So pleasant

 

So pleasant. Crystal waters, springs, shade and sun. Black-Ox Farm, belonged to an Eleutério Lopes — ways afore the Blue Field, on the way to the Scorched Desert. That was in February or January, in the time of the corn bloom. Moreso: what with the silver-tipped country-captain, which thrives in the cerrado; anise adorning its thickets; and the deianiras with tiny flowers. That marmalade grass thicks in fast, redoubling no sooner it sprouts, so sea-green, child of the slightest drizzle. From any cloth of woodland, from nigh-all two-leaves-touching, every colour of butterflies would spiral out. As you’ve never seen, here you see it. Cause in the gerais, the same breed of butterfly, which in other parts is trivial ordinary — here gets bigger, and brighter, you know; I say it’s the dryness of the air, the clear, this huge light. Long the banks of the Urucúia’s headsprings, there the handsome-beauty sings highly. And there was the whistling duck that chichirruped in the first sunblush of morn, the swamp sprite, the loopy-loo, the wee-saw, the striped cuckoo, the cow dove… and the you-I-see kiskadee, and raucous macaws. It was nice to hear the mer of the cows owing their milk. But, little sun-gem in the de-veil of dawn, for every glum thought your mind throws up, he asks again and fakes the answer. Then, in the afternoon, the flycatcher would tumbledive, in high low come go, peck-pecking from mid-flight every wee-winged critter; clever bird. It was going to rain late later. Dusk that fills the trees with cicadas — then, it doesn’t rain. Whistles that closed the day: the bananaquit, the blue grosbeak, the marsh wren, the kingbird, the rusty-thrush, the coconut finch… I was the whole time almost with Diadorim.  

- Excerpt from João Guimarães Rosa's Great Sertão: Meanderings, currently being translated by Alison Entrekin. (Source)

A poet's abdication

Canopy by Mikael de Lara Co (Vagabond Press, 2017) 

This poetry collection was full of invocations, full of imagery so frail and fragile they could shatter at a mere whisper: a river singing its rapids, a string tethered to a wrist, the evergreen canopy, the image of upturned hands. The image of hands upturned as if praying or asking for restitution for specific crimes, or reprieve from extreme weather events, or extreme cruelty, like massacre or genocide. And the task of poetry was questioned continually or its ironic presence invoked to question its role in our lives.

... how come there are always
enough blankets to wrap the bodies in,
always white and ready before the third day,
see, there is a form of empathy so cruel
only poetry can handle it. When
your friend told you about the twins
you wanted to ask him whether he saw
the clots being rinsed off their unripe
bodies, did he flinch, and later
could he name their ghosts. You must
have failed. And still you want to believe
that there is nothing more beautiful
than earnestness, that a human
throat can create a sound so luminous
it could engulf even the most private
of sorrows, that there is, perhaps,
hopefully in everyone, a secret pith
where grief comes from, or terror,
that there are tendrils that can wring
communion from the hungers
that shadow our silences, go,
ask him. Ask your friend now,
Did you see their hands? The twins,
tell me you saw their hands.
[from "Tendrils"]

We never really knew what happened to the twins in Sultan Kudarat, but their deaths were prefigured early on in the poem. This was in a place of perpetual conflict in southern Philippines.

"You [the poet, perhaps] must / have failed." Poetry was not a salve for the wounds. It was a helpless instrument. It could only tether stories of injustice and ask for facts—"Did you see their hands?"—not reparations.

Only the voiceless could count on poetry's compassionate side.

The Doomed

Poetry with lilies can’t stop tanks.
Neither can poetry with tanks.
This much is true.
Here is more or less how it happens.
You sit at your desk
to write a poem about lilies
and a clip of 9mm’s is emptied into the chest
of a mother in Zamboanga.
Her name was Hamira.
I sit at my desk to write a poem about tanks
and a backhoe in Ampatuan
crushes the spines of 57
—I am trying to find another word
for bodies. The task of poetry
is to never run out of words.
This is more or less how it happens:
I find another word for bodies
and Hamira remains dead.
Her son was with her when she was shot.
I didn’t catch his name.
I don’t know if he died. Perhaps
he placed lilies on his mother’s grave;
perhaps he was buried beside her.
One word for lily is enough.
There is enough beauty in flowers.
I want to find beauty in suffering.
I want to fail.

The task of poetry might be to never run out of words, but sometimes they did. In the face of senseless deaths, the artificiality of poetic construction crumbled. In "The Doomed", the poet wanted to embrace failure. Adorno's dictum lived on.

There was always a tactile quality to the poems of Mikael de Lara Co. The weight of his themes were unburdened by the lightness of diction and word choice. The tentativeness of his convictions, the self-questioning, was a hallmark of his humble poetics. He was aware that a false string of words was answerable to his subjects. He tried his best not to make the precious mistake of being too precious. He said as much in his open letter to the world.

Dear World,

I apologize for the many times
I used your suffering to populate
my poetry. To the children in the villages
I am now embarrassed to name,
to Hamira whose grave
I have yet to visit, I am sorry.
To the bees vanishing from their hives,
please understandd: I only wished to borrow
your tiny hearts because mine refused
to be still. Yesterday I read about
... see, here I go again. What does it matter
that the threads of our grief remain unwoven.
Already there are too many sons
hunched over the bodies of too many fathers,
too many daughters sweeping shrapnel
from too many streets. Dear world,
I abdicate my role as poet.
From now on I will dig bones from the mud
only if they are my own, pitch tents
to cover only this sky unshadowed
by bombs. I will make them high enough
to atone for this mouth
full of needles. Wide enough
so that when I am moved to prayer
no one will hear but you.

Perhaps a poet could only be called a true poet if he was not conscious of his role as such. So Mikael de Lara Co had to abdicate the royal profession in order not to condescend to his subject and his readers. Suffering was indeed a slippery subject in poetry. It risked implicating the poet in the perpetuation, or perpetration, of sufferance itself. The poet had to efface himself from the narrative. Words were only petty words, after all. When dealing with heavy subjects, a poet too clever for his own good was a writer of editorials.

Cleverness undoes my tracks.
Has the forest not shown that kindness
is the only map? ...
[from "Aimlessness"] 

If only poetry could be kind in a few words. Yet poetry too is a vision of kindness. It was gentle kindness in the periphery of the poet that absolved him of the guilt of using unnameable suffering as his materials. In a few paltry lines, poets could only strive for this value derivable from their perception of the world. 

A poet need not abdicate his role. Poetry’s task need not be to never run out of words. At the final punctuation, a poem literally runs out of words. A poet abdicates his role. A reader takes over, parses through the words and catches his breath and inhabits a measure of feeling. If he is lucky, he detects a living vitality, a tinge of kindness and sympathy. 

Stories for imeldific times

 

Our Lady of Imelda by Kristian Sendon Cordero (Savage Mind Publishing House and Cecilio Press, undated) 

Recent buys from Savage Mind Bookshop

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I knew the book (booklet, really) was small, but to see and hold it with my hand alongside other normal-sized trade paperback books made me grin. It was a tiny marvel of a booklet, with text printed on unassuming fragile paper. My copy's first page was now torn due to my indelicate handling of the page.

Our Lady of Imelda is a compilation of "two essays" by Kristian Sendon Cordero, the creative spirit behind Savage Mind Bookshop in Naga City. (Cordero's recent interview in Words Without Borders here is relevant.) I have already visited Naga City twice to present papers in seminars related to biodiversity conservation. That was before the indie publisher and bookstore Savage Mind opened shop. Now I'd like to go back to visit and browse their catalog. I have to content myself with ordering books online (via Shopee or through direct message to their FB page) for the time being. Savage Mind also distributes books by Ateneo de Naga University Press. It is fast becoming the leading publisher of quality Philippine books in original language or in translation.

About the booklet in question, I'm not sure when it came out. Probably last year or the year before that. The product description already gave away the unique qualities of the booklet.

Our Lady of Imelda is our first in project in collaboration with Cecilio Press (the oldest printing press operating in Naga City, who published the devotional and literary works of the old Bikolistas like Luis Dato, Antonio Salazar, Manuel Salazar and Sali Imperial). We hope that by giving them new printing projects we help Cecilio Press survive and [face] the challenges brought by the pandemic. 

The booklet contains two essays in Filipino by Cordero, Our Lady of Imelda and [Ang] Senakulo ng mga Colorum, both essays articulates the tangential relations of religions, myths and politics. This is the first in our series which popularize this kind of colportage literature which we hope will introduce our readers to the devotional aspect of writing, printing and reading. We hope that this novena-like material will help us relieve ourselves from our monitors, screens and keyboards.

Indeed, the booklet's "devotional", "colportage", and "novena-like" presentation disguised the revolutionary spirit behind the essays. "Essays" should always be in quotation since the two pieces also courted the boundaries of fiction. For an early version of "Our Lady of Imelda", Cordero won the first prize for Sanaysay (Essay in Filipino) category in the Palanca awards in 2013. This was also published under Sanaysay section in Likhaan: The Journal of Contemporary Philippine Literature in 2014. Next month, this essay will appear in Bernard Kean Capinpin's translation as Our Lady of Imelda and Other Stories, also published by Savage Mind.

"Our Lady of Imelda" was an essay in three parts, each part detailing a factual story related to Our Lady of Peñafrancia: (1) the tragic collapse of Colgante Bridge in Naga during the parade of the Virgin's statue on September 16, 1972, a week before President Ferdinand Marcos announced the imposition of Martial Law in the Philippines; (2) the theft of the Virgin's statue on August 15, 1981, (coincidentally, six days before the assassination of Benigno Aquino Jr., a known Marcos critic); (3) the discovery of the lost statue and its return to Naga on September 8, 1982.

