Alta Ifland's Blog: Notes on Books, page 3
March 17, 2013
Almost Never by Daniel Sada (Graywolf Press, 2012. Trans. from the Spanish by Katherine Silver)
Daniel Sada, a contemporary Mexican writer who died in 2011, and of whom you’ve probably never heard, is highly recommended by Roberto Bolano and Carlos Fuentes. In fact, from the very beginning, his novel, Almost Never, reminded me of Bolano, which may be the reason why it took me a while to “get into” it. But once I did, I couldn’t put it down. Sada’s style, its rhythm and tone, are like nothing I’ve ever read; its energy draws you into the book like a vacuum cleaner.
The “plot” can be summarized in a few words: the protagonist, Demetrio, is caught between two women: a whore he met in a brothel, and who fell in love with him, and a “saint” from his aunt’s village, whom he idealizes, and who doesn’t let him touch her until their honeymoon. From the moment Demetrio meets the two women until his ever-receding marriage, several years filled with longing, copulations and masturbation pass. Demetrio is one of the most uninteresting characters I’ve ever encountered in a novel, and yet, somehow, Sada casts a spell on us, keeping us entranced for 330 pages. Of course, the spell would never work without the magic of the translator, Katherine Silver, who, after Edith Grossman, is our best translator from the Spanish.
The “plot” can be summarized in a few words: the protagonist, Demetrio, is caught between two women: a whore he met in a brothel, and who fell in love with him, and a “saint” from his aunt’s village, whom he idealizes, and who doesn’t let him touch her until their honeymoon. From the moment Demetrio meets the two women until his ever-receding marriage, several years filled with longing, copulations and masturbation pass. Demetrio is one of the most uninteresting characters I’ve ever encountered in a novel, and yet, somehow, Sada casts a spell on us, keeping us entranced for 330 pages. Of course, the spell would never work without the magic of the translator, Katherine Silver, who, after Edith Grossman, is our best translator from the Spanish.
March 16, 2013
Blindly by Claudio Magris (Yale UP, 2012. Trans. from the Italian by Anne Milano Appel)
Claudio Magris, one of the most respected contemporary European intellectuals, is virtually unknown in the US—that’s why the publication of his novel, Blindly, in Anne Milano Appel’s very skilful translation, is a welcome change.
As all the reviewers have observed, it is hard to identify who the narrator in this novel is: is he “Comrade Cippico,” a Communist (not “anti-Communist,” as the book jacket wrongly states!) of Italian origin, who ends up, together with other Italian comrades in Tito’s gulag on the island of Goli Otok? Or is he Jorgen Jorgenson, a nineteenth-century adventurer with a twisted background, who is condemned to forced labor in Australia? As it becomes clear from early on, he is both: Magris creates a speaker of mixed identities and a listener (the man to whom he confesses, who might be a psychiatrist) equally ambiguous.
Blindly is a challenging, intriguing and beautifully written novel, but, above all, it is a novel of ideas—hence the question: what’s the book’s message? A novel needn’t have a message, but this one clearly has one; the problem is that, although the ideas in it are easy to identify, the overall message is not. Since Comrade Cippico has been interned at Dachau before Goli Otok, we can assume that he represents the little man crushed by history from all sides, right and left, Nazis and Communists. But Cippico, who, like his comrades, is in search of “the golden fleece,” doesn’t abandon his search and his belief in communism, even after his horrific tortures in Tito’s gulag, and this is where the novel’s ambiguity becomes problematic. We don’t get the sense the Magris deconstructs this search, but rather, that he presents Cippico simply as a victim of, let’s call them some bad manipulators of history. Also, consider this reflection: “Those who want to keep man enslaved—like the Fascists, the Nazis, the capitalists…” Statements like this made me less enthusiastic than I might have been about this novel. I’m no fan of “the capitalists,” but to list them next to the Nazis, especially after having called Dachau “the apocalypse,” is the kind of rushed talk one expects from a righteous freshman, and not from someone with Magris’s credentials. (I am aware that the narrator isn't Magris, but it seems to me that in some cases, like this one, the author identifies with the character. True, I might be wrong, and this identification may be a false impression).
A technique Magris uses is the contemporary rewriting of Greek myths and characters (the golden fleece is one of them). By inserting them in a contemporary setting he demystifies them and attempts to achieve some kind of universalization of his own characters and events: “the same old Charon going by the name of Daniel O’Leary; the ruse is successful, a facelift that makes him seem much younger…” This technique was very popular before WWII, in particular among French playwrights, such as Giraudoux—but today, this might a bit outdated.
