19 March 2025

The ephemera of Bernardo Soares

 

I read and am liberated. I acquire objectivity. I cease being myself and so scattered. And what I read, instead of being like a nearly invisible suit that sometimes oppresses me, is the external world’s tremendous and remarkable clarity, the sun that sees everyone, the moon that splotches the still earth with shadows, the wide expanses that end in the sea, the blackly solid trees whose tops greenly wave, the steady peace of ponds on farms, the terraced slopes with their paths overgrown by grape-vines.

I picked up The Book of Disquiet, again, and started from the very beginning. I wasn't able to mark where I left off so I decided to begin this fragmentary novel from the first page, from the introduction by editor and translator Richard Zenith. By fragment #87 – which ended thus, "Better and happier those who, recognizing that everything is fictitious, write the novel before someone writes it for them and, like Machiavelli, don courtly garments to write in secret." – I knew that my first pass already brought me up to a fifth or a fourth of the book. Rereading could be futile. Bernardo Soares himself could not bring himself to reread.

I reread? A lie! I don’t dare reread. I can’t reread. What good would it do me to reread? The person in the writing is someone else. I no longer understand a thing… [Text 63]

Soares was not the one flipping the pages but Fernando Pessoa. The author's identity is fickle. In a book about states of being and consciousness, hyperreal dreams, and intellectualized tedium, we detect the inconsistent protests of a poet suffering from impostor syndrome. His only recourse was random jottings; he could be the forerunner of modern blogging. He devoted his life to art and its contradictions and so embraced the contradictions of a life lived on the fringes of art.

We may know that the work we continue to put off doing will be bad. Worse, however, is the work we never do. A work that’s finished is at least finished. It may be poor, but it exists, like the miserable plant in the lone flowerpot of my neighbour who’s crippled. That plant is her happiness, and sometimes it’s even mine. What I write, bad as it is, may provide some hurt or sad soul a few moments of distraction from something worse. That’s enough for me, or it isn’t enough, but it serves some purpose, and so it is with all of life. [Text 14]

Blogger without a platform, Soares killed time writing to give his readers some sort of distraction. He believed it served a purpose because otherwise he'd be forced to admit that the time he spent on writing was all a waste.

Zenith's introduction prepped the reader for the chaotic and tedious composition of the book. Soares struggled writing and organizing it for most of his life. "Unfinished and unfinishable", the art consumed the artist. If only the novelist was born in the age of NaNoWriMo, then he could have made progress on his unfinishable enterprise, copy-pasting and tracking changes to his heart's content. Zenith believed though that it would not be the same masterpiece had Soares completed the task. Tightly edited, coherent, smoothly flowing, and possibly streamlined to half its published length, the non-posthumous Book of Disquiet would have been more daring and more passionate but less disquieting.

The editor said that the sequence he followed to shape the fragments was not definitive and was informed by a rough skeleton of dated fragments arranged chronologically. According to him, the reader could open the book at any page, create their own order of the texts, and proceed to any random page. A chaotic species of composition deserved an equally chaotic decryption. An unorthodox reading would not lose the decadent spirit and drift of Disquiet

With so many entry points and possibilities of arranging the texts and countless ways of reading and ordering the fragments, backward, forward, skipping every two or three pages at a time, it would not be an exaggeration to say that Disquiet is the definition of an infinite book. A book by Pessoa, the father of pluralism, had a secure place in the invisible library of Borges, a prominent place in the Library of Babel.

If it was up to me, I would appreciate holding a fragmentary version of Disquiet, the way Soares left it for posterity. In a large envelope and in a trunk, the texts written in different formats and all forms of paper. "He wrote," Zenith said, "in notebooks, on loose sheets, on the backs of letters, advertisements and handbills, on stationery from the firms he worked for and from the cafés he frequented, on envelopes, on paper scraps, and in the margins of his own earlier texts." 