The second essay, "Ang Senakulo ng mga Colorum" (The Passion Play of the Colorum), meanwhile relived the tradition of Senakulo as a theatrical spectacle of Christ's passion on the cross during the Holy Week, right before the celebration of Easter Sunday. In Cordero's colorful telling, the various groups performing the passion play each in their own modern way offered a unique, gendered perspective to this event for the religious.

While the two essays on Imelda and the Colorum group were factual in many respects, their reliance on suppositions and speculations made them fictional portraits of the sometimes tragic and sometimes imeldific stories about the customs and discrete periods of Philippine religious and cultural history. The intertwining of religion, history, and politics, in the case of the first essay, and religion, history, and sexual politics, in the case of the second essay, made for two narratives where religious fervor went hand in hand with human foibles and quirks. 

The first essay began with Colgante bridge collapse in Naga as premonition of the dark age of the Philippines under Martial Law. The way Imelda Marcos hobnobbed with the religious clergy (and vice versa) in those times was indicative of how the Catholic Church was complicit in the Marcos dictatorship. The Church may have played a role in the EDSA Revolution, but it was too little too late.

The booklet indeed mimicked the form of a devotional pamphlet, even being riddled with typos, which may or may not be deliberate, but fit for purpose to the ideas it tried to sell as merchandise. The pamphlet was a throwback to the times when we attend the holy mass and see these devotional books in front of us in the pew. The mode of the booklet's production was a story in itself, and the creative and divinely provocative stories inside were a match to the material form.

Amélie Nothomb's misrepresentations

“Everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler.” The quote was attributed to Einstein. At least that's how The Calculus with Analytic Geometry by Louis Leithold attributed it. It stuck to me because how often do you have a maths textbook with a provoking epigraph. As if the proofs of theorems were not enough for one to get mystified by. After the literary earnestness and apocalyptic sincerity of Benjamín Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World, I feel like reading something more heady. Less serious, more witty. What else but a slice of death of Jesus Christ. Simple, but not simpler.

Jesus Christ was the topic of Thirst, Amélie Nothomb's nth novel, translated from the French by Alison Anderson (Europa Editions, 2021). The story of the events leading to Jesus's crucifixion, told in the first person by a condemned incarnate, the omniscient son of God. 

Like any other non-devout book of fiction about Jesus, it was a riot of divine possibilities and novelistic (i.e., human) intervention. Jesus could peer into the future and foretell the cult surrounding his personality and the posthumous portrayal of his mysterious existence. In a self-critical way, Jesus was speaking in parables about living a simple and happy life and, indirectly, perhaps making a commentary about a mindful present bent on mining for cryptocurrencies and digging for NFTs. 

Or not. Whatever it is Nothomb was up to, she had weaponized the power granted to novelists to reinterpret the Passion of Christ and re-imagine a more plausible scenario or a simpler explanation of what transpired there on the cross, at the peak of Golgotha. 

Luke will write that I said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” That’s a misinterpretation. It was myself I had to forgive: I am more at fault than men are, and it was not from my father that I sought forgiveness. 

I’m relieved I didn’t say it: it would have been condescending towards men. Condescension is the type of scorn I loathe the most. And frankly, I’m in no position to scorn humanity. 

Nor did I say to John (who was no more present at the time than the other disciples), “Behold thy mother,” nor did I say to my mother (who showed the kindness of being absent), “Woman, behold thy son.” John, I love you very much. But that does not mean you can go around spouting nonsense.

Nothomb's Jesus was challenging the official version. God's words no less, as recorded by his disciples. While doctrine makers had religiously exhausted the search for biblical meanings, the novelist still had time to make her own discoveries sacreligiously. A correction was in order: “I [Jesus] am responsible for the greatest misinterpretation in history, which is also the most deleterious.” We were at this juncture now, having lived in such a complicated network of data and information; we must long for the most simple and plausible explanations for our follies, wars, and savageries. 

“The power of love is sometimes so difficult to differentiate from all the other ambient currents. My father sent me here out of love for his creation. Find me a more perverse act of love.” In the tradition of José Saramago's satirical gospel of Jesus Christ, Nothomb produced a Saramagian miniature, perennially quotable and quick-witted, informed by the delicate differentiation of ambient feelings of love and friendship, the fifty gradations of gray areas in human relationships and interactions.

Thank God, Jesus was here depicted as every bit as sensual and self-aware as a human being. Otherwise, he would be God. Nothomb was a freelance evangelist. Unshackled by dogma, she could clarify and contextualize events and invert their original sense if need be. 

I’m pointing out these issues because this is not what will be written in the Gospels. ... The evangelists were nowhere near me when this happened. And regardless of what people have said, they didn’t know me. I’m not angry with them, but nothing is more irritating than those people who, under the pretext that they love you, claim that they know you inside out. 

Who could dare claim to know Jesus, the body politic? Unfathomable he must be, yet the novelist had him speak of practical and pragmatic things. There were a lot of nonsense already said about him. There were a lot of mediocrities and misinterpretations already. Admonishing the weeping women of Jerusalem, only in his thought of course, Jesus was all about practical steps to a fruitful life. 

It’s just that their sobs won’t let me breathe. How can we help someone? Certainly not by crying in front of them. Simon helped me, Veronica helped me. Neither one of them was crying. Nor did they have grins on their faces: they were taking concrete steps.

In Thirst, Nothomb was taking concrete steps, purposefully deviating from the official and definitive narratives in a language that was contemporary and direct. She had Jesus weigh and question every word at every turn: a balm against self-righteousness. 

Nothomb was bored by the official interpretations and stereotypes produced by excavators of meanings in the Bible. She had to make her own version just to shake things up a bit, with not a little bit of irony: “The judgement of mankind is so predictable that I admire everyone for taking themselves so seriously.” 

It must be hard to translate the humor too, but divine inspiration must have possessed the translator. Like Peter, the novella petered out at the end. But it was obvious the evangelist novelist was having fun. Who knows at the expense of whom? 

The only Evangelist who has shown talent as a writer worthy of the name is John. That is also why his words are the least reliable. “Whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst”: I never said it, it would have been a misrepresentation.

 

 

Upcoming translations from the Philippines

 

English translation of novels originally written in Philippine languages is a recent phenomenon. In the 20th century, only 6 novels from the Philippines were translated into English. In the last 15 years (2006-2021), some 29 novels were translated. Most of these were bankrolled by local university presses. Only a handful were distributed in print outside the country. These include Jose Rizal's Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo (both translated by Harold Augenbraum) and Lope K. Santos's Banaag at Sikat (Radiance and Sunrise) which was published in December in Danton Remoto's translation. All were part of the Penguin Classics selection. Only 12 (34%) were the works of women writers.

I own 30 of the 35 translated novels. I read 26 of them in original Filipino or in translation. Maybe I should draft a personal selection of which were essential reads from among these.

Anyway, when I write and post a review of several of these books, it was as if I'm writing speculative fiction about books that were part of the Invisible Library. I knew that many readers would not be able to read or access these books, let alone see a glimpse of their spines. It's like I'm creating entries for the Neglected Books Page.

Every neglected book finds its ideal translator at the right time. Every translation will find its ideal reader. Every reader of translation ought to be excited in advance.

So what to look out for in translation from this part of the world in 2022 and beyond? I'm just listing the novels.

1. The '70s (1984, complete edition 1988) by Lualhati Bautista, trans. Clarisee B. de Jesus.

This is the defining novel of the martial law period in the Philippines. From my review 10 years ago:

Lualhati Bautista gained notoriety when Dekada '70 came out in 1984, after having shared the grand prize for the Palanca Award for Best Novel one year previous. This novel about a Filipino family drastically affected by forces beyond their control was a national narrative of resistance against the Marcos dictatorship, against its repression of individual and societal rights and liberties. The story was told by Amanda Bartolome, wife to a dominating husband, mother to five sons, and – as she learned in the course of the novel – woman of her own mind. We found Amanda contemplating her role beyond her family of men, beyond a traditional patriarchy where a woman is only expected to serve a husband and rear children. This even as her world was being swept by the tides of history. [Full review]

The English translation was recently self-published by the author. Penguin is interested in reissuing it for an international audience.

2-3. Crocodile Tears (1962) and Birds of Prey (1969) by Amado V. Hernandez, trans. Danton Remoto

Two novels of resistance from Amado V. Hernandez, a literary master of Tagalog prose and poetry. I've read the first of these (Luha ng Buwaya) and included it in my year-end list in 2012 (see #5). Note that book #6 in that list--Maganda pa ang Daigdig (1956) by Lazaro Francisco--already came out in translation as The World Is Still Beautiful (trans. Mona P. Highley). Crocodile Tears and The World Is Still Beautiful were sister novels in that both shared aspirations of agrarian reform and both dramatized direct resistance against an oppressive land tenure system. 

Hernandez was also a well regarded poet and short story writer. His most famous poem "Isang Dipang Langit" is required reading in Philippine literature classes. I posted an English translation somewhere in this blog.

Both novels will be translated by Danton Remoto and will be issued by Penguin Random House South East Asia. The second of this novel, Birds of Prey, was set in World War II during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines. It had an earlier English translation by Estelita Constantino-Pangilinan in 1976 (as part of her master's thesis) which was published for the first time last year. The novel was seen as a sequel to José Rizal's El Filibusterismo. Another Lazaro Francisco novel, Ilaw sa Hilaga, was also a sequel to the same Rizal novel!

