Lilian Nattel's Blog

Reading Women Around the World Project

When I look at my bookshelves, I see wonderful books by diverse authors, but they’re mostly from the US plus a few Canadians and Brits. So, I’ve been inspired by the #readaroundtheworld challenge to expand those shelves by reading a book from every country in the world, but with a twist: I want to focus on women writers. It’s more difficult for women writers to get published and reviewed everywhere, but in some countries, women’s voices are actively–even dangerously–suppressed. And I see this as an opportunity not only to read, but to learn more about the challenges women face, and their cultural contributions in each country so that I have context for their literary work before I start reading. I plan to proceed alphabetically, from Afghanistan to Zanzibar and to share what I learn and the authors’ work here and on social media platforms, and I’m really excited about the conversations we can have!

Sayaka Murata’s Explosions

Sayaka Murata, the author of Convenience Store Woman, which made a huge splash internationally, and Earthlings, her second novel to be translated into English, has thirty imaginary alien friends.

Cult Writer

Earthlings–according to Murata–is a return to the work of the cult writer she’s always been. In the west, reaction to this novel (her 11th book) is divisive: people seem to love it or hate it. Personally, I loved it, then hated it, then couldn’t stop thinking about it and became obsessed with finding author interviews because I needed to understand it.

Earthlings starts out as a whimsical story about a Japanese family going to a remote mountain village for the annual family festival at the grandparents’ home. The narrator, Natsuki, is an eleven year old girl in love with her cousin, who’s the same age. That’s stage one. Stage two gets darker. We learn that Natsuki has a very difficult life both at home and at school and has to cope with things no child should. Stage three. In her thirties, she returns to the mountain. Grotesquerie ensues.

Feeling like an Alien

As a child and an adult, the character, Natsuki feels like an alien. This is also true of the author, Sayaka Murata. In interviews, she says her goal was (and is) as her characters say, “Survive, whatever it takes.”

Like the character Natsuki, the author coped with being different by imagining herself as an alien who has a home on another planet. To this day she says she has 30 imaginary alien friends who comfort her.

She never mentions being neurodivergent, but read on–and tell me.

The Factory

Murata says that she tried to act human by imitating others, but she couldn’t figure out how until high school. As a child, she asked why her parents why they fed her. They replied, Because we’re a loving family, but she wasn’t satisfied with that answer. It didn’t make sense. What was the broader purpose? The context? She could see everyone around her conforming, but they had no rational answers for why. She came to her own conclusions. Like her character Natsuki, she views society as a reproduction factory. People are the tools that accomplish the factory’s aims and keep the factory going.

The protagonists in many of her stories are ace, and that’s also the case for Natsuki in Earthlings. To be ace is to refuse to conform to her society’s expectations for women. It’s a rejection of the reproduction factory. And a rejection of your body as a tool.

Yet Murata refers to herself as a tool for writing, which the universe placed for some reason in Japan.

Her Process

Before Murata writes a book or a story, she draws the characters as kind of stick figures. Then she draws a box, which she calls the aquarium, and she places her characters inside it. Then she says, she tampers with the aquarium and hopes for explosions.

Screenshot

Murata talks about herself as having no anger because her anger was broken in childhood. She doesn’t say how. But her characters can express anger and other emotions, which she enjoys.

Going for the Scary

Like the main character in Convenience Store Woman, Sayaka Murata worked at a convenience store for 18 years. She used to write from 2 am to 6 am (I can’t imagine the stamina) and she liked the routine. She only quit when she became so famous that fans were accosting her in the store. Now she writes in cafes, because she can’t focus at home.

Her objective in writing is to dig into her own subconscious, to go into the darkness, to reach for the scary, going deeper and deeper into the darkness. She says she knows she hasn’t yet reached the bottom, she says, because when she does, she’ll be broken. A broken person.

She comes across as a serene, composed, self-possessed person in interviews. Yet that’s her goal: to explode her imagination and break.

Sourceshttps://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/revie...

https://inews.co.uk/culture/books/sayaka-murata-earthlings-interview-japan-fiction-808213

https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-topics/e00175

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/oct/09/sayaka-murata-i-acted-how-i-thought-a-cute-woman-should-act-it-was-horrible

On Youtube

Friend of My Brilliant Friend

Elene Ferrante, author of My Brilliant Friend, loves the work of Alba de Céspedes, and keeps her books nearby while she’s writing as inspiration.

