectives salvajes to great critical acclaim from Spanish readers. It earned for him the coveted Premio Herralde de Novela and Premio Rómulo Gallegos. The novel was a hit due to its totalizing scope and brave narrative techniques. Its themes were deeply personal and yet communal—life on the run, the passage of time, the reliance on memory, the faultiness of memory, poetry as a way of life, the search for meaning, the lack of meaning, madness, boredom, the uses of boredom, the uses (and misuses) of art, friendship, literature and books, the politics of existence, death.

We talked about poetry. No one has read any of my poems, and yet they all treat me like one of them. The camaraderie is immediate and incredible.

The two poets who crashed Álamo's poetry workshop, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, were patterned after the author Bolaño and his best friend Mario Santiago. They herded a group of young poets in Mexico City and formed a poetry movement called visceral realism, which was also based on Bolaño and Santiago's founded poetry movement called the Movimiento Infrarrealista de Poesia. Their group "wreaked havoc" in the '70s by crashing and disrupting poetry readings of established writers like Octavio Paz, exporting fear in the literary elite. They were, of course, not taken seriously by the establishment.

Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima took it upon themselves to track a female poet named Cesárea Tinajero, a predecessor of a similar poetry movement in the 1920s. Somehow, in the middle of the first part of the novel, García Madero and Lima and Belano became involved with Lupe, a young prostitute under the charge of a nasty gangster-pimp. As a result they had to escape the pimp and Mexico City in a white Ford Impala.

There's an inner seduction to the whole ride, the reader made privy to adventure, naiveté, nonsense, emptiness, senselessness, or a combination of these. The memorable events before and after the holiday celebrations of '75-76 acquired a surreal quality. Hysteria and humor mingled together; the high seriousness of the novel punctuated by the low. As begun and imagined by García Madero, neophyte poet and sex initiate, and as extended into various splinters of voices that populate the midsection of the book, the parade of stories resembled a long drawn out joke and yet the feelings engendered were authentic, deployed in spontaneous bouts of drunken speeches.

"The Savage Detectives", the second chapter, interrupted the first part to give way to the testimonies of a horde of writers, poets, and drifters—representatives from Bolaño's "lost" generation of literati and lowlifes. The interviewees were members, ex-members, non-members of visceral realism, speaking to mostly unknown interlocutor or interlocutors. Their stories tried to shed light on Lima and Belano's pathetic and peripatetic lives before and after their escape from Mexico City. Listening to these different streams of voices was like listening to jazz, raw and improvised. What emerged, partly, was a satire of the literary and intellectual life of poets and writers in Mexico, in the tumultuous and earth-shaking decades from 70s to mid-90s.

The structure of the novel invites detective work. The Rashomon-style confessions in the second chapter will strike some as an unsettling and infuriating technique. After the first chapter ended in a sort of cliffhanger of a chase, it was as if a precipice suddenly opened up in front of the reader. An abyss that, by the looks of it, would take a fair amount of time to cross. It was an explosion of voices that took control from and unsettled the calmness and controlled edge of the linear narrative and that dumped the reader into a desert with tiny oasis. These voices are singing nonstop, describing the social, political, public, and private aspects of living in the margins of literature and society.

One of longest digressions devised in fiction, this section would take some time of getting used to. A receptive reader will have to submit and open himself to the artifice of structure that the author has adopted. What happened in between the multiplicities of singing was unclear. But somehow, at the risk of sounding melodramatic, the multitude of voices converged into a modern jazz opera. In the course of their telling, the characters ceased to be individuated voices and became one sustained song, a song singing across times and places, singing of their generation, their dreams, and lost causes.

This being my second reading of the novel, I appreciated the novel's literary abandon that first endeared me to it four years ago. I varied my reading this time, skipping the second chapter and jumping ahead to the third chapter, the continuation of poet García Madero's diary. The intervening years of reading had added to my appreciation of the book, having acquainted myself to the works of Bolaño in translation. In the interim I've also read a couple of books by classic and contemporary writers (Borges, Jarry, Cervantes, Kafka, Rulfo, Marías, etc.) that Bolaño admitted as his influences, the writers he placed in his personal canon. Encountering them in his essays and interviews, several of the writers that were name-dropped like flies in the novel no longer sounded like Greek philosophers to me. Still, references to reclusive writers, like the "French" novelist J.M.G. Arcimboldi, could bring a certain amused reaction. Rereading the novel as a precursor to 2666 and his other books also brought into sharp relief the themes that Bolaño was mining in his writings. In a testimony by one Abel Romero in Café L’Alsatien, Paris, September 1989, Romero recounted a conversation he had with Belano on September 11, 1983 (the dates in the book tell an interesting story):

Belano, I [Romero] said, the heart of the matter is knowing whether evil (or sin or crime or whatever you want to call it) is random or purposeful. If it's purposeful, we can fight it, it's hard to defeat, but we have a chance, like two boxers in the same weight class, more or less. If it's random, on the other hand, we're fucked, and we'll just have to hope that God, if He exists, has mercy on us.

The echoes and cross-currents with Bolaño's other fiction and nonfiction are worth a look. The Savage Detectives rewards avid readers of his other books with hints of meaningful correspondences. There were mention of the lines, for example, from a French poet that said "the flesh was sad" and that the poet had read all the books and slept with all the women. A female bodybuilder asked Belano what the poet meant by that. An answer was given in the novel but a closer reading of the lines by Mallarmé was found in Bolaño's essay "Literature + Illness = Illness".

Part of the enjoyment of reading The Savage Detectives was derived from its satire and comedy. It skewered the inflated egos of Spanish writers and intellectuals in the academia or otherwise. It also paid homage to actual personalities. The character of Iñaki Echevarne, the critic Belano had a duel with, was a nod to Ignacio Echeverría who was Bolaño's friend and editor and whom he designated as his literary executor. The novel was not above a practical joke. Like Kafka's unfinished novels, it was a joke ("The poem is a joke, they said, it's easy to see, Amadeo, look"). It was also like an elaborate game.

He explained that there were similarities between his last book [The Skating Rink? The Third Reich?] and his new book [The Savage Detectives?] that fell into the realm of games that were impossible to decipher [Antwerp?].... All I could ask was: what kind of similarities? Games, Guillem, he said. Games. The fucking Nude Descending a Staircase, your fucking fake Picabias, games.

In "About The Savage Detectives", one of the essays in Between Parentheses, also translated by Wimmer, Bolaño wrote that "there are as many ways to read my novel as there are voices in it. It can be read as a deathbed lament. It can also be read as a game." Whether as a joke, as a game, as a deathbed lament (like By Night in Chile), or as a cubist painting, the novel was determined to compose a tilting portrait of moments across the temporal axis. The chosen artistic medium would take care of the message. In an interview, Bolaño expressed his aesthetics of the supremacy of form and structure over the story.

[Plot is] not so important—the form, the structure, always belong to you, and without form or structure there’s no book, or at least in most cases that’s what happens. Let’s say the story and the plot arise by chance, that they belong to the realm of chance, that is, chaos, disorder, or to a realm that’s in constant turmoil (some call it apocalyptic). Form, on the other hand, is a choice made through intelligence, cunning and silence, all the weapons used by Ulysses in his battle against death. Form seeks an artifice; the story seeks a precipice. Or to use a metaphor from the Chilean countryside (a bad one, as you’ll see): It’s not that I don’t like precipices, but I prefer to see them from a bridge.

"A realm that's in constant turmoil". "Battle against death". "Precipice". These are the tropes that defined his creativity, his mad lit, his pellucid ravings, his literature of the abyss. But despite this apparent quarrel with plot, the novel was convulsed with the edge and energy of its prose.

In a brief moment of lucidity, I was sure that we'd all gone crazy. But then that moment of lucidity was displaced by a supersecond of superlucidity (if I can put it that way), in which I realized that this scene was the logical outcome of our ridiculous lives. It wasn't a punishment but a new wrinkle. It gave us a glimpse of ourselves in our common humanity. It wasn't proof of our idle guilt but a sign of our miraculous and pointless innocence. But that's not it. That's not it. We were still and they were in motion and the sand on the beach was moving, not because of the wind but because of what they were doing and what we were doing, which was nothing, which was watching, and all of that together was the wrinkle, the moment of lucidity. Then, nothing. My memory has always been mediocre ...

This passage is awkward, parenthetical, tentative, roughly hewn. And in a matter-of-fact gloss, memory was deemed mediocre; once again the story cheated with its acknowledged unreliability. And yet, despite the wrinkle, the passage is beautiful. It is propelled by a certain mystery, a certain kind of truth, poetry.

As the declamations of voices neared completion, the duration of their singing became longer and longer. The old familiar voices of the members, sponsors of the visceral realists, and other participants slowly gave way to new voices. The old ones were being muted, their owners dying or dead or forgotten. All except for the Amadeo Salvatierra's tenacious tipsy voice was constantly there to remind us of the mission of the visceral realists to find Cesárea Tinajero, constantly calling out from one of the earliest days of 1976.

The flash fiction pieces that bounce against each other in the beginning were now crowded out. The first long dramatic voice given early in the second part, the one by Auxilio Lacouture, the mother of Mexican poetry (probably the most powerful witness in the book), prefigured the cluster of lengthier testimonies. The immediate voices were still refracting each other, folding the novel's space-time continuum, and rounding up this anthology of dreams. Behind the scenes where the voices of the poets languished, a silent murderous protagonist (time) has also given her own deposition.

Les beaux livres sont écrits dans une sorte de langue étrangère, said Proust. Beautiful books are written in a kind of foreign language. In translation The Savage Detectives is a work of foreign beauty as its natural rhythms and its defiant otherness were quite distinctive in Wimmer's transposition of it into English. The colloquial, conversational, formal, visceral, and other high-strung and low-strung registers of English that the book exhibited may not totally correspond to the intractable types of Spanish inhabited by the original. But despite the obvious loss of the Spanish idioms and accents, that loss was turned into a beautiful noise. Into the music of a brave and beautiful despair.

With thanks to Richard for inviting me to co-host The Savage Detectives Group Read and to Jenny Volvovski for use of her book design as group read badge.

Detectives-Readers

Richard / Caravana de recuerdos
Caroline / Beauty is a Sleeping Cat
Bellezza / Dolce Bellezza
Sarah / what we have here is a failure to communicate
Bettina / Liburuak
nicole / bibliographing
Séamus / Vapour Trails
Amateur Reader (Tom) / Wuthering Expectations
Gavin / Page247

Insomnia (Kristine Ong Muslim)

2012-01-27T09:44:00.000+08:00

Insomnia by Kristine Ong Muslim
(Medulla Publishing, 2012)

Try Again

Sleep is an eel coiled
around itself. Tail

crammed inside the mouth.
Tongue inside the hole

in its tail. And judging by
its lack of teeth,

it will not last
the night.

Terse beauty. That just about sums up this poetry collection for me. As with Night Fish, Kristine Ong Muslim's whimsical voice is profoundly wedded to her arresting images. She is a poet who sees miracles in the mundane and whose way with language is unobstructed. The lines often start in a conversational tone, drawing the reader in to every conceivable possibility.

Sleep is an eel coiled / around itself.... The first couplet of "Try Again" is a laconic statement of the state of insomnia, pining for the onset of sluggish nightmare. It is one of the most trenchant variations of Ouroboros. Sleep as an eel, from tail to mouth, tongue in hole, toothlessness. The unobstructed passageway assures the sleeping form that sleep, closure, termination, is a process of infinite regress. The metaphor metamorphoses into itself.

Nothing like the malice of objects: the dank mouths of a sponge, the bent posture of a desk lamp, the sickness of a rickety chair. On the shelf are those books of eyelids, how the cracks between their pages let the light slip in all the wrong places.
[from "The Eater of Saturday Nights"]

Reading Kristine Ong Muslim's insomniac poems is like watching a low-volume late-night zombie movie. The quiet scenes first unfold in a clarity of unnamed terror. Suddenly her ordinary images take the shape of violence.

A legless ballerina performs her last pirouette. We would have applauded if only we have hands.
[from "No Possibility of Waking Up"]

The lines deliver the punch that is felt hard in the gut. “You wonder whether you are the landscape or the one taking in the scenery. You wonder why the shadows of curved things remain straight.”, she wrote at one point in "The Eater of Saturday Nights".

Whereas Night Fish was concerned with an alternate future reality, in Insomnia the reality is grounded in the secrets of suburbia that spill from an open can of worms. The poems here stare the reader hard in the face until he is inured to the final image. The worms squirm and take root in the mind.

There is a hint of feminism in the collection. Women are represented as limbless objects—"whoever looks into the window and sees the girl-torso looking through it will never notice her lack of limbs, the absence of life, the impossibility of the house housing the girl by the window" ("Impossible House")—living a loveless marriage, the objects of pornography, the victims of hate/crime, or the subjects of an autopsy in a cold morgue.

The perspectives of the wife or husband on the dissolution of marriage, the portrait of a recent divorce, deep cracks in relationships, these are explored through a pile of cutting irony.

Nobody became a widow here; some-
one just turned out to be a frozen head
of a bee after abandoning its stinger
somewhere. One could not hold the dark
long enough to fix it in place. It was like
flicking a feather caught on the maple syrup.
[from "That Portrait of the Missing Socks"]

From the bee voluntarily losing its sting (like giving up its life force, its drive, its appetite) to the feather on a maple syrup (a wonderful image of desperation and futility), the mixed metaphors create an enjambment of sense-impressions. They nudge toward a diagnosis of a suffocating relationship that is slowly and then suddenly entering a quicksand.

Insomnia exposes "the bedrooms we only see in our minds" (as in "Preface to a Pornographer's Dirty Book") through lines that stun and mystify. Muslim's themes cut through the surface of ordinary, sleepy life and stitch new threads of alertness to existence.

My thanks to the author for a copy of her book.

Blood and sound

2012-01-18T23:20:00.001+08:00

José Carlos Somoza's The Athenian Murders is turning out to be a detective novel of wit. A whodunit forged in pale fire. Caustic humor in the same mold as Borges and the Eternal Orang-utans by Luis Fernando Verissimo.

I picked it up yesterday after finishing The Savage Detectives, that book of monologues of hyper poets in a mock-up detective novel. I knew for some time that Bolaño has read and praised the work of Somoza. I'm a third into the book and it's becoming clear to me why this recommendation is a good one.

Somoza, born in 1959 in Cuba, is a writer from Spain. He is a psychiatrist by profession before becoming a full-time writer. The Athenian Murders, translated from Spanish by Sonia Soto, is his first novel to come out in English. The book was originally published as La caverna de las ideas (Alfaguara, 2000). The title should translate as "The Cave of Ideas", which, considering the milieu of the novel, is an apt title. The novel is set in ancient Greece, in the time of Plato and his school, the Academy. Plato's allegory of the cave is a philosophical sound that issues from it, bouncing and reverberating in its pages.

It's quite possible the English publisher wanted to market Somoza as a crime writer. (His second translated novel, The Art of Murder, was originally called Clara y la penumbra!) Nothing wrong with that except that it murders, in a manner of speaking, the self-referential elements of the story whenever the title itself was mentioned in the text, via footnotes. Yes, there are footnotes, it's that kind of book. The notes are provided by the fictional translator of the actual text (his supposed translation) that we are reading. As given by an extract from one of his more than a page long footnotes:

   The Athenian Murders, the novel I had just begun translating, was an eidetic text. She stared at me for a moment, holding one of the cherries on the nearby plate by its stalk.
   'A what?' she asked.
   'Eidesis,' I explained, 'is a literary technique invented by the Ancient Greeks to transmit secret messages or keys in their works. It consists in repeating, in any text, metaphors or words that, when identified by a perceptive reader, make up an idea or image that's independent of the original text. Arginisus of Corinth, for example, used eidesis to hide a detailed description of a young woman he loved in a long poem apparently about wild flowers....
   'How interesting,' smiled Helena, bored. 'And would you care to tell me what's hidden in your anonymous The Athenian Murders? [14]

Substitute The Cave of Ideas to the title in the above and one realizes it's more faithful to this 'eidetic' novel of ideas. Here is a striking passage from the "translated" text itself:

There was a scream. Then another. For a moment, absurdly, Heracles thought they came from Itys' mouth, which was shut; as if she had roared internally, and her thin body were shuddering and resonating with this sound produced in her throat.
But then the scream, deafening, entered the room; clad in black, it pushed the slaves away; crawled from one side of the room to the other, then collapsed in a corner, writhing, as if seized by a holy madness. At last it dissolved into an endless lamentation. [10-11]

I marked this up because I remember a similar passage of a sound's motion in The Savage Detectives.

He whispered that he loved me, that he would never be able to forget me. Then he got up (twenty seconds after he'd spoken, at most) and slapped my face. The sound echoed through the house. We were on the first floor, but I heard the sound of his hand (when his palm left my cheek) rise up the stairs and enter each of the rooms on the second floor, dropping down through the climbing vines and rolling like glass marbles in the yard. When I could react, I made a fist with my right hand and hit him in the face. He hardly moved. [194]

I was wondering about the resemblance between them. And then I came upon this passage from García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude:

A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendía house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining-room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta’s chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano José, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Úrsula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread.

Blood and scream, the sound of slap. What to make of their trajectories?

A partial 2012 reading list

2012-01-08T00:31:00.003+08:00

I read an average of 64 books a year. My TBR - unread physical books - stand at around 200 books. That means I can go on reading from my shelf alone for three straight years. Still, it's a conservative estimate. It doesn't factor in books earmarked for rereading. And books to be bought, swapped, borrowed, or downloaded. It should be easy to select 64 titles from the pile. However, I have a whimsical bent when it comes to choosing what to read. I'm putting up below a list of half my projected reading for the year. The rest I will fish out from the large ocean of literary goodness. Except for the books I committed to reading, the list is tentative, is more of a what-came-to-mind-right-now list. And in no discernible order.

1. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño - for the group read hosted by Richard and me, slated for the end of this month; rereading it in hopscotch fashion
2. 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami - for a readalong in one of my groups in LibraryThing; partially read
3. Deep River by Shusaku Endo - another for my group in LibraryThing, in fact we're focusing on five Japanese writers this year (Endo, Kobo Abe, Ryū Murakami, Yukio Mishima, and Natsume Sōseki); partially read
4. Almost Transparent Blue by Ryū Murakami - these Japanese titles also anticipate the 6th edition to Bellezza's Japanese Literature Challenge
5. The Sailor Who Fell from Grace With the Sea by Yukio Mishima
6. I Am a Cat by Natsume Sōseki
7. Black Rain by Masuji Ibuse - a group read for Caroline's Literature and War Readalong (July)
8. Varamo by César Aira
9. Maoh: Juvenile Remix by Kotaro Isaka and Megumi Osuga - a manga series I became addicted to last year, I finished up to volume 3, and there are 10 volumes in all
10. The Wild Goose by Mori Ōgai - I read this in a previous translation; a possible book I'm reading with nicole for the bibliographing Reading Challenge
11. The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe
12. Wolf Among Wolves by Hans Fallada
13. Rebellion in the Backlands by Euclides da Cunha - partially read
14. Bartleby & Co. by Enrique Vila-Matas - in the list of best Spanish-language novels of the past 25 years
15. State of War by Ninotchka Rosca - recently bought; partially read
16. The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa - a group read selection by Tom for his ongoing Wuthering Expectations Portuguese Literature Challenge; the schedule is end of March
17. Gathering Evidence and My Prizes by Thomas Bernhard - reread, in the case of the five-volume memoirs Gathering Evidence; elated to acquire this two-in-one edition of autobiography and speeches of a favorite writer; I still can't forgive myself when I listed my first copy - a Vintage paperback with Bernhard's photo on the cover - in Bookmooch (I must have been short on points and very desperate back then); Tao Lin mooched it off me
18. All the Lights by Clemens Meyer
19. Po-on (aka Dusk) by F. Sionil José - the first novel in the five-volume Rosales saga
20. The Way by Swann's by Marcel Proust - the Lydia Davis translation; my edition had this unusual title
21. Mandarins by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
22. The Unfortunates by B.S. Johnson - in the list of puzzle novels
23. Snow by Orhan Pamuk
24. When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro - partially read
25. Stoner by John Williams
26. Maganda Pa ang Daigdig by Lazaro Francisco
27. Moravagine by Blaise Cendrars - partially read
28. The Athenian Murders by José Carlos Somoza - in the translators in fiction reading list; a group read selection of my translation group in Goodreads; our reading schedule is end of February
29. Six Not-So-Easy Pieces by Richard P. Feynman - partially read
30. Ariel by Sylvia Plath
31. Trilce by César Vallejo
32. Hunger by Knut Hamsun
33. Voyage Along the Horizon by Javier Marías
34. Desert by J.M.G. ~~Arcimboldi~~ Le Clézio

Reading journal: December 2011

2011-12-30T23:56:00.000+08:00

What a year. The pages flew by, opening new vistas, perspectives, ideas. Great stories told with passion and force. Some books made their marks, a few duds scarred the mind. But even so, some epic reads accompanied the reading life. The year is almost over and we're still reading until the end. The pages accumulate and many proved, in my book, equal to their bound existence. The great books are bound to be awesome, as they are. The challenge and the chore of reading are its own rewards. The habit of reading is its happiness.

Etc., etc.

Anyway, I'm grateful to all friends and readers of in lieu of a field guide for keeping up with my posts. I hope everyone will have a prolific reading this coming year.

The following are what I read this final month of 2011. I have spoken too early with my year's list of favorites. Most of the books here deserve to be considered in the yearend best list. I guess I'll consider them for next year.

57. The Future of Life by Edward O. Wilson

One of my favorite books of the year, it is a manifesto for immediate action to stem the tide of global environmental degradation. The environmental disaster is already upon us. It is of our own making and, Wilson reminds us, it will be the instrument of our undoing. That is, unless we undo this horrible mess. The book itself provides strategies and examples of how to do so. It is a call to arms: a call to constructive environmentalism.

58. Patriotism by Mishima Yukio, tr. Geoffrey W. Sargent (reread)

A lurid, blood-curdling dissection of suicide. It celebrates supreme vanity and it negates everything. The display of patriotism through suicide must be Mishima's master statement about the pursuit of art to its own end. Don't buy this book. Buy Death in Midsummer where this short story is only one of several masterful stories.

59. The Dead by James Joyce (reread)

In Ireland, a New Year's party was in full swing. The three lady hosts were busy catering to their guests. All were reminiscing about the past, thinking of operatic singers and musical icons who entertained them through the years. Dances and songs were constantly playing. Gabriel Conroy, the hosts' nephew, braced himself for carving the goose and delivering the dinner speech. Everyone had some kind of issue in this annual party. The caretaker's daughter was feeling bitter about some kind of heartbreak. A man, possibly drunk, was being closely watched lest he upset the party. Gabriel was worrying too much about the contents of his speech. His wife, distracted by a lonely song sung in a hoarse voice, remembered something from the past. As the party drew to a close, the snow was softly falling. What else can I say. Joyce was in too deep.

60. The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy, tr. Louise and Aylmer Maude

About a magistrate who was dying of a mysterious disease. This wondrous novella was about the denial of mortality, a moment-by-moment self-auditing of a life, and the acceptance of an existence rendered meaningless by suffering and death. It must be Tolstoy's synthesis of a lifetime of writing.

61. Paulownia: Seven Stories from Contemporary Japanese Writers, tr. Torao Taketomo

Stories by three noteworthy Japanese writers of early modernism – Tōson Shimazaki (review), Mori Ōgai, and Nagai Kafū. The stories are undeniably beautiful. The translation, however, is so bad in many places that there's nothing to recommend it.

62. The Castle by Franz Kafka, tr. Mark Harman

Like Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich, this should be a strong contender in the favorites list. Kafka fashioned a brilliantly constructed joke about K., a land surveyor trying to gain entry into a castle on a hill. The ridiculous tangle K. found himself in was worthy of many laughs and cries.

63. Insomnia by Kristine Ong Muslim

In this collection of poems, Muslim's whimsical voice is profoundly wedded to her arresting images. She is a poet who sees miracles in the mundane and whose way with language is unobstructed. Her lines stun and mystify. They often deliver the punch that is felt hard in the gut. “You wonder whether you are the landscape or the one taking in the scenery. You wonder why the shadows of curved things remain straight.”, she wrote at one point. The reader was implicated in the poem. I will post a review of this book later in January, hoping to give justice to its terse beauty.

Updated reading statistics:
63 books read: 43 fiction, 12 nonfiction, 7 poetry, 1 play
50 books by male writers, 11 by female writers
19 in original language: 17 English, 2 Filipino
44 translations: 15 Japanese, 9 Spanish, 8 German, 3 Russian, 3 French, 6 others

Reading list: Fiction and poetry books with photographs

2011-12-29T01:58:00.000+08:00

Terry Pitts, the author of the Vertigo blog on Max Sebald, collects fiction and poetry books embedded with photographs. He records a bibliography of these books in LibraryThing site (this link).

It's a surprising catalog for me since I see some of the books in stores but didn't realize they have photographs in them.

The night before Christmas

2011-12-24T11:35:00.000+08:00

Film adaptation of Nikolai Gogol's story from Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka.

Reading list: Translation in fiction

2011-12-23T12:53:00.000+08:00

Encouraged by friends' comments on a previous blog post, I decided to look for works of fiction with translators as protagonists. I posted the question in Goodreads and LibraryThing and was rewarded with a lot of suggestions and links.

The reading list below collects works of fiction featuring translators or interpreters as major or minor characters. They are limited to books written in English or available in English translation. It's not a definitive list for sure but it may already contain a good chunk of what's out there. Some interesting books here already populated my wish list.

TRANSLATORS IN FICTION: A READING LIST

Leila Aboulela – The Translator
César Aira – The Literary Conference; La Princesa Primavera (untranslated)
Brian Aldiss – The Interpreter, aka Bow Down to Nul (science fiction)
Paul Auster – The Book of Illusions
Amadou Hampâté Bâ – The Fortunes of Wangrin
Ingeborg Bachmann – Three Paths to the Lake (see the story “Word for Word”)
L. Frank Baum – The Marvelous Land of Oz (see the 7th chapter, “His Majesty the Scarecrow”)
Luciano Bianciardi – La Vita Agra (It’s a Hard Life)
Anita Brookner – Falling Slowly
William F. Buckely Jr. – Nuremberg: The Reckoning
Italo Calvino – If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller
Cervantes – Don Quixote
Susan Choi – The Foreign Student
John Crowley – The Translator
Dicey Deere – The Irish Manor House Murder
Samuel R. Delany – Babel-17 (science fiction)
Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment
Sarah Dunant – Transgressions
Francesca Duranti – House on Moon Lake
Suzette Haden Elgin – Native Tongue; The Judas Rose (science fiction)
Sheila Finch – Guild of Xenolinguists (science fiction)
Jonathan Safran Foer – Everything Is Illuminated
Brian Friel – Translations (play)
Anna Gavalda – Someone I Loved
Suzanne Glass – The Interpreter
Peter Handke – The Left-Handed Woman
Todd Hasak-Lowy – The Task of This Translator
Donald A. Herron – The Misadventures of Interpreter Sam
Russell Hoban – Riddley Walker
Sheri Holman – A Stolen Tongue (historical fiction)
Nancy Horan – Loving Frank
Uwe Johnson – Anniversaries: From the Life of Gesine Cresspahl
Susanna Jones – The Earthquake Bird (thriller)
Ward Just – The Translator
Suki Kim – The Interpreter
India Knight – Don’t You Want Me
Dezső Kosztolányi – Kornél Esti
Ahmadou Kourouma – Monnew
Julia Kristeva – Possessions
Jhumpa Lahiri – Interpreter of Maladies (see titular story)
Wally Lamb – I Know This Much Is True
John le Carré – The Mission Song
Gwyneth Lewis – Keeping Mum (poetry)
David Lodge – Small World
Peter Manseau – Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter
Javier Marías – All Souls; Dark Back of Time; Bad Nature; A Heart So White; Your Face Tomorrow (3 vols.)
Harry Mathews – The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium; The Human Country: New and Collected Stories (see “The Dialect of the Tribe” and “Remarks of the Scholar Graduate”)
Pascal Mercier – Night Train to Lisbon
Anne Michaels – Fugitive Pieces
Andrew Miller – Oxygen
Nicole Mones – Lost in Translation
Robert Moss – The Interpreter (historical fiction)
Iris Murdoch – Under the Net
Joyce Carol Oates – The Tattooed Girl
Ann Patchett – Bel Canto
Matthew Pearl – The Dante Club
Jacques Poulin – Translation Is a Love Affair
Piers Paul Read – A Season in the West
Arno Schmidt – Bottom’s Dream (upcoming)
Carol Shields – Unless
José Carlos Somoza – The Athenian Murders
James Thurber – The Thurber Carnival (see “The Black Magic of Barney Haller” and “What Do You Mean It Was Brillig?”)
Rose Tremain – The Way I Found Her
Ludmila Ulitskaya – Daniel Stein, Interpreter
Mario Vargas Llosa – The Bad Girl
Paolo Volponi – Last Act in Urbino
Peter Waterhouse – Language Death Night Outside: Poem. Novel
Barbara Wilson – Cassandra Reilly Mystery series
Jeannete Winterson – Written on the Body
A. B. Yehoshua – The Liberated Bride
Banana Yoshimoto – NP

Sources:
ProZ.com Wiki; ProZ.com; Brave New Words; Biblit; Conference on Fictional Translators in Literature and Film - Vienna, 2011

Happy Christmas to all readers of in lieu of a field guide!