These ephemera deserved a better packaging, printed and preserved just as they languished for almost half a century (47 years) before their publication in a bound book. Opening that vessel of texts, the closest feeling I would potentially compare it to was when I, trembling, opened the box containing the stapled chapters of The Unfortunates by B.S. Johnson. Plus, I would throw in the lists Pessoa made of non-existent poems, stories, and books. Who is to say they do not exist? The fact that their titles exist made them exist. If only we would look hard enough.

"Each writer," Borges wrote, "creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future. In this correlation, the identity or plurality of men doesn't matter." In his writing, Pessoa created his own precursors: fictional authors writing about fictitious writers and fictive pieces, dreaming dreams inside dreams and daydreams. His "plurality of men" (heteronyms) doesn't matter. 

I am still obsessed with creating a false world, and will be until I die. Today I don’t line up spools of thread and chess pawns (with an occasional bishop or knight sticking out) in the drawers of my chest, but I regret that I don’t, and in my imagination I line up the characters – so alive and dependable! – who occupy my inner life, and this makes me feel cosy, like sitting by a warm fire in winter. I have a world of friends inside me, with their own real, individual, imperfect lives. [Text 92]

The writer fully inhabited the fictions of his beings. The writer inside the writing was somebody else. Soares needed to recover himself from himself: "I gave birth to my infinite being, but I had to wrench myself out of me with forceps."

 

15 March 2025

21 books I look forward to in 2025+

 

Before I get depressed about finishing a draft of a post on the state of this blog or the state of my reading, I decided to list books to be published this year (or beyond) that I want to read. And this cheers me up. I'm still reading "books-books". But ever since enrolling in a doctorate program, my reading fare lately consists of peer-reviewed journal articles and chapters from academic books. The worrying thing is that, since these texts are made up of words and they somehow contain narratives and storylines, I am quite enjoying the academic drudgery and all talk about "framing", "worldviews", "contestations", and "navigating complex, uncertain, and unsustainable societies". The arguments in some of those readings somehow resemble some concepts in the short stories of Borges. Academic reading and writing replaces time spent on reading and blogging. Yet I find I can still manage to squeeze the time to finish the quasi-philosophical ramblings of Clarice Lispector. In her A Breath of Life (Pulsations), for example, I discovered I can no longer distinguish the boundaries between reading and imaginary transcendence, between sense and sensemaking.

AUTHOR: I looked for you in dictionaries and couldn't find your meaning. Where is your synonym in the world? where is my own synonym in life? I'm unequalled.

After encountering four Lispector novels in the span of two years, I came to the conclusion that novels are instruments and vehicles for unearthing found meanings and found feelings. 

I have thoughts I cannot translate into words — sometimes I think a triangle. But when I try to think I get worried about trying to think and nothing comes up. Sometimes my thought is only the whispering of my leaves and branches. But for my best thought words are not found. 
 
I discovered that I need to not know what I’m thinking — if I become conscious of what I’m thinking, I can no longer think, I can only see myself think. When I say “think” I’m referring to the way I dream words. But thought needs to be a feeling. [tr. Johnny Lorenz]

The cumulative effect of passages like this is indescribable. I sometimes think I stumbled upon a comedy bar with a breakthrough artist performing a monologue in laughter and tears. It is alright to be sometimes all over the place. To think with a straight face can be difficult.

I've digressed.

 

1. Wildcat Dome by Yūko Tsushima, translated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda

2. No Man River by Dương Hương, translated by Quan Manh Ha and Charles Waugh

3. Women, Seated by Zhang Yueran, translated by Jeremy Tiang

4. The Aesthetics of Resistance: Volume III by Peter Weiss, translated by Joel Scott. - the end of a trilogy to end all trilogies.

5. Silent Catastrophes by W. G. Sebald, translated by Jo Catling - John Banville said this will "diminish" Sebald's reputation as a master of Central European high literature. I'm not bothered by this pronouncement. It's now more than two decades after Sebald's death. I very much look forward to see Sebald diminish in my fanboy eyes. 