Luckily, I was patient enough to read until the end, and at page 316, I stumbled upon this great passage:
"The fleece suffocates, it brings death to whoever touches it. . . . Every previous possessor, robbed by a subsequent one, is in turn a usurper who appropriated it unlawfully [aha! We are getting to the ‘lesson’!] Give it back to the animal, killed and flayed in homage to the gods always thirsting for blood; only on the sheep’s back was the fleece in its rightful place [Italics mine].”
I confess, I wasn’t expecting this! This is definitely better than Giraudoux!
As all the reviewers have observed, it is hard to identify who the narrator in this novel is: is he “Comrade Cippico,” a Communist (not “anti-Communist,” as the book jacket wrongly states!) of Italian origin, who ends up, together with other Italian comrades in Tito’s gulag on the island of Goli Otok? Or is he Jorgen Jorgenson, a nineteenth-century adventurer with a twisted background, who is condemned to forced labor in Australia? As it becomes clear from early on, he is both: Magris creates a speaker of mixed identities and a listener (the man to whom he confesses, who might be a psychiatrist) equally ambiguous.
Blindly is a challenging, intriguing and beautifully written novel, but, above all, it is a novel of ideas—hence the question: what’s the book’s message? A novel needn’t have a message, but this one clearly has one; the problem is that, although the ideas in it are easy to identify, the overall message is not. Since Comrade Cippico has been interned at Dachau before Goli Otok, we can assume that he represents the little man crushed by history from all sides, right and left, Nazis and Communists. But Cippico, who, like his comrades, is in search of “the golden fleece,” doesn’t abandon his search and his belief in communism, even after his horrific tortures in Tito’s gulag, and this is where the novel’s ambiguity becomes problematic. We don’t get the sense the Magris deconstructs this search, but rather, that he presents Cippico simply as a victim of, let’s call them some bad manipulators of history. Also, consider this reflection: “Those who want to keep man enslaved—like the Fascists, the Nazis, the capitalists…” Statements like this made me less enthusiastic than I might have been about this novel. I’m no fan of “the capitalists,” but to list them next to the Nazis, especially after having called Dachau “the apocalypse,” is the kind of rushed talk one expects from a righteous freshman, and not from someone with Magris’s credentials. (I am aware that the narrator isn't Magris, but it seems to me that in some cases, like this one, the author identifies with the character. True, I might be wrong, and this identification may be a false impression).
A technique Magris uses is the contemporary rewriting of Greek myths and characters (the golden fleece is one of them). By inserting them in a contemporary setting he demystifies them and attempts to achieve some kind of universalization of his own characters and events: “the same old Charon going by the name of Daniel O’Leary; the ruse is successful, a facelift that makes him seem much younger…” This technique was very popular before WWII, in particular among French playwrights, such as Giraudoux—but today, this might a bit outdated.
Luckily, I was patient enough to read until the end, and at page 316, I stumbled upon this great passage:
"The fleece suffocates, it brings death to whoever touches it. . . . Every previous possessor, robbed by a subsequent one, is in turn a usurper who appropriated it unlawfully [aha! We are getting to the ‘lesson’!] Give it back to the animal, killed and flayed in homage to the gods always thirsting for blood; only on the sheep’s back was the fleece in its rightful place [Italics mine].”
I confess, I wasn’t expecting this! This is definitely better than Giraudoux!
March 13, 2013
Middle C by William H. Gass
There are writers one respects and admires, but doesn’t necessarily enjoy reading. William Gass—for me—falls into this category. Middle C is an impressive and ambitious novel, which—hard as I tried—I couldn’t finish. The protagonist, Joseph, is the son of an Austrian man who, in order to get his family away from the Nazis, took the identity of a Jewish man, then, when the war ended, disappeared. The family moved from England to America—where Joseph’s story begins.
Like his father, Joseph is a musician—and if you are a lover of classical music, Gass’s outstanding knowledge on the subject is certainly a plus. Joseph keeps reflecting on the fate of humanity by way of rephrasing a sentence, “The fear that the human race might not survive has been replaced by the fear that it will endure.” Raymond Queneau did something similar in Exercises in Style—but Queneau is a very playful, funny writer, while Gass is a very serious one, and his numerous variations on the above sentence become tiresome. In fact, turning the pages of this book was the equivalent of a heavy lifting, in spite of Gass’s amazingly intricate-beautiful style.
As unenthusiastic as this review sounds, I want to thank Knopf for having published this “reader-unfriendly,” challenging novel. These days, it is a treat to feel, as a reader, that a publisher wants to lift you (up), rather than satisfy your lowest impulses.