All-year favorite books

2011-12-18T22:55:00.000+08:00

Ryan's 2011-favorites book montage

Ryan's favorite books »

1. Don Quixote, tr. John Rutherford

2. Chronicle of My Mother by Inoue Yasushi, tr. Jean Oda Moy

3. The Ubu Plays by Alfred Jarry, tr. Cyril Connolly and Simon Watson Taylor

4. Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald, tr. Anthea Bell

5. Chess by Stefan Zweig, tr. Anthea Bell

6. Toddler-Hunting and Other Stories by Kōno Taeko, tr. Lucy North and Lucy Lower

7. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

8. On Translation by Paul Ricoeur, tr. Eileen Brennan

9. Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me by Javier Marías, tr. Margaret Jull Costa

10. Stasiland by Anna Funder

11. The Future of Life by Edward O. Wilson

I've selected 11 books for my favorites list (6 fiction, 4 nonfiction, and a volume of plays) out of 57 books read, down from 80 last year. My total of fiction read outnumbered the nonfiction, 38 to 12. Male writers outnumbered female writers, 45 to 10. My most read authors were Murakami Haruki (6 books) and Javier Marías (4). Total of translations read was 40, mostly from the Japanese (13), Spanish (9), and German (7).

Books read in 2011

The novelist as ghostwriter

2011-12-13T02:25:00.000+08:00

Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me by Javier Marías

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A man and a woman are about to commit adultery. Suddenly the woman dies on him. The man cannot report her death and must immediately leave her and her sleeping child behind. From this opening scene, the novelist explores the idea of narrating and storytelling as acts fraught with emotional baggage, of the art of novel-writing as essentially ghostwriting. Later, the man considers revealing his identity to the woman's husband. He feels that unburdening himself can be the only way to save them both. He does not realize that both of them may already be past saving.

I reeled from the unexpected ending of this novel. The novelist's style is just as suspenseful and addictive as his other books. It is in some ways a companion book to his short story Bad Nature, whose narrator appears as a minor character in this novel.

The novelist can be said to act as a ghostwriter for his narrator, V., who was himself a ghostwriter in the novel. All the characters' thoughts and dialogues are filtered through V.'s consciousness, sometimes to the point of second-guessing them, as when he thought, inside quotations (emphases added):

"It's so easy to live in a state of delusion, or to be deceived," I thought, "indeed, it is our natural condition: no one is free of it and it certainly doesn't mean that one is stupid, we should not struggle so hard against it nor should we let it embitter us." That is what [he] had said, although he had added: "And yet, when we do learn the truth, we find it unbearable."

This is a key passage not only to this novel, but to the rest of Javier Marías's major fiction, all using the first person narration. It underscores his sublime ventriloquism and ghostwriting: the narrator thinking aloud his story and imputing words to the other characters. In a recent interview Marías said of his writing style: "I don't play tricks, that’s why I write in the first person." That is a tricky thing to say.

The narrator's profession is yet again a wonderful conceit on the part of the novelist, as it forces the two of them (narrator and novelist) to invent words for someone. As with A Heart So White, this novel luxuriates in the "dangerous" acts of observation and perception. This time, the narrator is actually twice removed from his subject (the politician he is writing a speech for) by having to fill the shoes of his ghostwriter-friend Ruibérriz who acts as his literary agent. He is, in fact, a "ghostwriter of a ghostwriter". Perhaps a fitting occupation for someone who is, all throughout the book, haunted by a ghost.

Marías's novels support the idea of 'faithful' translation and storytelling (novel-writing) as acts of careful and informed interpretations, as vehicles of interpretation themselves. The main characters - as translator, interpreter, ghostwriter - act as intermediary between two parties trying to seek an understanding. In A Heart So White, between two world leaders; in this book, between a powerful political figure and his subjects. The translating language, the 'target' language, thus becomes a hospitable medium. Reading it in Margaret Jull Costa's expert translation adds a layer of déjà vu to the mix.

The novel-writing then doubles as translation, a way to capture and match ideas and intentions in the original language (thought) and to convey them in another (text/speech). The free first-person narrative style, proceeding in a deliberately digressive and lengthy trajectory of conscious memories and dreams, betrays the writer's intent to sharpen the perception of a reader caught in a swirl of words and ideas. To open communications between the embattled reader and the text.

View all my reviews

Stasiland (Anna Funder)

2011-12-07T21:54:00.000+08:00

On the night of Sunday 12 August 1961 the East German army rolled out barbed wire along the streets bordering the eastern sector, and stationed sentries at regular intervals. At daylight people woke to find themselves cut off from relatives, from work, from school. Some made a dash through the wire. Others who lived in apartments overlooking the borderline started to jump from the windows into blankets held out by westerners on the footpath below. Then the troops made the residents brick up their own windows. They started with the lower floors, forcing people to jump from higher and higher windows.

An investigative report about life in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) prior to the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall by Australian writer Anna Funder was a work of genuine pathos. The true stories of common people recounted in it seemed to have come directly from George Orwell's dystopia. As Funder's narrative had shown, the heyday of East Germany did not just resemble the alternate reality of Nineteen Eighty-Four, its very ideology was immersed in the depths of Oceania. It was a system isolated and enclosed by an impregnable fence, with human beings as the subject of the experiment and the bureaucratic apparatus secure in place. In East Germany the application of totalitarian theory took its own course for all of four decades. After an audit of history, the human cost – the pain, the sacrifices, the lives squandered and lost – was staggering.

Early on, the reader was given an overview of what transpired in the land of the Stasi police:

The Stasi was the internal army by which the government kept control. Its job was to know everything about everyone, using any means it chose. It knew who your visitors were, it knew whom you telephoned, and it knew if your wife slept around. It was a bureaucracy metastasised through East German society: overt or covert, there was someone reporting to the Stasi on their fellows and friends in every school, every factory, every apartment block, every pub. Obsessed with detail, the Stasi entirely failed to predict the end of Communism, and with it the end of the country. Between 1989 and 1990 it was turned inside out: Stalinist spy unit one day, museum the next. In its forty years, 'the Firm' generated the equivalent of all records in German history since the middle ages. Laid out upright and end to end, the files the Stasi kept on their countrymen and women would form a line 180 kilometres long.

In the GDR, people learned to inform on each other. They were used by the state to gather information on potential "enemies". People spied on people, and all records and reports were systematically collected and archived. As Funder described it to a colleague in the book, the Stasiland was "a place where what was said was not real, and what was real was not allowed, where people disappeared behind doors and were never heard from again, or were smuggled into other realms." The breakdown of reality certainly had an air of wonder about it, but it was a breakdown orchestrated from a meeting room in hell.

Intimidation and surveillance, those classic strategies of depriving individuals their privacy and peace of mind, were used in good measure. As it turned out, the participants in it – some hardline Stasi and their victims – were still playing the same game even after 1989. Even after the fall of the wall, harassment was norm for people who were critical of the former regime or who could reveal the identities of the ex-Stasi.

A former border guard who appeared on a television talk show was threatened with an acid attack and had to be placed under police protection. Home-delivered harassment is popular: one man had a ticking package delivered to his doorstep; wives have had to sign for porn not ordered by their husbands. The strangest incident I heard of was when a man was delivered a truckload of puppies, yelping outside his door and the driver demanding a signature. . . . The child of an outspoken writer was picked up from school by a person or persons unknown and taken to drink hot chocolate, just for an hour or so.

The tricks were almost funny. The idea being: that the fall of the wall did not guarantee complete freedom from intimidation. Everything could remain as before. Totalitarianism was a kind of latent disease that would strike humanity's immune system given the right physiological conditions for it to prosper. Right now, as we speak, the apparatus of the Stasi was still in operation. In any country, in any given day, the malicious smile of a Stasi was plastered on the face of an operative.

The style of the book was far from a dry journalistic report. It read very much like a novel. Like fiction, except it wasn't. Funder wrote indelible images of a repressive regime in a restrained but effectual manner. The hybrid form of creative nonfiction, in which searing human stories took over the nightmare of reality, was used to maximum effect. The portraits of people in it were well drawn and their experiences were made immediate and harrowing. There were haunting scenes in it, moments of quiet and understated anguish, that would make one's hair stand on end.

It was evident that no one could be spared the iron rule because the "enemies" were in plain sight, wearing everyone's face.

'Who were the people you were doing the "Operational Control" on?'
'They were enemies.'
'Oh. How did you know they were enemies?'
'Well,' he says in his soft voice, 'once an investigation was started into someone, that meant there was suspicion of enemy activity. . . . We searched for enemies in all the areas I mentioned: in the factories, in the state apparatus, the church, the schools and so on. In fact,' he says, 'as time went on there was more and more work to do because the definition of "enemy" became wider and wider.'

How could any citizen escape the definition when the damning definition would encompass all conceivable pronouns?

(Compare this to a novella by Machado de Assis called "The Psychiatrist", described by the Wuthering Expectations blog, in which the definition of "madness" had become so broad as to cast a wider and wider net and catch an increasing proportion of "mad" in the population. Using the same haphazard way of handing down human definitions, GDR embodied "both theory and practice", to borrow Tom's quote from Machado. Emily's comment to the review, regarding the similarity of the plot of José Saramago's novel Blindness to Machado's story, was very perceptive. The conceit of Saramago's novel – wherein people suddenly became blind one after the other, an abnormal disruption that led to chaos and horrible acts of cruelty as the blind were herded in a closed facility – was that it used blindness to conceal the fact that a bunch of seeing people, in the same situation, would react in exactly the same inhuman ways. Even if the epidemic of white blindness did not descend on the city, the turn of events would be the same as long as an extreme situation like food scarcity took hold and power was concentrated in one place.).

The conceit of Stasiland, and it was a real conceit, was that the Berlin Wall was also an imaginary structure. What happened within the walls only intensified or heightened what was happening outside it. What happened inside were happening outside; the goings-on inside just happened to be more prominent and more blatant.

The rise and fall of the GDR, as documented by the personal histories in the book, was a reminder to the present that lessons are not only manufactured by history. History was the lesson itself. Human beings in power, given free rein in a closed society, are capable of inflicting everything imaginable and unimaginable. Not forgetting is always a worthwhile undertaking as it is a substantial step toward asserting one's inalienable freedom and dignity. Remembrance of the unjust past is a proactive form of resistance, a way to guide the course of present events in an ideal direction.

Funder's report distilled the best and worst aspects of people in an isolationist society. Her use of language was liberating. It trained its unflinching light on the dark, disgusting shadows of the past. Her writing was a courageous feat of synthesis and imagining. It provided ample space to observe the disposition of the heroic peoples whose stories were thoughtfully conveyed, the people who stuck blindly to their principles in the face of demoralization and deprivation of rights.

In the book, a woman was described as a person of "such great humanity" by another whose life may have been fatefully saved when the woman refused to cooperate with the regime. In its own way, Anna Funder's book deserved the same unqualified judgement. Hers was a work of such great humanity.

I received an uncorrected proof of the book from the publisher. The quotations above should be checked against the final published copy.

Reading diary: October to November 2011

2011-12-03T16:03:00.001+08:00

Eight books read in October (half of them graphic fiction) and five books in November, with reviews also appearing in my accounts in LibraryThing, Shelfari, and Goodreads. I read four books for the just concluded German Literature Month. Links to my previous reading lists this year – 1st quarter, 2nd quarter, 3rd quarter.

OCTOBER

44. Pan by Knut Hamsun, trans. James W. McFarlane

Pan (1894) is a lyrical expression of man's inner nature. The forest teems with the beauty of the natural world and Knut Hamsun is too wise not to use it for his own ends. The novel fairly anticipates the sensuous and erotic works of D. H. Lawrence and the spiritual confessions of Rainer Maria Rilke. Ostensibly the journal entries of a soldier hunter who inhabited a hut in the woods of a rural community, the short novel otherwise relies on various storytelling registers—folktales, legends, testimonies, monologues, daydreams, prose poetry.

Hamsun depicts a fierce battle of the sexes, a battle to the end between the narrator, Lieutenant Glahn (a man with an irresistible "animal look"), and his object of love, the fickle beauty Edvarda. Despite their obvious passionate feelings for each other, they enact a savage choreography of power and dominance. Each one will not yield submission to the other.

The novel proceeds in swift chapters, each mostly running for two or three pages. Glahn's journal tells of his hermit-like existence in the woods and of his intimate relationship with Edvarda, in a voice that at first is romantic and then becomes more and more vindictive and vicious. Its language is incantatory, as if delivering poetry reading after poetry reading on the subject of mountain, sea, forest, moon, birds, and beasts. Hamsun's achievement is in portraying extreme and conflicting psychological states in one man and one woman—compassion-cruelty, love-rage, reason-madness, intelligence-delusion.

In James W. McFarlane's translation from Norwegian, it is a rousing mad poem of love sickness.

I lie closer to the fire and watch the flames. A fir cone falls from its branch, and then a dry twig or two. The night is like a boundless deep. I close my eyes.
After an hour, all my senses are throbbing in rhythm, I am ringing with the great stillness, ringing with it. I look up at the crescent moon standing in the sky like a white shell and I feel a great love for it, I feel myself blushing. "It is the moon," I say softly and passionately, "it is the moon!" And my heart beats gently towards it. Several minutes pass. A slight breeze springs up, an unnatural gust of wind strikes me, a strange rush of air. What is it? I look about me and see no one. The wind calls to me and my soul bows in obedience to the call, I feel myself lifted out of my context, pressed to an invisible breast, tears spring to my eyes, I tremble—God is standing somewhere near looking at me. Again some minutes pass. I turn my head, the strangely heavy air ebbs away and I see something like the back of a spirit who wanders soundlessly through the forest. (p. 107)

45. Bad Nature by Javier Marías, trans. Esther Allen

This is my second read of this short story which was published as part of the New Directions Pearls series. It first appeared in Granta 66.

Elvis Presley is shooting a movie in Mexico and needs a Spanish interpreter so he can deliver the lines with a convincing accent. This appeal to 'authenticity', to a perfect and accurate delivery of the lines, is the very theme that the Spanish novelist Javier Marías explores here, in condensed form, and elsewhere in his other works of fiction.

Ruibérriz (aka Roy Berry) is the man who fills the job of interpreter adequately. That is, until the Elvis contingent gets waylaid in a bar full of gangsters. The exchange of insults between two parties, mediated by the poor interpreter, is only one among many happening in the real world. These conflicts could be the result of cultural differences, prejudices, and intolerance of 'the other'. At any rate, the role of the translator cannot be discounted in a world of perpetual wars.

46. Trese: Last Seen After Midnight by Budjette Tan and Kajo Baldisimo (review)

Trese is a graphic series based on reworkings of stories from the Philippine "lower mythology". The heroine, Alexandra Trese, battles it out against some of the mystical and mythical villains and figures from Filipino pop culture. "Last Seen After Midnight" is the fourth installment in the series. Inked in noir-like black and white art, it's a restrained and well written quartet of stories in the genre supernatural crimes and mysteries.

47-49. Maoh: Juvenile Remix, Volumes 01, 02, and 03 by Kotaro Isaka and Megumi Osuga, trans. Stephen Paul

I'm hooked on this series, which by the third volume ends with a cliffhanger. But I learned there are already 10 volumes in the series (and possibly more coming!).

The "juvenile" in the title refers to the main character Ando, an orphan who discovered he had the power of ventriloquism -- he can make other people speak things he want to say. The potential enemy is the charismatic Inukai, head of a vigilante group called Grasshopper. Inukai, self-proclaimed savior, wants to take over the whole Nekota City and save it from rapid urbanization. He marks as enemies businessmen, urban developers, investors, and mall owners. He wants to prevent the city from being overtaken by impersonal capitalism and commercialization. A valid enough cause, but his methods of violence against paid criminal gangs and goons are questionable. Our good-natured teen Ando, who is just learning to use his power, sees something sinister in Inukai's grand plan. Will he be able to stop him?

50. Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck, trans. Susan Bernofsky (review)

The novel is a tale of a house by the lake in a German woodland area. The main character is Time, who predictably moonlights as Death. Other characters include History and Memory. The page count is small, but the technique is dense with innovative manipulations of language. The story – there's no story – covers a century of racial abuses and prejudices. The plot is linear enough but the delivery is sophisticated. It drives home the point that all human beings are dispensable. The theme and style will remind one of the midsection of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, the cruel chapter called "Time Passes". That is precisely what the main character does in the novel. He passes. The narrative proceeds in bursts of prose poetry. It holds a candle to the accumulation of private and public memories.

51. The Silent Angel by Heinrich Böll, trans. Breon Mitchell (review)

According to W. G. Sebald, in On the Natural History of Destruction, this novel by Heinrich Böll was one of only a handful of postwar novels that depicted the intensive carpet bombing leveled against Germany in the second world war. Though written early in Böll's career, the novel however was not published in his lifetime due to the subject matter. The publishers thought it was not appropriate to dwell on such a topic. After a long war, is it not perhaps best to move on to cheery stories?

Böll described the ruins and rubble of wartime Germany right after the end of the bombings. Amid this wasted landscape the characters moved like zombies, traumatized by their experiences. They lived only to survive hunger, scrounging for the rare bread and provisions that came at high prices. The centerpiece of the story was a love story and a subplot of a family drama. Böll was able to illuminate a time that was barely recorded, even consciously avoided according to Sebald, erased from memory, sanitized and repressed by German writers. It was not a popular subject but it was necessary to keep a record of destruction of cities and its effects on men and women.

NOVEMBER

52. The Shooting Gallery by Tsushima Yūko, trans. Geraldine Harcourt (review)

Tsushima Yūko (b. 1947) is known as the daughter of the Japanese novelist Dazai Osamu who committed suicide when she was one year old. She's an accomplished writer herself, having won several prestigious literary awards in Japan. The Shooting Gallery is a collection of eight short stories about modern women, the difficulties they experience in the face of divorce or family pressures, and their search for freedom. Tsushima portrays single mothers and separated women with a generous sympathy.

53. The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum by Heinrich Böll, trans. Leila Vennewitz (review)

Originally published in German in 1974, this short novel explicitly dealt with the modern dilemmas of the individual that Franz Kafka stipulated in The Trial. The apparent illusion of liberty was manifest in the gradual ruin of Katharina Blum's reputation and the invasion of her privacy, by the press and by the state. The issues raised by Heinrich Böll, in a thinly disguised satirical voice, were today still "newsworthy".

One morning Katharina Blum was brought in for questioning by the police. She was involved with a man who stayed in her place the previous night. The man was accused of murder, most wanted by the authorities, and by all indications, it looked like she helped him escape the police stakeout around her place. At the outset this looked like a simple crime investigation, but Heinrich Böll framed a narrative about the willful distortions of the truth to sensationalize a piece of news. It's a lethal piece of writing that questioned the absolute freedom granted to press. Böll sought to question the extreme application of freedom of the press in his depiction of a woman held hostage by the media's manipulation of truth. I think only a few radical writers could get away with a controversial subject like this. Böll was one of these writers who grappled with human institutions and systems and developed a prognosis on the fallibility of that system to protect human rights. He was spot on in describing the helplessness of the individual amid an onslaught of lies and deceptions broadcast on the news.

54. Night Fish by Kristine Ong Muslim (review)

Night Fish is a 13-poem chapbook written in the language of a hypothetical (future) reality. It opens with the title poem, submerging the reader in a world without landmass. Everything that once stood on high ground is reduced to the level of the sea. Despite the uncertainties accompanying a watery life, humans learn to adapt (“Everyone will learn to paddle towards the nonexistent shores.”) and form an aquatic community, an emergent race of water people. Kristine Ong Muslim, the poet behind these lines, has imagined an alternate environmental habitat in which sea level rise is the state of nature and adaptation to an extreme environment is the way of life: "The sound of oars cutting the water clean will be the most familiar sound in the universe."

55. Rock Crystal by Adalbert Stifter, trans. Elizabeth Mayer and Marianne Moore, illus. Josef Scharl (review)

Rock Crystal: A Christmas Tale by the Bohemian-born Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter (1805-1868) was a novella marked by purity of prose, naturalism, and portents. It was first published in the original German in 1843, and appeared in translation, by Elizabeth Mayer and the poet Marianne Moore, a century later (1945). Despite the onset of holiday cheer that pervaded the start of the tale, the reader could detect that something would go wrong.

In the long opening of the book, a slow sequence of scenes gradually expanded to contain the traditional Christmas festivities, culture, natural cycles, social structure, and topography of the village of Gschaid and its neighboring village of Millsdorf. The way the passage culminated on the fact of the dead staying at home for the long winter signalled a dark tone to the fable-like simplicity of the tale. The landscape and mountain communities were exquisitely evoked in sinuous sentences.

56. Stasiland: Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall by Anna Funder

An investigative report about life in the German Democratic Republic prior to the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. The true stories of common people seemed to come straight out of the Orwell's dystopia. It's a topic that still resonates today, given the totalitarian regimes in the Middle East that were toppled right and left. The style of the book was far from dry journalistic report. It read very much like a novel. The portraits of people in it were well drawn and their experiences very immediate and harrowing. A very human book. I will post a longer review of this book.

Reading plans for December:

I started The Savage Detectives for next month's group reading with Richard (Caravana de recuerdos) and 13 (as of last count) readers. I'm almost done with Part I, "Mexicans Lost in Mexico (1975)".

I finished reading a dozen superb stories by Machado de Assis for Amateur Reader's Wuthering Expectations Portuguese Literature Challenge.

I also started two works of nonfiction and may further read a poetry chapbook.

The Silent Angel (Heinrich Böll)

2011-11-25T10:00:00.001+08:00

As noted by W. G. Sebald in his book of literary criticism On the Natural History of Destruction, Heinrich Böll's The Silent Angel was one of only a handful of postwar novels that depicted the aftermath of intensive carpet bombing leveled against Germany in the second world war. Though written early in Böll's career, the novel was not published in his lifetime due to the subject matter that was perceived by his publisher as unpalatable to the German public. Isn't it inappropriate to dwell on a topic that brings home the very episodes one wanted to forget? After so much destruction and suffering, is it not perhaps best to move on to cheery stories?

Böll described the wasteland of war-torn Germany right after the end of the bombings. Amid this tortured landscape the characters moved like zombies, traumatized by their experiences and haunted by relentless hunger. The lack of food and shelter consigned the majority of the citizens to the status of refugees. They lived only to survive hunger, scrounging for the rare bread and provisions that came at high prices.

At the start of the novel, Hans, a German soldier who lacked proper identification, stumbled into a hospital and was offered a bread loaf by a nun working there. The reader was given a first taste of the novel's subject.

Quickly he broke off a large piece of the bread. His chin trembled and he felt the muscles of his mouth and jaws twitch. Then he buried his teeth in the soft, uneven place where the bread had been broken, and bit in. The loaf was old, at least four or five days old, perhaps even older, plain brown bread bearing some bakery's red paper label; but it tasted so sweet. He bit in even more deeply, taking the leathery, brown crust into his mouth as well; then he seized the loaf in his hands and tore off a new piece. While he ate with his right hand he held the loaf fast in his left, as if someone might come and try to take it from him, and he saw his hand lying on the bread, thin and dirty, with a deep scratch that was soiled and scabbed. (6)

There was pathetic beauty in the way Hans noted both the sweetness and the stale condition of the bread. The act of biting and chewing acquired a strong sense of concretion particularly when juxtaposed with the soiled and scabbed hand holding the bread. The attention paid to the color of the crust and the paper label seemed to celebrate the bread's providential existence.

It was notable that Hans was not only concerned with satisfying his hunger but with securing his identification papers. That he should lose his identity in the rubble and ruins, together with the experience of seeing his hometown burnt to the ground and his loved ones perish, made for a victim who almost didn't have anything more to lose.

Physical hunger and destroyed landscapes of the city inhabited the tissues of the novel. Hunger (and destruction) was so pervasive as to go beyond the realm of the physical. It crossed the threshold of the characters' physical state, to become the hunger of their souls, the debilitating poverty of spirit. It became the very fires in their belly that drove them to resist that very same hunger.

HIS HEART KEPT on pounding. He was still thinking about the bread, and his heartbeat was like the gently painful yet pleasant throbbing of a wound: a large, raw spot in his chest, his heart. (84)

In the distance, beyond the community gardens, jutting high above the railway embankment, he saw the charred ruins of the city, a dark, ragged silhouette—he felt a deep, piercing pain and pulled the window closed again. Now, within, it was dim and quiet once more, shut off from the chirping of the birds. he now understood why she hadn't wanted to open the window. (64-65)

Hunger and ruins were likened to a gaping wound in (to) the heart, a source of pain. For the characters, hunger was a constant reminder that they were still alive. It was the very backdrop of the book, which at its center was a love story with a subplot of a family drama. Yet the plot was almost sketchy and directionless as to reflect the chaos of the cityscape.

Böll was able to illuminate a time that was barely recorded, even consciously avoided, according to Sebald—erased from memory, sanitized and repressed by German writers. It was not a popular subject but it was necessary to keep a record of destruction of cities and its effects on men and women. Sebald found in The Silent Angel not only an important subject but a quality of writing that he felt approached the gravity of the subject. For a general sense of this kind of writing, I'll quote from a previous post on a novel by Gert Ledig:

Sebald's essay ["Air War and Literature"] takes to task the postwar German writers for failing to record the destruction wrought by wars. For Sebald, the books of Ledig, as well as that of Heinrich Böll and Peter Weiss, among others, are a rare exception to this apparent defect in the German letters. Sebald champions the kind of novels that speak plainly and precisely, and with unpretentious objectivity, as opposed to novels full of "aesthetic or pseudo-aesthetic effects." He favors the concrete and documentary style of writing over the abstract and imaginary. For Sebald, accounts of suffering must be commensurate to the magnitude of the human loss; these are the kind of novels worth writing about in the face of total destruction.

In The Silent Angel, the imaginary was given up in favor of the imaginative.

The curtains had been pulled open, and in the large, black window frames stood the fantasylike image of the ruins: smoke-blackened flanks of buildings, cracked gables that seemed about to fall—overgrown mounds that had been ripped apart a second time, leaving only a few spots where the green was mossy and peaceful. . . . (91-92)

The above passage described the image of the ruins as "fantasylike" but the real view of destruction made the image un-fantasylike. The qualification of the smoke-blackened, cracked, overgrown, and ripped objects could not deny the direct harms inflicted to the people on the ground.

Likewise, Böll's similes and imagery were purposefully constructed. An open piano in a corner "stood like a monster with a thousand false teeth" (39). In a particular ruin could be seen "only naked destruction, desolate and terribly empty, as if the breath of the bomb still hung in the air" (86). That lingering "breath of the bomb" was sufficient to convey the utter "nakedness" of the damage.