6. Vastlands: The Crossing by João Guimarães Rosa, translated by Alison Entrekin - Coming in 2026, actually. That Cormac McCarthy-inspired subtitle, though.

7. A Suitable Girl by Vikram Seth - may be out next year, or the year after that.

8. Borges by Adolfo Bioy Casares, translated by Valerie Miles. - what, 700 more pages about Borges?

9. Yñiga by Glenn Diaz - Tilted Axis Press, 2026.

10. Out of the World by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated by Martin Aitken - 2027 or thereabouts.

11. Into the Sun by C. F. Ramuz, translated by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan

12. Schattenfroh by Michael Lentz, translated by Max Lawton

13. Unusual Fragments: Japanese Stories by Taeko Kono, Nobuko Takagi, and others, translated by Lucy North, Margaret Mitsutani, and others. From Two Lines Press.

 

From locally published books, I look forward to reading

14. I Am a Voice by Genoveva Edroza-Matute, translated by Soledad S. Reyes - One of the books I bought last Thursday, Day 1 of 2025 Philippine Book Festival (PBF), from the booth of Ateneo de Manila University Press.

15. The Compendium of Impossible Objects by Carlo Paulo Pacolor, translated by Soleil David. This received a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship. I bought the original Filipino (and some other goods) in the PBF booth of the publisher, Everything's Fine PH.

16. Narkokristo, 1896 by Ronaldo S. Vivo Jr. - I finished it in one sitting yesterday.

17. The Twentieth-Century Philippines in Ten Novels: Literature as History (1913-1975) by Soledad S. Reyes

18. Sa Ibang Kariktan (Another Beauty) by Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles - The poet's latest nonfic from The University of the Philippines Press. I also managed to snag his triptych on sonnets, which is part of a septology on a poetry movement Ayer calls "Sonetoismo": Laging Patúngo (Always on the Way), Monstruo, and "Not the Stuff of Sonnets": Ilang Talâ sa Sonetoismo (Notes on Sonnetoism).

19. Pagkamangha sa Parang-Katapusan-ng-Mundo (Awe at the Apocalyptic-ish) by Genevieve L. Asenjo - Not yet on the shelves when Rise dropped by the PBF booth of Balangay Books. 

20. Pitumpung Patnubay sa Paglikha ng Palagiang Panahon (Seventy Guideposts on Creating a Stable World) by Edgar Calabia Samar

21. Cerco un Centro di Gravità Permanente by RM Topacio-Aplaon - the second installment in the Southern Quartet. And to think I haven't started yet anything from his Imus Novels, a projected septology, and am still in the middle of At Night We Are Dancers, which might be the first book in a trilogy. 

Perhaps I want to collect all of these books so that when I see any of them online I can say, just like Borges, "What a pity I can't buy that book because I already have a copy at home."


06 March 2025

Women's Month: Filipina novelists in translation

Last October, someone from Canada emailed to ask if I have updated figures (gender statistics) to a 2016 blog post Women in Translation Month: Novels from the Philippines.

Yes, I have.

Here are the updated numbers:

  • Between 1900 and 2024, a total of 50 novels from the Philippines were translated and published into English. In the past century (1900-1994), only seven of these novels (14%) appeared in English translation for the first time. The first English translations of the rest (43 novels) were published in the last 20 years (2006-2024). Note that "novel" is loosely defined in my list.
  • Out of the 50 translated novels, 13 were written by female novelists (26%). The percentage is expected to go down as 11 novels by male novelists are forthcoming in translation. 
  • Four languages were represented: 30 were translated from Tagalog/Filipino; 10 from Spanish; six from Cebuano, and four from Hiligaynon.
  • The most prolific translator (11 novels) was Soledad S. Reyes.
  • The 50 novels were written by just 39 writers: 31 male and 8 female novelists.
  • The eight female novelists, arranged by number of novels translated, were:  
    1. Rosario de Guzman Lingat (3 books)
    2. Austregelina Espina-Moore (3 books)
    3. Magdalena Gonzaga Jalandoni (2 books)
    4. Luna Sicat Cleto (1 book)
    5. Lualhati Bautista (1 book)
    6. Liwayway Arceo (1 book)
    7. Fe Esperanza Trampe (1 book)
    8. Jonaxx (1 book)

The information came from a database I maintain online: Bibliography of Philippine Novels in English Translation.