 

 

 

4. A Brief Investigation to a Long Melancholia (1990) by Edel Garcellano, translated by Bernard Capinpin

This is a highly modernist, theory-centric short novel filled with literary allusions of the times. Subtitled "First Book in a Trilogy" (Unang Aklat sa Trilohiya), the novelist never produced the follow up novels. (The same case as in the bilingual novel The Birthing of Hannibal Valdez by Alfrredo Navarro Salanga which was conceived as a trilogy but was never completed.) Edel Garcellano's novel was written in the span of two months when the author was awarded a literary fellowship grant in Italy.

The original book--now out of print--contained the following synopsis at the back.

Ang nobela ay una sa binabalak na trilohiya tungkol sa buhay at panahon ng mga tauhang alalaom baga'y paradima ng isang rehimen. Sa anyong science fiction (isang metodolohiya na nagsasangkap sa scenario building at imahinasyong malaparabula), ang larawan ng isang kaayusan, sa pagbabalik-tingin, ay pinatindi upang dalirutin, wika nga, ang idyolohikal na tagisan ng relasyon sa pag-ibig, uri at katauhan. Ang produksyon ng aklat na ito ay bunga rin ng mga kontradiksyon sa lipunan: sapagkat ito'y sinulat sa Como, Italya, sa biyaya ng Rockefeller Foundation, isang banyagang institusyon na nagpaunlak sa awtor upang makaupo nang matagalan sa estudyo, isang matamis-mapait na paradoha sapagkat hindi maanggihan ng kalinga ng mga lokal na ahensiyang nakatalaga diumano sa creative writing. 

The novel is the first in a projected trilogy about the life and times of characters who in some ways embody paradigms of a certain regime. Written in the form of science fiction (a method which combines scenario building with parable-like imagination), its illusion of order, in hindsight, was exaggerated in order to critique, so to speak, the ideological contestation between relationship and love, social class and personality. The book's production is also the end-product of contradictions in society: as this was written in Como, Italy, through the beneficence of Rockefeller Foundation, a foreign institution who indulged the author to sit for an extended period of time in a studio, a bittersweet paradox considering the author was not showered any attention by local agencies who were supposedly champions of creative writing. [my translation] 

In some ways, this novel was the author's meditation on literary theory, class struggle, and dictatorship while being sheltered abroad. It had a bit of an esoteric feel and yet propelled by a momentum of its own.

Not sure when this is coming out. Bernard Capinpin received the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for this translation project. The judges' citation made the book seem like a literary rock star.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But why stop there? Garcellano's other out-of-print cult novel, Ficcion (1978), was another unclassifiable specimen of collage writing, unapologetically Marxist and post-colonialist, a web of dialogues and anti-colonialist discourse (read: rant) interspersed with blistering stories of injustice, stitched together by quotations from a dubious mix of sources and personages, literary and otherwise: Pablo Neruda, Prince Charles, Beatles, Bob Dylan, Cesar Vallejo, Simone de Beauvoir, Kafka, Andres Bonifacio, Yeats, Newsweek articles, Bible verses, and so on. It was an assemblage of consciousness, a melange of artifacts. The genius was in the assembly. Any translator will have a headache and doubly hard time in replicating the word plays and the spirit of in-jokes. With a title that was the singular of Borges's creations, it was possibly the most formally inventive Tagalog novel.

5.  Ang Makina ni Mang Turing (The Machine of Old Turing) by Ramon Guillermo, translated by Bernard Capinpin

In many of his online translations, for example, this extract from A Brief Investigation, Capinpin was said to be currently working on a translation of Ang Makina ni Mang Turing. This was another challenging work to translate due to its acrostic nature. I look forward on how he would replicate the game at its center.

The title was a play on words. Turing was a Filipino diminutive for Arturo. Mang in Mang Turing is an address given to an older man as a form of respect. It could be translated as Old Turing but it would then lose its local specificity. The allusion was to Turing machine: more obvious if title is written in the possessive (Old Turing's Machine).

It was a detective novel slash novel of ideas, set in Europe in 1883, in the time period of Rizal, contemporaneous with the eruption of Mount Krakatau in Indonesia. The novel made use of a unique vocabulary, replicating how Filipinos must have spoken or written at the time, a sort of Tagnish, a combination of Tagalog and Spanish. With a puzzle at its center, its thematic concerns were war, war machine, war games, and games. War as prelude to colonialism; colonialism as political objective of war. It reminded me in places of The Master of Go by Kawabata Yasunari.

Here is the opening chapter, followed by my translation:

Mula sa kinatatayuan natin ngayon, kinamamanghaan natin ang kamangmangan ng mga panauhing pangkasaysayan tungkol sa kanilang sariling daigdig at panahon. Kapag nagbabasa ng mga kasaysayan ay umiiling-iling tayo habang pinagmamasdan silang lumulusob sa mga landas na nalalaman nating walang patutunguhan. Hindi natin sila mapipigilan habang sila’y tumatalon sa mga dagat na walang sukat ang kalaliman o buong tiwalang lumulusong sa malalapot na kumunoy na hindi na nila matatakasan. Natitiyak natin na ang mga experimento nila'y mabibigo kahit ilang beses pang ulit-ulitin. Paulit-ulit itong mabibigo.

Pero nakikita rin natin sa hindi mabilang na halimbawa na wala nang nilalang na mas matigas pa ang ulo kaysa sa isang taong ayaw tumanggap ng pagkatalo. Bugbog-sarado, pikit na ang isang mata, basag ang mga buto ng mga daliri, nakahandusay sa maruming canal, pero ang lagi pa ring sinasambit na parang nababaliw, “Darating din ang araw, maglalaho ang mga inaapi at nang-aapi, mababanaag ang pagkapantay-pantay ng sangkatauhan ...”

From our vantage point, we wonder at the folly of history's witnesses bungling their own place and epoch. As we read narratives of history, we shake our heads as we watch them navigate the roads that lead to nowhere. We cannot stop them as they jump at unfathomable seas or as they naively brave murky quicksands that swallowed them whole. We are sure their experiments will fail no matter how many times they try. They will fail repeatedly.

Yet we know from numerous examples that no one is more stubborn than a person who does not accept defeat. Beaten to a pulp, with one eye shut, broken fingers, lying prostrate on a dirty canal, but still uttering over and over like crazy, “The time will come when slaves and masters are no more, when equality of all rises on the horizon ...”

***

The following novels were recipient of the Translation Subsidy Program of the National Book Development Board. The complete list of grantees were posted here. Their publications are not assured but I sure hope they see print.

6. Ang Larong Nagwakas sa Atin (The Game That Finished Us Both) (2019) by Fe Esperanza Trampe

This is marketed by the publisher as a book for teens or YA. Two high school students of opposite sex compete for chess and vie for a scholarship. Only one will emerge as a winner. 

7. ABNKKBSNPLAKo?! by Bob Ong

Not a fan of this author. This book is a popular bestseller. I watched a movie version of this book. It was awful. You can check it out in Netflix. I would have preferred if the publisher submitted Si, which is a more mature novel of this author.

8. Tatlong Gabi, Tatlong Araw (Three Nights, Three Days) by Eros S. Atalia 

I selected this as a favorite book in 2014 (see #10 in this post). My short overview of the book made it sound like a horror story. It's actually spec fic. Or maybe an ecological fable. I'm not sure anymore. I'm also not sure if the translation will appeal to me.

***

I said I would only list novels. But last year saw print Love Potion and Other Stories by Alvin Yapan, translated by Randy M. Bustamante. I read Bustamante's version of the epic poem Florante at Laura. It was decent but I am still on the look out for the version of Marne Kilates.

Upcoming story collections to be translated into English and worth checking out are: 

Kulto ni Santiago: Mga usipon sa Bikol asin Filipino (Santiago's Cult: Stories in Biko and Filipino Languages) by Kristian Sendon Cordero. I read the title story in an anthology called Mondo Marcos and I still could not get it out of my mind. I have a copy of the anthology Ulirát: Best Contemporary Stories in Translation from the Philippines (Gaudy Boy, 2021) and I saw the Cordero's title story "Santiago's Cult" translated by Capinpin. Our Lady of Imelda, Cordero's first story collection (although I saw it subtitled and described as "Two Essays"), is also being translated by Capinpin.

Is There Rush Hour in a Third World Country by Rogelio Braga, translated by Kristine Ong Muslim, is forthcoming from 87 Press (UK).   

 

Related posts:

Bibliography of Philippine novels in English translation, 2

A list of Philippine novels in English translation 

Schrödinger's cat was a zombie

 

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut, translated from the Spanish by Adrian Nathan West (Pushkin Press, 2020) 

 

Amateur Reader teased the Sebaldian tendencies of Benjamín Labatut's Anthropocene novel of verdure. There was simply an overabundance of associations in the novel. The first part, for example, on the blue pigment Prussian blue, had the breathless pace of curated details on art and science chained together in journalistic fashion, laced with bitter irony, and fueled by the inexhaustible capacity of human beings (scientists, particularly) to ingeniously engineer human cruelty (in wars or otherwise) at a massive scale. The kinetic sentences moved along like unstable noble gases spreading and branching in every direction and circling around ideas the narrative will return to time and again in the remaining four parts.