A most powerful description of destruction was that of the silent statues in a church.

His gaze remained below: the altar was buried in debris, the choir stalls had been toppled by the blast. He saw their broad brown backs inclined in what seemed sarcastic prayer. The lower rank of saints on the columns showed gaps as well: abraded torsos and flayed stone, hideous in its mutilation and painfully deformed, as if it once had been alive. He was struck by the demonic grotesqueness. A few faces grimaced like furious cripples because they lacked an ear or a chin, or because strange cracks deformed them; others were headless, and the stone stumps of their necks thrust up horribly from their bodies. Equally disturbing were those who lacked hands. They almost seemed to bleed, silently imploring, and a baroque plaster statue was oddly split, almost cracked like an egg: the pale plaster face of the saint was undamaged, the narrow, melancholy face of a Jesuit, but its chest and belly were ripped open. The plaster had trickled down—it lay in whitish flakes at the base of the figure—and from the dark hollow of the belly straw spilled forth, saturated with hardened plaster. (119-120)

There's no ambiguity here as to why the mutilation of the statues displayed a "demonic grotesqueness". There's also no mystery as to who it was the personified stone ("as if it once had been alive") stood for. This posthumous horror was probably one of the most indirect and one of the most graphic descriptions of the aftermath of a night of "successful" bombing run a reader will encounter in fiction. The sickening image of desecration reminded me of a scene at the end of José Saramago's Blindness, where a group of blind men and women made their way to a church where the "blind" statues of saints seemed to mock their tragic condition.

Despite the depressing, vivid images in the novel, the reader could not fail to detect the deep sense of the novelist's humanity. He did not reduce his characters to virtual zombies. Instead, the novelist kept intact their human strengths and failings. His genuine compassion was evident in his nontrivial portraits of the human casualties of war.

Amid the the piles of debris in the city, the white powder chalk and plaster, signs of renewal of vegetation started to shoot up from the ground. From these bleak surroundings, Böll's beautiful prose was able to yield a comforting quality of tenderness, like the love story at its center. The words had lightness and softness, like sweet bread. It was not really all black smoke and white dust:

He stood up, walked quietly over to the door, and opened it cautiously. Light was coming from the kitchen. The old, blue coat that she had draped over the windowpane let large, yellow beams of light in through its tattered holes, and the rays fell onto the debris in the hall: the axe blade gleamed somewhere and he saw the dark logs, their split surfaces glowing yellowly. He approached slowly and now he could see her. He realized he'd never seen her like this before. She was lying on the couch with her legs drawn up, wrapped in a large, red blanket, reading. He saw her from behind. Her long, damply shining hair seemed darker, tinged with red; it fell across the arm of the couch. A lamp stood beside her, and the stove was lit. A pack of cigarettes lay on the table, together with a jar of marmalade, a loaf of bread that had been cut into, and beside it the knife with its loose, black handle. . . . (130-131)

The colors and sheen (blue, yellow, gleamed, dark, glowing yellowly, red, damply shining, darker, tinged with red, black) were so lovingly spread over this description of domestic setting and minutiae (coat, windowpane, axe blade, logs, couch, blanket, "book", hair, lamp, stove, cigarettes, marmalade, bread, knife handle) as to drum up the characters' expectations of a return to peaceful, normal circumstances. There was a flicker of love in that passage, a sense that all was not lost. The sense that hunger (physical, spiritual) does not go unfulfilled. The intermittent pangs of hunger only served as their amulet.

This review is for German Literature Month, hosted by Caroline of Beauty is a Sleeping Cat and Lizzy of Lizzy's Literary Life. The Silent Angel (trans. Breon Mitchell) was also a selection of Literature and War Readalong 2011.

Night Fish (Kristine Ong Muslim)

2011-11-21T19:12:00.001+08:00

Sometimes, this door is mishandled and someone drowns. Sometimes, too, it allows grief to run its course, gets a novel written by some stranger inside that glass lakehouse. Lake water laps at the shore, gravel and silt sliding in and out. A watery city of typography. All the pebbles are letters desperately forming into words. The handwriting is not quite legible yet.

Grief is taken as inspiration for novel writing. The interfacing between shore pebbles (land) and lake water straddles writing and grief. The lake as possibly the liquid symbol of tears. The land trying to make sense of the murder or drowning in the lake, its source of sorrow.

A key poem that acquaints the reader to a general idea of the whole collection is “Heat Stroke”, a condition where moisture has left and hellish grief has triumphed. It is in direct contradiction to the watery city, this time the severe heat wave razes the landscape. It is also again an elegy for someone who may have died: "what remains and what we remember is / someone else's absence, the slam of the doors."

The poem then provides a way to read its contents, a way to cope with the rising temperature and the sense of death all around, through its own navigation of heat:

We ultimately learn to slice impressions,
separate them according to texture.
Smooth-skinned on top. Rusty underneath.
Grit and cruelty crammed in the middle.
Heat presents itself in the form of waves
melting the world away. Squandering nothing.

This poem, like everything in Night Fish, is very brief, and each rereading reveals an ambivalent voice of a prophet. When language and image liquefy in short lines, meanings condense in a small space, “squandering nothing”. Every image, every texture ("smooth-skinned", "rusty", "grit and cruelty") is contained in the simulacrum of transience, meanings arising from grief brought about by floods and heat waves, extreme conditions that challenge the homeostasis of the human organism.

The rest of the poems display a consistent interest in night times, bodies of water, and desert-like environments. They evoke the edgy atmosphere of noir science fiction, through nocturnal meditations, not in a speculative mood but in terse meditations about an altered future landscape and the place of man in it.

The structure of the lines – in prose or short clipped lines – usually enact the very ideas they profess. The self-reference gives way not to a metafictional consciousness but to an awareness of the limitations imposed by the fictional artifice. (I tend to emphasize 'fiction' in these poems, perhaps a way to underscore the essentially narrative content in Night Fish.) For example, the way the last line fades out at the end of the second poem (“Night Swimmer”) – "Sometimes, one plunge is enough / to cut the water clean, the splash / merely an afterthought" – trails like an afterthought itself. The final stop is an inevitable punctuation of a thought that meandered beyond boundaries. Similarly, the end of "Art", the penultimate poem, gives itself away when it declares that art is not "[s]ome flimsy rowboat that can be disassembled into exactly nine pieces". A puzzle that alludes to the nine full stops in the poem, corners that don't exactly define its boundaries. In fact each piece, sentence, or line resists the kind of objective deconstruction that puts a poem in a box (or bowl) resting on the table. Hence, "Art is repulsion floating in a bowl of soup. / Sometimes, it is the soup."

The primordial liquid in which Muslim's poetry is soaked in is the puzzle (or riddle) of existing in a mirror world. An ecological interpretation of the poems can be: that they are cautionary poems – not in a hard-science fiction way – that give us hope that poets will not give up and will ensure that poetry will still be written when the worst of climate events runs its course. Poetry, in fact, appears as a viable strategy to adapt to climate change. Even if the lines can be disturbing or unsettling, they can teach us ecological resilience and resistance. As with any literary hypothesis, this interpretation is valid only in the imagination.

Another theme of Muslim's that one could detect in some of these poems is that of stray souls and "random ghosts". But that is another work of fiction.

December

This cold has taught me
about the nature of souls.

Although I have known
a long time ago that the body
is meant to be a sieve for
the soul fermenting inside,

I am still surprised by the fog
of breath coming out of my mouth.
So dense. It seems that I am not the only one
who is exhaling in this frozen yard.

Kristine Ong Muslim is the author of We Bury the Landscape – a collection of flash fiction and prose poems – and the upcoming poetry collection Insomnia (Medulla Publishing, 2012). Her poems have appeared in Boston Review and Southword, among many publications. I received an e-galley of Night Fish from the author.

Rock Crystal (Adalbert Stifter)

2011-11-18T17:48:00.001+08:00

Rock Crystal: A Christmas Tale by the Bohemian-born Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter (1805-1868) was a novella marked by purity of prose, naturalism, and portents. It was first published in the original German in 1843, and appeared in translation, by Elizabeth Mayer and the poet Marianne Moore, a century later (1945). Despite the onset of holiday cheer that pervaded the start of the tale, the reader could detect that something would go wrong.

Among the high mountains of our country there is a little village with a small but needle-fine church spire. Conspicuous above the green of abundant fruit-trees, this spire—because the slates are painted vermilion—can be seen far and wide against the faint blue of the mountains. The hamlet nestles in the very center of a fairly wide valley that is an almost perfect ellipse. Besides the church, a schoolhouse and a parish house, there are a few stately homes around a square with four linden-trees and a stone cross in the center. [...] In the valley and scattered along the mountain-sides are many little huts of a sort common to such regions—whose inhabitants belong to the village [...] Even more distant huts, hidden away in the mountains, cannot be seen from the valley; the people rarely come down among their fellow-parishioners; often, indeed, are obliged to keep their dead with them over the winter till they can bring them to the valley for burial after the snow has melted.

The above passage was clipped from the extended opening of the book, a slow sequence of scenes that gradually expand to contain the traditional Christmas festivities, culture, natural cycles, social structure, and topography of the village of Gschaid and its neighboring village of Millsdorf. The way the passage culminated on the fact of the dead staying at home for the long winter signalled a dark tone to the fable-like simplicity of the tale. The landscape and mountain communities were exquisitely evoked in sinuous sentences. Something had to upset the balance of beauty.

It took some time of lingering on the natural and cultural landscape before the story alighted on the central characters and story line. A shoemaker from Gschaid married a dyer's daughter from Millsdorf. They had a son and a daughter. Something happened on Christmas eve that will affect the whole family's relationship to their extended family and to the whole community.

Although the background of the story was Christian, a valuable lesson imparted by this fairy tale for adults and young adults was not wholly religious but of the universal human variety. It was partly about how a time of crisis or calamity became the very thing that could make a community realize that everyone is equal in grief. Nature could teach a tightly knit community to accept people who were from another place, outsiders who were different from them in several respects.

This is a heart-winning story that could leave a lump in one's throat. The prose was rock crystal clear. It could render something out of nothing, like the following description of silence which had the concreteness and precision of poetry:

They stood still, but heard nothing. They stood a little longer, but there was nothing to be heard, not a single sound, not the faintest except their breathing; indeed, in the stillness reigning, it was as if they could hear the snow falling on their very eyelashes.

Read as part of German Literature Month, hosted by Caroline (Beauty is a Sleeping Cat) and Lizzy (Lizzy's Literary Life). My copy was the 1965 revised edition from Pantheon Books, with illustrations by Josef Scharl. It was reissued, without the illustrations, by Pushkin Press and New York Review Books.

The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (Heinrich Böll)

2011-11-09T19:55:00.000+08:00

Someone must have slandered Katharina Blum for, one morning, without having done anything wrong, she was brought in for questioning by the police. But no, it appears the police were questioning Miss Blum for her involvement with a man who stayed in her place the previous night. The man was accused of murder, most wanted by the authorities, and by all indications, it looked like she helped him escape the police stakeout around her place. At the outset this looked like a simple crime investigation, but Heinrich Böll, a writer who has now gained my readership (thanks to German Literature Month), framed a twisted narrative about the willful distortions of the truth to sensationalize a piece of news. It's a lethal piece of writing that questioned the absolute freedom granted to press. In the present 'civilized' world where libel was, by broader consensus, increasingly considered taboo and contrary to the ideals of press freedom, Böll sought to interrogate that very ideal in his depiction of a woman held hostage by the media's manipulation of truth. I suspect only a few radical writers could get away with a controversial subject like this, subject that concerned itself with ethics, the handling of truth, and the disintegration of one's cherished values. Böll was one of these writers who grappled with human institutions, systems, and structures, and developed a prognosis on the fallibility of that system to protect human rights, the nakedness of the individual amid an onslaught of systematic lies and deceptions broadcast boldface on the news.

The novel's manner of telling gave it a journalistic flavor, well-fitted to its subject matter. The supposedly objective report however was distracted by the many asides and satirical portraits that made the narrator just as guilty of passionate subjectivity like the characters in his story. This omnipresent narrator, a self-aware and self-conscious individual, was a manipulative one himself. He knew all the facts and he gradually doled out the information to the reader in a blow-by-blow round-the-clock account of events. The short chapters, some so short they ran for less than a page, were ticking seconds of a clock that made an hour of suspense with well-timed revelations. (I intended to say ticking seconds of a bomb but the bomb detonated early on, by page 9, and the earlier events were told only to expand on this explosion, picking up the still cutting shrapnel, to backtrack and map the events leading to this act of violence.) The narrative went forward and backward, making for a dynamic plot movement, like the impeded streamflow of the drainage or blocked tributary, which the narrator adopted at the beginning (and alluded to throughout the text) as the "conduction" framework of his story. The subtitle - How violence develops and where it can lead - prefigured a cause-and-effect method but did not really give indication of the reverse engineering it followed to disclose the flowering of Miss Blum's criminal intent. Here's the passage of page 9:

The first facts to be presented are brutal: on Wednesday, February 20, 1974, on the eve of the traditional opening of Carnival, a young woman of twenty-seven leaves her apartment in a certain city at about 6:45P.M.to attend a dance at a private home.
Four days later, after a dramatic—there is no getting around the word (and here we have an example of the various levels that permit the stream to flow)—turn of events, on Sunday evening at almost the same hour (to be precise, at about 7:04P.M.)she rings the front door bell at the home of Walter Moeding, Crime Commissioner, who is at that moment engaged, for professional rather than private reasons, in disguising himself as a sheikh, and she declares to the startled Moeding that at about 12:15 noon that day she shot and killed Werner Tötges, reporter, in her apartment, and would the Commissioner kindly give instructions for her front door to be broken down and the reporter to be "removed"; for her part, she has spent the hours between 12:15 noon and 7:00P.M.roaming around town in search of a remorse that she has failed to find;furthermore, she requests that she be arrested, shewould like to be where her "dear Ludwig" is.

The lost honor of Katharina Blum was a consequence of a series of defamatory articles against her. These articles denigrated every aspect of her life which up to this point can be considered exemplary owing to her professionalism, hard work, and a strong sense of independence. The novel slowly built a case on "how violence develops and where it can lead" by building a case on how one incorrect or inappropriate word is a matter of honor and dishonor, on how distortion of words can be fatal. The novel itself flowed in a stream of measured and precise wording that tended to question, meta-fictionally, the constituent words that the characters spouted, the very constituent words of the text. There's already a clear example in the above passage: "dramatic—there is no getting around the word".

This appeal to precise wording - to the exactness of meaning, to the elimination of ambiguity - was also evident in the way Katharina Blum insisted on the exact words to be used in her statement (pp. 29-30).

The prolonged nature of the interrogation was explained by the fact that Katharina Blum was remarkably meticulous in checking the entire wording and in having every sentence read aloud to her as it was committed to the record. For example, the advances mentioned in the foregoing paragraph [of the novel, i.e., "often the men had had too much to drink and made advances to me"] were first recorded as "amorous," the original wording being that "the gentlemen became amorous," which Katharina Blum indignantly rejected. A regular argument as to definition ensued between her and the public prosecutors, and between her and Beizmenne, with Katharina asserting that "becoming amorous" implied reciprocity whereas "advances" were a one-sided affair, which they had invariably been. Upon her questioners observing that surely this wasn't that important and it would be her fault if the interrogation lasted longer than usual, she said she would not sign any deposition containing the word "amorous" instead of "advances." For her the difference was of crucial significance, and one of the reasons why she had separated from her husband was that he had never been amorous but had consistently made advances.

That paragraph alone underscored not only the semantic concerns and word choice but also the uncompromising and intelligent character of Blum and her physical attractiveness. The economy of words in this novel was a product of the novelist's self-same desire to convey using the best words the clearest expression of one's vision. Other passages in the novel sustained this tendency to grope, or fumble is perhaps the more proper term, for the word or words that will accurately describe what one truly meant. Conversely, Böll expertly delineated the damning antithesis - the perversion of the words' meanings to suit the base predisposition toward the sensationalism of news.

In differentiating the "shades", the nuances and the subtleties, in the German words and finding equivalents in English that would draw out the same contextual effect, translator Leila Vennewitz must be commended. She had brought out a translation with a distinct voice for the "obtrusive" journalist-narrator and a good ear for what must have been slippery German idioms.

Originally published in German in 1974, this short novel explicitly dealt with the modern dilemmas of the individual that Franz Kafka stipulated in The Trial. The apparent illusion of liberty was manifest in the gradual ruin of Katharina Blum's reputation and the invasion of her privacy, by the press and by the state (through wiretapping). The issues raised by Böll, in a thinly disguised satirical voice, were still "newsworthy". It retained its contemporary feel. The "social function of Art", itself made the subject of a joke at the end of the novel, was relevant whenever absolutes (like freedom of the press) were erroneously promoted in perverted forms (like perverted freedoms of expression and of speech: gutter News holding sway over the public).

I live in a place where listening to the radio in the morning, any morning, will invariably make one hear of a barrage of disparaging remarks and insults by one broadcaster railing against one politician and then extolling the virtues of another, in a manner that made it grossly apparent that he was on the payroll of the second politician. That the integrity of media practitioners can be sold like cold cakes was taken for granted. For me then, the province of this book was here and today. Raising questions about the absolute "freedom of the press", Böll was deliberately treading the line of moral scruples. He had a position on the matter, and it was not the middle ground. There was no question where his sympathy, his exacting sympathy, lay.

Another view at Tony's Reading List here.

The Shooting Gallery (Tsushima Yūko)

2011-11-06T01:11:00.001+08:00

By default, three things at least define the literary career of Tsushima Yūko (b. 1947). The first is that her real name is Tsushima Satoko. The second is that she is the daughter of the novelist Dazai Osamu who killed himself when she was just one year old. The third, and the most significant, is that she's an accomplished writer herself, a multi-awarded literary figure in Japan. With Kōno Taeko, Tsushima blazes as the foremost female short story writer in Japan, a prolific and consistent teller of subtle stories concerning human relationships. Like Kōno, the majority of her works remains untranslated. At least three books of hers have made it in English so far: the short story selection The Shooting Gallery (1988) and the novels Child of Fortune (1983) and Woman Running in the Mountains (1991). All were handled by translator Geraldine Harcourt. The two novels were originally published in Japanese in 1978 and 1980 while the short stories appeared in the period 1973-1984. It is puzzling (but maybe not) that no recent book of hers has appeared in English – in French, for example, nine titles already came out – given that she is a considerable talent, her stories displaying a diversity of approaches that are hard to categorize into a single style.

The eight stories in her only collection in English are about the aftermaths of (or preludes to) a divorce from a lover or family. It reveals a writer concerned with gender disparities and with a woman's search for freedom. Tsushima's female protagonists are confronted with situations they either want to understand or, having failed to do so, they want to escape from. In their stubbornness and liberal attitudes they can be considered rebels of the time. The characters are almost exclusively single mothers, divorced or separated partners, or single women who tenaciously face their lot in life and dream of something better. What is exemplary in Tsushima is the unique chameleon-like style she deploys in story after story. The writing is clear and transparent, without any apparent tricks and obscurities, and yet the whole composition exhibits a strong sense of both familiarity to and estrangement from the narrative intent. Consider the opening of "The Silent Traders" in which a single mother begins her narrative straightforwardly, only to defamiliarize it with her unexplained fear.

There was a cat in the wood. Not such an odd thing, really: wildcats, pumas, and lions all come from the same family and even a tabby shouldn't be out of place. But the sight was unsettling. What was the creature doing there? When I say 'wood', I'm talking about Rikugien, an Edo-period landscape garden in my neighbourhood. Perhaps 'wood' isn't quite the right word, but the old park's trees – relics of the past amid the city's modern buildings – are so overgrown that the pathways skirting its walls are dark and forbidding even by day. It does give the impression of a wood; there's no other word for it. And the cat, I should explain, didn't look wild. It was just a kitten, two or three months old, white with black patches. It didn't look at all ferocious – in fact it was a dear little thing. There was nothing to fear. And yet I was taken aback, and I tensed as the kitten bristled and glared in my direction.

With this nest of stray cats in the background, Tsushima tells of an imagined transaction (the 'silent trade') between the narrator's two practically fatherless children and a cat. The children previously met their father six months before but it was a rather awkward reunion. The mother is thinking of a beneficial exchange between her children (who will leave food for the cat) and this same cat who could act as a "father figure" to them whenever he visits to eat his fill. This mutual trade she likens to an ancient transaction that is ideal but then is always accompanied by primal fear.

There are tales of mountain men and villagers who traded a year's haul of linden bark for a gallon and a half of rice in hard cakes. No villager could deal openly with the lone mountain men; so great was their fear of each other, in fact, that they avoided coming face to face. Yet when a bargain was struck, it could not have been done more skilfully. The trading was over in a flash, before either man had time to catch sight of the other or hear his voice. I think everyone wishes privately that bargains could be made like that. Though there would always be the fear of attack, or discovery by one's own side.

Such is the mother's wild imagination that she makes a leap from this trade of old to the current situation of her children. Their lack of a "human father" impels her to enact a similar trade in her mind, a beneficial one but also attended by fear.

The children leave food on the balcony. And in return the cat provides them with a father. How's that for a bargain? Once a year, male cats procreate; in other words, they become fathers. They become [fathers] ad nauseam. But these fathers don't care how many children they have – they don't even notice that they are fathers. Yet the existence of offspring makes them so. Fathers who don't know their own children. Among humans, it seems there's an understanding that a man only becomes a father when he recognises the child as his own; but that's a very narrow view. Why do we allow the male to divide children arbitrarily into two kinds, recognised and unrecognised? Wouldn't it be enough for the child to choose a father when necessary from among suitable males? If the children decide that the tom that climbs up to their balcony is their father, it shouldn't cause him any inconvenience. A father looks in on two of his children from the balcony every night. The two human children faithfully leave out food to make it so. He comes late, when they are fast asleep, and they never see him or hear his cries. It's enough that they know in the morning that he's been. In their dreams, the children are hugged to their cat-father's breast.

In the above passage, the mother mentions the word "father" almost a dozen times, as if the very scenario she painted vividly in her mind already makes it a feasible trade, that the cat would be a substitute for her children's absent father. The other stories in the selection also cling to this idea of looking for suitable substitutes (or metaphors) or of creating ones. The finding of these substitutes-metaphors, usually some kind of animal (mythical or legendary or not), is often the objective of the characters, the very task they are trying to complete. In "The Chrysanthemum Beetle", the kikumushi beetle is the central metaphor of the story, in fact the beetle supplies a back story, making for a story within a story. It is an old ghost story that is then dissected by the characters through the lens of their personal interpretations of it. In the title story, the single mother of two young boys imagines herself as a golden dragon ("one day my back will sprout a pair of lance-shaped wings which will begin to beat, my body will visibly expand, and when the metamorphosis is complete I'll be a dragon that ascends spiralling to the heavens") to divert herself from boredom and perhaps to forget her difficult situation of raising her children. The soaring dragon is a projection of her desire for complete freedom and independence which are now undercut in part by her caring for her two boys all by herself.

It can be said that an essential itinerary of these stories, stories of self-discovery in some ways, is teasing out these overt metaphors, underlining the substitutions, the surrogate images that will fully describe the characters' petrified condition and thus release them from being mystified by their own boredom and discontent. The characters are seeking to unmask their avatars which will bring them to a more complete description of their states and thus toward a diagnosis of their afflictions. Their chosen avatars may or may not save them, the characters, who were somehow aware of their wishful thinking, but at least there is satisfaction to be had in knowing their lives at this point have meanings insofar as metaphors and details, both tangible and mystical, reflect their stories.

Aside from this tendency toward marked symbolism, another brilliant aspect of Tsushima's fiction is her remarkable structuring of stories. The stories seem to be composed of discrete "acts", as in a drama, where each succeeding act is seemingly disconnected to the previous. The recombined parts at the end of a reading do not always produce a neat puzzle-fit whole. Rather, the enjambment of disparate scenes create and reinforce surface tension as the plot jumps from one area of concern to another. Instead of relying on the limited rationality of decoding the sequence of dynamic scenes, Tsushima seems to encourage a multiple reading of her setups, that is, looking not only for substitutes and masks and symbols, but for the justification itself of the story's fragmentary expansion, teasing out the very seams in her sketched outline. At the level of the sentence or paragraph or broken chapter, this appeal for unbounded rationality can be spontaneous and immediate and unsettling. The beginning of "Clearing the Thickets", the story with the most unreliable narrator in the selection, illustrate these transitions.

   The door opened and a red colour appeared. A clear, dazzling red. The young woman stared in admiration at the dress, whose wearer she knew.
   In an art class once – years ago, in high school – a classmate had selected a tube from a box of oil paints and shown it to her grandly: 'This colour is produced by crushing a certain exceedingly rare species of insect and working it into a chemical base.' It was, she understood, a very expensive pigment, and although she wasn't sure whether to believe the story of its source, the squeeze of red on the palette certainly suggested an insect's body fluid. Although clear, it had a choking viscosity. A beautiful colour, there was no doubt about that. But she expected that once on canvas it would turn heavy and sombre beside the other tints. It's so rich I wouldn't know how to handle it, she had thought. She was even aware of an odour like an ant-lion fly's.
   The dress was the same red. A light material, perhaps, for its triangle of skirt billowed coolly. It had no buttons, ribbons, or other trimmings. It suited the slender wearer well.

The narrator's awareness of the color red proceeds first from the color itself before identifying it as the young woman's dress. From the red dress, it moves to her recollection of the same shade of red in her high school art class, the supposed 'origin' and manufacture of that specific color, before going back to the red dress in question. The shifts in focus at the outset already signal a structural treatment of the story, for a few more paragraphs into it, the speaker branches off into an entirely new direction – a lengthy flashback, memory, daydream, or dream – another territory, another tale that does not organically derive from the first. This second act is about a woman's slow and tiring progress clearing out the grass weeds in the lawn with her gossiping mother and sister. It's a complete about-face from the red-colored dress, almost making for a diptych. It is a most strange story that otherwise wears its strangeness very lightly. As in the rest of The Shooting Gallery, the story is lucid, precise in its telling but approaches a state of hallucination via its procession of startling proxies and metaphors. Unlike the oil paint, the prose is not choking heavy and viscous. Yet this anthology of Tsushima's is the same rich red: a beautiful and stunning pigment of imagination.

An autobiographical essay by Tsushima can be read here.

Visitation (Jenny Erpenbeck)

2011-11-02T18:51:00.003+08:00

The visitation is of ghosts. Early in the book, they appear matter-of-factly. It must be said that the term 'ghosts' could be applied here to both the dead and the living. Sometimes it's hard to distinguish between the two. Throughout the novel, the haunting of both is persistent.