Antifascist Feminist

Born in Rome, Alba de Céspedes was Cuban-Italian. Her grandfather, after leading a rebellion against Spain, was the first president of Cuba, her father was a diplomat, and she was a firecracker. At 15 she ran off with a count, had a son, and a few years later was divorced. In the 1930s, she was involved in antifascism agitation, her books banned. During WW2, she was a partisan.

Forbidden Notebook Rediscovered

Forbidden Notebook was published in 1952 and it’s a riveting example of the Italian neorealist movement: writing and film that grappled with the legacy of Italy’s fascism prior to WW2, and with the struggles of poverty post WW2. At the time, Alba de Céspedes was hugely popular and also critically acclaimed, yet later she was forgotten. As so many women have been. (The Britannica article about neorealist literature is expansive, listing many great writers—none of them women. For an exchange about writing as women, see this translation of a 1940s literary conversation between de Céspedes and her friend, Natalia Ginzburg.)

I’ve noticed that women writers are being rediscovered and their books being reissued lately. Forbidden Notebook is one of them, and about time!

The StoryAlba de Céspedes

The narrator is a working woman, an accountant, who also does all the traditional wifely stuff—cooking, cleaning, especially taking care of her now young adult kids. Her husband has a low level banking job, and both of their families were once much better off, but now they’re the working poor. She has no physical space, not a corner for herself, in the house that doesn’t involve taking care of others, and no space in her mind either. On a whim, she buys a notebook–illegally, on a Sunday, from a tobacconist only allowed to sell tobacco products on Sundays because, you know, addiction). She realizes that her family would think it was hilarious. I mean the very idea of her having a thought of her own that she wants to write down!

To be honest, I was amazed at the relevance of a novel written over 70 years ago. The conflicts between mothers and daughters still the same, the difficulty of carving out physical and mental space. (I just kept saying omg yes.)

An Affair With Herself

Writing in the notebook and hiding it becomes a kind of affair with herself. In doing that she becomes aware of herself as a separate being needing self-expression and new experiences. As she starts to bloom, she is aware of her own relative youth–she’s just in her early 40s–and revelling in the possibility that she is still a sexual being. However, every time she’s stressed she retreats into conventional morality, though she doesn’t believe in it, and the role she has in her family as the guardian of that conventionality.

The central question that keeps the pages turning is whether she has the courage to follow what the notebook is opening up for her, relinquishing the self-image of the “good” woman, or will she retreat into the bland but unchallenging monotony that was her life prior to the notebook?

A Little Book Blew My Mind

I nearly didn’t read this. I wasn’t taken by the first couple of pages–a woman in her sixties begins writing her memoirs knowing that she’s nearing the end of her life. Hmm, I’m in my sixties, maybe this isn’t for me right now, might be depressing. I left it, read something else, but then came back to it, and was hooked.

If I say what the book is about it’ll be misleading, and yet I can’t say much more than the premise, because I’d give too much away. Forty women are trapped in a cage. They remember the world before, but among them is a child that somehow ended up with them, and she has no memory of anything prior.

The woman writing the memoir was that child, and she begins with writing about her adolescence and an awakening of sexuality and consciousness as she stares at a young guard.

But the story is about what it means to be human, who and what we are in essence. If you strip everything away–family, money, jobs, entertainment, acquiring what we need and want, aspiration, even any sense of where you are–and replace it with sterility and monotony, who would we be? What would make us live? That sounds dour and boring; it is anything but!

I couldn’t put this book down. I was reading while brushing my teeth, like I used to when I was a kid and read constantly, even while walking to school.

The author, Jacqueline Harpman, was born in 1929 in Belgium. Her father was Jewish, and in 1939, her family fled to Morocco and spent the war years in Casablanca. (There are echoes in this novel of the confinement and losses that they survived by escaping the country.) She wrote four novels in the late 1950s to mid 1960s, and then nothing for twenty years. During those years of literary silence, Harpman became a psychoanalyst. In 1987, she published a new novel and continued quite prolifically until her death in 2012. I Who Have Never Known Men was published initially in 1995, translated two years later, and re-issued, making a splash in 2022.

I keep thinking about the story and turning it over in my mind. I read the Afterward by the translator twice because I want to know what other people think about this book. The translator, Ros Schwartz, reads it as a tribute to the value of the ordinary, but I think it goes beyond that as even the ordinary is cut off from the experience of the narrator. Yet there is love, tenderness, compassion, thought, questioning, curiosity.