The most controversial book in the list, after Noli and Fili, was probably La Loba Negra (The Black She-wolf). The translated book (1958) was published under the name of José A. Burgos, a Catholic priest. Although the original Spanish novel was attributed to Burgos, historians later proved it to be one of the forgeries or hoaxes by Jose E. Marco. The hoax novel was adapted into an opera in 1984.

26 December 2024

Todas las almas


Notes on The Pole: A Novel by J.M. Coetzee (Liveright, 2023)


1. "The decision to invite the Pole ... is arrived at only after some soul-searching." The Pole then is the soul being searched for. And reading The Pole by J.M. Coetzee is an attempt to find the soul in a human being. 

2. If our searchee is Witold, the Pole, our searcher is Beatriz, a board member of a concert organizer in Barcelona. "Dante", the poet, is mentioned 21 times in the novel.

3. For those not into Chopin, Forest of Piano might be a good crash course into the master.

4. Spanish phrases are led astray into the novel. I was half expecting Jesus (or David) to make an appearance. El Polaco first appeared in Spanish translation a year before the original.

5. "Enough to quench whatever spark there is in the soul." The blog's title is a tip of the hat to the late Javier Marías, not least because the novel is partly set in Barcelona. Coetzee was given by the Spaniard the honorary title of Duque de Deshonra, in 2001, for the inaugural Reino de Redonda Prize. Learning of the award:

Professor Coetzee replied, from the University of Cape Town (he now lives in Australia), with a most polite note of thanks, and chose to call himself "Duke of Dishonra" [sic] in Redonda. "Although I am conscious," he wrote, "of both the denotation and the connotations of the Spanish word 'dishonor,' and unless you consider that I am thereby treating the company of Dukes too lightly, I will adhere to that title, which seems to me suitably quixotic." [Google Translate]

6. The word "soul" or "souls" (including words appended with "soul") appears 21 times in The Pole: seven times in the first chapter, 10 times in the penultimate chapter. The novel consists of six chapters and 167 pages in Kindle.

7. The word "feel" (including "feels", "feeling", "feelings", and felt") appeared 30 times.

8. "Happy" (including "unhappy" and "happiness") occurs 18 times. "Music" (and "musical" and "musician"), 40. "Life" and "live" (plus associated words), 82. "Language/s", 12. "Word/s", 41.

9. Witold Walczykiewicz, the Pole pianist, is being confused with Max von Sydow. The novelist Coetzee has finally admitted the resemblance.

10. 

He certainly does not have a big stomach. He is even a bit—she reaches for a word she does not often have a need for—cadavérico, cadaverous. A man like that should bequeath his body to a medical school. They would appreciate having such big bones to practise their skills on.

The black humor in that passage is simply vampiric. Language is a conscious mannerism in the Coetzee universe. An inner translation exists. The Spanish thought, rendered in English, befits the novel's first appearance in Spanish. Novel writing is such a suitably quixotic exercise for Coetzee.

11. As of today, December 26, 2024, 112 other people highlighted this part of the book, according to Kindle:

‘Why is he important? Because he tells us about ourselves. About our desires. Which are sometimes not clear to us. That is my opinion. Which are sometimes desires for that which we cannot have. That which is beyond us.’
 
12.
It is not Chopin who fails to speak to me, Witold, but your Chopin, the Chopin who uses you as his medium—that is what she would say. Claudio Arrauyou know him?—she would go on—Arrau remains, for me, a better interpreter, a better medium. Through Arrau, Chopin speaks to my heart. But of course Arrau was not from Poland, so perhaps there was something he was deaf to, some feature of the mystery of Chopin that foreigners will never understand.
 