The unknown fisherman holds out his hand and she helps him climb out of the rocking boat and then lets his hand go again. Only when he holds out his hand to her a second time does she understand that he wants her to lead him further. Halfway up the slope where the earth is no longer quite so dark and the grass is drier, there will surely be a place for her and the fisherman, whose hair is so wet that the water is dripping to his shoulders and running down his arms all the way to where his fingers are intertwined with hers. Only now, when she is looking for a good spot to sit down with him, does it strike her how many people there are all around her in this bit of woods, and everywhere there might be an attractive spot to rest, someone is already sitting or standing, some are reclining in the shade, asleep, others are having their evening meal, and yet others are leaning against a tree, smoking and blowing rings in the air. It's no doubt because all these people are so quiet that she didn't notice them before. In a sunny spot under the big oak tree the kind of grass she likes is growing, tall, dry grass, tuft after tuft of it, and when she kneels down there and draws the fisherman down beside her, the others finally begin to move, they put their sandwiches, apples and hard-boiled eggs back in their baskets, fold up their blankets and calmly rise to their feet, while the ones who are leaning against the tree trunks now toss their cigarettes on the ground and crush the stubs beneath the soles of their shoes. One at a time, all of them turn to walk back up the slope, leaving behind this place without addressing a single word or even a wave to Klara and her fisherman. The fisherman lays his head in the lap of the mayor's youngest and as yet unmarried daughter, and she begins to dry his wet lock of hair with her skirt. On the far side of the oak tree directly behind her, two last silent visitors to this bit of woods whom she had overlooked now rise to their feet and leave as well. [9-10]

The novel is a tale of a house by the lake in a German woodland area. The main character is Time, who moonlights as Death. Other characters include History and Memory. The page count is small, but the writing is dense with innovative manipulations of language. The story – there's no story – covers a century of racial abuses and prejudices. The plot is linear enough but the delivery is sophisticated. It drives home the point that all human beings are dispensable. If the poet Wisława Szymborska is to write a novel, I would imagine she will produce something like Jenny Erpenbeck's. In Susan Bernofsky's translation, Erpenbeck's prose has the clarity and cadence of a poem. The theme and style also reminds one of the midsection of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, the cruel chapter called "Time Passes". That is precisely what the main character does in the novel. He passes. The narrative proceeds in bursts of prose poetry. It holds a candle to the accumulation of private and public memories. I read this in speed read mode – a bad idea. I could have read slowly and listened hard to the music and differentiated the notes soaring above the words. The music is playing the whole time in the background. The musical translation reads and flows well. It's very good, awesome even, but I imagine the original is a nasty beast. It is recommended for those interested in poetry and German history (or just history) and great original writing.

I read Visitation for the German Literature Month hosted by Caroline of Beauty is a Sleeping Cat and Lizzy of Lizzy's Literary Life. An excerpt of Visitation can be seen here. Other links: interviews with the writer and translator. Also, Bernofsky's blog, Translationista, is a great resource on translation, of German literature and otherwise.

Celebrating José Saramago

2011-10-31T12:23:00.001+08:00

Margaret Jull Costa's profile of José Saramago can be read "online only" at Granta. What caught my eye was her quote of Saramago in an interview, discussing the point where he realized a way to proceed more effectively with his storytelling, the very point of his transition to a "non-punctuated style".

I was already at the twentieth section of the book [Levantado do chão (Raised from the Ground)] and not very happy with it, when I realised how it could be written. I saw that I would only be able to write it if I did so as if I were actually telling the story. That could not be done by putting so-called oral language into writing, because that’s impossible, but by introducing into my writing a mechanism of apparent spontaneity, apparent digression and apparent disorganisation in the discourse. I say ‘apparent’ since I am only too aware of how much work it took to ensure that it turned out like that.

I underlined "apparent spontaneity ...". It described a realistic style which I find very absorbing, a style in which method is closely tied to content and form. It's the same spontaneous style one can also detect in César Aira and Javier Marías. Spontaneity in these writers can be a result of a desire for "authenticity" (I use this term loosely, as it has many pitfalls).

Margaret Jull Costa analyzed this writing style (which is closer to that of Marías who she also translated):

In reducing punctuation down to commas and full stops, in letting a sentence follow the natural digressions of thought, Saramago cuts himself free from the straitjacket of conventional realistic literature, allowing himself, as narrator, to carry the reader along on the wave of those thought processes, those digressions. [...]

One cannot help but see this egalitarian approach to both punctuation and narration as an expression of Saramago’s declared anarcho-communism and atheism, as cocking a snook at orthodoxy and authority, be it God or Government, and as a way of privileging the spoken voice, the ordinary human voice. [...]

Read more here.

Image sources: Asymptote and The New York Times, from Small Memories; prae.hu

Cross-posted from Bifurcaria bifurcata.

Max's maxims

2011-10-27T10:20:00.001+08:00

It’s always gratifying to learn somethingwhen one reads fiction. Dickens introducedit. The essay invaded the novel.But we should not perhaps trust ‘facts’in fiction. It is, after all, an illusion.

It’s good to have undeclared, unrecognizedpathologies and mental illnessesin your stories. The countryside is fullof undeclared pathologies. Unlike in theurban setting, there, mental afflictiongoes unrecognized.

There has to be a libidinous delight infinding things and stuffing them in yourpockets.

The collected maxims of W. G. Sebald can be found in the fifth issue of Five Dials, a magazine of his UK publisher Hamish Hamilton. The issue (at this link, in pdf) was mostly dedicated to Max. There's an "A to Z" guide on him where one reads, for instance, under "X":

Coincidence, the point where pathscross, is at the heart of Max’s writing –and the X at the end of his name alwaysseemed emblematic to me. When I askedhim once about the role of coincidencehe said that whatever path he took in hiswriting he always, sooner or later, cameacross another path which led quicklyback to some detail from his own life. Healso said that the more one was attunedto look out for such things, the more frequentlythey occurred.

Five Dials is a recommended online literary resource. You can subscribe to the magazine here.

(via Vertigo)

November is German Literature Month

2011-10-25T23:25:00.000+08:00

November is German Literature Month. Caroline of Beauty is a Sleeping Cat and Lizzy of Lizzy's Literary Life will host.

My reading list will include the novel Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Susan Bernofsky, and The Silent Angel by Heinrich Böll, translated by Breon Mitchell. Böll's posthumously published novel is also part of Caroline's "Literature and War Readalong 2011", slated for 26 November.

If there's still time, I might be able to squeeze in Anna Funder's Stasiland: Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall. The book was winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction. I've already read a couple of chapters. Already, the beginning is quite compelling.

Giveaways abound in this reading challenge. In fact, I already won something wunderbar from last week. The prize: All the Lights by Clemens Meyer. I can't wait to receive that one.

German literature is something I really want to explore more of. Two of my all-time favorite writers wrote in this language – W. G. Sebald and Thomas Bernhard. Since I started blogging in 2009, I've reviewed a handful of translations from German. Here are the review links for reference.

Perfume by Patrick Süskind
Wittgenstein's Nephew and Yes by Thomas Bernhard
The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald
          Chapter I; Chapter II; Chapter III; Chapter IV
          Chapter V-VIII; Chapter IX; Chapter X
On the Natural History of Destruction by W. G. Sebald
          Air War and Literature, 1; Air War and Literature, 2
          Against the Irreversible; The Remorse of the Heart
The Stalin Front by Gert Ledig
Journey Into the Past and Chess by Stefan Zweig
Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald

Test post

2011-10-23T13:06:00.001+08:00

I'm having problem with my Blogger layout, here and in my other blog. The sidebar has moved to the bottom of the page. I'll try to work on it.

The Savage Detectives Group Read

2011-10-21T23:23:00.005+08:00

For details, see Bifurcaria bifurcata and Caravana de recuerdos.

Just leave a comment to join.

Every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me, says one Juan García Madero. A book is the best pillow there is, says Roberto Bolaño.

Richard of Caravana de recuerdos and I think one of these notable pillow books could be Bolaño's cult object Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives, translated by Natasha Wimmer). We are hosting a group read of this novel in January 2012.

All are cordially invited – rebels, poets, bloggers, slackers. It's not poetry reading but it could have the same effect.

Savagery or previous experience as detective isn't required to participate. Nor is one expected to be a member of an avant-garde group like the visceral realists.

All one needs to do is sleep on the book and maybe join in on the discussion. Readers become "salvajes" in their own right.

Bloggers may post reviews and impressions anytime in January but "official" discussion starts on the last weekend of the month (Jan. 27-29). We'll link to your reviews.

About the book. At around 600 pages, it's a hefty pillow. We can't promise a wild poet chase, but wildness and unwieldiness shouldn't be in short supply. (Here's an excerpt.)

This early announcement should give readers plenty of headway. It's probably best to start early with the detective work. Or you can wait till All Souls Day, when our narrator began to write his adventures. Or the new year. It may turn out to be a firecracking yearstarter.

You can read this as part of the Bolaño Reading Challenge. It's supposed to end this year, but we'll count this toward your future Godzilla status.

"Detectives-Readers"

Richard, Caravana de recuerdos

mel u, The Reading Life

Amateur Reader (Tom), Wuthering Expectations

Emily, Evening All Afternoon

Scott, seraillon

Frances, Nonsuch Book

Stu, Winstonsdad's Blog

Anthony, Time's Flow Stemmed

Bettina, Liburuak
Gavin, Page247
Sarah, A Rat in the Book Pile
Caroline, Beauty is a Sleeping Cat
Jeremy, READIN
Becky, Page Turners
Séamus, Vapour Trails
Amy, The House of the Seven Tails
nicole, bibliographing
Bellezza, Dolce Bellezza
Sarah, what we have here is a failure to communicate
Col, Col Reads
Selena, luxe hours
Claire, kiss a cloud

(Image design by Jenny Volvovski)

Trese 4 (Budjette Tan and Kajo Baldisimo)

2011-10-12T01:53:00.001+08:00

Last Seen After Midnight by Budjette Tan and Kajo Baldisimo

BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! After 17 cases of supernatural crime/mystery, the Filipino graphic novel Trese still seethes with its trademark edginess and darkness. The latest volume in the series again exhibits a nuanced manipulation of its source materials. Budjette and Kajo’s execution is still top form. As we’ve come to expect, the stories are tight, well crafted. The artwork, a work of art. It’s amazing how the interest is sustained and how the telling of stories shows remarkable restraint in their emotional effects. By the last case ("Fight of the Year"), the deliberate branching out to pop culture stretches and expands contemporary reality to accommodate the fluid concept of heroism. Heroism as an absolute masochistic self-sacrifice and as a complex of materialism and messianism. Ever since my mouth fell open at the first case (Murder on Balete Drive), I was a happy vampire, sated after every spanking new version of Pinoy lower myth. Arguably the franchise is even prophetic, as shown by the previous collection Mass Murders (still their best), which describes a cultural origin of violent crimes. Relevant in what it can say about the culture of violence and cruelty, in the South and elsewhere. I think I can read 13 more collections like this, maybe more, and still dig it. For sheer entertainment, visual fun. For its impassioned engagement with the underworld’s underbelly.

Third quarter reading, 2011

2011-10-04T16:14:00.001+08:00

I finished 18 books from July to September, averaging 6 books a month. Here's the rundown, with a brief description and link to review, if any, of each book.

JULY

26. Poems New and Collected by Wisława Szymborska, translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh

A forty-year harvest of poems, 164 in total, translated from the Polish language, this is the most substantial of Szymborska's poetry in English. It overlaps with the one hundred poems from the previous selection View With a Grain of Sand. A very fine translation, informed with the voice of a true witness to the cruelty and crimes of humanity.

27. Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald, translated by Anthea Bell (review)

One of my favorite reads this year.

28. The Fall by Albert Camus, translated by Justin O'Brien

While reading this, what came to my mind was the self-portrait David With the Head of Goliath by Caravaggio. Go figure.

29. Chess by Stefan Zweig, translated by Anthea Bell

A world chess champion is aboard a ship sailing from New York to Buenos Aires. Chess aficionados try to engage him in a game at a high price (the arrogant champion will not play them unless they pay him a large fee). In the middle of the game that is as good as lost, a passenger whispered to them the move that will wrest advantage from the champion and at least force him to a draw. This passenger has not played chess for 20 years. Who is he? And more importantly, what is his story?

This novella is a political and psychological thriller about Nazism and the perverted nature of genius - what makes for an "expert" of something like a game of chess. Zweig's writing has captured the suspense of the game which is more than a battle between Black and White. It's also a play between sanity and madness.

30. Manual of Painting and Calligraphy by José Saramago, translated by Giovanni Pontiero (review)

The novel is narrated by H., a fifty-year old painter commissioned by S. for a portrait. It tells of H.'s difficulties in producing two simultaneous portraits of his client. In order to get around to this problem, or more like to escape from it, H. decided to produce another third portrait of S., but this time the image will be in words. Through sudden impulse or instinct, H. decided to turn into writing (the "calligraphy" in the title).

Saramago's fans, rejoice! This out-of-print book will be finally reissued May 2012 by Mariner Books.

31. Your Face Tomorrow 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell by Javier Marías, translated by Margaret Jull Costa (review)

This is the valedictory volume in Javier Marías's spy novel whose prose style represents a calcification of poetic images, symbols, and a very very very very slow motion. We find Jacques Deza, newly separated from his wife in Spain and employed in London as a 'secret agent' under the tutelage of Bertram Tupra, an engimatic and strong character. What starts as a mental blood-battle of spy-wits in the first two volumes ends as a voluble treatise on actual physical bloody violence of recent and modern wars.

32. Toddler-Hunting and Other Stories by Kōno Taeko, translated by Lucy North and Lucy Lower (review)

The stories were originally written in the 1960s and concerned women and their unstable marital relationships. Kōno Taeko, the 85-year old grand dame of Japanese letters, was admired by Oe Kenzaburo and Endo Shusaku. Her genre of writing was classified as "transgressive fiction" owing to elements of sadomasochism and aberrant behaviors. The stories are characterized by odd details and psychological quirks.

AUGUST

33. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

I read this to complete the so-called "Big Three" among dystopian novels that also include We by Yevgeny Zamyatin and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. It didn't disappoint. It's a very well written and harrowing thought experiment.

The other reason I read it is that I will most likely be reading Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 which is published this month. According to Murakami, Orwell's influence on the book not only inspired its title but also its handling of alternate realities.

34. On Translation by Paul Ricoeur, translated by Eileen Brennan

A short (72 pages) book of essays on the philosophy of translation. In the first essay "Translation as challenge and source of happiness", the late French philosopher introduced the concept of translation as a work of remembering and a work of mourning (after Freud). It also introduced the very beautiful term 'linguistic hospitality' to describe the appreciation of translation through the acknowledgment of its limitations, the acknowledgement that there is no total (or perfect) translation: "Just as in the act of telling a story, we can translate differently, without hope of filling the gap between equivalence and total adequacy. Linguistic hospitality, then, where the pleasure of dwelling in the other’s language is balanced by the pleasure of receiving the foreign word at home, in one’s own welcoming house."

35. Between Parentheses by Roberto Bolaño, edited by Ignacio Echevarría, translated by Natasha Wimmer

A book of short essays on books and writers, mostly from Latin America. Bound to increase one's TBR.

36. First Love by Ivan Turgenev, translated by Constance Garnett (review)

Turgenev's story was a linear and controlled exploration of being in love at a young age. It offered a portrait of a transition from youth to adulthood: from the confusion and giddy puzzlement that accompanied the raw feelings of youth to a more luminous perception of reality as one gained more experience. The protagonist was a sixteen-year-old student, a young man of middle class background. The object of his affection was a young princess, older than him by a few years, who with her mother was his family's new house neighbor.

Turgenev created tension in two fronts. First, although members of Russian nobility, the new neighbors were actually on the verge of poverty. Their tenuous hold on their upper class status was endangered by their large debt owed to some influential persons. Second, the beautiful young princess was not entirely a bashful one. She was as carefree as can be and she was surrounded by a lot of suitors who were slaves to her every wish. Into their midst was flung the young protagonist - awkward, dejected, and in love. Soon, the young princess was sending a covert message to the group of young men (our student, a poet, a doctor, a handsome count, and a hussar) around her. She had found someone: a lover who was her match. She, her heart, was already taken. But who among them could it be?

37. Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville

Never expected this to be such a funny and engaging short story. I read it, online, to prepare for reading Enrique Vila-Matas's Bartleby & Co.

38. The Duel by Joseph Conrad

Very suprising to know that the author of Heart of Darkness and Nostromo can be very funny. A highly recommended novella.

39. Maybato, Iloilo, Taft Avenue, Baguio, Puerto by John Iremil E. Teodoro

A collection of poems in Filipino language. This, Teodoro's second collection, charts a poet's peripatetic life around the Philippines. My favorite section is the "Puerto" poems, where I'm currently based. It's also the same beautiful place that is the subject of Iremil's first poetry book.

SEPTEMBER

40. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Murakami Haruki, translated by Philip Gabriel

A useful book for those interested in taking up running. It may just be the book to inspire you. But ultimately it's a minor memoir bogged down by clumsy writing. If you're not a Murakami completist you can skip this with a clear conscience.

41. Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters

In straightforward free verse, the dead people of Spoon River speak from beyond the grave. The ghosts, injured when still alive, can not rest in peace. Some are haunted by their former lives. Full of irony, bitter memories, vindictiveness, melancholy, poetic musings, and comic touches, the stories of the dead are oddly full of life.

42. The Seamstress and the Wind by César Aira, translated by Rosalie Knecht (review)

This short novel is perhaps not the best place to start with the Argentinean micro-novelist César Aira. But there's probably no best place to start with Aira, you just start reading him. It's about a writer writing in a Parisian café, a 'kidnapped' child, his seamstress mother who ran after him, his father who ran after her, a flying wedding gown sewn by the seamstress, a pregnant teacher who ran after her flying wedding gown, a truck driver, a 'Paleomobile' made from the body of a dead armadillo, a powerful talking wind, and a monster who came out of nowhere. In short, the plot is mayhem.

43. Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me by Javier Marías, translated by Margaret Jull Costa

I'm still reeling from the unexpected ending of this novel. Marías's style is just as suspenseful and addictive as his other books. It is in some ways a companion book to his short story Bad Nature, whose narrator appears as a minor character in this novel.

Bagras

2011-10-03T19:19:00.000+08:00

by Mark Angeles

BY THE RIVER, the eucalyptus:
               unspooling
                              the stitches
               of self-wood.

A rainbow

undying in shifts
ofversicolor.

A nobility changing
into resplendent raiment.

It cannot be beheld

bedecked
of inlaid braid.

The dress disappears of its ownaccord.

               Ripsout the husk
                              so as to celebrate
               theverdant green
                              of stained
                                             semi-ripeness

tocompletely reveal

scraps of blue, purple, andorange.

The river freely accepts the fragments
               streamingforth,
                              partaken as food
               by its cherished creatures;

sucking in raw exudate

component
of things gum-crafted.

BY THE RIVER, a native:
dippingclear water
with hands joined together.

Her face is sunglint broken
               onrip-tides.
                                             The hems of sea-surface
                                                            scrollaway:

               shrill reverberations in the universal
                                             mirror.

Witness the vibrating arrowsthat follow
the strike of the bow
in fiery heavens:

not fog but conflagration
from burnt petrol.

BY THE RIVER, the eucalyptus accompanied the hymn,
                              music—kumintang—to the rhythms
                                             kulintang, tagongko,and kapanirong;
                              gurgles of kutiyapi,dayuday, and daguyung.

The native beguiled by the budyong. Entranced by

integrity.

She reached for the kampilan slung from the waist ofhistory.

AGAIN, the eucalyptus sheddingits bodice.
               Shedding and shedding.

                                             Incessant rains
                              lashed the ancient river

               but the native stood rooted:

her fixity
               and faith fenced in
                              by amber light

                                             of eucalyptus resin

endlessly spilling
from shoots to infinity.

TRANSLATED FROM FILIPINO

Notes:

Bagras is the local name ofRainbow Eucalyptus or Rainbow Gum (Eucalyptusdeglupta), a Philippine tree whose bark peels off all year round. The kumintang,kulintang, tagongko, kapanirong, kutiyapi, dayuday, and daguyung are traditional Filipino songs or musical instruments. A budyong is either a conch shell or a flute while a kampilan is a sword.

The original of the above translation came from Engkantado (“Enchanter”), a chapbook by Mark Angeles, available at this link (pdf). It is part of the collection that won third place in the2010 edition of Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards. It also appears in Likhaan Journal 5 of University of the Philippines.

Mark Angeles is former vice president for Luzon of College Editors Guild of the Philippines. He is the author of the poetry collections Patikim and Emotero.

Pan (Knut Hamsun)

2011-10-02T21:47:00.000+08:00

I lie closer to the fire and watch the flames. A fir cone falls from its branch, and then a dry twig or two. The night is like a boundless deep. I close my eyes.
After an hour, all my senses are throbbing in rhythm, I am ringing with the great stillness, ringing with it. I look up at the crescent moon standing in the sky like a white shell and I feel a great love for it, I feel myself blushing. "It is the moon," I say softly and passionately, "it is the moon!" And my heart beats gently towards it. Several minutes pass. A slight breeze springs up, an unnatural gust of wind strikes me, a strange rush of air. What is it? I look about me and see no one. The wind calls to me and my soul bows in obedience to the call, I feel myself lifted out of my context, pressed to an invisible breast, tears spring to my eyes, I tremble—God is standing somewhere near looking at me. Again some minutes pass. I turn my head, the strangely heavy air ebbs away and I see something like the back of a spirit who wanders soundlessly through the forest. [107]

I'm very much taken by the poetic expressions in this novel. In James W. McFarlane's translation from Norwegian, Knut Hamsun's Pan (1894) is ringing in one's ears with its lyrical presentation of man's inner nature. The beauty of the natural world is teeming in the forest and Hamsun is too wise not to use its beauty for his own ends. Pan fairly anticipates the sensuous and erotic works of D. H. Lawrence and the spiritual confessions of Rainer Maria Rilke. Ostensibly the journal entries of a soldier hunter who inhabited a hut in the woods of a rural community, the short novel otherwise relies on the resonance of various storytelling registers—folktales, legends, testimonies, monologues, daydreams, prose poetry.

Hamsun depicts a fierce battle of the sexes, a battle to the end between the narrator, Lieutenant Glahn (a man with an irresistible "animal look"), and his object of love, the fickle beauty Edvarda. Despite their obvious passionate feelings for each other, they enact a savage choreography of power and dominance. Each one will not yield submission to the other. Their pride blinds them from reality and brings them to the precipice where the only thing that sustains them is pure hate.

The novel proceeds in swift chapters, each mostly running for two or three pages. Glahn's first person journal tells of his hermit-like existence in the woods and of his intimate relationship with Edvarda, in a voice that at first is romantic and then becomes more and more vengeful, vindictive, and vicious. Its language is incantatory, as if delivering poetry reading after poetry reading on the subject of mountain, sea, forest, moon, birds, and beasts. A deliberate sense of the lofty and sublime tends to mar books of similar themes, but in this the sublime subtly refracts Glahn's confusion, baseness, and naiveté. It is a bold and posthumous sublimity.

Hamsun's achievement is in portraying extreme and conflicting psychological states in one man and one woman—compassion-cruelty, love-rage, reason-madness, intelligence-delusion. These states fluctuate according to their perceptions of each other's lust and ruthlessness. The situations, both exaggerated and muted, allow the characters to display their violent gestures and subtle rejections. The desires of the characters are never really restrained, being transparently drawn from an assumed complex interiority, and this only serves to make the characters seem like pawns to their own pretenses and schemes. One has the sense that their abrupt and absurd decisions are a product of inevitability. Their tragic sense of reality deserves close observation and sympathy.

Pan also appears in a recent translation by Sverre Lyngstad. But I think McFarlane's version is not yet dated and is even brilliant for its mapping of a man's spiritual descent into the heart of darkness, for producing a rousing mad poem of love sickness.

   "A toast, you men and beasts and birds, to the lonely night in the forest, in the forest! A toast to the dark and to God's murmuring in the trees, to the sweet, simple harmonies of silence upon my ear, to green leaf and yellow leaf! A toast to the sounds of life I hear, a sniffing snout in the grass, a dog snuffling over the ground! A rousing toast to the wild-cat crouching with throat to the ground and preparing to spring on a sparrow in the dark, in the dark! A toast to the merciful stillness over the earth, to the stars and the crescent moon, yes, to it and to them! ..."
   I stand up and listen. No one has heard me. I sit down again.
   "I give thanks for the lonely night, for the hills, for the whispering of the darkness and the sea ... it whispers within my heart. I give thanks for my life, for my breathing, for the grace of being alive tonight, for these things I give thanks from my heart! Listen in the east and listen in the west, but listen! That is the everlasting God! This stillness murmuring in my ear is the blood of all nature seething, is God weaving through the world and through me. I see a gossamer's thread glistening in the fire's light, I hear the rowing of a boat in the harbor, the Northern lights rise against the northern sky. Oh, I give thanks by my immortal soul that it is I who am sitting here! ..."
   Quiet. A fir cone falls with a dull thud to the ground. I think: a fir cone fell! The moon is high, the fire flickers among the half-burnt embers, about to die. And I stroll home through the late night. [103-104]

The spontaneous realism of César Aira

2011-10-01T21:04:00.000+08:00

In the late Portugese novelist José Saramago's Memorial do Convento ("Annals of the Convent", 1982), which appeared in the English version by Giovanni Pontiero as Baltasar and Blimunda (1987), a liberal priest, with the help of a maimed former soldier and a clairvoyant woman, attempted to construct the Passarola, a flying machine that could soar into the sky, fold the spacetime (perhaps), and basically help them escape the sweet embrace of the Inquisition. Their success on this fairy-tale project would depend on the accumulation of "human wills" that would generate enough power for the Passarola to fly. These "human wills" would have to be harvested by the clairvoyant woman from the human bodies and somehow funneled into the machine. That's the general idea. Whether the conceit works in theory and in practice depends on the suspension of both belief and disbelief.

The preceding paragraph may have nothing to do with the rest of this post. The post is supposedly about the novel The Seamstress and the Wind (translated by Rosalie Knecht, 2011; La costurera y el viento, 1994) by César Aira, "micro-novelist" (which is to say, a prose stylist with a predilection for precision, for scientific or near-scientific details, and a predisposition to short-length novels). I decided, while in the middle of reading the book, that I should start my post on it with a description of the Passarola in Baltasar and Blimunda. And then see where it leads me. One foot in front of another. One word placed after another. I'm superficially borrowing Aira's method of writing: never revising much of what one wrote, never planning ahead what one is going to write, and simply writing whatever comes to mind. Where the story leads is anybody's guess. Where it ends up is where it will.

In a recent interview, he said that not revising is not a deliberate choice for him, "it just seems to me like the natural way of doing it." When starting to read and correct what he wrote months before, he's "overcome with laziness, or with self-deception, and I leave it as it is." The slacker.

At around ten in the morning I go to a nearby café with a notebook and a pen (I have a huge collection of fountain pens from all the famous brands, and I’m always buying strange or elegant notebooks) and order an espresso. I write for a while, never more than an hour, and I never end up with more than a page. Back at home I type it up and then print it. That’s it. I dedicate the rest of the day to reading, watching films at home, meeting up with friends or riding my bike.

Of all the translated fiction by Aira to date, each of which is a singular specimen of absurdity, The Seamstress and the Wind had the most patchy or sketchy of plots. It was essentially all over the place. Whims alighted on a variety of objective ideas - lunar tidal effects, the dessicated landscapes of Patagonia, particle physics. More like a draft outline than a complete natural story. Instead of a synopsis of the plot, an enumeration of the elements (characters, more like chess pieces) would best serve to communicate its radical senselessness. There's a writer writing in a Parisian café, a 'kidnapped' child, his seamstress mother who ran after him, his father who ran after her, a truck driver, a levitating wedding gown sewn by the seamstress, the betrothed teacher who ran after her wedding gown, a 'Paleomobile' made from an ancient animal shell, a powerful talking wind, and a monster. The plot, in other words, is mayhem.

The best way to read The Seamstress and the Wind is as a parody of a César Aira novel. At this point, where a paltry half a dozen of the novelist's six or seven dozen books has so far been translated, "what a César Aira novel is" is still a working theory. There are, however, many symptoms. The novel is something "polymathematical", a constellation of ideas, forged in a method free of linearity and driven by superfluity. Some of its novel qualities are: (i) contradiction - or maybe, a willful opposition - let's say, the constant sending up of what was said or what had just occurred ("I have always venerated work above all else; work is my god and my universal judge, but I never worked, because I never needed to" [23]); and (ii) spontaneity - let us say, the elimination of the plot's "scriptedness", its built-ness, and hence, its predictability. But to put it simply, the elimination of plot. Or rather, its studied outline, its "studied-ness". Instead of thriving in epiphanies, the novel goes for metamorphosis after metamorphosis after metamorphosis. Perpetual transformation and emergence of scenarios and character pieces sucked in by dynamic space and time. An attempt to describe the "Airaesque" has been made in someone's rabid rambling review of The Hare (which might as well be titled "How I Became a Fan").