 

 

 

 

A sentence could leave a trail of associations, threaded by the splendor of ironical statements about fallible mankind and his folly.

An ingredient in Dippel’s elixir would eventually produce the blue that shines not only in Van Gogh’s Starry Night and in the waters of Hokusai’s Great Wave, but also on the uniforms of the infantrymen of the Prussian army, as though something in the colour’s chemical structure invoked violence: a fault, a shadow, an existential stain passed down from those experiments in which the alchemist dismembered living animals to create it, assembling their broken bodies in dreadful chimeras he tried to reanimate with electrical charges, the very same monsters that inspired Mary Shelley to write her masterpiece, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, in whose pages she warned of the risk of the blind advancement of science, to her the most dangerous of all human arts. 

Panning from one proper noun to the next, from one journalistic anecdote to another, from Prussian blue in paintings to literature, Labatut attempted to reanimate historic details in relation to another, sandwiching highly selected facts between layers of human drama and madness. Inevitably, the tone veered toward grand pronouncements about important discoveries. We knew they were important. We knew they must be couched in verdure.

He was convinced that mathematics, physics and astronomy constituted a single body of knowledge and believed that Germany was capable of exercising a civilizing force comparable to that of ancient Greece. To do so, however, its science must be raised to the heights already achieved by its philosophy and art, for “only a vision of the whole, like that of a saint, a madman or a mystic, will permit us to decipher the true organizing principles of the universe.” 

In a way, Labatut was after that singular holistic vision. But what of his organizing principle in this fictional creation? What structure behind the scientific revolutions did he want to build? 

One could talk about its form. There was innovation there enough. The novelist admitted in the afterword about the nonfictional elements and situations becoming more and more relaxed by the end of the narrative. Real facts and events were losing their foothold: the "motifs" fully revealed and taking over at the end and synthesizing the whole invention. 

Here may be a unique specimen of fiction. Here we encountered a form of literary criticism of science, or criticism applied to scientific ideas generated by mad geniuses of the day, giving rise to philosophical and historical and dare I say artistic consequences.

The novelist happened to assemble his elements--his artful method to madness and precise craziness--around these motifs, which were the "stitch" made to hold the found materials. The novelist happened to assemble dark and Important Historical Motifs such as death by gas in the first and second world wars; a glimpse into the fundamental nature of matter; excess nutrients giving rise to a speculative apocalyptic event in the future where a terrible vegetation will colonize the world and dominate the food chain; the abyss (black hole) engulfing everything; the uncertainty principle and what it implies about the unpredictability of quantum objects.

Let's not talk about form: five separate yet interconnected tales. The organizing principle was discrete "motifs". Sometimes, powerful connections were unleashed, but with the insistence on falling back to a predetermined set of motifs. The recurrence of thematic concepts/images came to be expected and "only connect" became a predictable pastime for the reader. 

About his method, the novelist shared in an interview that "What I did was combine things that are true by themselves but not true as a whole." With only connect as the animating principle to create the fictional whole, this may or may not be an approximation of the aesthetics of Labatut's prominent literary model. In an interview, W. G. Sebald shared his aesthetics of falsification in his prose fiction.

The truth value of the story does not depend on its actual truth content. The truth value depends on how it is framed and phrased. If a story is aesthetically right, then it is probably also morally right. You cannot really translate one to one from reality. If you try to do that, in order to get at a truth value through writing, you have to falsify and lie. And that is one of the moral quandaries of the whole business. [emphasis added]

Sebald demarcated the lines not between truth and fiction but between "truth content" and "truth value" in fiction and acknowledged that fiction writing using actual truth contents as the material ballast of the writing was always about making moral choices and moral judgements. Right or wrong was not based on actual truth content of the writing but depended on the gut feel of what is aesthetically right, the framing and phrasing (read: stitching) possibly giving indications of the writing's truth value. It's all questionable, Sebald admitted. 

The differentiation between what is powerfully true and what is blatantly false in writing could come down to whether the aesthetics felt right. This could justify the whole business of falsification. In a narrative of nested associations, did the connections seem organically connected to each other or did they seem forced or foisted on the reader? The moment one made an association, there was already an appeal to recognize the artificial connection. At the simplest level, a metaphor linking two ideas could be considered as original or novel if it burst the bubble of familiarity. A trap for novels discussing physics, especially the quantum world, and also mathematics, lay in the way they aspire to profundity in laymanizing science and equations so as not to disappear into the abyss of abstractions. The writer had to carefully work out practical metaphors and apply them to the ungraspable concepts of fundamental particles.

But Heisenberg knew they were all wrong. Electrons were neither waves nor particles. The subatomic world was unlike anything they had ever known. Of this he was utterly certain, his conviction running so deep that he was incapable of putting it into words. Because something had been revealed to him. Something that defied all explanation. Heisenberg had glimpsed a dark nucleus at the heart of things. And if that vision was not true, had all his suffering been in vain? [emphasis supplied]

Parts of When We Cease to Understand the World were precious writing, in both good and bad ways. We could observe see how metaphors break down when discussing scientific insights or the rigors of knowledge and madness, how it could only ever recycle clichés about certain paradoxes behind the equations, repeat the same astonishments that greeted the shock of discovery and recognition, resurrect the stereotypical behaviors of obsessed, erratic, intelligent, mad scientists. Science has the capacity to advance ways of life and at the same time undo it. Similarly, metaphors could certainly advance the interest of the novel and at the same time efficiently undo it. 

Labatut was always re-formulating his ideas, offering elegant variations of the same concepts through contrived re-echoes. From "fistful of equations" to "handful of equations", he would map out the genius's propensity for acquiring knowledge and building upon the works of others and somehow, tragically, describe how circumstances would fail the genius, ceasing to understand the world or what being human meant or failing to identify with other human beings, allowing the deaths of unimaginable number of innocent civilians in wars. During the most critical moments, the best scientists who were granted free agency, the will to decide, to select the most appropriate course action, almost always fucked up.

As to detecting the truth value behind something already designed with the ends (motifs) in mind, the novelist could only rely on the readers' shallow powers of association to: (1) recognize the obvious paradoxes and ethical dilemmas of science, and (2) unravel an artificial synthesis of scientific breakthroughs in the dark ages. The paradox of scientific progress was, of course, the fact that for every forward step toward securing knowledge to better the conditions of humanity, we take two steps backward.

The sudden realization that it was mathematics—not nuclear weapons, computers, biological warfare or our climate Armageddon—which was changing our world to the point where, in a couple of decades at most, we would simply not be able to grasp what being human really meant. Not that we ever did, he said, but things are getting worse. We can pull atoms apart, peer back at the first light and predict the end of the universe with just a handful of equations, squiggly lines and arcane symbols that normal people cannot fathom, even though they hold sway over their lives.

With regard to the overall synthesizing effect, the whole novel was afflicted with a kind of eco-anxiety or ecological paranoia. Destructive overabundance (the "terrible verdure") was the novelist's choice of alarmist death knell. Frankly, I would have preferred he tackled the more urgent biodiversity loss or "climate Armageddon", but the hardly cinematic, "invisible" greenhouse gases or vanishing wildlife might not be as colorful or as painterly as the pigments of blue or carbonized black. 

So he stuck to the nutrient overload, product of excess nitrogen fixated in plants, producing man-made imbalance after breaching the limits to growth. The verdure was our apparent doom, a feasible destiny awaiting mankind at civilization's end. But it was not purely anthropogenic it turned out.

What was marvellous but at the same time horrible about the process, the girl said, was that these offspring [of a female aphid] would in turn produce offspring of their own after just a few hours of life; these new creatures were themselves gestating while still inside their mother. Three generations were nestled one inside the other, in a sort of dreadful Russian doll, a super-organism that embodied nature’s tendency to overabundance, which elsewhere compelled certain birds to produce more chicks than they could feed, so that the dominant fledgling would murder its siblings, pushing them from the nest. In some species, such as the shark, it was even worse, Miss Herwig explained, as the eggs hatched inside the mother’s womb, with teeth sufficiently developed to devour the young that came after them; this fratricidal predation gave them the necessary nourishment to survive during the first weeks of life when they were vulnerable enough to be preyed on by the same fish they themselves would feed on as adults. 

Not the most graphic description in the book, but the violence was striking in the evolutionary behavior of aphids, birds, and sharks. Overabundance was also apparently a freak of nature. 

Labatut offered an amusing refresher on maths and physics, with a verdure twist. In combining individual true things to produce a fictional whole, the writer was reanimating a Frankenstein cat: a pastiche cat made of discrete body parts and forming a weird whole. The whole book must resemble a thought experiment gone haywire. In Schrödinger's bloodless experiment, referenced near the end of the title story of the English translation, a paradox was evinced when a cat was considered to be both alive and dead at the same time. One obvious interpretation was that the cat was a zombie. Labatut was reanimating a zombie cat. 

The giant lie in The Buried Giant

 

I was thinking how The Buried Giant was an elegant variation on Kazuo Ishiguro's (KI's) themes: memory, forgetting, historical wrongs. However, he had pulled the rug from under the feet of his characters. Instead of unreliable narrators recalling their past, he enshrouded his ancient English world with a literal mist where anyone under it was under the spell of forgetting. Unreliable through and through, and the small chinks of memory creeping in were as precious as madeleines.

In the current post-truth world order, of course, that mist was already enveloping our consciousness. The racists and xenophobes in us would hardly flinch at the vocabulary of hate permeating the stratosphere. Some of us gullible enough would stand behind leaders and dictators (and dictators' sons) and preach the gospel of unity and unification and empty platitudes. Even Sir Gawain to the end held steadfast to his loyalty to King Arthur's reign despite the stain of colonialism and genocide that marked all conquests and wars.