I underlined many passages I can’t quote because it would give too much away, but I can share this:

I was perfectly aware that I had only added another question to all the others, but it was a new one, and, in the absurd world in which I lived, and still live, that was happiness.

I Who Have Never Known Men

And this:

The briefest conversation creates time. Perhaps I have tried to create time through writing these pages. The reader and I thus mingled will constitute something living…because my story, added to their mind, will then become part of their thinking.

I Who Have Never Known Men

Yaa Gyasi, Ling Ma & Me

At first glance, it doesn’t seem like Homegoing–a sweeping historical novel covering 300 years in Ghana and America, about enslavement, colonialism, and ethnic conflict–and Severance–speculative fiction about the survivors of a deadly pandemic, the crushing boredom of work, and a cult–would have any connection to each other. Or that Yaa Gyasi and Ling Ma, both POC millenial writers, would have anything to do with me, a little old white lady writer.

But that would be wrong.

We are all children of immigrants. Yaa Gyasi came to America with her family from Ghana when she was a baby, and Ling Ma was a young child when her family moved from China to America. A generation earlier, my parents moved to Canada, having been liberated from concentration camps and marrying when they were teenagers.

Their fiction would suggest that their families were fucked up by history, racism, and the trauma of being cut off from your home–but that’s fiction, and they’re both pretty close-mouthed in interviews about their families of origin. For myself, I can say quite openly, that, yes, my family was fucked up by all of that–just substitute antisemitism for racism (in today’s terms; in my parents’ youth, being a Jew in Europe was a racial construct).

Both Yaa Gyasi and Ling Ma went to prestigious universities and began working on their first novels during MFA programs. Both of them resisted pressures to write a typical immigration story though their resistance took different forms. And both of them explored their preoccupations in the forms they chose, through historical fiction and speculative fiction.

Like Yaa Gyasi, I dealt with intergenerational trauma by writing a historical novel–The River Midnight. I needed to re-create a bond to the past that was severed (yes, referencing the title of Ling Ma’s first novel) in the only way I could. It was lost to me, the family stories lost, the culture lost.

One difference between us is that their families didn’t anglicize their names. My parents, emigrating a generation earlier, felt they had to. Diversity just wasn’t a thing. Even when I was in my thirties, I heard people, including friends, use the word “Canadian” to mean someone of British ancestry and “ethnic” for everyone else. (I could be ethnic as a Jew or a Pole, they weren’t picky about which, but I couldn’t be “Canadian” even though I was born here.)

Yaa Gyasi could visit Ghana and has, and meeting her extended family was a balm for the alienation she felt as the only Black family in her white church in–of all places–Alabama. There is no balm for me. When I went back to Poland, Jews exist only in museums and plaques. It’s true that I can blend, here at least,–with my white face–but the ability to hide doesn’t erase anxiety about needing to hide, though it does carry privilege. I can fade into the default that is whiteness in our society.

(The same issue exists as a person with DID. As someone multiple, I am always pretending to be singular, when in truth I am “we” and my “they” is a literal one, not the singular “they” that ungenders English pronouns.)

Both Yaa Gyasi and Ling Ma received tremendous acclaim for their first novels, written when they were quite young. The River Midnight was also critically acclaimed and a success beyond anything I’d imagined. What to do after that? Repeat and rinse or not?

Not. I’m really glad not. Yaa Gyasi’s second novel, Transcendent Kingdom is completely different and beautifully written. It’s a first person, contemporary narrative about a woman in her late 20s who immigrated from Ghana as a child with her family. It deals with the immigrant experience, classism, racism, addiction, poverty, mental health, and faith.

Ling Ma’s second book is a collection of stories, many of them speculative fiction, others realism grappling with being in the world as the adult child of Chinese immigrants. It’s wonderfully imaginative, exciting writing, and I relate to so much of it, remembering what life was like for me at thirty, and the difficult relationships I’d had.

I also turned away from the first genre I wrote when I was ready to deal more directly with my own history. Plus I was sick and tired of the misrepresentations of DID. I still, to this day, think Web of Angels–besides being a rip-roaring story–is still the most accurate portrayal of DID.