The Airaesque is the deliberate and conscious flouting of logic and literary conventions. It is a representation of a literary search for meaning, without due regard for whatever methodical means are used to justify the obscene ends. Where the act of disruptive writing is a reflection of chaotic reading. The Airaesque is artistic gestation nipped at the precise point when the story is just about to escape absurdity, in order to re-enter absurdity. The Airaesque is the climax and ending that resist further epiphanies. The Airaesque is the obsessive-compulsive order.

This formulation highlighted more the tic than the tendency. Let us assume for a moment that a unique writing method is but a manifestation of a more general genre of writing, perhaps a literary movement, concerned not only with the method but with the worldview that springs from that method. Assume for a moment that the Airaesque is but a specific instance of this genre of writing. Assume that there exists a type of writing that deliberately plunges ahead into the story, accessing the stock of imagination, and transcribing imagination's past and present memory to write the future. The result, if the method is applied successfully, is another working theory, of questionable validity but a vital step toward completion of a thinking thought. It operates or propagates in what the micro-novelist referred to as the "continuum" (a word that probably appears in Aira's books just as often as the word "abyss" appears in Roberto Bolaño's).

The genre can take a convenient name, announced by this post's title. Spontaneous realism - that genre of writing that is ... self-explanatory.

Assume that it arises, spontaneously, from the need to float ideas that may or may not flow and gel into unity. The plot trajectory (the surface story) zigzags and digresses with minimal regard for smooth transitions. Underneath the plot surface, the graph approximates an average trend, new underlying patterns emerge, establishing a fresh set of narrative principles propelling the story into an ending that is immaterial to the whole. In the process of writing, form is built up and discovered.

The result is "live writing", writing alive with potential interpretations. Its only constraints are length and spontaneity (i.e., none) for every novelette has to prematurely end and spontaneity is but a form of daydreaming. In the special and general theories of relativity, the speed of light is the upper limit of the speed of all matter; spontaneous realism requires that the theory of relativity, all existing physical theories in fact, be held in abeyance. The only rule is for imagination, like suspected neutrinos, to travel at a freewheeling speed that exceeds even that of light. (Speed is particularly relevant to The Seamstress and the Wind wherein characters run or flee all throughout the book, speeding up and accelerating faster and faster, reaching supersonic speeds, "supernatural velocity", not entirely relying on the allowable outcomes predicted by Newton's laws of motion, the law of gravitation, and the theory of relativity, but on the unpredictable outcomes of Aira's mutant-like powers of observation.) In principle, existing theories (narrative conventions) are considered unstable, perpetually under construction. The spontaneous realist makes his own relativity rules. Spontaneous realism, where narrative freedom is its own literary (moral) code, where literary experimentation is not the test of the validity of a story, but the other way around.

To quote Pontius Pilate, in one of his several decisive and definitive acts in John's testament - Quod scripsi, scripsi. What I have written, I have written. The very epigraph, in fact, of Senhor Saramago's The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1993; O evangelho segundo Jesus Cristo, 1991).

Besides Aira, other notable practitioners of spontaneous realism are Portuguese and Spanish language novelists like Saramago, Javier Marías, and (to some extent) Bolaño. Saramago said as much in his interview with his first translator Giovanni Pontiero:

I have no special method or discipline. Words emerge, one after another, in strict sequence, out of a kind of organic necessity, to put it loosely. But there is inside me a scale, a norm, which permits me to control, one might almost say intuitively, the 'economy' of detail. In principle, the logical I is open to all possibilities, but the intuitive I governs itself with its own laws which the other I has learnt to obey. All of this is clearly unscientific, unless as part of another involuntary and inherent science ...

Aira has embraced this similar involuntary and inherent science of spontaneous realism. Marías put it to use in the cosmogony of his late fiction, 'thinking novels' that first emerged as works in progress. He described his writing method, a clear variant of Aira's, in his Paris Review interview:

I lose time in the sense that I very rarely write more than one page per day, sometimes two, which means that I don’t advance very quickly. Until I have finished one page the best possible way and have rewritten it as many times as necessary, I don’t move on to the next. Many writers I know write a first draft and then revise again and again. On page two hundred they realize that it would be better if they had said something different on page one or two. They change page one or page two, but that is precisely what I never do. Even if it would make things easier if I hadn’t said this or that on page five, I won’t change it. If I wrote that something would happen or be said by a certain character, then on page two hundred I must stick to it.

This method is quite a risky one and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone because the final result can be disastrous. But I write my novels according to the same principle of knowledge that rules life: If you do something when you are fifteen or twenty, you can’t change it. When you are forty you may wish you hadn’t done this at fifteen or twenty, but you have and you can’t change that. Some people try to change it, some people try to forge a past, some people become imposters, some people hide the things they did, but in fact you cannot undo what was done. You have to stick to what happened. Much of what I write in the beginning of a novel occurs by chance. Once I finish a page, it goes to the printer. Later, I force myself to make things match, to make necessary what was whimsical. If you come to think of it, it is quite absurd to do this in a novel, because in a novel you do have the chance to change everything—until it is published.

Surprisingly, one or two pages per day is the same amount of daily writing that Aira and Saramago committed themselves with. Saramago also never revised too much and never made detailed plans of his writing. Here's his method, also in The Paris Review:

I do not force myself to work a certain number of hours per day, but I do require a certain amount of written work per day, which usually corresponds to two pages. This morning I wrote two pages of a new novel, and tomorrow I shall write another two. You might think two pages per day is not very much, but there are other things I must do—writing other texts, responding to letters; on the other hand, two pages per day adds up to almost eight hundred per year.

...

Once I have reached the end of a work, I reread the whole text. Normally at that point there are some alterations—small changes relating to specific details or style, or changes to make the text more exact—but never major ones. About ninety percent of my work is in the first writing I put down, and that stays as is.

...

Yes, I have a clear idea about where I want to go and where I need to go to reach that point. But it is never a rigid plan. In the end, I want to say what I want to say, but there is flexibility within that objective. I often use this analogy to explain what I mean: I know I want to travel from Lisbon to Porto, but I don’t know if the trip will be a straight line. I could even pass through Castelo Branco, which seems ridiculous because Castelo Branco is in the interior of the country—almost at the Spanish border—and Lisbon and Porto are both on the Atlantic coast.

What I mean is that the line by which I travel from one place to the next is always sinuous because it must accompany the development of the narrative, which might require something here or there that was not needed previously. The narrative must be attentive to the needs of a particular moment, which is to say that nothing is predetermined. If a story were predetermined—even if that were possible, down to the last detail that is to be written—then the work would be a total failure. The book would be obliged to exist before it existed. A book comes into existence. If I were to force a book to exist before it has come into being, then I would be doing something that is in opposition to the very nature of the development of the story that is being told.

I don't have an idea about his writing method, but the gravely ill Bolaño for sure had limited time to revise his works as he wrote book after book in his last years. And his fiction sometimes have the quality of a ramble or an outpouring.

Success or failure of these writers' fictional enterprise - enterprise being a more apt term for what they do, as opposed to fiction writing - is meaningful only if assessed on their own terms: the degree to which spontaneous realism perfectly matched the requirements of the story. An excerpt from The Seamstress and the Wind:

In the summer I woke up very early, with the birds, because the dawn was very early then, much earlier than now. Time didn't change according to the seasons then, and Pringles was very far south, where the days were longer. At four, I think, the chorus of birds would begin. But there was one, one bird, the one that woke me up on those summer mornings, a bird with the strangest and most beautiful song you could imagine. I never heard anything like it afterwards. His twittering was atonal, insanely modern, a melody of random notes, sharp, clean, crystalline. It was special because it was so unexpected, as if a scale existed and the bird chose four or five notes from it in an order that systematically sidestepped any expectations. But the order could not always be unexpected, there is no method like that: by pure chance it would have to meet some expectation, the law of probabilities demands it. And yet, it did not.
In fact, it was not a bird. It was Mr. Siffoni's truck, when he turned the crank. In those days you had to turn a crank on the front of a car to make the engine turn over. This was a really old vehicle, a little square truck, a red tin can, and it wasn't clear how it kept running. After the marvelous trill came the pathetic coughing of the engine. I wonder if that wasn't what woke me up, and that I imagined the previous. I often have, even today, these waking dreams. [20-21]

So much for the bird, poor bird, whose beautiful poetic existence was music for no more ears. It wasn't a bird, it was a truck, okay? The methodology can be rude sometimes.

(The metamorphosis of plot was put into greater effect in the hallucinatory novel How I Became a Nun (2007; Cómo me hice monja, 1993) - I think my most favorite flavor of Aira's ice cream. In it, the kid narrator had the same barbaric precocity, the same feral intensity, as the narrators of other excellent novels where kids are the main protagonists. Here's an unsolicited reading list: Henry Roth's Call It Sleep, Helen DeWitt's The Last Samurai, J. M. Coetzee's Boyhood, Thomas Bernhard's Gathering Evidence, Amélie Nothomb's Loving Sabotage. All featured a highly intelligent child, who was at the same time a "problem child". The last three books in this list, like Aira's, were autobiography or autobiographical. The only difference is that Cómo me hice monja completely overturned the concept of the "coming-of-age" tale. La costurera y el viento was made a companion volume to Cómo me hice monja in the Spanish edition, and in another omnibus comprising the same two novellas alongside a short story featuring the young César and Omar the 'kidnapped kid'.)

In reading a novel of spontaneous realism, one is on the lookout for the hard details, for the whims and asides and digressions, for the meta-structural descriptions made through authorial interventions. One keeps reading between the lines. The story often seems to loop back on itself, to reference itself, as evident in key passages and digressions. One is never lacking for things to ponder; the key is to keep on reading.

Spontaneous reading. Read now, think later. The criticism will take care of itself.

... she came out somewhere completely different, in a dark and intricate jumble of metal. She was helplessly caught in its twists and turns. As if the inertia weren't enough, she insisted on continuing forward, sticking a leg in, and then another, an arm, her head ... [90]

With emphasis on the "insistence" to continue moving forward. If one tried to brave the bramble of Aira's nonsense, then the jumble of metal could melt into the alloy of joke. One might suddenly find oneself in a happy place. Disneyland. Or a magic toyshop. It shouldn't be a mystery why Dr. Aira writes the way he does. He's having so much fun.

I read this for Ficciones: 2011 Argentina Reading Challenge. For more interviews with Aira and his translators, see the César Aira page in the Bolaño Challenge blog.

Two stories by Tōson Shimazaki

2011-09-17T00:31:00.000+08:00

TŌSON SHIMAZAKI

The two stories came from Paulownia: Seven Stories From Contemporary Japanese Writers (1918), translated by Torao Taketomo. The remaining five stories were divided between Mori Ōgai and Nagai Kafū.

I first encountered the name of Tōson Shimazaki (1872-1943) in Murakami Haruki's introductory essay to Jay Rubin's translation of stories by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke. In that essay, Murakami shared his personal list, more or less ranked, of the modern period's top 10 Japanese writers of national stature. He came up with nine names. The top spot was occupied by Natsume Sōseki, in second place was Mori Ōgai, and Tōson Shimazaki was in third.

Tōson Shimazaki first started his literary career as a poet but later shifted to fiction writing at the turn of the twentieth century. His books were said to embody a strong sense of 'naturalism'. Some of his fiction were often considered as autobiographical. He was the author of Before the Dawn (a massive historical novel), Chikuma River Sketches, The Broken Commandment, and The Family. The latter two novels were part of the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works. (I recommend these works that were singled out by UNESCO for translation due to their cultural and literary values. I was fortunate to have read excellent novels by Sōseki and Tanizaki that were included in this very selective list. The complete list of UNESCO representative works from the Japanese language can be found here.)

The first of Tōson's stories in Paulownia, "A Domestic Animal", began without wasting words on exposition:

HER first misfortune was at her birth; she came into the world with short gray hair, overhanging ears, and fox-like eyes. Every animal which is called by favor domestic has a certain quality which attracts to itself the friendly feeling of man. But she did not have it. Nothing in her countenance seemed to be favored by man. She was entirely lacking in the usual qualifications of a domestic animal. Naturally she was deserted.
However, she was also a dog, an animal which cannot live by itself. She could not leave the hereditary habitat to be fed by people and then go back to the wild native place of her remote ancestors. She began to search after a suitable human house.

The story thus progressed into a search for home by an ugly-looking dog called Pup. Because of her appearance, she was shunned by the people in the neighborhood. But it was the narrative voice of the story that provided an endearing counterpoint to the sad plight of Pup: "To her eyes, there was nothing as merciless and cruel as the human being." In spite of the intimations of man's capacity for animal cruelty, the story maintained a lightness of touch and wit behind the anthropomorphism. The story's ending was a redemptive resolution that only generous stories can offer.

In the second story, Tōson wrote: "Nothing is so hard to foresee as human life." And later: "Observing the world, I notice that the present age, lacking in faith, does not keep the young mind in quietude." Something told me he was an epigrammatic writer.

"Tsugaru Strait" was about a married couple who traveled aboard the ship Surugamaru. The couple decided to take some time off while grieving for the unexpected death of their young son Ryunosuke. The sea as backdrop of the story was specially interesting for its reference to maritime tensions between Japan and Russia, nations at war at that time (1904-1905):

The day was perfect for a voyage. It was the time when the regular steamship lines were interrupted by the rumor that the Russian ships from Vladivostock, which not long before had passed through Tsugaru Strait, were appearing now and then along the Pacific coast. During five or six days only was this line between Awomori and Hakodate in operation. As it was disappointing to my wife and myself to go home after having come so far, and as the Russian ships were said to be cruising on the open sea in the vicinity of Oshima and the Izu Islands—the very night before we had heard that the fleet of the enemy was sunk, the announcement of which some of the newspapers printed in an extra—we left the inn, not worrying about the ships, trusting somewhat to the truth of the statements in the extra.

The translation by Torao Taketomo did not sound smooth here and in other places in the two stories in fact. If the original sounded the same, I wouldn't know. But still there were moments when the translator was able to convey some surprising metaphors (e.g., "My wife is tiresome, for she is just a baby, and I am only a nurse who is taking care of this infant of forty years.").

The second story was not as tightly written as the first, but it did give a unique perspective on a parent's grief over the loss of a child. The story became interesting when, during the couple's journey on ship, they encountered a young student who was a spitting image of their son. This only intensified their grief, and what happened next aboard the ship further exposed their feelings.

These two stories by Tōson demonstrated an idiosyncratic handling of metaphors ("some [passengers] were sleeping on the deck with their mouths open like fishes") such that the simple details became pregnant with possibilities. The course of events in these stories was driven by simple universal motivations, but the simplicity could be deceptive. Behind the plot were human (and humane) points of view about compassion to animals, about parental grief, about navigating this world where animals and men are exiled by their emotions. These are wise stories. Enough fuel for a new reader of Tōson to search out his full length works.

I downloaded the text (pdf) of Paulownia from Hathi Trust Digital Library. Thanks to Nihon distractions for the tip on the free availability of this book. Image source: Facebook.

A cosmogony of Javier Marías's major fiction

2011-08-31T20:19:00.017+08:00

Poison, Shadow and Farewell is the valedictory volume of Javier Marías's spy novel whose prose style represents a calcification of the novelist's poetic images, lines, phrases, and symbols, all unfolding in the pedantic mind of its narrator in a very very very very very very very slow motion. (Yes, that's seven verys for each chapter.) In the 1,200-page opus Your Face Tomorrow, we find Jacques Deza, recently separated from his wife Luisa in Spain and employed in London as an interpreter and as a kind of behavioral consultant under the tutelage of his boss Bertram Tupra, an enigmatic and strong character of an unidentified national descent - we find Deza afloat in a thick fog of reminiscences and observations, endlessly conversing with people, with his father and with his mentor Peter Wheeler, both old and ailing, involved in some shady adventures with his superior, and finally involved in his own personal battle. What started as a mental bloodbath among spy-wits in the previous two volumes ends as a voluble political treatise on actual physical violence of wars and conflicts: (i) the recent and modern wars between nations and (ii) the intimate personal conflicts between two men.

Despite its obvious quarrel with a straightforward plot, there is an actual linear progression of story that builds from its feverish beginning, to the point of spear and a bloodstain, to dancing and dreaming, and in this volume, to the injection of poison, to the transformation of a person into a shadow-character, and to a final farewell. Here is how Deza's corruption began:

As I looked and half-looked and saw, a poison was entering me, and when I use that word 'poison', I'm not doing so lightly or purely metaphorically, but because something entered my consciousness that had not been there before and provoked in me an immediate feeling of creeping sickness, of something alien to my body and to my sight and to my mind, like an inoculation, and that last term is spot on etymologically, for it contains at its root the Latin 'oculus', from which it comes, and it was through my eyes that this new and unexpected illness entered, through my eyes which were absorbing images and registering them and retaining them, and which could no longer erase them as one might erase a bloodstain on the floor, still less not have seen them.... [124]

The passage of course runs for longer than that, but Jesus, how weird it is for the man to still invoke the etymology of a word when he is strapped helpless and forced to view some graphic images. Beyond the vocabulary lesson, there is an insistence on the part of the narrator to capture the most suitable word to describe the increasingly envenomed state he's entering. Stumbling upon the word "inoculation", as a conscious or unconscious translation of his condition, almost provides a comic relief, almost relegates the process to comedy, black and pitch. Deza's acceptance that he is being 'inoculated' proceeds from a linguistic recognition ("that last term is spot on etymologically") to a validation of that recognition ("it contains at its root the Latin 'oculus', from which it comes") to a final recognition that he is now infected. Awareness of what is happening to him brings with it a certain comfort since he is able to interpret the situation at the level of language at least. His command of language is used as defense mechanism to 'process' images of unspeakable horrors into recognizable shapes, into a semblance of comprehensibility. He detects evil in what he sees and it is being passed on to him.

It is innate in humans to try to act rationally in the face of the irrational. And so pedantic Deza continually corrects the charismatic Tupra in their long drawn out conversation that culminates in the video showing. For instance, he corrects Tupra on the correct attribution of a quote (Rimbaud), on the right pronunciation of "Coahuila", and on many other linguistic matters which are seemingly at odds with the issue at hand, the issue of the moral and ethical justifications of the "use of force". Deza's obsession with the precise application of language seems to him the very act that will restore order in the increasing imbalance against peace and good that the latest events are undermining. But what practical and lasting use are one's powers of perception and linguistic skills in the face of an increasingly violent, intolerant world? In the face of bloody wars?

Through the videotaped images of atrocities, the implications of 'careless talk' introduced by the novelist in the first two chapters are now, for Deza, coming closer to home. The book has traced the gradual progression of plot from talk to live action, from language to reality. The flood of poisonous words - consistent in its unchecked spilling - becomes the very material of the novel's movement and resolution. Words betray. Words sink ships. Words are instruments of one's undoing. On the other hand, words warn. Words can be a ticket to salvation. Words console. Words memorialize. For spies, the exchange of words has become both necessary and suspect, a paradoxical situation whose balance a speaker constantly strives for whenever she opens his mouth, whenever she decides with finality to finally communicate, to finally speak out and declare a simple fact.

The plot is thin, and the book thick. The ideas are plentiful. The writing style has crystallized and hardened to such an extent that it almost rivals the exquisite and delicious boredom of Henry James's last three poetic masterpieces (but I will single out the brooding boredom of The Golden Bowl). However much the charismatic Tupra plead for our narrator not to "linger and delay", linger and delay he did, in every significant incident, as if the injunction is just the thing he needed to hear so he can disobey and freely follow his thoughts. The narrative style is that of free thinking, of freezing the frames of action and dwelling in them at leisure, and then to branch out to other frames, to go off tangent in the freedom of space.

* * *

If the major fiction of Javier Marías is likened to a solar system, the sun will have to be yielded to Your Face Tomorrow. The other six books make an elliptic orbit around this massive planet, sucked in by the latter's strong gravitational potential energy. It is the sublime energy of ideas, forcible feelings, and serpentine expressions that holds the inertia of this literary space. Like planets, the novels also have satellites of their own, orbiting around them. Because of the book's random composition, published one after another in the continuum, the novels gradually accumulate a scattered dust of ideas. The reader, in bringing these ideas together as he navigates the fabric of space-time, can sense a set of physical principles related to the constant gestation of the novelist's ideas, to his process of fictive creation that religiously follows the law of imagination. There emerges a literary universe - the Marían cosmogony - answerable to a single-minded desire to talk, to think, to talk more about what has been previously talked about, to think through what has been so far talked about, and to do more talking and thinking as long as one has the luxury of blank pages to do so. To talk and to think being further qualified as deliberate acts of searching for meanings: of translating, interpreting, and to generalize: of reading.

How did the birthing of this universe came about? In 1989, All Souls, Marías's first novel in this spatial configuration, was published in its original Spanish language. The unnamed narrator, a Spanish scholar in Oxford, will continue his story in YFT. Three years after, A Heart So White followed, introducing a character who was in many respects similar to Deza. The book contained an almost inconspicuous reference that winks at previous novel. In the same year, Written Lives was published, a collection of biographical sketches, ostensibly of a different genre, but the subject matter was relevant. The writers in it were some of those the novelist translated and whose works unquestionably contributed to his literary education. Another two years will pass (1994) before Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me came out to sketch entirely new characters and situations and yet with obvious thematic and plot links with the other two (for instance, the death of a woman at the beginning). A short story collection, When I Was Mortal, followed in 1996. The stories shared characters and backgrounds with the previous books and anticipated references in the books to come. Also in 1996, the almost-novella Bad Nature plucked out a previous character, or at least his name, and brought him face to face with cultural prejudice, a central conflict in the novelist's literary space. After that Dark Back of Time (1998) shook things a bit more by playing a game of fact-and-fiction with the first book and using again the same characters, or at least their names. After four years, the three volumes of YFT started to arrive in installments (2002, 2004, 2007), almost completing the writer's elegant train of thought.

The above figure is an initial attempt - I haven't yet read When I Was Mortal and am just about to start Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me - to tease out the cosmogony of Marías. The books are treated as discrete celestial objects in the same space cluster. The solid lines indicate a sharing of one or more "major" characters in the story; the broken lines show a sharing of stray Shakespearian phrases and images (e.g., "dark back", "tomorrow in the battle think on me") and of minor characters and their names. In the first case, the object directly revolves around a book in a well-defined orbit, having a direct link between them. In the second case the object wobbles in its orbit, having an 'imposed' semantic/philosophical/literary connection with the others. The orbit can be assumed not to be unstable or semi-stable (think Pluto) as to escape from the attraction of thematic gravity.

For sure there is an element of 'chance' in the composition of this cosmogony. It's possible that if there is a rough outline of it, then it is conceived in sequential bursts of creativity and revised along the way. The serial nature of YFT, its unwieldy style, and the tenuous recycling of character's names from other books, indicate that there is only a provisional map of it in the novelist's mind. At any rate, there is an agglomeration of the dust and chaff of novelistic ideas, Shakespearian drama and episodes. Their consolidation into a solid mass begins to form a more expansive core to forge the adamantine style, to calcify into a sun that is YFT.

How can something so boring like YFT be the one at the center of this solar system? Well, it's only boring to some, but I find several sections of it a page-turner, especially in the last volume. The sheer mass and density of YFT sweeps and reins in the dramatis personae of the other books, including some of the philosophical and aesthetic ideas in them. So its magnitude could not help but align the other books into its fictional system. The novel, voluminous and volatile, is powered by a slow-burning energy. At its center, a nuclear furnace of words, long trailing paragraphs, and flaring images, all of which elements are also in the other books but in YFT are blazing with renewable intensity, as if it wants to consume all its energy.

To read (into) these books is a wondrous experience of creative reading. Tracking meanings, codes, and images, attempting to decipher from them the basic principles that govern the planetary orbits. There is too much matter (words) to lose oneself into. The lines of poetry are repeated many times over in a book, and then they freely cross over other books, as if conversing with them. One book to another book. One poem to another. The poetic lines are deliberate devices to stitch together the fabric of one literary cosmos. They ("like snow on shoulders, slipping and docile") are pieces played out like mantras, incantations, amulets. The poems are like novenas offered to dispel the impending loss of continuity of the story. They are "markers", "signifiers", force fields pulling readers back to the thread of the story. Without exception, the titles of the seven books, as translated, are all cribbed from the plays of Shakespeare (with variations only for "All soules", "dark backward and abysm of time", and "evil nature").

The lines from poetry also play out as musical variations. By the end of the novel (YFT, as with A Heart So White), the lines coil around each other in a tightening noose. The snippets (from Shakespeare, Rilke, Eliot) are repeated as in the movements of a symphony, signalling that the novelist is ready to wrap up the story, to elevate it to one final stirring movement, his baton poised to gather all the elements into a tight, constricting unity.

But what is exciting about this solar system thing is not that there are tenuous connections at all, but that the oeuvre formed from the constellation of novels is still expanding in the reader's mind long after the reading.

* * *

NAMES. The names in these books are sacred grounds. It's as if a name has the weight of blood, as stubborn as the rim of bloodstain on the floor. A man's character is his fate. In Marían cosmogony, so is his name. The revelation of names, their withholding, and their numerous bifurcation into aliases, matter as much as the destiny of the characters behind the name. A name is the first level of measurement, the nominal label of a person. One's most basic attribute is inscribed in a name. Anyone's transaction, public or private, is associated with a name. Names are words, too. And the novelist luxuriates in words. So there.

SECRETS. One should keep his mouth shut. But there are exceptions after all. "I suppose there comes a point when one has to tell things, after a lot of time has passed, so that it doesn't seem as if they simply never happened or were just a bad dream ... " [510]

SEMANTICS, HERMENEUTICS, TRANSLATION. Marías's protagonists - Jacques Deza, Juan Ranz, Ruibérriz de Torres, "Javier Marías" - navigate the world through translation. Their professions as translator or interpreter or linguistic scholar or "novelist" are primarily concerned with the decoding of dense languages and images into small understandable components. Otherwise, they become lost in the verbal labyrinth, just like the often-incensed reader. And so the protagonists are prone to self-examination, to self-justification and self-abnegation. Almost always they put under the microscope the very fine (grain-sized) details that they encounter. They describe events and surrounding details with the utmost precision for they are concerned with the transmission of information, with the exploration of workable (and alternative and flawed) translations. They fully recognize the limitations of communication, of the speculative natures of 'excellent' interpretation of one person's future actions, what she's capable of tomorrow, what her face tomorrow will reveal. In their physiological make-up there is a gene desiring to exercise its specialized function. This gene automatically answers to linguistic stimuli and is responsible for a variety of allied functions: to analyze, to make judgements, to philosophize, to interpret, to break words apart, to search for definitions and cultural contexts, to translate, to read.

This indicates that a robust framework for conceptualizing the linguistic/cultural system of YFT, and maybe even of the whole cosmogony, is a theory or philosophy of translation. One such philosophy is explored by the late French philosopher Paul Ricoeur in On Translation (Routledge, 2006; trans. Eileen Brennan), a book of essays on the philosophy of translation that distills the work of George Steiner (After Babel) and other translation theorists. Ricoeur's book is a rigorous and concise (72-page) exposition on the ethical justification for the existence of translation.

The work of translation, according to Ricoeur (after Freud), is an act of remembering and of mourning. This is from the first essay called "Translation as challenge and source of happiness". Throughout YFT, readers are treated to Deza's constant allusion to the past, to "the things as they were" before his separation from his wife, a separation which decisively marked his life. In the novel's store of stories, readers are made privy to the reminiscences of Wheeler and Deza's own father. In translating and interpreting, Deza constantly goes back to the sources of language, the etymology, the idiomatic and popular uses of a word or phrase, the puns and the historical-cultural contexts behind words. He remembers and at the same time he mourns, with a sometimes tragic sense of loss, for "what might have been". He mourns for what more faithful meaning could have been substituted to some slippery word or statement. Atmospherically, the novel is so suffused by tones of elegy and melancholy as to be draped in black cloths of mourning.

In delineating the private-public spheres of human relationships, through translation and semantics, Ricoeur highlighted the division between external and internal translations. External translation being the translation from a source to a target language, internal translation being the process of translating "within the same linguistic community", i.e., from Spanish to Spanish, or from English to English.