Is a Polish pianist the best interpreter we'll ever have of Chopin? Is it because the native pianist breathed the same air and lived in the same landscape as the Pole's, nuances that the foreign interpreter will never be able to incorporate in his repertoire? Such a nativist perspective will forever preclude a foreign genius from being acknowledged.
 
13. 
She writes a second email. ‘Why are you here, Witold? Please be frank with me. I have no time for pretty lies. Beatriz.’ 
 
She deletes I have no time for pretty lies and sends the message. It is not just lies that she has no time for, but also circumlocutions, word games, veiled meanings.
 
A Coetzee novel is a word game. A Freudian slip unmasks the foreign speaker. Lies can be pretty too. Lindas mentiras.

14. "Heart" words, including "heartache" and "heartless", are mentioned 28 times in the novel. "Peace" is used 23 times. "Love", as well as other words with "love" as a root word or as half of compound word (e.g., "lovemaking"), appears 86 times. "Sexy", "sex", and "sexual", 10.

15. The inability to access a language is a tragic barrier to communication. Beatriz had the poems from her lover Witold translated from Polish to Spanish by a translator.
 
The shame is that Clara Weisz, who is no one to her and no one to Witold, has had access to what was going on in Witold’s soul, clearer access than she, for whom the poems were written, will ever have, given that there must be tones, echoes, nuances, subtleties in the Polish that no translation can ever transmit.
 
16.  What was left for Beatriz to interpret—a sheaf of translated pages—was only second-hand Witold, not the essence of her Polish lover. No translation can ever transmit the soul of the original. 
 
17. Not a word of "Quixote" or "quixotic" appears in the novel. 
 
18. Neither does the name "Jesus" appear. Yet the phrase "I am who I am!" appears once.
 
19. "Spanish", meaning the language, or native speaker, or as an adjective, appears 15 times.

20. "Mean" (not the adjective), "meanings", etc., 35 times.

11 September 2024

Prefiguration of a madness unforeseen

 

Does he know what his sentence is?” “No,” the officer said, wanting to continue with his explanations, but the traveler interrupted him: “He does not know his own sentence?” “No,” the officer repeated, pausing briefly as if to insist that the traveler should give a more specific reason for his question, and then said: “There would be no point in announcing it to him … He will come to know it on his body.”
—Kafka

 

Among the stories of Franz Kafka, including those contained in Selected Stories, translated and edited by Mark Harman (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2024), "In the Penal Colony", a tale of brutal torture in a remote garrison, was perhaps the most violent. Yet physical violence or bloodletting was almost an antithetical characteristic of the "Kafkaesque", which often relied on interior or psychological violence, a disorientation so unsettling and pathetic as to unmoor one's self (or one's conception of self). 

The Kafkaesque was on my mind lately as I read Ronaldo Vivo Jr.'s The Power Above Us All, translated by Karl R. de Mesa (Penguin Random House SEA, 2024). The first book in the Dreamland Trilogy, Power was an uncompromising look into police lawlessness and human rights violation. First published in Filipino in 2015, it appears this year in two editions: the English translation and the 10th year anniversary edition of the original Filipino novel.

But going back to the Kafkaesque. Reams of book pages and scholarly materials must have been expended on this "absurd" topic. The closest definition was maybe from translator Harman himself, characterizing his first reading of the writer in German: "Many readers (including myself) tend to identify with the protagonists of Kafka's stories and novels as they grapple with mostly horrible, grotesque, tragic, or inexplicable situations." This was a simplistic definition of the Kafkaesque, taken out of context and probably misused, but, for the purposes of this blog post, it would do.

Power delineated a society in the grip of paranoia and darkness, or a world that could only be described as Kafkaesque. No, scratch that. Power originated the nightmare world of Dreamland, not like a story of Kafka but a director's cut of Kafka, a story where scenes of brutality were digitally restored and transgressive bloodshed was aplenty. In Dreamland, we were far from the politeness of the Kafkaesque though the pervading sense of unease and humor (behind the gratuitous violence) was just as palpable.