It buoys me to think that there is so much connecting these very different writers to each other and to me, that we share something through our work and that making art out of human experience, wrestling with it, trying to understand and love it, is a kind of transcendent kingdom.

What are custom stories?

These are gifts to my followers. The challenge: the follower’s preferred name, a genre, whether they’re the hero and villain, any other details they want included. The resulting story has to be under three minutes–it’s read on Tiktok @lilian.nattel.writes, and then published below!

At the End of a Bad Day

(The challenge: Lisa, hero, suspense)

Lisa doesn’t recognize the body lying on the floor of her living room. She crouches next to it. There isn’t much time, she’ll have to call the police, soon. And this isn’t even the worst part of her day. No, that was when her mother called and announced that she’d be coming for a long visit.

The body’s been shot multiple times. First, while it sat in Lisa’s chair, the one with the footrest. There’s a mark on the back, where the head rested. Not even Mom could get that out. There’s also a smear on the armrest as if the body slumped over before it was dragged to the floor. Lisa counts the entry wounds. Eight. More than were strictly necessary to accomplish the assassin’s goal.

Someone was upset.

When Lisa’s working as a pathologist, she always has a pile of latext gloves, but now she makes do with a tissue from the box on her coffee table. With fingers wrapped in tissue, she reaches into the body’s pants pocket and pulls out the victim’s phone. She lifts his hand, still warm. She presses the waxy thumb onto the fingerprint reader. The screen lights up, and she scrolls through recent calls. The last one is a number she recognizes. Lisa can curse in four languages, but she doesn’t have time for that now. She’s got to make up her mind and quickly.

A creak makes her turn around. She’s already checked the apartment, but she drops the phone, unflicks her pocket knife, and does another walk through, switching lights on as she goes down the hallway toward the sound. In her bedroom, she kicks aside the laundry basket to get to the closet. She opens the door carefully, keeping to the side in case someone bursts out. The figure standing beside the shoe rack in the closet blinks at the light.

“Mom!” Lisa says.

Mom blinks some more.

Mom is holding a gun.

Mom says, “What do you think you’re going to do with that little knife? Have I taught you nothing?”

“You promised me you were done!” Lisa says.

“I was done. Except for this one.”

“Mom!”

Her mother says, “He hurt your sister.”

“What do you mean hurt her?”

Lisa’s mother tells the story quickly. When she gets to the end, she asks, “Are you going to call the police?”

Lisa doesn’t reply. Her mother waits, the gun lowered. Lisa shakes her head.

“I’ll get rid of the body,” she says. “But you have to promise me. For real. this is the last time.”

Global TV

Drawn to Lily’s Life

Lilian Nattel felt drawn to Lily Litvyak the moment she heard of her.

It was in the early 2000s when Nattel’s husband first came across Litvyak’s story online: she was a golden-haired Soviet fighter pilot whose plane was shot down behind German lines in 1943. After that, nobody knows what happened to her.

With so little information about her on the Internet at the time, the superficial details – especially the similarities between the two women – shook Nattel. They were both short and Jewish, Nattel noticed, and they even shared the same first name.

“Why haven’t I heard of her?” Nattel, sitting in a café in downtown Toronto, recalls asking herself. “It just kind of blew my mind that this existed.”

Nattel knew then that she wanted to write a book about Litvyak. She immediately began scouring the Internet for more information, finding a few contemporary memoirs from people who knew her.

– Michael Fraiman, interview, CJN

Full interview here!

Mysterious Female Pilot Comes to Life

Nattel has said that Girl At the Edge of Sky took all her “skill in research and writing craft to bring to life this fictionalized story based on the real (Second) World War female fighter pilot.” Given that her skill is considerable and her craft formidable, the readers are the great beneficiaries. Lily Litvyak does indeed come to full animated life in a suspenseful, heart-rending story that is difficult to put down…

Girl at the Edge of Sky is rich with history and fictional engagement… Whether describing the young fighter pilot’s many riveting air battles or creating the stomach-churning tension in the young prisoner’s many perilous predicaments, Nattel is superb. Thus we see Lily being cynical and inspiring, vulnerable or hard-as-nails, trembling or courageous.

Nattel has created a work that conveys the immeasurably important message that an individual’s true stature is measured by factors more compelling than physique, gender, ethnicity, colour of skin or religion.

Share and enjoy!

–Mordechai Ben-Dat, Book Review, CJN

Read the full book review here