 

***

A passage from the novel:

Edwin appeared to comprehend the soldier’s wishes, if not his actual words, for he left the mare and came to join Wistan. As he did so, the soldier [Gawain] adjusted slightly the position of his horse. Axl, noticing this, understood immediately that the soldier was maintaining a particular angle and distance between himself and his charges that would give him the greatest advantage in the event of sudden conflict. Before, with Wistan standing where he was, the head and neck of the soldier’s own horse would momentarily have obstructed his first swing of the sword, giving Wistan vital time either to unsettle the horse, or run to its blind side, where the sword’s reach was diminished in scope and power by having to be brought across the body. But now the small adjusting of the horse had made it practically suicidal for an unarmed man, as Wistan was, to storm the rider. The soldier’s new position seemed also to have taken expert account of Wistan’s mare, loose some distance behind the soldier’s back. Wistan was now unable to run for his horse without describing a wide curve to avoid the sword side of the rider, making it a near-certainty he would be run through from behind before reaching his destination. 

This passage came after the old man Axl denied knowing anything about soldiery to the warrior Wistan. Wistan questioned him three times, I think, and the old man refused to acknowledge his military past at every time, like Peter denying Jesus thrice over. Yet from the passage alone it was all too evident to the reader that Axl was in his prime a full pledged soldier. 

The third person point of view shifted its subject from one person (Edwin) to another (Gawain) before alighting to Axl. It was apparent from Axl's perception of slight shifts and nuances in the fighters' postures that he knew swordsmanship and had battle experience. The carefully calibrated phrases, the efficient way of anticipating a fatal curve, and the way the position of the horse was considered: it was a well choreographed blocking of characters amid a tense situation.

Axl was silent throughout his observation of the military posture of both the soldier Gawain and the warrior Wistan. Yet the free indirect thought (not speech, because silent), made him a liar. Did he deny his past unknowingly (because of the mist) or knowingly (because of voluntary forgetfulness). KI's mist was a convenient shroud to cover up the faint stirrings of memory so that uncomfortable things that happened in the past remain hidden. So we were still in the territory of unreliability after all. The mist just intensified what Axl was trying his best not to remember. Clearly there was guilt behind his conviction to deny his past and happily forget. Early on, the reader might be flagged that this is a tale told by liars inside a mist and by soldiers with shady pasts but the reader was not sure anymore if the forgetfulness was due to the mist or a forced deception of the self. The construct of the mist was obscuring everything and it's hard to differentiate what was forgotten, half-remembered, imagined, or knowingly denied.

The dragon held the key to banishing the mist, and the cast of characters (the old couple Axl and Beatrice, Wistan the warrior, Edwin the warrior-in-the-making, and Gawain the knight) ventured off and journeyed to the dragon's lair. KI wanted to imbue each character with a redemption arc so he supplied a back story for each and described their conflicting motivations even as their selfish/personal interests collided. Along the way, then novelist opened up debates about self-imposed forgetfulness and the uses and manipulations of memory. 

What is the true cost of remembering? Was it okay to just forgive and forget past atrocities (or offenses) so everyone can just move on with their lives? Just how grave must the atrocities (and offenses) be so that bygones could not be bygones? What combination of wrongs and circumstances can make it justified to be silent about the past?

Imagine a character in a novel with a perfect memory (read: Aira), one who never forgets up to a certain timestamp (read: Handke). Fickle memory had no place in its world. Dementia was but a memory(!) Such a world fails through and through since one could not escape the full auditing of life and history. The mechanism of perfect and imperfect memories was a promising subject to pin down in novels, fantasy or otherwise. The characters in these novels almost always failed to prosper beyond the reckoning of the past. The novelists either forgot the perfect ending or were quite content to an open-ended and unfinished resolution.

KI's insertion of fantastical beasts into his novel was not a trick of sorts. It was the great big lie: a telling metaphor. He was the spin doctor of reality. He opened up an uncomfortable inquiry into domestic and historical iniquities and infamies. Must a dragon be slain first for memory to return and a nation to wake up from the totalitarian deep shit of self-deception? Why is it we could not see beyond the big lie in front of us and keep deluding ourselves when it comes to the historical, well documented atrocities committed by a dictator and his family? #NeverAgain #NeverForget 

 

Notes on The Buried Giant

 

Why is it when I read Kazuo Ishiguro I could laser-focus on what he's saying in the text before me? Was it a product of leisurely pacing of his prose? The slightly off yet so careful turns of phrase which intensified the act of reading. There were no overt modernist hijinks and purple pyrotechnics where readers multitask their mind to absorb the stream of images and weirdness. Ishiguro's modernism was hidden under the surface, buried like an egg or an iceberg. The readerly sensors in me could not help but observe the niceties and subtleties and embroideries of fantasy. He did display a tendency for the outlier in the dream logic (or illogic) of The Unconsoled. What he put on the page were all surface mannerisms. Behind the mise-en-scène lurked a fog of feelings, meanings, and epiphanies.

A strange spell befell the lands in what must be medieval times backdrop of The Buried Giant. Like a persistent (read: permanent) hangover, a mist of forgetfulness hung in the air. A physical and figurative fog dimmed the memories, both individual and collective, of inhabitants, Saxons and Britons both. If, indeed, collective memories existed. (Susan Sontag would like to qualify the concept). What caused this shady state of unremembered affairs? Ishiguro would bring us on a journey to discover the hidden mechanism of his forgotten world. 

The sally into unknown territories was led by Axl and Beatrice, the old couple who kept half-remembering or half-forgetting some possibly earth-shaking super-spreader events in the past. They would travel some distance to visit the dwellings of their son, whom they somehow half-forgotten, half-remembered. Along the way they would band together with a brave warrior looking after a dragon and a child cursed and expelled by his community. The setup was intriguing. Time would tell if all the elements would hang in a logical framework or the half-baked mist would simply evaporate and bring out the pot of gold in the light of day.

The narrator was partly to blame for his all-knowing asides and patronizing attitude to the reader. His writerly tone was rather irksome, but that was just me. He knew more than he would let know. 

In one such area on the edge of a vast bog, in the shadow of some jagged hills, lived an elderly couple, Axl and Beatrice. Perhaps these were not their exact or full names, but for ease, this is how we will refer to them. I would say this couple lived an isolated life, but in those days few were “isolated” in any sense we would understand.

Thankfully, after a couple of chapters, the point of view would shift so that reader would no longer be at mercy of this narrator who would constantly check himself lest he spill the big secret and not-so-small mystery. Why, for instance, would the community of Axl and Beatrice take away their candles? 

Why, in the first place, would anyone forget but not forgive? As Beatrice quipped, “It’s queer the way the world’s forgetting people and things from only yesterday and the day before that. Like a sickness come over us all.” The pandemic of amnesia held sway over the land, and there seemed to be no remedy or inoculation in sight. 

All this forgetfulness: it's obvious people often lacked a sense of history. We kept on forgetting not because historical truth was inconvenient. We forgot because truth hurts. And people always loved to be hurt and to commit mass suicide. #NeverAgain #DisqualifyMarcos #MarcosDuwag

“But there’s one place we need to be cautious. Axl, are you listening to me? It’s when the path goes over where the giant is buried. To one who doesn’t know it, it’s an ordinary hill, but I’ll signal to you and when you see me you’re to follow off the path and round the edge of the hill till we meet the same path on its way down. It’ll do us no good treading over such a grave, high noon or not. Are you fully understanding me, Axl?” [emphasis supplied]

Like a giant buried hastily under the mound of a hill, shared history was a painful malaise, an irremediable malady, and hence must not be definitive. Historical truth, which had a ring of truth about it, was usually a product of unspeakable violence, so traumatic one must not excavate let alone speak of it lest the leviathan wakes. To remember in the world of Axl and Beatrice was taboo. One must not contaminate history because the offspring of history is truth, Cervantes admonished. Or was it Menard?

“How can it be they forget even this, and so soon after watching the warrior leave with two of their own cousins to do what none of them had the courage for? Is it shame makes their memories so weak or simply fear?” 

Shame and fear. It must be both. It had to be. Fiction is the father of historical revisionism, the sibling of post-truth, favorite cousin of fake news. Trolls were manufacturers of shame and fear. It must be shameful to remember. It must be fearsome. So we create our own comfortable false fictions in our minds and cast out true fiction. Because true fictions (i.e., ficciones) are a powerful set of tools to excavate the buried giants in our midst. I'm getting ahead of myself.

Anyway, the narrator spoke in the first person, but sometimes boldly addressed his story to "you" and yet he often qualified his observations with "perhaps" as if to distance himself from accountability. Then he would seem to disappear in the fog of free indirect style. By Chapter Four, the narrator yielded the point of view to another character, the boy Edwin, newly outcast from his Saxon community for being bitten by a monster. His community and kin were too superstitious and cowardly to let go of the fresh bite marks on the boy and the terrific image they project.

By Chapter Five (the end of the novel's first of four parts), the point of view seemed to shift to an omniscient one, the "learned" narrator who couldn't help himself to be encyclopedic and bubbly, becoming muted or perhaps he was already bored. Ishiguro's dialogues often veer into wooden exchanges. The sparks of wit and humor (as in the labyrinths of unrelenting confusion in The Unconsoled or the brute force reckoning of The Remains of the Day) were somehow dampened. 