I first read Kapangyarihan in early 2015. Its unnerving story of serial killings and torture was lightened in some parts by stories of friendship. Mere anarchy was loosed upon Dreamland. The first and last novels of the Dreamland Trilogy were in fact published outside the time frame of the Duterte presidency (2016-2022). Still, their thematic concerns and brutality were Dutertean. Vivo's Dreamland Trilogy must be contextualized within the era of Duterte violence as it was both a diagnosis of and a response to the societal breakdown whose origins and symptoms came much earlier. 

* * *

Is there such a thing as a Duterte novel? Maybe. To date, the reading list featuring EJKs and published around the time of the Dutertards was short. Patron Saints of Nothing by Randy Ribay. Sindicato & Co. by Jose Elvin Bueno. Andrea: Oyayi sa Daluyong by Rom Factolerin. At Night We Are Dancers by RM Topacio-Aplaon. Even Norman Wilwayco's Migrantik (translated by Peter Dominique Mutuc), whose OFW protagonist was busy sowing curses, ennui, and terror in the morning, noon, and arvo Down Under was touched by the tentacles of EJK madness unforeseen. A tokhang episode in Wilwayco's novel provided its soulful pathos and was arguably the core of the book.

The "Duterte novels", if they could be categorized as such, were a literary condemnation of the police state during the capital War on Drugs under the six-year Duterte regime. Killings, corruption, and impunity backdropped their fictional fabric. The protagonists were visited by desperation or neuroticism, walking aimlessly along streets of darkness, navigating places of urban decay, confronting a society in the grip of necrosis. In the concluding novel of Dreamland Trilogy, Ang Suklam sa Ating Naaagnas na Balat (2024), Vivo used necrosis of the flesh as a fitting metaphor for the damaging impact of corruption and injustice on the soul of the body politic who, fed up by the fucking system, was given an option to collectively turn the tables on their aggressor and fight back, tooth for tooth, savagery for savagery.

* * *

Like the labyrinthine journeys of Kafka's characters trapped in a modern bureaucratic society more than a hundred years ago, Vivo created a consistent world of deepfuckery, describing how it is to live under an authoritarian regime, in a world where "waking nightmares were more dreadful than the ones you had when you slept." The very air, the very atmosphere of that world was suffocating. Something weighed heavily on your chest. Breathing was a chore. The matter of death was a matter of fact.

Here in the Inners, for example, it’s a never-ending inside peek into the gears and cogs of death. We’re all fucking dead down here. Only thing we can’t predict is when we’ll be six feet under. None of us have the inside scoop on that, yet we know full well that death isn’t just measured by getting shipped out in a box. Even with gambling and prayer, we keep vigil at our own wakes on the daily. Because we die every day. With every neighbourhood in this country that’s like the Inners, death carries absolutely no mystery.

...

‘You should be used to it by now. Seems like it’s every month these days there’s a corpse dumped on our streets.’

Published a year before the ascension of Duterte to the throne, Power was a Duterte proto-novel (or ur-text) that anticipated the unspeakable evils of a fascist state, with graphic scenes of violence rendered in transgressive manner. Power was a red band trailer version of the bloody aspects of Philippine society where people of power take advantage of people bereft of power. Except that the red band trailer went the whole fucking length of an R-rated horror movie. The movie foreshadowed a society paralyzed by fear and retribution. It chronicled serial murders and the hunt for the perpetrator or perpetrators. One could not find a more obvious prologue or preamble to the drug-related crimes of an emergent lawless kingdom. Up to now, the official number of victims of the Drug War was still not established. One government estimate pegged it at 20,000 deaths at the hands of mostly policemen who, in a short span of time, became dedicated serial killers at the behest of a sitting president.