I would like to show, at least very succinctly, that it is in this same language’s work on itself that underlying reasons for the insuperability of the gap between a supposed perfect universal language and the languages that we term natural, in the sense of non-artificial, are revealed. As I have suggested, it is not the imperfections of natural languages that we would like to do away with, but the very functioning of these languages in their astonishing peculiarities. And it is the work of internal translation that in fact reveals this gap. I come close here to the statement that commands the whole of George Steiner’s book, After Babel. After Babel, ‘to understand is to translate’. This is about much more than a simple internalization of the relationship to the foreign, in accordance with Plato’s adage that thought is a dialogue of the soul with itself – an internalisation that would transform internal translation into a simple appendix to external translation. This is about an original investigation, which lays bare the everyday processes of a living language: these ensure that no universal language can succeed in reconstructing its indefinite diversity. This is really about approaching the mysteries of a language that is full of life, and at the same time, giving an account of the phenomenon of misunderstanding, of misinterpretation which, according to Schleiermacher, gives rise to interpretation, the theory of which hermeneutics wants to develop. The reasons for the gap between perfect language and a language that is full of life are exactly the same as the causes of misinterpretation.

All of which may, or may not, acquit Deza of his insufferable mannerism of trying to find equivalent synonyms to obscure words. Ricoeur here highlighted diversity and vitality ("full of life") implied by the act of translating within the same linguistic tradition. This requires internalization and critical defamiliarization in the source language, maybe the act of attaining fluency in one's native language. I like the part in the above quote where it says that no universal language can successfully reconstruct the staggering diversity ("fullness", let us say) of a living language. I also like the idea behind interpretation arising from a given account of misunderstanding and misinterpretation. For without the discrepancies of sense and meanings in and between languages, without misprision (the willful distortion and misreading of texts, as Harold Bloom would have it) in translation, there is nothing to interpret at all, nothing to speak of, to write about, hence, nothing to read, to argue about, to talk about, to think about.

'THE OTHER'. Compounding the external-internal, private-public spheres of translation and semantics is the perception of that that is other than you or unlike you, which is perhaps the untranslatable, the foreign, the strange, and the alien. The novelist brings these spheres of human relationships and the internal-external into direct engagement with wars and conflicts in history, the past and ongoing history. He interfaces these wars with an individual's private wars and demons (as with Deza's confrontation with C). And this he simultaneously made to bear on an "ancient and modern" conundrum, i.e., a timeless concern of the past, present, and future (tomorrow's unknowable face) - how to tolerate the 'other'.

Bad Nature encapsulates most succinctly the novelist's recurrent theme in his major works. In this short story, the protagonist is witness to the same problem of confronting people unlike one, people who speak a different language and whose values and backgrounds are relatively different from one. The situation is representative of the conflicts that tend to plague the Marías cosmogony. Here's from something I wrote in my profile-review:

The book is about a translator/interpreter who worked for Elvis Presley in a movie set in Acapulco, Mexico. In one of their bar hops, one of the guys in Elvis's contingent offended a Mexican gangster. Inevitably, Elvis and his companions became embroiled in an argument with the gangster's group. The translator is the only person who could communicate the insults shuttling back and forth between the two factions. As is usual with Marias, the currents of terror are at first gliding innocently on the surface of the story and then breaks to the surface to take over the story. As I understand it from this story: the bad nature resides in all of us. The gangsters and also Elvis can be bad, as in evil, anytime. The key to world peace is tolerating "the other" but this is impossible because there is always a barrier of communication. Language and the significations of language can get the better of people. If we can not get past our own linguistic (i.e., cultural) prejudices then we are at a permanent state of conflict. Even gestures, like language, can be fatal.

TOLERANCE. In his introduction to Ricoeur's On Translation, Richard Kearney explains the concept of translation in terms of hermeneutics:

Translation can be understood in both a specific and a general sense. In the specific sense - the one in common contemporary usage - it signals the work of translating the meanings of one particular language into another. In the more generic sense, it indicates the every day act of speaking as a way not only of translating oneself to oneself (inner to outer, private to public, unconscious to conscious, etc.) but also and more explicitly of translating oneself to others. As Dominico Jervolino puts it:

To speak is already to translate (even when one is speaking one's own native language or when one is speaking to oneself); further, one has to take into account the plurality of languages, which demand a more exacting encounter with the different Other. One is tempted to say that there is a plurality of languages because we are originally plural. The encounter with the Other cannot be avoided. If one accepts the necessary nature of the encounter, linguistic pluralism appears no longer as a malediction, as the received interpretation of the myth of Babel would have it, but as a condition which requires us to surrender the all-encompassing dream of a perfect language (and of a global translation, so to speak, without residues). The partiality and finitude of individual languages is then viewed not as an insurmountable obstacle but as the very precondition of communication among individuals.

The key passage from Jervolino that Kearney quoted is the beautiful solution that Ricoeur has arrived at. This is also, in my view, what Marías has been obliquely mapping in his fictional sequence featuring translators as characters. In his book Ricoeur introduced a wonderful term, linguistic hospitality, to describe the appreciation of translation through the acknowledgment of its limitations, the acknowledgement that there is no total (or perfect) translation: "Just as in the act of telling a story, we can translate differently, without hope of filling the gap between equivalence and total adequacy. Linguistic hospitality, then, where the pleasure of dwelling in the other’s language is balanced by the pleasure of receiving the foreign word at home, in one’s own welcoming house." That acknowledgement is a source of mourning for the translator who is not able to fully capture the sense and essence of what one is asked to translate, the inability to find exact equivalents, a one-to-one correspondence between the source text and the translating medium. At the same time (and this really depends on one's orientation, one's readiness), this limitation can be a source of happiness because one has given up. One has finally surrendered from trying to excavate the most faithful cognate, from trying to unearth the statement that would represent utmost fidelity to what is (assumed to be) really meant by the original.

USE OF FORCE. This linguistic surrender, this acceptance of our inadequacy to fully comprehend each other, may be the precondition for building a humane and just society. Maybe. And perhaps it can be a way to skirt around the perceived ethical problems of translation, a way to bridge post-national cultures, prevent incidents of violence and bloodshed, enable tolerance. Maybe. These suppositions may as well be formulated as rhetorical questions (This linguistic surrender ... just society ? Perhaps it can be a way to skirt around ... enable tolerance?). The framing of these positive statements makes them sound insincere. They will bring us neither here nor there.

Faced with a more brazen question, like, Why should one not hurt or kill people?, we seem not to be at a better position. On hearing this question, the value system starts to rebel. Our order-loving sensibilities are offended. Yet in YFT, the novelist forces the reader to confront naive questions like this. To consider the larger implications of using violence in desperate times. The reader may as well listen in rapt attention since these questions, as the poet Wisława Szymborska noted, are "the most pressing" ones. By giving it a proper context and narrative grounding in the novel, that 'innocent' question turned out to be not as naive as it sounds.

At the end of the novel, Deza gives up on his job as translator under Tupra. His unconditional surrender is not just an act of principled defiance; he is giving himself up to embrace his 'other life'. There is now in him an openness to transform and translate his real life into something more real, more concrete, something he can derive an ounce of happiness from. And so the novel arrives at its resolution after a long agonistic telling, a telling permeated with a fever of protracted remembering and sorrowing. At the cost of long stretches of boredom, irritation, and compulsive reading, the protagonist, and maybe the reader too, is harvesting from it the rewards of a reading experience, a sharpened sense of memory and loss. An expectation to face a new task of translation, a new opportunity for hospitality.

Your Face Tomorrow is rendered in English by Margaret Jull Costa, as are all other translated books by Marías, except for Voyage Along the Horizon, translated by Kristina Cordero, and Dark Back of Time and Bad Nature, translated by Esther Allen.

With thanks to Richard (Caravana de recuerdos) for leading a three-part group read (Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3) of this one-of-a-kind novel. For a mapping of Marías's books, see Conversational Reading, Wuthering Expectations, and the review by William Deresiewicz in The Nation. I first read about Ricoeur's ideas in an interview with An Sonjae in Asymptote. "The Century's Decline" by Wisława Szymborska can be viewed here (pdf).

First Love (Ivan Turgenev)

2011-08-20T22:42:00.012+08:00

This post is my wee participation to The Art of the Novella Reading Challenge, instigated by Frances of Nonsuch Book with the support of publisher Melville House. I'm all out for the Curious Level (1 novella) but a look at the eclectic list of novellas in the series - not to mention the elegant cover designs pared down to a one-tone background color - tells me this is not a one-night stand affair. I'm already eyeing a couple of titles for my next reads post-challenge. But first my gratitude to Nicole of bibliographing, the source of my copy of the novella which I won in her giveaway. An opportune prize to win since by reading it I also get to come close to fulfilling the requirement of one of only two reading challenges I signed up for this year. (After Zamyatin and Szymborska, it will be my third book for The 2011 Eastern European Reading Challenge, over at Black Sheep Dances.)

While this Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883) novella was the first I've read under the Melville House imprint, I counted this as the fifth or sixth I've finished for the year. The last two before First Love were unequivocal masterpieces - Chess by Stefan Zweig and The Fall by Albert Camus. Quite unlike the narrative playfulness of these last two modern novellas, Turgenev's story was a linear and controlled exploration of being in love at a young age. It offered a portrait of a transition from youth to adulthood: from the confusion and giddy puzzlement that accompanied the raw feelings of youth to a more luminous perception of reality as one gained more experience. The protagonist was a sixteen-year-old student, a young man of middle class background. The object of his affection was a young princess, older than him by a few years, who with her mother was his family's new house neighbor. Turgenev created tension in two fronts. First, although members of Russian nobility, the new neighbors were actually on the verge of poverty. Their tenuous hold on their upper class status was endangered by their large debt owed to some influential persons. Second, the beautiful young princess was not entirely a bashful one. She was as carefree as can be and she was surrounded by a lot of suitors who were slaves to her every wish. Into their midst was flung the young protagonist - awkward, dejected, and in love. Soon, the young princess was sending a covert message to the group of young men (our student, a poet, a doctor, a handsome count, and a hussar) around her. She had found someone: a lover who was her match. She, her heart, was already taken. But who among them could it be?

The novella was translated by Constance Garnett, she who was often reviled as a poor translator of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy but acknowledged even by translators working today as a peerless stylist when it comes to finding equivalents for Turgenev's natural prose style. Her words in this novella are well chosen and restrained; they possess a certain vitality that pushes the story forward to its more emotional and more elemental conclusion. In Garnett's translation First Love, first published in 1860, still maintained a fresh coat of varnish for a classic Russian tale. The highlight of the narrative was when the text briefly switched to the poetic mode near the end - with precious words like dost, thou, thee, canst, art, wilt - not really in a sappy way, in order to impart a lasting "lesson" for the young man, a lesson that he will treasure for its insight into the workings of life. A way for his young heart to adapt to the bittersweet experiences that came, will come his way. This poetic interruption was like a Chekhovian nudge, enriching even as it culminated in a hypothetical statement of despair.

I know that one of these days I may enter a Russian phase of reading and will finally make my acquaintance with Turgenev's celebrated novel Fathers and Sons. Such as it is, this novella is already a good starter for dipping into Turgenev's essential writings.

Toddler-Hunting and Other Stories (Kōno Taeko)

2011-07-28T23:45:00.004+08:00

Kōno Taeko, 85 years old, must be the grand dame of Japanese letters. Her outputs were praised, most deservedly, by writers like Ōe Kenzaburo ("At once the most carnally direct and the most lucidly intelligent woman writing in Japan.") and Endo Shusaku ("Kōno Taeko is the female writer I most admire among all the Japanese authors. Her unsparing gaze penetrates the depths of human nature; and she sets forth what she finds there with absolute precision."). The blurbs came from the back page of Toddler-Hunting and Other Stories, a collection of ten short stories, all translated by Lucy North (except for the last, translated by Lucy Lower), and published in 1996 by New Directions. All the stories were originally written in the 1960s (1961-1969) and concerned women and their unstable or uncertain marital relationships. Kōno's genre of writing was classified as transgressive fiction owing to her use of elements of sadomasochism and aberrant behavior. The stories were often open-ended, which are really the best kind of stories; and they were propelled by ordinary details made to seem odd and entirely new, as if the outcome of the story was dictated by the way the characters think through these once-familiar details. In each story, the main character was either a middle-aged female (an obsessive, or on the way to becoming one) or a couple in a strained relationship. The story's telling will unravel a relationship or spell a kind of doom for the woman (wife or female partner). The writer was deconstructing the story through strange deployment of metaphors and symbols circling around a tragedy waiting in the wings or already hinted at even before the story started. For Kōno, it's either the "shock value" of stories was revealed behind the scenes (all the more shocking and unsettling for being untold) or the partial or incomplete shock was displayed in full in all its gross profundity, in front of a well-lit stage (all the more shocking for being brazen). The intelligence of the "shock" stories derived from their ability to transgress the boundaries of narrative convention and to achieve unpredictability beyond the mechanical relationship between the sexes. We were somehow given a restrained ending when we were perhaps expecting something explosive, or we were treated to something nauseating when we were bracing for a tame plot development. The uncertain feeling was perhaps summarized by this paradoxical passage from the first story, "Night Journey":

Fukuko realized that she'd been in a particular mood for some time now, a mood that would keep her walking beside Murao into the night, walking on and on until they became the perpetrators - or the victims - of some unpredictable crime.

That "particular mood" hovered in every story in Toddler-Hunting, a mood that either implicated the reader as the guilty party or rendered him a hapless victim of the story. A seemingly harmless mood that suddenly turned into a murky plot, twisting along a maze of menace and sick psyche. The reader of Kōno will relish the gradual shifts of focus in a story's limited duration, the bombs being dropped very slowly but surely, the monomaniacal tendencies of narrators faced with their own dissembling, and the exploration of the issues of femininity and sexuality: motherhood, infertility, marriage, family ties, and fidelity in relationships.

Kōno's intelligence as a novelist was recognized in her country where she was a multi-awarded writer. However, with only a single collection of hers appearing so far in English, she was certainly under-translated and under-appreciated. Her transgressive short stories, superior in many respects to the ones put out by Murakami Haruki, deserve to be assimilated and widely talked about. They are fleeting stories that leave lasting aftereffects, very like the afterglow of sparklers in "Full Tide":

The children set about lighting their sparklers. Each time she brought a flame to the tip of one, the girl's fingers would tremble slightly. She had to be careful: she could never tell exactly where the first sparks would shoot out. Then the darkness suddenly would be ablaze, and transfixed, she would be in another world. The sparkler would make fiery, spitting sounds, fizzling away before her eyes. In those few seconds, though, she knew the sparkler was living for all it was worth - fiercely, keenly, in a beautiful world of color and light. Even when everything became dark and still once more, the girl would be sure that she still saw something there, glowing and fizzling away.

The internal combustion in a Kōno story was lighted by the same inner explosions, the darkness and its recesses uncovered for a brief moment by blazing fireworks. The sparklers' glow never receded without being indelibly imprinted in a child's imagination.

For a sample of a Kōno story, here is a full story that recently appeared in TWO LINES Online of Center for the Art of Translation:

"An Odd Owner", translated by Goro Takano
http://catranslation.org/an-odd-owner

Reading diary: 2nd quarter 2011

2011-07-06T00:31:00.007+08:00

A list of what I read in the second quarter of the year. This brings me to a total 25 books read since January - much less than the 38 books I read in the same period last year.

Marxism and Literary Criticism by Terry Eagleton (review)

I picked it up as it's a short book. It's an academic survey of the topic's basic concepts. Some interesting arguments in it even though the author mentioned a lot of Marxist critics and books I'm not familiar with.

Borges and the Eternal Orang-utans by Luis Fernando Verissimo,

translated by Margaret Jull Costa (review)

Entertaining whodunit, with more than passing references to Borges (a major character here), Poe, and Lovecraft.

My Kind of Girl by Buddhadeva Bose, translated by Arunava Sinha (review)

Four men, strangers to each other, were stranded on a train. They met a young couple who appeared very much in love. This led to them reflecting about love and sharing stories with each other. Each of the stories that followed was beautiful. They were all simple tales, but together they form a subtle whole.

South of the Border, West of the Sun by Murakami Haruki,

translated by Philip Gabriel (review)

Love story. A boy fell in love with a girl. Many years later, when the man was already married, they met again. I usually hate Murakami's stories. But this was one of his good efforts. There's a surprising depth in his characterization.

2666 by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Natasha Wimmer (review; reading guide)

My second read of this posthumous epic-length book consisting of 5 discrete parts. Bolaño left instructions before his death for the five parts to be published one at a time, but his literary executor and family decided to put out a single book. There's a panoply of stories, and stories within stories, in 2666. At the center of it is the real-life murders and rapes of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. The lasting impression I take of the book is its exploration of serious stuff - violence, cruelty, intolerance. Technically, the writing is inventive, swimming in many registers. It is atmospheric and replete with mystery, symbols, metaphors, and forceful scenes. Its best quality is perhaps the creation of a convincing atmosphere of lurking evil. How evil operates through time and how a portrait of it can be investigated in literary terms in many ways, in many realms - culture, economy, politics, ethics.

Journey Into the Past by Stefan Zweig, translated by Anthea Bell (review)

A well written novella about love tested by years of physical separation. It reminds me of Henry James in the depiction of inner passions and conflicts, but with a more fast paced and electric prose.

Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney (quasi-review)

An entertaining graphic-epic. The ancient world is shaken by the appearance of a monster with a pure evil heart. Everybody cowers in fear. Thankfully, a hero appears, bent on ridding the world of monsters. The fight scenes are eye-popping, the energy as pure as electricity, the testosterone filled to the brim. There is probably a hint of comedy in the translator's language, the hyperbolic humor shooting like skyrockets.

Underground by Murakami Haruki,
translated by Alfred Birnbaum and Philip Gabriel (review)

A book of terrorism reportage. It tells of what happened in the Tokyo subway on March 20, 1995. Five men, members of the religious cult called Aum Shinrikyo, punctured sarin nerve gas in plastic bags using the sharpened tips of their umbrellas. The poison gas released killed a dozen people injured hundreds. Nine months after the incident, the novelist Haruki Murakami began to interview the victims in order to understand what actually happened. The book followed the template of Murakami's fiction: the story of ordinary men and women thrust in an abnormal situation. The narrative has two self-contained parts, divided into short sections focusing on one person and his part in the gas attack. The accumulation of the stories portrayed a kind of hell, a nightmare experienced in broad daylight, underground.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz (review)

Pulitzer Prize winner that didn't pull me in. It was good and funny in parts but did not make a wondrous whole. Homeboy Díaz disappoints after his promising debut collection Drown. However sketchy some of the pieces in Drown are - my favorite is the last story, "Negocios", which is also the longest - they are linked together in a subtle way, almost allowing the stories to coalesce into a novel. Unlike Oscar Wao, the less overreaching Drown is truer in its depiction of the mental and physical hardships of the Dominican immigrants in the US and of the familias they left behind in the country.

The Old Capital by Kawabata Yasunari, translated by J Martin Holman (review)

Chieko, a young woman, was in search of her identity. She was a foundling, left behind by her true parents when still a baby. Her adoptive parents treated her like their own, but her broken connection from her biological parents seemed to weigh on her more and more. It was as if there was something lacking in her, a part of her nature that was also reflected in her seeming disconnect from and yearning for the natural world. Kawabata writes in a sequence of haikus. Reading it is like meditating on beauty and man's broken relationship with nature.

The Ubu Plays by Alfred Jarry,
translated by Cyril Connolly and Simon Watson Taylor (review)

The three core texts of Ubu form a trilogy of sorts. They are the best of satires; their comedies are without let-up. Pa Ubu is an amoral character, "crappy creature". In the first play, he and Ma Ubu, his equally base partner, usurped the throne of the king of Poland. As new king, he pursued acts of cruelty and greed, satisfying all his base appetites. When Ubu Rex was originally performed in Paris in 1896, the utterance of the first word of the play (Merdre) provoked a riot of its audience which lasted for 15 minutes. Read it to find out why.

What's in store for July?

I've finished two books, Wisława Szymborska's Poems New and Collected and W G Sebald's Austerlitz. I've started Rizal's El Filibusterismo and Marías's Your Face Tomorrow 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell for the Your Face Tomorrow Group Read, led by Richard (Caravana de recuerdos). I'm due for a book of nonfiction (literary criticism or science), more poetry from the infinity of riches The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (a long excerpt from the introduction can be read here), and a Shakespeare play.

Austerlitz (W G Sebald)

2011-07-04T19:19:00.004+08:00

The story of Austerlitz is told in the voice of an unnamed narrator. Its setting constantly changes from one European country to the next. Its themes appear to be the same ones Max Sebald tackled in his other works of fiction: memory, melancholy, ghosts, the Holocaust. It shares a lot of obsessions and motifs with his other books (e.g., constant travel and detailed descriptions of architecture of buildings and railway stations). The style is in his trademark style. Long paragraphs contain long sinuous sentences. Uncaptioned photographs accompany the text. A difference with the other novels is that Austerlitz is one long sustained story of a troubled life. By Sebald's exacting standards, this is a conventional novel, but it's no less enchanting. And still, like his other novels, the text is built up of fragments of travel, biography, memoir, and natural history. At the time it was published, before his untimely demise in 2001, it already represents a distillation of his strengths as a writer. It displays all his strengths as a consistently sublime writer and proves to be an astonishing variation of his earlier fiction.

The gleam of gold and silver on the huge, half-obscured mirrors on the wall facing the windows was not yet entirely extinguished before a subterranean twilight filled the waiting-room, where a few travellers sat far apart, silent and motionless. Like the creatures in the Nocturama, which had included a striking number of dwarf species - tiny fennec foxes, springhares, hamsters - the railway passengers seemed to me somehow miniaturized, whether by the unusual height of the ceiling or because of the gathering dusk, and it was this, I suppose, which prompted the passing thought, nonsensical in itself, that they were the last members of a diminutive race which had perished or had been expelled from its homeland, and that because they alone survived they wore the same sorrowful expression as the creatures in the zoo.

The story opened up with an unsettling image of the Nocturama. The eyes of recluse philosophers were juxtaposed beside the eyes of animals. The narrator and Austerlitz were presented as solitary characters and the people surrounding them are also depicted as distant figures, like ghosts. People and objects were described as foreshortened or miniaturized. This physical aberration was implied as a kind of consequence of historical or natural events. Physically humans shrank in size when they get old, but there's a kind of length contraction that Sebald described that was somehow related to an accelerated passage of time. One may think of the principle of physics, specifically the length contraction described by Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity.

I have to admit I found it hard to get into the rhythm of this book. I abandoned it after a few pages the first time I tried to read it 3 years ago. I thought "boring" was written all over it. There's something suffocating in reading the early passages. It must be the quality of the translation and/or the darker aspects of the book. It would require a specific mental state to tolerate Sebald's assault on the psyche. The deliberate lack of paragraphing didn't hep ease the feeling of helplessness and oppressiveness. Some blocks of text are encased in a creepy, menacing, breathless, and ghostly atmosphere; they require lungfuls of air to get through. Here's a passage, plucked out of a longer one, telling of entering a passage in an old building structure.

Histories, for instance, like those of the straw mattresses which lay, shadow-like, on the stacked plank beds and which had become thinner and shorter because the chaff in them disintegrated over the years, shrunken - and now, in writing this, I do remember that such [an] idea occurred to me at the time - as if they were the mortal frames of those who once lay there in that darkness. I also recollect now that as I went on down the tunnel which could be said to form the backbone of the fort, I had to resist the feeling taking root in my heart, one which to this day often comes over me in macabre places, a sense that with every forward step the air was growing thinner and the weight above me heavier.

The novel seemed to be creating narrative momentum and tension through the same connect-the-dots approach he deployed in his hybrid fiction, as exemplified by the image of Sir Thomas Browne's quincunx in The Rings of Saturn. The narrative building blocks of the novel relied on streams of memories and digressions, with temporal and narrative shifts announcing sharp transitions. What's brilliant about it was the seamless integration of otherwise disparate ideas. A brilliant example was Austerlitz's discussion of the casement torture chambers, which led to his reflection on Jean Améry's torture (cf. the essay in On the Natural History of Destruction), and then to a passage in Simon Claude's memoir Le Jardin des Plantes which described that torture. That memoir contained a profile of a certain Gastone Novelli who was also tortured and later had some dealings with a Brazilian tribe, documenting their language: "[Novelli] adopted [the tribe's] customs, and to the best of his ability compiled a dictionary of their language, consisting almost entirely of vowels, particularly the sound A in countless variations of intonation and emphasis ..." Later, Novelli became a painter and incorporated the letter A in his pictures, tracing them out closely together and on top of each other, "rising and falling in waves like a long-drawn-out scream".

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Like this visual painting, the progression of ideas in Austerlitz, based on the selected facts of the novelist's reading of writers and thinkers, were "crowding closely together and above one another". Just like the quincunx, the novel was becoming a network of stories tied together by the novelist's sensibility. The drawn-out scream was like the anguished expression of tortured individuals.

For more on Novelli's painting, these two articles are recommended:

Vertigo blog: "Sebald, Simon, Novelli and the Long-Drawn-Out Scream"

The Silo: "Gastone Novelli" by Raphael Rubinstein

The recurring phrase "_____ told me, said Austerlitz" in the book was too conspicuous. It represented a two-tiered (or even three-tiered) narrative attribution wherein the recounting was filtered and shaped by distant memories. In an essay, "Terrible Rain: W.G. Sebald, Thomas Bernhard and the bombing of Europe" (2003), the English novelist Geoff Dyer traced this mannerism to Thomas Bernhard:

It was from Bernhard that Sebald derived his inverse telescoping of reported speech ("I was particularly anxious, Vera told me, said Austerlitz") whereby the narrative recedes in the act of progressing. The comic obsessiveness and neurosis common to many of Sebald's characters are like a sedated version of the raging frenzy into which Bernhard's narrators habitually drive themselves. The influence was most explicit in Austerlitz, whose long pages of unparagraphed meanderings even look like Bernhard's.

Specifically, the influence came from Bernhard's Old Masters. Dyer expanded on this essay and described the "inverse telescoping" narrative device by Sebald - from "W.G. Sebald, Bombing, and Thomas Bernhard," in Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (2011), quoted in Conversational Reading - as emphasized below.

It is possible that the similarities between the two appear more striking in the English translations than in the German originals, but it was, surely, from Bernhard that Sebald derived the inverse telescoping whereby the reliability of the narrative recedes and diminishes the more incessantly it is vouched for. “You concealed your shock very well, I said to the Englishman, Reger said to me,” writes Atzbacher, the narrator of Bernhard’s Old Masters. “I was particularly anxious, Vera told me, said Austerlitz,” writes the narrator of Sebald’s Austerlitz.

I don't totally buy Dyer's explanation of the narrative receding and diminishing the more repeatedly it is vouched for. It seemed Sebald was constantly using the double attributive phrase to convey a sense of reliance on memory rather than on undermining it. Memories were like ghosts haunting the characters. The transfer of memory through telling and retelling was the only way to exorcize the ghosts. They may not always be clear, objective, and 100% accurate, but the insistence on attribution strengthened the narration from memory and brought out to the light of day what was otherwise receding from the background. Sebald himself called this a periscope, instead of an inverse telescope (yes, there was a difference!). His last interview (KCRW interview, December 2001) bore this out:

What he [Bernhard] achieved, I think, was also to move away from the standard pattern of the standard novel. He only tells you in his books what he heard from others so he invented, as it were, a kind of periscopic form of narrative so you're always sure that what he tells you is related at one remove, at two removes, at two or three. And that appeals to me very much.... Bernhard single-handedly, I think, invented a new form of narrating which appealed to me from the start.

The periscopic form of narration only tells what is heard from others. In this way, perhaps, the question of reliability was minimized and the role of memory to give witness, in the face of selective or total amnesia, whether voluntary or involuntary, was justified.