To compensate for his dull dialogues, the novelist relied on wayward, expressive gestures. He particularly loved describing his characters at an angle. I mean, peering at something at a bent posture, making a pronounced angle from a vertical stance, as if to heighten the intensity and fire inside his characters.

His [Edwin's] eyes were fixed on the warrior’s back just in front of him, though intermittently he would angle his head to one side, as though trying to peer around the warrior’s legs at the thing on the ground. 

He [Ivor] was quite elderly, and though his back was relatively straight, his neck and head protruded from his shoulders at a grotesque angle. Nonetheless all present appeared to yield to his authority—the dog too ceased barking and vanished into the shadows. 

He [Wistan] seemed suddenly to see something in Axl’s own features and, for a small moment, to forget what he had been saying. He gazed intently at Axl, angling his head.

The angle shots in these three separate passages about three separate characters made the reader lean heavily on one side and appreciate the keen concentration of the characters.

Qiu Miaojin's manuals for young people

 

To this day, I've never understood my fear. Where does it come from? I'd been keeping my deviant sexual desires in check for most of my adolescent and college years. I reassured myself that I'd done nothing wrong. It felt like the fear was coming from inside of me. I never did anything to attract it, nor did I choose to be this way. I had no hand whatsoever in shaping the self that was crawling with fear. Yet I grew into exactly that: a carnal being stirring the cement of fear with every step toward adulthood. Since I feared my sexual desires and who I fundamentally was, fear stirred up even deeper fears. My life was reduced to that of some hideous beast. I felt as if I had to hide in a cave, lest anyone discover my true nature.

Qiu Miaojin's Notes of a Crocodile (New York Review Books: 2017), translated from the Chinese by Bonnie Huie, was a novel of introspection, so honest and unflinching in its confessions and self-questioning. Lazi, the female protagonist, was programmed to fear, like any other human being always put on the spot to reconcile herself with herself, with others, with society. It was a novel driven by sexual identity crises, filled with characters unable to fully function due to fears and reprisals. The right to play the game was only accorded to two kinds of players. The novel's sex problematique:

Two very different types of people, mutual attraction. And for what reason? It’s hard to believe, this thing beyond the imagination of the chess game known as the human condition. It’s based on the gender binary, which stems from the duality of yin and yang, or some unspeakable evil. But humanity says it’s a biological construct: penis vs. vagina, chest hair vs. breasts, beard vs. long hair. Penis + chest hair + beard = masculine; vagina + breasts + long hair = feminine. Male plugs into female like key into lock, and as a product of that coupling, babies get punched out. This product is the only object that can fill a square on the chessboard. All that is neither masculine nor feminine becomes sexless and is cast into the freezing-cold waters outside the line of demarcation, into an even wider demarcated zone. Man’s greatest suffering is born of mistreatment by his fellow man.

The text of the novel was spread out over eight notebook entries, numbered consecutively and which served as the novel's chapters. The texts inside the notebooks were a pastiche of journal writing, love letters and break up letters, an ongoing satire on a Crocodile and its adventures in a scandalized society who could not imagine the life of a Crocodile (the Crocodile being a stand-in for the narrator and her identity as a lesbian), references to films and novels (e.g., Norwegian Wood by Murakami Haruki, The Box Man and The Face of Another by Abe Kobo), references to music and pop culture (e.g., news about Lady Diana), flashbacks and reminiscences of friendships and doomed love affairs with both sexes. Lazi called her eight notebooks "manuals", the reading of which, rather than the writing, illustrated her "process".

Based on ten massive journals' worth of material, I wrote eight manuals that can be read as admonitions for young people. A clean transcription was made using a ballpoint pen before each notebook was stuffed into the bottom of a drawer. Whenever my memory failed me, I would take out a notebook and look at it, and go over the events that made me who I am. They illustrate the process.

The novel was marked by fluidity of gender in the interaction of its characters: "When we were together, my masculine and feminine sides reached their highest state of dialectical tension. It was the same for him, and he knew that it was his optimal state."

After two French films (see previous post), sure enough we got more references to films. Valley of the Dolls (1967): the trailer alone was oozing with sappiness; the film must be a revolutionary template for instant gratification in soap operas. Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1987): another adaptation, from a famed novella of Gabriel García Márquez, reviewed elsewhere in this blog. Lazi's synopsis brought one back to the fatalistic atmosphere of García Márquez, but it more or less refracted her view of obsessive love.

The male protagonist searches everywhere for the woman of his dreams. After "selecting" the female protagonist with only a glance, he racks his brain thinking of ways to lavish his riches on her before eventually taking her as his bride. But on their wedding night, he discovers that his bride isn't a virgin. That evening, the half-undressed, sobbing bride is "sent back". And so the bride's family takes her in, and every day, she sends him a letter. In the final scene, the male protagonist, carrying an enormous sack of letters, enters the courtyard, where the female lead awaits him. "The journey is littered with letters...."

...

Shui Ling didn't know it, but when I saw Chronicle of a Death Foretold and discovered that the bride wasn't a virgin, I followed in the groom's footsteps. [first ellipsis in the translation]

Lazi herself was an inveterate writer of letters to her lovers. It made the novel conversational and the revelations and confessions more intimately voiced. Lazi followed in the groom's footsteps after discovering his bride's devirginized status. Yet she also followed the obsessive patience of the bride in writing letter after letter to the groom who spurned her. (The fate of Santiago Nasar, the man who deflowered the bride and murdered in broad daylight, was not mentioned.) Qiu Miaojin's second posthumous novel, Last Words from Montmartre, was apparently more love letters churned out.

Lazi's notebooks compiled ultra-honest portrayals of herself and her friends as spiritually wounded people. In Notes of a Crocodile, the characters' sexuality seemed to contaminate their relationships and ability to forge and sustain love affairs. For them, the force of love was like an unstable radioactive substance they could not control however much they wanted to pin it down. So these characters underwent suffering and transformations to cope with their damaged relationships. In the end they destroy themselves and the objects of their love. 

Elsewhere: Andrey Tarkovsky's Nostalghia (1983). Then: van Gogh's The Potato Eaters. It's as if Lazi's memory filtered the art forms her senses encountered and made of them scrap materials for her readymade project. She was seeing herself in the painting, the central figure, her back turned. "How can we get to know each other?" a woman intoned (in subtitle) near the end of the trailer for Nostalghia. "By abolishing the frontiers," a man responded. Easier said than done.

Whether I was delivering a rambling speech or serving potatoes, I reeked of a degenerative disease of the spirit, the result of having been sequestered for too long. The layer of glass had grown thicker and harder to shatter. 

Like "damaged goods" as one character described himself, Lazi was spiritually broken. It came to the point that she could invoke a Kafkaesque transformation. What if you suddenly woke up one day to find that you'd turned into a crocodile, what would you do then? asked Pro-Croc, a satirical character in the parallel universe of Lazi's notebooks/manuals. The choice of a crocodile as alter-ego was inspired: a beast feared by every one, and is in turn constantly hounded/harassed/persecuted for its animal nature whenever it goes out to hunt for food. Living in fear, the Crocodile suited up itself and descended from its habitat to disturb society's binary conception of sex.

"Hey, we should found a gender-free society and monopolize all the public restrooms!" I was elated at the idea. He didn't have to explain. He too could envision the manual I was writing about my own experiences. I decided to stop pressuring myself to state those experiences explicitly. ... I would speak up when the time was right.

In Qiu Miaojin's manuals, her "admonitions for young people", a literary project was conceived: the dream of a gender-free society, whose fluid and post-gender relations of the sexes lead to trust and love and understanding contra "mistreatment" of fellow human beings. Where crocodiles were dealt with without fanfare and fear.

All of which point to Qiu Miaojin's novel as a premonitory exercise of suicide. The text, which included a short extract from Suicide Studies, a presumed extant text, was a foreboding of the end point. In the company of Enrique Vila-Matas's literary silences, the suicides occupy a point where their death terminated their message. But it was too late to reverse what already survived them. The final statement in Notebook #2 was as close to a mission statement there is: As long as I'm alive and able, I won't stop talking about humanity and all of its fears.

This cold novel had some powerful writing in it, dissecting friendships and love affairs with cold-blooded precision and a reptilian prose giving the feels. It could not instantly abolish frontiers and lead to dramatic changes in gender relations but it could pose questions and deliver unforgettable images in freeze frame. Like how Lazi "was reminded of how in Truffaut's The 400 Blows, the boy breaks out of prison and runs to the sea, and that final close-up of the expression on his face."

Truffaut's iconic last scene in The 400 Blows was addressed directly to the viewer. The novelist just happened to let her protagonist remember the cinematic shot and relive the drama behind the ambiguity.

Image from Criterion

Two French films

In Notes of a Crocodile, translated by Bonnie Huie, Qiu Miaojin had her protagonist describe two films from France. The first, Mauvais Sang (1986), directed by then-26 years old Leos Carax, starred Denis Lavant and Juliette Binoche and had a intriguing premise.

A sexually transmitted disease called STBO is sweeping the country; it’s spread by having sex without emotional involvement, and most of its victims are teenagers who make love out of curiosity rather than commitment. A woman hires two men to steal the serum, which has been locked away in an inaccessible government building. [from Wikipedia]

The narrator of the novel was a female writing student who developed feelings for a female classmate. Her assessment of the Carax film made me want to watch it. Spoiler alert.