When a body is conditioned over and over to an indignity visited upon it, it became normalized. Though he denied it to himself, Butsok realized he was physically craving the experience, that he now equated it as a sign of affection. He despised it. He had come to subconsciously like the violations.
It was grotesque and it must be addicting. And so with the murder spree. As body bags piled up, the nation stood silenced and sidelined, shocked and wide-eyed; the living daylights of hell opened. The initial shock was followed by a numbing sensation of normality. Everything, everyone moved on in his/her daily routine.

In this recent variation of the dictator novel, the agents of malevolence controlled the outcome. They ruled without order and coherence. As with Kafka's story, the citizens were treated like insects; individuals were dehumanized; dignities trampled. Human liberties and happiness were lore. The novel operated on dream logic, nightmare mode. The banality of evil was stultifying. The lopsided power structure gave rise to domestic violence, rape, and serial killings.

"Was there another way out of this clusterfuck?" Karl R. de Mesa surely had the mean streak in spiritedly translating the crass language of this novel. Bad cops were central to the turn of events in Dreamland where the mastermind/s of the killings were hard to pin down. For his part, the kingpin was artistically conducting the music of terror in plain sight. Characters found solace in black humor, struggled sisyphusly in spite of the fear of something ominous, of the power haunting all, dwarfing all.

For my carelessness in forgetting they weren’t human but rather police scum, here I was, only just realizing like a fool that even before we’d arrived at the room where Buldan and I lived, all the evidence had already been planted, all potential allegations to fit their story already ironed.

The body would bear all fresh wounds and old scars of assault. The body would come to know the knowledge of what evil was capable of. The body was the involuntary test subject of political crimes. The official narrative was already decided by the powers that be. Given that the crime story was already foretold and prefigured, how does one resist the madness unforeseen?

I do not think there is such a thing as a Duterte novel inasmuch as there are horror stories of Kafkaesque proportions. Narratives of violence belong to all periods because wars are constant. A tumultuous period in Philippine history is already that: history, for better or worse. Why beget a new fictional category or genre if it was all just a wicked blip in the history of dictators opening a precipice under our feet. If any genre has to stick at all, let it be a reckoning of history, a tallying of crimes, an inventory of sins. Let it not recover our lost innocence and relive the hells we'd been through. Let it reject or transcend notions of what a proper novel should be. Novels about crass society had to be crass and abject, written in obscene language, a public register of private anguish.

If we do not need a novel of restitution or stocktaking tales of guilt and retribution, if not that kind of novel, then what creation?

* * *

"To create today means to create dangerously," said Albert Camus, in a speech translated by Sandra Smith. "Every publication is a deliberate act, and that act makes us vulnerable to the passions of a century that forgives nothing. And so, the question is not to know whether taking action is or is not damaging to art. The question, to everyone who cannot live without art and all it signifies, is simply to know—given the strict controls of countless ideologies (so many cults, such solitude!)—how the enigmatic freedom of creation remains possible."

He went on to say:

What characterizes our times, in fact, is the tension between contemporary sensitivities and the rise of the impoverished masses. We know they exist, whereas before, we tended to ignore them. And if we are aware of them, it is not because the elites, artistic elites or others, have become better. No, let’s be clear about that—it is because the masses have become stronger and won’t allow us to forget them.

If there be a novel that creates or recreates the trauma of the times, then let it be a dystopian novel for the victims of history. The poor, the petty thieves, the drug addicts, the prostitutes, the innocent bystanders, the common people caught in the crossfires.

Camus, once again: We must know that we cannot hide away from communal misery, and that our sole justification, if one exists, is to speak out, as best we can, for those who cannot. And we must do this for everyone who is suffering at this very moment, despite the past or future greatness of the states or political parties that are oppressing them: to artists, there are no privileged torturers.

Fiction must give voice to the powerless, give power to the voiceless. Let the novel be told from the perspective of victims, not tyrants. Let it be told in a language that is crass but sounds true, in passages that were unrefined but communicated the truth. The novel, after all, is a medium of communication. It has the capacity to awaken the victims of history.