The Ubu Plays (Alfred Jarry)

2011-06-28T04:17:00.006+08:00

Twelve Theater Impressions

Spoilers

1) Ubu (Homo sapiens Jarry) is an amoral organism, "crappy creature", ancestor of Jabba the Hutt, the star of a comedy to be taken seriously. Anti-Quixote, he is not enchanted, but he tilts his own windmill. He is a war strategist (he must have scanned pages of Sun Tzu and Machiavelli) and a war freak. (He thinks) he's in control. He has state-of-the-art weapons in his arsenal. And he knows his arithmetic.

I recommend you to load your rifles with as many bullets as they will hold, since eight bullets can kill eight Russians and that's just so many more I won't have on my back. We shall station the light infantry around the bottom of the hill to take the brunt of the Russian attack and slay a few of them, with the cavalry behind to charge around and add to the confusion, and the artillery set up around this windmill here to fire into the general mêlée. As for ourselves, we shall assume our command position inside the windmill, fire through the window with our phynancial pistol, bar the door with our physic-stick, and if anyone tries to break in he'd better look out for our pschittahook!!!

PA UBU. Pschitt!
MA UBU. Ooh! what a nasty word. Pa Ubu, you're a dirty old man.

Pschitt! according to translators Cyril Connolly and Simon Watson Taylor. (In the original: Merdre! In other versions: Pshit!, Shitteth!, Shittr!, Shikt!, Shrit!, and Shitsky!) Not since Anonymous's Beowulf has there been a first utterance - Hwæt, rendered as So by Seamus Heaney and elsewhere as Lo, Hark, Attend, Behold, or Listen - that stretched the English language, fashioned Shit into various Shit-permutations, and elevated the Shit-discourse of Shit-derivative.

What makes it a nasty word? Addressing the audience during the debut performance of Ubu Roi (Dec. 10, 1896), Alfred Jarry introduced the play, thus, "And the action, which is about to start, takes place in Poland, that is to say Nowhere."

So, nowhere. That is to say, here, there, and everywhere. Nowhere, as in nothing. Merdre! is nothing but the opening sesame. Just like Nonada in Grande Sertão: Veredas, in which Piers Armstrong had this to say:

We’re talking about the first word, and the difficulty of just the translation of the first word. And we could think of it not only in the degree of difficulty, but in openness, possibility, and the multitude of possible renderings. You could go this way or that way; and it’s like this sentence by sentence by sentence. Even if we restrict ourselves to the “good” translations, there are an infinite number of alternate translations.

So why bother? Shat!

   3) Pa Ubu began as a creation of Ma Ubu, the wretch. She planted the seed of a poisonous tree in him, which grew and later bore fruit - the overthrow of the rightful king. Pa Ubu, now king, became his own master. The unlimited power granted him poisoned his mind. As a soldier, he was already abusive. As ruler, he was worse. In pursuit of cruelty, greed, and more power, Ubu went out of bounds. He perpetrated heinous crimes to satisfy his base appetites. Ma Ubu couldn't control him anymore.

   4) Says Jarry in one of his writings on the theater: You are free to see in Mister Ubu as many allusions as you like, or, if you prefer, just a plain puppet, a schoolboy's caricature of one of his teachers who represented for him everything in the world that is grotesque.

And also: In any written work there is a hidden meaning, anyone who knows how to read sees that aspect of it that makes sense for him.

Ubu is bad, objectively. But "that aspect of it that makes sense" for the reader makes him a champion of subjectivity.

   5)

MA UBU (Running after [Pa Ubu]). Oh! Pa Ubu, Pa Ubu, I'll give you some fine fat sausages. [10]

BOGGERLAS. He's done for. M'Nure has just split him in two like a sausage. [16]

What is it with sausages? Could it be that the pliant, juicy texture, and intestinal softness of the sausage have something to do about the helplessness of the victims?

Says Wiki: Sausage is a logical outcome of efficient butchery. Traditionally, sausage makers put to use tissues and organs which are edible and nutritious, but not particularly appealing - such as scraps, organ meats, blood, and fat - in a form that allows for preservation: typically, salted and stuffed into a tubular casing made from the cleaned intestine of the animal, producing the characteristic cylindrical shape.

So there. Sausage-like butchery.

PA UBU. Oh, tripe! Isn't injustice just as good as justice? Ah! you're taking the piss out of me, Madam, I'm going to chop you into tiny pieces.

Ma UBU flees for her life, pursued by PA UBU. [23]

    6) The three core texts of Ubu form a trilogy of sorts. Ubu Rex is the forerunner of the dictator novel. Ubu Cuckolded - a play that's more a segue than a sequel - is The Empire Strikes Back, with the Ewoks prematurely appearing in it. Ubu Enchained is The Return of the King. The best part of the lot.

    7) Ma Ubu and Gyron's songs (Act Four, Scene One) and the Song of Poland by Pa Ubu and the Chorus (Act Four, Scene 3), both in Ubu Rex, can be performed by a combination of rapping and beatboxing.

    8) Wordplays and puns abound. The challenge to translation is evident when one compares the version of Ubu Rex by Connolly-Taylor (Methuen, 1968) with the version by David Copelin (Pulp Press, 1977).

Connolly-Taylor:

PA UBU (countering). Take that, great clot, pisspot, son of a harlot, nose-snot, bigot, faggot, gut-rot, squawking parrot, Huguenot!
MA UBU (hitting him too). Take that, pork-snout, layabout, whore's tout, pox-riddled spout, idle lout, boy scout, Polish Kraut!

Copelin:

PA UBU: (riposting). There! Polack, drunkard, bastard, buzzard, Tartar, fathead, cockroach, stool-pigeon, greaseball, communist!
MA UBU: (joining in). There! eunuch, pig, felon, ham, rascal, sloven, bedspread!

Whether the original French insults are rhymed or not, then Connolly-Taylor bests Copelin in the "inspired" word choices.

But words are words alone. Copelin also holds his own through "erudite" puns on the countries of Germans and Poles.

Connolly-Taylor:

PA UBU. Wild and inhospitable ocean which laps the shores of the land called Germany, so named because it's exactly half way to Jermyn street as the blow flies.
MA UBU. Now that's what I call erudition. It's a beautiful country I'm told.
PA UBU. Beautiful though it may be, it's not a patch on Poland. Ah gentlemen, there'll always be a Poland. Otherwise there wouldn't be any Poles!

Copelin:

PA UBU: Fierce and inhospitable sea which washes the country called Germany, so named because the inhabitants thereof are always germinating.
MA UBU: That's what I call erudition. They say it's a lovely land.
PA UBU: Gentlemen: it may be beautiful but it can't equal Poland. Without Poland, there would be no spit and Polish!

Ah, France was such a country of residence and French a language of choice for Frenchman Jarry. Without the French he is left with doors, windows, and fries!

9) In the second play Ubu Cuckolded, the character of Ubu was cuckolded because he was given less screen time in it. The supporting characters have strangely dominated this play. Lots of song numbers here. Again, a beatbox performance may turn out to be robust on stage. And, by my green lantern, the appearance of the stuffed monkey reminded me of the baboon in the novel Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician.

10) The final play Ubu Enchained was the height of this slapstick-physick. It started as a straightforward case of mistaken identity. Then along the way, it unravelled as a psychotic parable. An allegory of malcontents.

Deep Dada, if there was one.

An Ubu-topian society was born, a place where freedom and slavery coexist like Greek masks placed side by side. Where the master is enslaved by the slave, and where the slave prevailed.

The culmination of the trilogy - the abolition of freedom - was one of the best expressions of the freedom of the theater, the great inversion being proclaimed by Pissweet, in shocking bittersweet exclamation:

We are free to do what we want, even to obey. We are free to go anywhere we choose, even to prison! Slavery is the only true freedom!

11) At the end of the play, Pa Ubu and Ma Ubu were driven away from prison - "we aren't in Poland any longer". If Poland is Nowhere, and they're out of it, where are they now?

The final scene will not say. I hope it wasn't a prophetic ending, too:

MA UBU. We're getting farther and farther away from France, Pa Ubu.
PA UBU. Ah, my sweet child, don't you worry your pretty head about our destination. It will certainly be a country extraordinary enough to be worthy of our presence, since we are transported there in a trireme equipped with an extra bank of oars - not just three, but four!

Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos of the Philippines. Juan and Eva Perón of Argentina. Any country will fit with Pa Ubu and Ma Ubu.

12) The Ubu plays are some of the books that marked Roberto Bolaño's life. Like Jarry, Bolaño constructs an edifice of references in the texts and worked from there to create his enchained reality. He invented his own tools, built his own concepts, and erected markers to navigate the labyrinth of his poetry. For it is in Bolaño's poetry that the influence of Jarry is readily apparent.

Ubu had his neologisms and set of references (e.g., the pschitt-prefix, his uniquely named weapons, his Palcontents) that he constantly used throughout his fantastical adventures. In the same manner Bolaño's poety is riddled with internal references. His First Infrarealist Manifesto, for one, is full of surrealist touches and invented references ("THE EYE OF TRANSITION", "The Constellation of the Beautiful Bird", "Nightclub of misery", "THOUSAND DRAWN-AND-QUARTERED VANGUARDS OF THE SEVENTIES").

The poetry triptych Tres is likewise full of internal references that call on itself and are also embedded in his works elsewhere. There's the "immeasurable room in Hell", the "Atlantis moment", the "Neochilenos", and the "Unknown University". The latter is a kind of testing-ground for the curious vagabond (which is also to say the minor poet), a higher education institution that persists in the novels, poems, and letters. The poet is also fond of word labels or assignments:

... you arrive at the moment that you name the autumn and discover the stranger.
...
... the word kaleidoscope slips like saliva from her lips and then the scenes become transparent in something you could call the moan of the pale character or geometry around your naked eye.

The effect is rather like weaving a tapestry of reality. It is populating the universe with elements of one's own devising. An exercise in world-making. For Jarry, it's the Nowhere place, the pschittaworld of Ubu; for Bolaño the worlding of real viscerealismo, that is to say the abyss.

The Anything Ubu Readalong Opportunity is initiated by Nicole (bibliographing) and Amateur Reader (Wuthering Expectations).

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Díaz)

2011-06-25T14:52:00.027+08:00

Spoilers.

The short happy life of Oscar Wao, as told by Yunior, Junot Díaz's narrator and Oscar's best buddy, began with a disquisition on a curse and ended with an inversion of Kurtz's last words in Heart of Darkness. In-between was an excursion into the territories of the dictator novel, immigrant fiction, postmodernism, and post-LOTR venture. Somehow the book turned out to be a crowd-pleaser, one that pandered to a shallow expectation of what constitutes a "wondrous life".

The novel was angry with the Trujillato - the Trujillo dictatorship regime - in the Dominican Republic.

... You might roll your eyes at the comparison, but, friends: it would be hard to exaggerate the power Trujillo exerted over the Dominican people and the shadow of fear he cast throughout the region. Homeboy dominated Santo Domingo like it was his very own private Mordor; not only did he lock the country away from the rest of the world, isolate it behind the Plátano Curtain, he acted like it was his very own plantation, acted like he owned everything and everyone, killed whomever he wanted to kill, sons, brothers, fathers, mothers, took women away from their husbands on their wedding nights and then would brag publicly about "the great honeymoon" he'd had the night before. His Eye was everywhere; he had a Secret Police that out-Stasi'd the Stasi, that kept watch on everyone, even those everyones who lived in the States, a security apparatus so ridiculously mongoose that you could say a bad thing about El Jefe at eight-forty in the morning and before the clock struck ten you'd be in the Cuarenta having your cattleprod shoved up your ass. [224-225]

Yunior's voice was laced with such scathing irony in the proceedings of Trujillo's tortures, abuses, crimes. Terrorist acts were committed and ample examples were given for Yunior to luxuriate in his supreme fury. His offenses were to the point. He never minced words. The dictatorship was presented as an infamy of rapes, sexual assaults, and male domination. He scored a lot of points describing the Sauron-incarnate on Earth. This reader was nodding his head and pumping his fists in the air, shouting "Down with El Jefe! Viva libertad!"

Trujillo isn't getting any reprieve from the devil. The generous servings of swear-words and curses of the narrator were not enough to lock down, reclusion perpetua, the soul of the dictator in hell. The unsubtle deployment of cuss words, the long and winding string of epithets were all sincerely meant to denounce the Ur-regime. Political correctness be damned. When it comes to violation of human rights, Yunior was boiling in his acerbic voice. He was - his greatest virtue as character - a consistent narrator. So consistent in fact that, for me, it became the novel's liability. The narrator - often depicted as a sexist brick - could get so carried away and become too indulgent in his twice-told tale.

No matter what you believe: in February 1946, Abelard was officially convicted of all charges and sentenced to eighteen years. Eighteen years! Gaunt Abelard dragged from the courtroom before he could say a word. Socorro [his wife], immensely pregnant, had to be restrained from attacking the judge. Maybe you'll ask, Why was there was [sic] no outcry in the papers, no actions among the civil rights groups, no opposition parties rallying to the cause? Nigger, please: there were no papers, no civil rights groups, no opposition parties; there was only Trujillo. [247]

Eighteen years! No papers! No rights groups! This passage was at a point in the narrative - about three-fourths into the book - where cruelty and abuses of a repressive regime were already more than apparent. Where the reader already had a more than vague idea that he was not reading about a saint running a government in deep shit.

An antagonistic voice projecting a vile, abhorrent regime (no complaint there). An assault to one's ad hominemic sentimentalidad (none still, Trujillo was baaad you know). A strong current of anger devolved from pure irony to crude complaint (positive). The amoral suasion of the narrator was so excellently laid out and so irreproachable that it kills the joy of the reader. We were so very much prodded on to cheer for Oscar and to double thumbs down Rafael T. We were so conditioned to like the book with an adolescent Facebook thumbs up.

Granted, the novelist was up to some very risky narrative devices. Telling a story whose outcome was already spoiled by the title was no mean feat. (Hemingway at least filled the blank spaces naturally, as if the unfolding of plot did not hamper the act of discovering what happens next.) The crude inelegant style was part of the book's charm, and it's also probably where the problem lies.

A virtue of post-modernist-like stories is how the authors or narrators attempt to insert themselves into the narrative, at the same time also effacing themselves. In this case, the highly conscious narrator shaped the life of one Oscar de Léon according to his street, pop-culture, and nerd-culture vocabulary (photon torpedoes, dwarf-fucking-star, Akira). It was an intelligent voice, very aware of the gradations of offense and offensiveness. The copious lengthy footnotes often revealed his personal commentaries, providing in themselves micro-histories of the Dominican Republic under dictatorship, somehow contributing to a synthesis of that problematic era. A very strong intrusive voice, however, could also kill the narrative.

The danger with an unadulterated voice of hate is that it puts a spin on things that rather trivializes the whole enterprise. I'm not proposing that Yunior tone down his adjectives or that he moderate his verbal assaults. If he did so, then he will not be a consistent character anymore. I'm saying that there is a way of telling - let's say, the Thomas Bernhard mold of creaking complaint - wherein the message (or the form or style or content) can be delivered by a wounding rant that piles abuse upon disabuse. A way of telling that does not lay down history lessons all too obviously, that integrates angry form with angry content without pathetic gesticulations.

The Bernhard rant is subversive and existential and political. Breathless all at the same time. The Junot rant is a trite existential and wholeheartedly political. Yet it lacks the sober hints of subversion.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is the June selection of The Wolves.

(Image)

The Old Capital (Kawabata Yasunari)

2011-06-15T00:50:00.013+08:00

The grove of cherries inside the main gate to the left of Ninnaji was overflowing with blossoms.

Whenever I see the lovely straight cedars at Kitayama, my spirit feels refreshed.

A small tree stood at the water's edge on the far side; the reflection of its crimson leaves shivered in the flow of the river.

If a novel can be built on haikus, then The Old Capital by Yasunari Kawabata, translated by J Martin Holman, is one. The sentences have the profound simplicity of the form. The narrative is broken by short paragraphs. The paragraphs usually contain a single sentence or two or three. The descriptions are charged with the beauty of the natural world, its concentrated essence. The sentences unfold in painterly scenes, flowering into the greenery of the forest and red orchard.

The novel's backdrop and setting are delicately described. The viewing of weeping cherry blossoms, the parade of cultural festivals, the weaving of the most exquisite obi - everything is evoked precisely. In sinuous sequence, the details appear with the transcendence of calligraphy.

Chieko, a young woman, was in search of her identity. She was a foundling, left behind by her true parents when still a baby. She grew up comfortably being cared for by a couple who ran a business selling fabric cloths. Her adoptive parents treated her like their own, but her broken connection from her biological parents seemed to weigh on her more and more. It was as if there was something lacking in her, a part of her nature that was also reflected in her seeming disconnect from and yearning for the natural world.

The novelist's theme seems to be the attempt to reconcile human beings to the natural world. There was a broken pathway that the characters are trying to bridge. They were restless, not content with the way things have so far progressed in their lives. If only this hidden something, an ecological connection, is found, then perhaps they will learn their rightful place, their niche, in their surroundings. And this knowledge will free them from their apprehensions.

As substitute for the beauty of the natural world, the fine arts of painting and weaving became significant expressions of it. Here is Chieko's father Takichiro on a painter that he used as inspiration to create a pattern for weaving:

"He [Paul Klee] is a painter who was in the forefront of the abstract movement. His paintings are gentle, exceptional. You might say they have the quality of the dream, a quality that would speak even to the heart of an old Japanese like me. I studied them over and over until I came up with this pattern. It's unlike any traditional Japanese design. "

Flowers, wood trees, festivals, and fabric were the motifs in the books. They were the sources of inspiration to create works of art. The flowers and the trees were used to come up with the design for weaving an obi. The numerous Japanese festivals described in the book usually involved elements of nature appreciation.

The mountains were neither high nor deep. The trunk of each individual tree was visible even on the tops of the mountains. The cedars were used in the construction of tearooms so the appearance of the groves themselves had the elegant air of the tea ceremony.

The cedar grove evoking the elegance of a tea ceremony was the perfect statement of culture relying on nature. The utility of trees evoking, at the same time, the function of form and the form of function.

The old capital is Kyoto, after the designation of Tokyo as the new. The foundation of its art, crafts, and trades were the natural surroundings. Its old patterns had the vitality found in nature. Nowadays, though, the old men perceived that the increasing materialism and capitalism are affecting the quality of the artworks.

"My eye just isn't accustomed to them [flowers]. I wouldn't like an obi or kimono cloth in a tulip pattern, but if a great artist were to create such a painting, even tulips could become a work with an eternal life," Takichiro said, looking aside. "Some of the ancient designs were like that. Some of them are older than this capital city itself. No one can create anything like that anymore. They can do no more than copy them.... Aren't there even trees here, still living, that are older than the capital?"

Like Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, Kawabata seemed to eulogize the fading past. The ushering in of modernity signaled the encroachment of Western views, the increasing reliance on mechanization and mass production. They seemed not to bode well for the fate of pure art.

The old capital seemed to represent a last stand for the "old", while the new was stealthily modifying the traditions and values built on ancient nature and art. Open lands were converted into industrial zones. Houses were giving in to construction of inns. While in the mountains, in a tree plantation ("surrounded by the straight cedar trunks of uniform size") the place of man in nature was put into question, perhaps the central question raised by the novel.

"These [man-made trees] are about forty years old. They'll be cut and made into columns or the like. Left alone, they would probably grow for a thousand years ... wide and tall. I think about that occasionally. I like virgin forests the best, but in this village it's as though we're growing flowers for cutting."
[...]
"Were there no such thing as man, there would be nothing like Kyoto either. It would all be natural woods and fields of grasses. This land would belong to the deer and wild boar, wouldn't it? Why did man come into this world? It's frightening ... mankind."

What is the place of men and women in that natural canvas? The supremacy of nature is fleeting when it is us who eventually manipulate it at our own bidding. Takichiro turned to Western painters like Klee who were inspired by orientalism in order to come up with a flower pattern for his daughter's obi. He sought harmony and yet Hideo, a young master weaver, saw through the artifice of the design and dismissed it as lacking in "harmony". Hideo recognized that, ultimately, an artistic design for an obi can mimic the color of the flowers, yet it can never capture the true beauty of nature.

One after the other, the Kyoto festivals were described in the novel in detail, a seemingly endless profusion of ceremonies. The Gion festival, the bamboo cutting ceremony at Kurama Temple, the Daimonji fire-lighting festival, the Festival of the Ages. In these moments the novel seemed to transform into a cultural guide to festivals.

By interspersing these cultural events with nature viewings, the novelist seemed to contrast the activities of man in unbuilt nature and in his built environment. Rainer Maria Rilke, in the first of his Duino Elegies, seemed to have voiced the same perpetual listlessness of the novel's characters, as they move in the world interpreted for them:

... Ah, whom can we ever turn to
in our need? Not angels, not humans,
and already the knowing animals are aware
that we are not really at home in
our interpreted world. Perhaps there remains for us
some tree on a hillside, which every day we can take
into our vision; there remains for us yesterday's street
and the loyalty of a habit so much at ease
when it stayed with us that it moved in and never left.

The cedars and willows are always at home in the natural world. In contrast, the fine art of painting, the wearing of colorful obis, and the festivals - all are mere "interpretations" of nature, all subject to human appreciation. They exist as a culmination of inspiration, having been shaped after the likeness of trees and flowers.

Kawabata said in his Nobel Prize speech that his goal is to seek man's harmony in nature. In The Old Capital, the novelist manipulated nature and conducted a "natural experiment" to observe a person discovering her natural (biological) identity. The novelist set up questing identities, selves, and cultures in their natural surroundings and from there sought to define their feelings for it.

Chieko preferred camphor trees over mountain cedar trees presumably because the former are natural forest trees while the latter are man-made plantations. It cannot be denied that the gulf between landscape and man widens whenever land use decisions led to alteration and modification of nature.

To repair a broken connection is a difficult thing. Because the forest trees possess some great power, a "weird power", that holds sway over the characters, they have the capacity to strike them to the core, to restore them to their selves, who were born naked in the face of the elements. From a delicate sequence of sentences and passages as slender as cherry branches, Kawabata produced a beautiful work of ecological realism. One that questioned the rootedness of man in the natural environment and in this, our interpreted world.

Addendum to the reading plan (June 2011)

2011-06-10T00:08:00.003+08:00

In addition to the books mentioned in the previous post, I'll be flipping through the flip side of modern theater.

6. The Ubu Plays by Alfred Jarry, translated from the French by Cyril Connolly and Simon Watson Taylor

Aba, it's Ubu!

The inimitable bloggers Nicole of bibliographing and Amateur Reader of Wuthering Expectations are hosting the The Anything Ubu Readalong Opportunity.

My edition (thanks to J for picking me up a copy - the very last copy - at Fully Booked Rockwell) contains the three core Ubu texts: Ubu Rex, Ubu Cuckolded, and Ubu Enchained.

I'm already un-bored.

Ubu cross-posted.

Reading plan: June 2011

2011-06-01T22:04:00.009+08:00

Here's my reading plan this month:

Design by Teammanila

1. El Filibusterismo (Subversion) by José Rizal, translated from the Spanish by Ma. Soledad Lacson-Locsin

The Filipino national hero is celebrating his 150th birth anniversary on June 19. In observance of it, the Malacañang Palace declared June 20 a non-working holiday. What better way to celebrate this than by reading one of his two masterpieces? The other one is Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not) to which El Filibusterismo is the sequel.

Originally written in Spanish, the two novels are popularly known as the Noli and Fili. As I've written previously: "The novels of Rizal, the Noli Me Tangere and its sequel El Filibusterismo, are the formative documents in the securing of Philippine independence from the Spanish government before the turn of the twentieth century. The tinder that set on fire the hearts and spirits of Filipino freedom fighters, they inspired the revolutionaries to fight for their own independence."

Incidentally, Penguin is coming up with a new translation by Harold Augenbraum (via The Literary Saloon). But I don't have this copy. The one I have is by Ma. Soledad Lacson-Locsin so that's the one I'm going to read and blog about. It was also her version (a superb version, I think) of the Noli which I read in 2009. I've previously read both books in English translation by Leon Ma. Guerrero. The books were required reading in school. I'm excited about this read because I personally prefer the Fili over the Noli, although both are great really.

2. Austerlitz by W G Sebald, translated from the German by Anthea Bell

This is for a group read in the Sebald group in Shelfari. Our discussion starts in July. This will be the fourth selection of the group. Austerlitz won for its author and translator the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2002.

3. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz

This is the June selection by the Wolves. I sort of liked Díaz's short stories in Drown. Oscar Wao should be interesting, footnotes and irreverence and all.

4. The Japanese Literature Challenge 5, hosted by Dolce Bellezza, just took off today and I'm so hyped up I listed down the books I plan to read in the next 8 months. My short list comes to more than a dozen titles. Wishful thinking, I hope not. Last year I was able to finish 15 Japanese books, and this year I count 6 books already. As to which one to read first for this year's challenge, I'm thinking of finally starting something by Yasunari Kawabata or Shusaku Endo.

5. Your Face Tomorrow by Javier Marías, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa

The Your Face Tomorrow Group Read is being hosted by Richard at Caravana de recuerdos. The discussion of the first volume, Fever and Spear, will officially start at the end of the month. I will be joining in August for the finale - Poison, Shadow and Farewell. I heard there's a twist at the end of the book. A twist no one could have seen coming.

Underground (Murakami Haruki)

2011-05-29T21:19:00.007+08:00

Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche
by Murakami Haruki, translated from the Japanese by Alfred Birnbaum and Philip Gabriel

I wanted, if at all possible, to get away from any formula; to recognize that each person on the subway that morning had a face, a life, a family, hopes and fears, contradictions and dilemmas—and that all these factors had a place in the drama.

The drama took place on March 20, 1995. Five men, members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult, released sarin poison gas inside the trains of the Tokyo subway, killed a dozen people, and injured hundreds. Nine months after the incident, the novelist Haruki Murakami began to interview the victims in order to understand what actually happened.

Underground followed the template of Murakami's fiction: the story of ordinary men and women thrust in an abnormal situation. But it was a real nightmare happening to real people in the real world, unfolding as if in real time. He did what Gabriel García Márquez did in Clandestine in Chile—compress hours of interviews into a compelling narrative.

The narrative has two self-contained parts, divided into short sections focusing on one person and his part in the gas attack. The first part, titled "Underground", was translated by Alfred Birnbaum. It recounted the event from the victims' point of view. To balance the story the second part, "The Place That Was Promised", translated by Philip Gabriel, told of the stories of members and ex-members of the Aum cult. The first part was already a brilliant exploration of the outcome of terrorism; the second part was a glimpse into the minds of individuals who renounced the world and joined the religious cult.

In the first part, the victims and their relatives narrated the story one by one. They shared their personal backgrounds, where they came from and where they were born, their current occupation, the daily itinerary of their train rides, and what happened to them in the subway on the day they were exposed to sarin gas. For most of the victims, the attack had taken a permanent toll on their health. It had adversely affected their physical and mental constitutions. Many are still burdened by the aftereffects of sarin months after inhaling it.

The individual stories fitted well into Murakami's adopted journalistic framework to convey a macroscopic view of the nightmare. The story of the attack may have been predetermined; the outcome was all over the news. But here it was told naturally, without sensationalism, and yet several moments in the book would give one the scare. While some of Murakami's fiction was permeated with elements of science fiction and magic, the true story here stuck to the "truth". Ultimately, the truth was no less unbelievable or surreal, just like any surreal event in life.

The acknowledged influences in the composition of Underground were Studs Terkel and Bob Greene, but the form and structure itself was reminiscent of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke's story "In a Grove". Several witnesses were asked in a kind of deposition to recount what happened on that day. The accumulation of the stories portrayed a kind of hell, a nightmare experienced in broad daylight, underground.

(Murakami was too entrenched in his subject to completely efface himself from the narrative. His strong opinions were shared in the prefaces to the two parts, in the brief introductory sections preceding each interviewee's account, and in his summary essays at the end of the two parts. In contrast to the oblique way with which he confronted the catastrophe of the Kobe earthquake in after the quake, this work of nonfiction tackled upfront the cruelty inflicted on an unsuspecting public.)