Not another Godard movie. A more youthful French film. Its male protagonist is built like a lizard and clearly has traces of crocodile in his blood. All the other men are short and stout and bald. They're all ugly old men in this film, aside from this sight-for-sore-eyes of a young Adonis in the lead role. The director is a contemporary master of aesthetics.

"I must ascend, not descend," the protagonist declares. As he nears his final moments, the female lead embraces him from behind, and he resists. It's moving beyond words. He closes his eyes with a dramatic flutter and utters his last words: "It's hard being an honest child." After he dies, a hideous old man squeezes a single blue tear out of his closed eyes. There's essentially no way the lizard can be honest. Even as it rolls over and turns its white belly up, it must take its hidden tears for its lover to the grave. 

Her wry descriptions of the characters' physical appearances and the movie's rather preposterous yet emotive plot was already evident from the trailer alone. See it here.

Yet another inoculating experience for the narrators was Betty Blue, which also appeared in 1986 and was directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix. The synopsis in Criterion was written by a master of the Blurbing Syndrome. 

When the easygoing would-be novelist Zorg (Jean-Hugues Anglade) meets the tempestuous Betty (Béatrice Dalle, in a magnetic breakout performance) in a sunbaked French beach town, it’s the beginning of a whirlwind love affair that sees the pair turn their backs on conventional society in favor of the hedonistic pursuit of freedom, adventure, and carnal pleasure. But as the increasingly erratic Betty’s grip on reality begins to falter, Zorg finds himself willing to do things he never expected to protect both her fragile sanity and their tenuous existence together. Adapted from the hit novel 37°2 le matin by Philippe Djian, Jean-Jacques Beineix’s art-house smash—presented here in its extended director’s cut—is a sexy, crazy, careening joyride of a romance that burns with the passion and beyond-reason fervor of all-consuming love. [from Criterion; see also Betty Blue at The Modern Novel]

Given the subject matter of Notes of a Crocodile and its anti-sentimental tone and its cinematic approach to narrative (i.e., a sequence of pithy scenes with efficient images and understated yet bursting emotions), one could appreciate why these two films were singled out by the novelist. The narrator's review of the second film was a window into her soul. Second alerte spoiler.

It's relatively institutional fare. A French film made for a young mainstream audience. Just how is it made for them? There are only two colors, blue and yellow, which makes things easy to remember, and aside from the two protagonists—a man and a woman—there's no one else on earth. Time glides by in the film without so much as half a struggle or a long conversation. ...

The best thing about the entire film is when the main couple's friend, upon hearing news of his mother's death, lies in bed paralyzed, and other people have to dress him for the funeral and tie his necktie, which is adorned with naked ladies. The tears streaming down his face make you want to explode laughing. The female protagonist, Betty, says, "Life always had it in for me." She gouges out her own eyes and is sent to a mental institution, where they strap her to a bed. The male protagonist says, "No one can keep the two of us apart." He disguises himself as a woman in order to sneak into the institution, and with a pillow, smothers Betty to death. At that moment, his face, exquisitely white, radiates a ghastly feminine beauty. The director uses a crazy love to curse the hand of fate. Fair enough, though the last bit will make you gag on your popcorn and soda.

...

... The second film is deceptive in its approach. It tricks you into thinking that you're not on the road to nausea, until the very end, when the truth becomes clear.

The sinister undercurrent was already apparent in the trailer of the director's cut (link). I could sense—and I wanted to be proven wrong—that this novel had something deceptive too in its sleeve. "Anyone with eyes, even if they're color-blind," the narrator thought, "can sit with popcorn in one hand and soda in the other, and leisurely watch the whole thing. Fair enough." 

***

The watching of a film may be deliberate or a happenstance. And yet the rules of film making were already made visible. In "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", Walter Benjamin wrote that "It is inherent in the technique of the film as well as that of sports that everybody who witnesses its accomplishments is somewhat of an expert." The democratized access to the movie theater and television—at least during pre-pandemic times—made film watching as ubiquitous as watching sports in stadiums and on TV. Benjamin's thoughts on the reproducibility of art and films were made prior to the digital age and film streaming devices—not to mention the rise and fall of blogging and the rise and rise of vlogging and content creation—and yet the ideas he propounded in his essay were all the more validated by the technological advances.

For Benjamin, every moviegoer was a film critic, but not every one of them was aware that they were. 

The film makes the cult value recede into the background not only by putting the public in the position of the critic, but also by the fact that at the movies this position requires no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one. [tr. Harry Zohn, from Illuminations]

With "popcorn in one hand and soda in the other" the watcher was assaulted by a barrage of moving images, which for Benjamin could induce a kind of vertigo and produce a violent crisis of imagination, a "shock effect" which was akin to the experience of Dadaist art in (real) time and space.

Dadaistic activities actually assured a rather vehement distraction by making works of art the center of scandal. One requirement was foremost: to outrage the public.

From an alluring appearance of persuasive structure of sound the work of art of the Dadaists became an instrument of ballistics. It hit the spectator like a bullet, it happened to him, thus acquiring a tactile quality. It promoted a demand for the film, the distracting element of which is also primarily tactile, being based on changes of place and focus which periodically assail the spectator. Let us compare the screen on which a film unfolds with the canvas of a painting. The painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon himself to his associations. Before the movie frame he cannot do so. No sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it is already changed. It cannot be arrested. Duhamel, who detests the film and knows nothing of its significance, though something of its structure, notes this circumstance as follows: “I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.” The spectator’s process of association in view of these images is indeed interrupted by their constant, sudden change. This constitutes the shock effect of the film, which, like all shocks, should be cushioned by heightened presence of mind. By means of its technical structure, the film has taken the physical shock effect out of the wrappers in which Dadaism had, as it were, kept it inside the moral, shock effect.

The immediate visual and auditory gratifications afforded by the binge watching of scenes after scenes of life and counter-life produced an alternative vista and borrowed time for the watcher. Benjamin thus indirectly defined—or came close to—what could constitute a classic in art (literature or painting or film). The relevance or the life of the art, its longevity, its stature and resilience as a classic—these were not contingent on present readers or viewers or watchers. If it survived at all—in J. M. Coetzee's definition of a classic as a survivor—after the initial onslaught of the present, then it must have done so because it was created using the template of the future. Its concerns were, overtly or covertly, futuristic. Because (futuristic) art could aspire for future appreciation, the true audience of art are the future people who stumbled upon it at a future time. "One of the foremost tasks of art," said Benjamin, "has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later."

The history of every art form shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical standard, that is to say, in a new art form. The extravagances and crudities of art which thus appear, particularly in the so-called decadent epochs, actually arise from the nucleus of its richest historical energies. In recent years, such barbarisms were abundant in Dadaism. It is only now that its impulse becomes discernible: Dadaism attempted to create by pictorial—and literary—means the effects which the public today seeks in the film. 

Every fundamentally new, pioneering creation of demands will carry beyond its goal. [emphasis added]

The classic was an attempt at something new; its newness was only made more apparent after a certain time has elapsed when the technical (or literary) standard, alongside hidden critical and historical forces and movements, had changed. The classic remained steadfast in emitting hidden energies long after the first outrage or shock or awe at the conflagration or war of the senses had settled or died down.

The watcher's assumption of the role of the film critic mirrored that of the author's reader. As Benjamin noted, "At any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer. As expert, which he had to become willy-nilly in an extremely specialized work process, even if only in some minor respect, the reader gains access to authorship." Truly, the Quixote can be subsumed by the pen of Pierre Menard.

***

What of Qiu Miaojin's literary antecedents, Dadaist or otherwise? The first paragraphs of the posthumously published novel already gave away her reading list.

July 20, 1991. Picked up my college diploma at the service window of the registrar's office. It was so big I had to carry it with both hands. I dropped it twice while walking across campus. The first time it fell in the mud by the sidewalk, and I wiped the mud off with my shirt. The second time the wind blew it away. I chased after it ruefully. The corners were bent. In my heart, I held back a pitiful laugh.

When you visit, will you bring me some presents? the Crocodile wanted to know.

Very well, I'll bring you new hand-sewn lingerie, said Osamu Dazai.

I'll give you the most beautiful picture frame on earth, would you like that? asked Yukio Mishima.

I'll plaster your bathroom walls with copies of my Waseda degree, said Haruki Murakami.

And that's how it all began. Enter cartoon music (insert Two Tigers closing theme).

Dazai, Mishima, and Murakami—all suicides except for the latter. Notes of a Crocodile was written in 1994, a year before Qiu Miaojin's suicide in Paris, where she studied and directed a short film. She was 26 years old.

Murakami's published novels before 1991 (the year in the notebook entry) were arguably his best output (i.e., before Murakami's commercial literary appeal catapulted him into literary stardom and somehow, probably, contaminated his magical realist worldview and eroded his discipline for world-building). These were my favorite works of Murakami: the world of A Wild Sheep Chase, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Norwegian Wood, and Dance Dance Dance. The magic in these novels was restrained and unforced; their tones were polished, at a time when the quality of his novels was unburdened by overanalyzing current events and the technical shift from typewriter/word processor to desktop computer.

The surrealist beginning of the entrada already hinted at an idiosyncratic voice and temper of the narrator, her aura of literary knowingness, the tinge of easygoing loneliness intercut with lighthearted and cinematic moments of emotional eruptions, linear and non-linear. "Nauseating is nauseating," the novelist quoted from Mauvais Sang. The tactile details of this tactile novel may prove to be a memorable watch, attuned as it is to colors blue and yellow and presumably the truth, which at this point is not yet clear, or may never be, but no one is complaining. Tactile is tactile. 

Enter: music from Two Tigers.

Hoshino Tomoyuki, performance artist of the Quixote

 

The visible imprints made to date by Hoshino Tomoyuki, at least in English language translation, could be easily summarized. This Japanese novelist, born in 1965, began publishing stories and novels after a half-decade sojourn in South America in the first half of 1990s. He had been fairly prolific in publishing Japanese novels and newspaper commentaries. 

Unpardonable therefore was the short list of 11 works in Goodreads, which of course skirted around some anthologized stories in journals and magazines, but I had no recourse to a definitive bibliography of his primary works. In the Internet age, everyone who had access to digital paraphernalia was a bibliographer. The incompleteness of this listing exercise is obvious, but I had established that his English presence, circa 2021, consisted of the following:

     a. Lonely Hearts Killer, tr. Adrienne Carey Hurley (PM Press, 2009, original in 2004) - with an introduction by the translator and a brief preface by Hoshino. It also had a Q & A between novelist and translator at the end of the novel.

     b. We, the Children of Cats, tr. Brian Bergstrom and Lucy Fraser (PM Press, 2012) - five stories and three novellas published in the original between 1998 and 2006. My edition (Kindle) listed the sources from which the pieces first appeared in Japanese and English. The story "The No Fathers Club", for example, was included in Digital Geishas and Talking Frogs: The Best 21st Century Stories from Japan (Cheng & Tsui Company, 2011). It also contained a preface by Hoshino and an extended afterword by translator Bergstrom.

     c. ME, tr. Charles De Wolf (Akashic Books, 2017, original in 2010) - with an afterword by Ōe Kenzaburō entitled "A Model for the Power of Literary Thought" and a note from the translator. An audiobook of this novel was also released.

This list had to be updated once other books/novels, some of which won awards in Japan - like The Last Gasp (1997), The Mermaid Sings Wake Up, Fantasista, The Nights Never End, and Spell - get to be picked up for translation.

     d. "Pink", translated by Bergstrom is collected in Granta 127 issue (2014). It is readable here. This was also collected in The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories under the section "Disasters, Natural and Man-Made".

     e. I should end there, but I was told Hoshino was a journalist who wrote kaisetsu or newspaper and book commentaries. There was a kaisetsu of his which appeared at the end of the Japanese paperback reissue of Tsushima Yukō's Woman Running in the Mountains. The latter novel (and the Hoshino kaisetsu) was translated by Geraldine Harcourt and will be reissued next month by NYRB.

My introduction to Hoshino, the performance artist of the Quixote, was Harcourt's translation of his commentary on Tsushima's novel. In his kaisetsu, Hoshino imagined the future life of characters in Woman Running in the Mountains. After more or less 26 years (Tsushima's novel appeared in Japan in 1980; the paperback reissue was in 2006), how would those characters - a woman and her baby boy - appear now and how would they behave given Japan's changed social outlook and mindset. (How about we take it further since the novel will be reissued next month? The baby would now be around 42, himself a father of at least one kid and the woman is now a senior citizen and a grandmother! How would they live in contemporary Japan in the age of pandemic?).

I should now single out that one story, the inimitable, the concise, the stupendous construction - the opening salvo in We, the Children of Cats called "Paper Woman" - the short story that announced a surprise attack on how to approach novel reading.

It’s been two years now since I became a novelist, and I’ve found myself thinking more and more about just who it is who reads the things I write. This may be simply due to the relatively poor sales of my own books, of course, but it may also be due in no small part to my recent pondering of what larger meaning a novel’s existence might bear. After all, statistically speaking, the number of people reading novels is decreasing, part of a general decrease in the sales of literature, but I think the real problem may be that fewer and fewer people really read any more, really consume literature as if printing the words on the interiors of their bodies.

Our novelist, Hoshino Tomoyuki, was contemplating the self-reflexive art of novel writing and the self-awareness that comes in novel reading. The reader might be writing the novel as he reads, but he was also inhabiting ("deciphering") the writer's psyche. This new material perception of reading was due in part to technology and the rise of professional amateurs. "On the Internet, within fanboy culture, anyone can pose as anything." He might also be referring to self-proclaimed bibliographers. And he might also be referring to "content creators" or "content writers" (but what does one write if not contents to be itemized in a table of contents?).

Fortuitously, in the midst of his novel-mongering, our novelist met the Paper Woman, an aspiring novelist who "wrote a fantastical tale about a woman who could eat only paper and eventually became entirely composed of the stuff". The Paper Woman did not want to compose another Quixote, which is easy as (eating) pie. She created a paper-eating character (papervore?) who would embody the Quixote printed on paper: the Quixote made of paper. The Paper Woman's method was simple: write about a papervore who would transform into the paper she consumed. But this was a commentary on a commentary. And her encounter with Hoshino was less than palatable to say the least.

“Do you sometimes dribble soy sauce onto sheets of paper and wrap them like seaweed around your rice?” I asked, and she replied with a touch of contempt. “I’m not a literal bookworm, I don’t actually eat paper. Besides, no matter how much paper a bookworm eats, it’s still just a worm in the end, no? Wanting to become paper and eating paper are two different things.” 

“Good point. If eating paper turned you into paper, all a little kid who wanted to be a soccer player would have to do was eat other soccer players to succeed.” 

“Have you eaten many authors, Mr. Hoshino?” 

“No, no, I’ve never spent any time wanting to become an author. Become a novel, maybe.” 

“If you’re still saying things like ‘I want to become a novel,’ you’ve got a long way to go, I’d say.”

It was no longer a word-to-word correspondence between the Quixote and his reader. It was the performative act of the reading life itself, or the life-to-word correspondence. Writing the Quixote in the early 17th century was a feasible, perhaps a necessary task; in the early 21st, the task would simply be cliché. The blank paper would virtually self-detonate. All great works are - or remain - unfinished, suggested Borges, not in his literary criticism but in one of his stories. The Quixote could no longer be read, rewritten, or translated. Nowadays, it could only be performed. 

The novelist Hoshino eventually married the novelist Paper Woman. They were so compatible that they resembled each other. Insecure about their relationship, Hoshino "made every effort to treat Paper" like a blank paper. He wrote on her skin using fine-tipped pens and brushes and this gave them both sexual pleasure. They would engage in a role-playing game in which Hoshino would erase the writing on Paper by washing her body clean and start over again.

As if with perfect memory, Paper could remember the characters Hoshino inscribed on her. Paper would dictate it to Hoshino and the latter would type it into his word processor. That became his method of writing. For a time this routine suited them both. Until Paper became pregnant and gave birth to a boy.

Their marriage started to fall apart once Paper became a mother. Hoshino's habit of writing on Paper became less and less frequent and Paper eventually became depressed and unstable and withered. The novelist husband hatched another plan to resuscitate Paper's health.

It was around that time that I started to seriously consider tattooing Paper. I thought that if the words on her skin were fixed and meaningful, she’d stop getting so caught up in the chaos of the characters’ formation, and her mind would grow more ordered as well. I decided to write out a translation of Don Quixote, a book we both esteemed above all others, in as fine a print as I could manage, then find a good tattoo artist to complete my plan. 

The reader may ask, Why the Quixote? That choice, made by a Japanese novelist, was obvious given his familiarity with the literary landscape of Latin America where he stayed and must have traveled far and wide before embarking on his literary career. Fermat ran out of space to publish his proof but the skin of a paper could be an infinite stage of calligraphy if one resorted to the finest of fine print.

Hoshino's microscript Quixote is more subtle than Cervantes'. Since the Quixote masqueraded itself as a pseudo-translation, the Japanese novelist's technique was odder and crueler than Pierre Menard's original text in Spanish. Since Paper would be the repository of the characters (presumably in Japanese), the performative act of the tattoo artist was now the opposite of anthropomorphism. The opposite of anthropomorphism is dehumanization which eliminates the human-like traits of beings and relegates or views them in non-human terms. The wife Paper was no longer paper-like but had became an actual paper. 

The skin-deep absorption of literature, the unhealthy consumption of letters and belles-lettres, could lead to an innovative, yet somehow tragic, commentary on performance art. In Kafka's In the Penal Colony, the young judge, in order to uphold his blind sense of justice through the use of a torture machine, opted to subject himself to the depravity of suffering under the same machine. The reading experience was empiricized not through simple reading but the experience of pain as the needle was etched on skin.

It is a blast to compare the Don Quixote of Hoshino Tomoyuki with that of Miguel de Cervantes. Cervantes, for instance, wrote this (Part I, Chapter IX):

... truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor.

This short list of platitudes about truth, written in the 17th century, by a "crazy amateur" Miguel de Cervantes, is desperate for a heart emoji. Hoshino, on the other hand, wrote:

Paper wanted her whole body covered, but I decided to leave her face blank, telling her she could always fill it in later. The words Don Quixote: The Ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha ran down her backbone. “Let’s compare spines!” exhorted Paper, so we lined her up with the new Don Quixote translation that had just come out from Iwanami Press and took a picture.

Paper's metamorphosis was complete. Loudly, she exulted, "I am paper!"

Pierre Menard left no traces of his invisible work. He would carry his notebooks and make cheery bonfires. The ending of "Paper Woman" was also a bonfire which consummated the words on human paper. Performative reading was a form - the worst form maybe - of suicide. One could read an open book but, as Hoshino showed, "the prospect of never truly being able to understand another person's feelings completely" was a tragedy of Cervantesque proportions.