LEFT IMAGE: NORMAL LEFT EYE OF A RABBIT; RIGHT IMAGE: CONTRACTION OF THE PUPIL, 5 MINUTES AFTER THE INSTILLATION OF 5 µg/kg OF SARIN (Vijayaraghavan et al. 2007)

Just how deadly was sarin gas? Classified as a weapon of mass destruction and banned by the United Nations in 1993, a tiny drop of it could kill a person on the spot. Depending on the amount of exposure, sarin can lead to contraction of the eye pupils, convulsions, coma, difficulty in breathing, disturbed sleep and nightmares, extreme sensitivity to light, foaming at the mouth, high fevers, loss of consciousness, loss of memory, nausea and vomiting, paralysis, post-traumatic stress disorder, respiratory ailments, seizures, uncontrollable trembling, vision problems (temporary or permanent), and death.

(One victim suggested that increasing materialism was partly to blame as catalyst to this attack. Capitalism as a precondition to insensitivity, the loss of moral compass, leading to complacency, selfishness, and cruelty. This critique was not really too pronounced in the book although one can frame this latent argument from the way the narrative repeatedly presented the attack as an interruption of the subway passengers' travel to their work. Something of a Marxist idea about this interruption of the mode of production was similar to the way countless crimes against women in Roberto Bolaño's 2666 can be seen as an indictment of the maquiladora economy in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.)

In the first part, Murakami questioned 35 individuals and elicited from them a sense of what it felt like to be in the middle of a tragedy. It was obvious that he had copious amounts of sympathy for the victims. In interview after interview, he introduced a new face, a new victim, someone with not just a unique injury but a new perspective on what transpired on that day. The victims were telling and re-telling the terrorist act for the reader, over and over.

   ... I walked up the stairs to the ticket barrier and went above ground. Suddenly I met with the most amazing sight. People were dropping like flies all over the place.
   I'd taken the third car from the back and had absolutely no idea what was happening at the front of the platform. I was just heading up above ground, swearing under my breath like everyone else, when right before my eyes I saw three people fall down and foam at the mouth, their arms and legs twitching. "What the hell's going on here?" I thought.
   Closest to me was this man whose limbs were quivering, he was trembling all over and foaming at the mouth, having some kind of seizure. I just looked at him and my jaw dropped. I knew it was serious and rushed over to ask him what had happened. I could see he needed immediate care. That's when someone who was still walking by said, "Him foaming like that is dangerous, you'd better stuff some newspaper in his mouth." So we both helped him. After that all these exhausted people kept coming up from the ticket barrier below, then dropping to the ground. I couldn't work out what had happened. Some of the people sitting down suddenly just keeled over flat out.

What would be the point of replaying for the reader the above scene in different ways, repeatedly drilling the same thing in his mind? All these individual stories, what do they say? Do they add up to something coherent, something that can be grasped?

One was struck by a variety of responses to the attack: anguish, complacency, bitterness, fear, trauma. Seen from many angles, the gas attack approached a certain magnitude of reality for the reader, just as it must have had for the novelist who personally talked and listened to the victims, shaping and re-shaping the narrative in his mind.

In the act of reading, the packets of sarin were being punctured dozens of times, the deadly liquid spreading on the floor, releasing the potent smell and downing passenger after passenger. But in the end it did not feel gratuitous or redundant to me. The stories were reliving the individual responses, reactions, and sufferings; yet collectively they were pointing to something more troubling, more arresting. We were not learning something from one tragedy, one nightmare, or one moment of hell. We were reading about many disasters, many parallel nightmares, many hells that materialized simultaneously.

"Overwhelming violence" is Murakami's description of catastrophes in Japan, which included the 1995 Kobe earthquake and may as well include the recent March earthquake and the resulting tsunami and the nuclear accidents. Hate and violence and natural calamities are being staged in an uncertain world. It is a world where one moment you're walking and standing free, and the next moment you are tipping over the train platform, the world turning upside down, literally darkening in front of you.

The blow was very hard but that doesn't mean one ought to give up. What the survivors can do is describe what memory can still describe. And what the writer can do is seek out the witnesses, listen to their stories, and set on paper testimonials of suffering. Murakami accomplished what he set out to do: describe a person's life, family, hopes and fears, contradictions, and dilemmas. In addition, "Underground" was a catalogue of crimes.

What impelled the novelist to write about the gas attack was his desire to know how this kind of event could happen in Tokyo, one of the safest cities in the world. A terrorist act by a religious group, undertaken in the name of salvation, flew in the face of everything we hold sacred. Logic and common sense broke down. In the transcribed interviews in Underground, belated words after the brutal fact, Murakami allowed the victims to assert their humanities in a dangerous world. He wrote a memorial for human fortitude, a manifesto against irrationality.

(Posted in early form in Project Dogeared; Chemical structure of sarin nerve gas from Wikipedia; Images of rabbit's eye from J Med CBR Def.)

Journey Into the Past (Stefan Zweig)

2011-05-26T11:21:00.005+08:00

Journey Into the Past is a well written novella about love tested by years of physical separation. It reminds me of Henry James in the depiction of inner passions and conflicts, but with a more fast paced and electric prose. Not to say that James is less intense, but his is a kind of cold intensity that withers a flower in a single glance. Stefan Zweig's intensity is a fever-pitch evocation of desire and disappointment.

Ludwig, a man of humble beginnings, fell in love with his employer's wife, and she with him. They recognized their strong feelings for each other on the eve of Ludwig's departure abroad. He was sent overseas, in Mexico, to oversee a mining venture, a rare chance for him to improve his lot in life. The job will cost him two years away from Germany. Before his departure the lovers came to an understanding that they will renew their relationship when he returns to Germany. After two years, when he was just about ready to come home, the first world war broke out and transport to Europe was cut off.

Like James, class distinction between characters hangs like an oppressive weight. Early in the book the narrator Ludwig contemplates his new opulent surroundings, the house of his employer where he was asked to live:

All he had brought with him, even he himself in his own clothes, shrank to miserable proportions in this spacious, well-lit room. His one coat, ridiculously occupying the big, wide wardrobe, looked like a hanged man; his few washing things and his shabby shaving kit lay on the roomy, marble-tiled wash-stand like something he had coughed up or a tool carelessly left there by a workman; and instinctively he threw a shawl over the hard, ugly wooden trunk, envying it for its ability to lie in hiding here, while he himself stood inside these four walls like a burglar caught in the act. In vain he tried to counter his ashamed, angry sense of being nothing by reminding himself that he had been specifically asked for, pressingly invited to come. But the comfortable solidity of the items around him kept demolishing his arguments. He felt small again, insignificant, of no account in the face of this ostentatious, magnificent world of money, servants, flunkeys and other hangers-on, human furniture that had been bought and could be lent out. It was as if his own nature had been stolen from him. [12-13]

Being a member of the lower class ("His one coat ... looked like a hanged man"), in Ludwig's own mind, is like being a criminal ("like a burglar, caught in the act") and at the same like a victim ("his own nature had been stolen from him"). The book is characterized by this kind of inner speech, where the protagonist blurts out his emotional and mental angsts.

Ludwig's stream of feelings is in constant flux, undergoing metamorphosis. His self-awareness is fueled by suddenness, by uninhibited epiphanies.

... She shone down from another sphere, beyond desire, pure and inviolable, and even in his most passionate dreams he did not venture so far as to undress her. In boyish confusion, he loved the fragrance of her presence, appreciating all her movements as if they were music, glad of her confidence in him and always fearing to show her any of the overwhelming emotion that stirred within him, an emotion still without a name but long since fully formed and glowing in its place of concealment.

But love truly becomes only love when, no longer an embryo developing painfully in the darkness of the body, it ventures to confess itself with lips and breath. However hard it tries to remain a chrysalis, a time comes when the intricate tissue of the cocoon tears, and out it falls, dropping from the heights to the farthest depths, falling with redoubled force into the startled heart. [19-20]

This is part of a longer passage sketching Ludwig's acknowledgment, at first, of a chaste love. The chrysalis in his mind is getting more desperate to get out and express its wings. He is conscious of his desiring yet its unfolding yields surprise.

And yet love is not only the kind of feeling that arouses Ludwig. It is but part and parcel of his strong sensitivities, his always startled recognitions. This passage comes right after his employer (the Councillor) offered him a new lucrative job, the job that will improve his station in life.

Then he had left the Councillor's study, still heated by the swirl of figures, reeling at the idea of the possibilities that had been conjured up, and once outside the door he stood staring wildly around him for a moment, wondering if the entire conversation could have been a phantasmagoria conjured up by wishful thinking. The space of a wingbeat had raised him from the depths into the sparkling sphere of fulfillment; his blood was still in such turmoil after so stormy an ascent that he had to be in control again, sensing his inner being more powerfully and as if separated from himself. [24]

This is reminiscent of a passage in The Wings of the Dove: "One had only to admit that her complaint was in fact but the excess of the joy of life, and everything did then fit. She couldn’t stop for the joy, but she could go on for it, and with the sense of going on she floated again, was restored to her great spaces."

Ludwig couldn't stop for the joy, he could go on and on, floating, but suddenly his eyes "fell as if by chance on a picture hanging over a large chest, and lingered there. It was her portrait." It was the portrait of his beloved, and realizing the implication of accepting his new job abroad, he once again underwent an extended epileptic-like seizure, a state of possession ("a blow struck through his whole body from the top of his skull to the bottom of his heart, a lightning bolt tearing across the night sky and illuminating everything"). The lightning singed his wings.

This is a pretty intense book, and what makes it intense is the fluid flow of the prose. The book is to be read aloud so as to savor the sentences, the lyricism, and the sentiments. Anthea Bell's translation captured the live-wire intensity of Zweig's poetry and the Jamesian lucidity of perception.

The second half of the book is where the "journey into the past" takes place, though every bittersweet journey here is already some kind of journey into the past. The present is always filtered by what happened in the past. Very aptly, the novella is in the past tense. The intimations of a new war in real time is in the past continuous. And even Ludwig's present thoughts are referred to in relation to the past: "The past always comes between us, the time that has gone by."

Journey Into the Past by Stefan Zweig, translated and with an afterword by Anthea Bell, introduction by André Aciman, New York Review Books, 2010. Copy from BookMooch.

"Ang Dinosawro" (Augusto Monterroso)

2011-05-23T23:44:00.000+08:00

Ang Dinosawro
ni Augusto Monterroso

Pagkagising nya, naroon pa rin ang dinosawro.

Salin mula sa Ingles ni Edith Grossman

Related posts:

"The Dinosaur" (Augusto Monterroso)

An elegant proof

My Kind of Girl (Buddhadeva Bose)

2011-05-16T22:16:00.020+08:00

BUDDHADEVA BOSE

Four men, complete strangers to each other, were stranded on a night train. They met a young couple ("clearly newlyweds") who appeared very much in love. This sight of the couple triggered memories for each of them. They began reflecting about love. They decided to pass the time sharing stories with each other. Each of the four stories that followed was rendered in very simple yet beautiful prose. They were all simple tales but together they form a subtle whole.

Romantic love is the subject of My Kind of Girl (1951, English 2010) by Buddhadeva Bose (1908-1974), a prolific Bengali writer. Though primarily known as a poet, Bose wrote in various genres, including novel, short fiction, drama, and essay. He was often considered in the same breath as the Nobel prize winner Rabindranath Tagore.

The novel is a slim one, 138 pages, translated from Bengali by Arunava Sinha, who is said to be presently at work on Bose's magnum opus Tithidore (1949), a family saga. Bose himself was an accomplished translator of European poets like Rainer Maria Rilke and Charles Baudelaire.

Anyway, romantic love. If being in love is a natural subject for poets, then Bose was one of its purest practitioners. He explored the theme in a very likeable way, even if the stories did not have fairy tale-like endings. There are no special pyrotechnics in his writing, but sometimes the sentences will stop one in his tracks –

In the ashen first light of dawn we saw his lips move. We were so still as we watched, and it was so silent all around, that we seemed to see his words, not hear them.

There's something oddly fantastic about that seeming ability to see words in complete silence. There it was. Utterly compelling.

The descriptions of characters can be cartoonish but the unusual circumstances they found themselves in allowed them to easily surpass their cartoonish-ness. There's a sense of humor, hesitant, poker-faced. Here is a striking passage, a handsome parody of Austen's "truth universally acknowledged":

... Theirs was an affluent household, and a bride would only make their cup of joy brim over. And the boy wasn't one of those typical, bespectacled midgets – just see how handsome he was.
Yes, he was indeed handsome – there was no denying this. I know – knew – Makhanlal very well; at twenty-one he was a burly, powerful giant who looked thirty-two. Large and ungainly, he had prominent teeth, a manly, hair-covered chest, enormous shoes that caused great consternation when they were sighted lying around. Seeing as he could easily pass for a father of three, it didn't seem suitable for him not to be married.

The stories may be sharing the same topic and setting, yet their diverse viewpoints formed individual portraits of the social and cultural contexts of India in the early period of 20th century. The stories formed a whole because they seemed to spring from the same source of feeling. Being in love was mixed in different states of being: disillusion, loss of idealism, pride, kindness, compassion. The simple telling was an assurance that the novel was devoid of mawkish chick-litry.

The stories build on each other. They enlarge. Like love, they can be beautiful and in that sense, inspiring and life-affirming. Also, they can be cruel and heartbreaking and yet still enlarge the heart, by a few millimeters at least.

"The more I heard about love, the more I wanted it," a dejected character cried out at one point in the story he was telling. For love can be addictive. The four voices in My Kind of Girl, spun in a kind of addictive prose, somehow tells of it.

The novel reminded me of another book set in the region. Love and Longing in Bombay by Vikram Chandra is also structured as a book of independent love stories, seemingly linked by the writer's fine sensibility and poetry. It also reminded me of A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth. For the characters are in search of a suitable boy or girl to spend the rest of their lives with. Marriage and matchmaking were the book's provinces.

The two wonderful books by the two Vikrams can be traced to the same (romantic) tradition as Bose's. It was a tradition that was not blind to historical and cultural shifts in Indian society – to a time when attitudes by, and toward, women were starting to change. These attitudes are increasing liberality and independence. The passing references to them in Bose's stories are constructing a map and milieu of this new understanding.

The book brings in a flux of strong feelings, some empathy, personal and social revolutions. Possibly more. Acquaintanceship with an excellent writer.

I read an advanced reading copy of this book which I received through BookMooch.

(Image)

Beowulf (translation by Seamus Heaney)

2011-05-14T18:18:00.006+08:00

Spoiler. Alert.

So. In the midst of this fiendish fun-book,
monsters flit to and fro, the hungry blokes.
Heaney's translation exhales and breathes.
It brooks no comparison mayhaps.
Old English’s boon is drinking in its words,
delivering blow by blow as swords clash
bilingually. The movie grays beyond
compare to the verses that believe
in the breast where the chain-mail protects
our hero’s blood, and flesh. The chain-mail cloth
is everything to the brave wolf’s safety net.
To the adventuring prince Beowulf, it brings
the bad bad wolf into the epic
big big.

Ho! The villain comes to town
to slay a lot of warriors, to orphan boys
and girls. Beowulf to the rescue, fasten
your seats. The ride’s rough but blood
is plentiful. Holy smack! The brutal
arm-of-monster is ripped-torn from
the sharp shoulder blade. It demands big-eyed
wonderment: the hero’s bare-hand handiwork,
He was unarmed, yes, yet he prevailed, leaving
a one-armed monster with a big wound
to lick. Thus ended the evil ambushing,
the terror-monger's terrible monstering.
The ligaments were showing, the wire of nerves.
Blood drip-dripped, the bad monster’s life’s snatched
as the arm was un-armed. While our insouciant hero
Beowulf was unharmed! Hurrah!

The death-den is inviting men to the death.
God-Messiah we pray for the strength of one man:
the macho muscles of the brawn Beowulf.
He was the stoic power of the people. He must
have crunched up to the bone, built strength
to the marrow, exercised fastidiously, lifted
weights, then aghast, his enemies
must cower and declare their sincere cowardice
else their heads fall to the side, leaving
headless necks atop headless bodies.
Heeded, less and more, the call of poetry -
Heaney was bold to use words that build
realism of battle scenes and gruesome gore.

Act Two was the jolly vengeance of angry ma.
Grendel was grand yet his mother was grander.
Monsters extraordinaire, the twosome trolls
haunted the lands of Denmark, mark it.
The battleground was ever wet, the sea.
Beowulf brought his diving gear and
dived to the bottom of the muck where
the ugly wicked momma sat femme fatally.
Nothing was as risky as that, cannibally,
a truesome truth that grew out of some
pure greed and gluttony, an evil hue.
The underwater skirmish would make
the non-swimmer squirm in his skin.
Beowulf emerged from the water victorious,
the aqua-monster was victimized,
drowned by her own amphibious lungs.

Years passed.

Ha! Enter the dragon breathing fire
in each cranny and nook. The cave of treasure
was thieved and dragon went berserk.
The gold must be returned by hook
or by crooked ways. The reader on edge, at the precipice’s
edge, suspense suspended, hanging by threads.
Spiderman’s finally defeated, crawling on all fours
after inflicting the draconian wound to his enemy.
Testosterone’s elevated to the throne,
Pure energy, pure pyre and fireworks.
The visual effects eye-popped and thrown
the reader out of balance watching
with bated breath, as the hero bathed in sweat.
The ring-leader was un-ringed, the hero
was un-kinged, escaped his final escapade,
delivered his final feeble speech. The people
were aggrieved by this smashing turn of events.
Exeunt knifed dragon and slain dragon-slayer.

Before the blogger forgets, via dismembered
memory, the rating is waiting: five out of five
stars. And may it shine as it brings
a shiner, a result of a hardline punch.
The hard lines of poetry were not by an epigone.
The poet had versed-translated them epically
with the spirit, mayhaps, of nobility,
of Anglo-Saxon succession of virtues
and vices that continue to this day.
Contemporary reader wasn't held at bay.
The interest waxed and did not wane.
It was bloody and disarming.

(Image: Gerard Butler as Beowulf)

Don Q, via Cervantes

2011-05-07T03:17:00.011+08:00

RANK BADGE, MING DYNASTY, EARLY 15TH CENTURY CHINA EMBROIDERY

In which the blogger posts his final thoughts on the novel, with a nod to its real author.

The pleasures, the comedies, the verisimilitude of Don Quixote are bottomless, unrelenting, imaginative, that the reader, both the open and close ones, will be relishing its tricks and treats. A reader open to the unforgiving comedy will forgive the author for concocting all kinds of humor, from the slapstick to pitch black. The close reader, if by close we mean the closeness to the spirit of adventure, the willingness to be subjected to quixotic winks and, can I say, sanchic-panzic wit, in other words to be "in on the joke", will be rewarded with plenty of amusement. To be laughed about or lapped up. Or, being laughable, simply lopped off.

'... If you do not believe me, Sancho, I beg you to do something that will correct your mistake and make you see that I am telling you the truth: mount your ass and stalk them [flocks of sheep], and you will soon see how, once they have gone a little way, they turn back into what they were at first and, ceasing to be sheep, become real men again, just as I described them to you. But do not go yet, because I have need of your assistance: come here and see how many of my teeth are missing, for it seems to me that there is not one left in my mouth.'
Sancho came so close that his eyes were nearly inside his master's mouth ... [Part I, Chapter XVIII, Rutherford translation]

We are inside the mind of the author of the Quixote, who at this point is reading the translator's writing from the manuscript by the Arab historian Cide Hamete Benengeli. What happens next inside the mouth of our knight errant, where Sancho's eyes peered as close as any close reader of a text, is so gross it could turn one's stomach upside down and spew all the hibernating contents. For that was precisely what happened.

The history sometimes displays humor through puns so sprightly they could make one jump up and down:

'I didn't cut any capers in the blanket.' Sancho retorted. 'I cut them in the air, and more of them than I'd have chosen to.'
'I suppose,' added Don Quixote, 'that every history that has ever been written has its ups and downs ...' [Part II, Chapter III]

Somehow the comedy also paints a most disturbing picture of the times. Spain in the time of Cervantes being a time of inquisitive struggles.

   ... Sancho stood up and took himself a good way off, and as he went to lean against another tree he felt something touching his head; he raised his hands and they came into contact with two feet in their shoes and stockings. He shuddered with fear and went to another tree, and the same thing happened there. He screamed to Don Quixote for help. Don Quixote came and when he asked Sancho what had happened and what he was frightened of, Sancho replied that all those trees were full of human feet and legs. Don Quixote felt them, and immediately realized what the cause might be, and said:
   'There's no need to be afraid, these legs and feet that you can feel and cannot see must belong to outlaws and bandits who have been hanged from these trees; in these parts the authorities hang them twenty or thirty at a time when they catch them, from which I deduce that we must be near Barcelona.'
   And he was quite right, too. As they were leaving, they raised their eyes and saw the fruit that was hanging from those trees: bandits' corpses. [Part II, Chapter LX]

There's no need to be afraid. Yeah, right. Can anything be more surreal than some booted pairs of feet dangling lifeless from trees. Indeed, it could be an influence of a scene happening in the night. A powerful, disconcerting image in any context that it will give one pause (there's a striking passage, for example, in Laforet's Nada referring to a hanged man on a tree, quoted in Caravana de recuerdos.) What a strange and black sense of humor the historian must have had to include this unsolicited lesson on the death penalty. Poor Sancho. The comedy is not funny at all when you just plain jump in fright and it's your heart that goes up and down.

The translated "true history" was so grounded in the historical and the real that it contained some details that speak of events, conflicts and religious policies in the 16th/17th century. There was also, for example, the prejudice against races, particularly the Morisco people (converts from Muslim) who were forcibly driven out of Spain because of their race.

There was no respite to humor in the novel. Comedy was so well integrated into the history's base and superstructure that it functioned as a conduit for its telling. Humor and history closely accompanied each other.

In addition to poking fun of knightly misadventures and verisimilar historical events, the true history floated certain questions of authorship, translation, plagiarism, and the self-determination of characters. Humor also brought these questions to their feet.

Don Quixote, it turned out, had such a poor regard of translation that he inadvertently belittled his own true history, which was in the first place a purported text translated from the Arabic. In fact, the Quixote is not so much an early instance of metafiction as the progenitor of what could be termed as a meta-translation. That is, a written text that (i) is being put forward as a translation and (ii) is well-aware of the fact.

Here is our knight on the subject of translation (a passage used as epigraph in translator John Rutherford's introduction to the book):

And yet it seems to me that translating from one language into another, except from those queens of languages, Greek and Latin, is like viewing Flemish tapestries from the wrong side, when, although one can make out the figures, they are covered by threads that obscure them, and one cannot appreciate the smooth finish of the right side; and translating from easy languages is no indication of talent or literary ability, any more than transcribing or copying a document on to another piece of paper is. [Part II, Chapter LXII]

Arabic being one of these "easy languages" instantly made the present written history of our knight already suspect, presumably because it has hidden the smooth finish of the fabric. (Of course, the English translation stitched from the Spanish doubly concealed the lining. So we didn't really stand a chance.) For although Don Quixote extols the virtues of his historian for his supposed accuracy in laying down his adventures, his idea of the inadequacy of translation to deliver the nuances of the whole pattern of the tapestry, humbled the entire enterprise of the paid translator. This seeming inconsistency was yet another manifestation of the pragmatic attitude of the storyteller toward his own tale that harks back to the very first sentences of the novel, where the narrator confessed that the idea for the book (likened to a "son") was conceived while he was in prison.

Idle reader: I don't have to swear any oaths to persuade you that I should like this book, since it is the son of my brain, to be the most beautiful, elegant and intelligent book imaginable. But I couldn't go against the order of nature, according to which like gives birth to like. And to what can my barren and ill-cultivated mind give birth except the history of a dry, shrivelled child, whimsical and full of extravagant fancies that nobody has ever imagined – a child born, after all, in prison, where every discomfort has its seat and every dismal sound its habitation? [Prologue]

Ah, truth in storytelling is never as slippery as when one tries to efface the traces of active authorship by electing to be humble before one's own creation. How could something living and vital be willed to be born if the mind that constructed it was, from the start, dry and barren, hence infertile?

One last note. Going back to the idea of translation as the reverse side of the tapestry, this novel metaphor yet proved original thinking on the part of the speaker.

Or not.

It may be possible that this fabric thing was fabricated from another source, in the same way that several lyrics and verses in the novel were filched from other writers and appropriated by Don Quixote as his own. A similar idea on translation was alluded to in The Book of Tea (1906) by Kakuzo Okakura:

Translation is always a treason, and as a Ming author observes, can at its best be only the reverse side of a brocade—all threads are there, but not the subtlety of colour or design. But, after all, what great doctrine is there which is easy to expound?

The idea of translation as the reverse of tapestry [PDF] was attributed to an author of the Ming dynasty, whose reign at least overlapped with the lifetime of Cervantes. Who was this Ming author and what exactly did he say, in what book or scroll? Whether the brocade/tapestry idea was independently formulated by Cervantes or whether he absorbed it from the Ming directly or indirectly, is still an open question. In the meantime, those threads were indeed obscuring the design, preventing us from admiring the full frontal beauty of the original.

But why does a viewer choose to look from behind? One can always turn the carpet around and look for the embroidery. An imaginative translation of a meta-translation, from any language, king or queen or subject, has the capacity to reveal the intricate colors by approximating the loops the threads make in the original, using different kinds of fibers. If it is any good, it could even weave another textile of its own, one whose subtlety and smoothness can approach the original patterning. The workmanship preserved regardless of how the translator has woven the materials or operated the loom.

P.S.
Do not believe the blogger when he said this will be his final post on the subject. He has mooched another adaptation that promises to explore some catholic ideas about the nature of truth, or that will probably tackle faithfulness to the source text, if not the author's faith to his brainchild. "Don Q, via Greene" goes like this:

[T]he author continues to explore moral and theological dilemmas through psychologically astute character studies and exciting drama on an international stage. The title character of Monsignor Quixote is a village priest, elevated to the rank of monsignor through a clerical error, who travels to Madrid accompanied by his best friend, Sancho, the Communist ex-mayor of the village ...

Doesn't that sound the least bit heretical?

(Image source: Rank badge [China] (1988.154.1) | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

South of the Border, West of the Sun (Murakami Haruki)

2011-05-06T14:23:00.012+08:00

The story, a love story, is simple. A boy fell in love with a girl. Many years later, when the man was already married, they met again.

I usually hate Haruki Murakami's fiction. The flatness of his characters, the cheesy self-help quotes, the repetitions of these cheesy self-help quotes, the poor execution of surrealism. These are some of my gripes about his works, particularly in most short stories in The Elephant Vanishes, all the stories in after the quake, and in Kafka on the Shore. The latter novel is simply an ambitious mess of puzzle fragments whose seams show at the edges. So I'm a bit surprised with the depth of characterization in South of the Border, West of the Sun. Murakami's mannerisms were still present but they were tempered by the voice of its narrator. The things that don't work well with the other books found their way here in concentrated form but somehow this book resisted the tendency to be mediocre. Perhaps it was because of the straight diction of the book, which can be detected in translator Philip Gabriel's careful words. For some reason, I liked this book as much as I liked Norwegian Wood. The simple writing style evoked authentic feelings of pain and loss. The characters were ordinary (ordinary guy, ordinary person) as the characters themselves are wont to describe themselves, here as well as in Norwegian Wood. Their very ordinariness questioning the extraordinary circumstances they find themselves in, the unusual relationships forged and broken. The narrator's emotional journey progressed through a fair amount of self-examination, an all too honest self-examination that was despairing and yet never totally depressing, never completely succumbing to the blows of life and hate, to the vision of the abyss. The main characters foundered and were lost. But a touch of hope lingered at the end, a generous glimpse of the miracle of existence. The ordinary characters were trying to be brave for the coming of "a brand-new day", here in this novel and in others.

This love story had certain moments of darkness, certain ominous moments. Yet in certain places, it had lightness and buoyancy, the fleeting clarity of an insight. Perhaps an inner truth, perhaps what goes on in the heart.

It's a good story. As clear and transparent as good wine.

(Image)