Like his father, Joseph is a musician—and if you are a lover of classical music, Gass’s outstanding knowledge on the subject is certainly a plus. Joseph keeps reflecting on the fate of humanity by way of rephrasing a sentence, “The fear that the human race might not survive has been replaced by the fear that it will endure.” Raymond Queneau did something similar in Exercises in Style—but Queneau is a very playful, funny writer, while Gass is a very serious one, and his numerous variations on the above sentence become tiresome. In fact, turning the pages of this book was the equivalent of a heavy lifting, in spite of Gass’s amazingly intricate-beautiful style.
As unenthusiastic as this review sounds, I want to thank Knopf for having published this “reader-unfriendly,” challenging novel. These days, it is a treat to feel, as a reader, that a publisher wants to lift you (up), rather than satisfy your lowest impulses.
December 31, 2012
Purge by Sofi Oksanen (Trans. from the Finnish by Lola Rogers. Black Cat, 2010)
Having grown up in a communist country, I am skeptical when it comes to successful novels about communism written by writers that haven’t experienced it firsthand. That’s why even before I checked to see if Sofi Oksanen has grown up in Estonia, where her novel takes place, I suspected she hasn’t. It turns out she is Estonian on her mother’s side, but born in Finland. This is not to say that Oksanen’s novel isn’t good: it is a very well written, suspenseful novel—but written for a Western audience and with a somewhat Western sensibility (in the same way the movie The Lives of Others about East Germany under communism was directed by a young German with training in Hollywood).
Purge moves between two periods: the one when the communists took power in Estonia after WWII, which coincided with the Soviet takeover (1946-the early fifties); and the post-communist years (1991-1992) when Estonia conquered its independence and began its transition toward a free market. The character making the connection between the two eras is an elderly, widowed woman, Aliide, who becomes the accidental host of a Russian young girl in need of help, Zara. The girl is hiding from two men who forced her into prostitution after she left Vladivostok (Russia) to work in West Germany in 1991.
It turns out that Zara didn’t stumble by accident in Aliide’s home: she had her address from her grandmother, a woman of Estonian origin, who, before the girl left for Germany, revealed that she had a sister in Estonia (who is, of course, Aliide). And so, we plunge into Aliide’s past and find out how, after having been tortured and raped by the new communist authorities (a fate her sister, and apparently, her seven-year old niece, i.e., Zara’s mother, have also endured) she is forced to become a collaborator (a common practice in communism). Eventually, she marries a communist (whose surprising past is revealed at the end of the novel in an appendix of “top secret” files). After her sister and her daughter (Zara’s future mother) are sent to Siberia, Aliide and her husband move into the freed house, which also serves (unbeknown to Aliide’s husband) as a hiding place for Aliide’s brother-in-law, with whom she is secretly in love.
Although Zara knows who Aliide is, she is unaware of her (and her own family’s) past; on the other hand, Aliide doesn’t know until the end that Zara is her relative, but knows that they have in common a history of surviving male violence. The ending is surprising and, although cathartic, not very plausible. I won’t give it away, but I’ll say that it involves a gun (there is no way that anyone, especially an old babushka, could have owned a gun during communism). There are some other details that bother me, but very likely, they are only noticeable by people like me: besides the gun, I would mention the rape of a seven-year-old, which to me, and probably to most people who’ve grown up in a communist country, seems like a gratuitous addition meant for Western audiences: throw in a scene with a raped child, and everybody will be disgusted with the evil done by the communists. The communists deserve to be accused of many evil things, but the rape of children was not one of them. Nevertheless, the novel is a great read, its best parts being those that describe Aliide in her kitchen, or those dealing with (her) fear. Fear, that feeling specific to dictatorships, is something Oksanen understands and knows how to convey. A good lesson in history, Purge is a novel definitely worth reading.
Purge moves between two periods: the one when the communists took power in Estonia after WWII, which coincided with the Soviet takeover (1946-the early fifties); and the post-communist years (1991-1992) when Estonia conquered its independence and began its transition toward a free market. The character making the connection between the two eras is an elderly, widowed woman, Aliide, who becomes the accidental host of a Russian young girl in need of help, Zara. The girl is hiding from two men who forced her into prostitution after she left Vladivostok (Russia) to work in West Germany in 1991.
It turns out that Zara didn’t stumble by accident in Aliide’s home: she had her address from her grandmother, a woman of Estonian origin, who, before the girl left for Germany, revealed that she had a sister in Estonia (who is, of course, Aliide). And so, we plunge into Aliide’s past and find out how, after having been tortured and raped by the new communist authorities (a fate her sister, and apparently, her seven-year old niece, i.e., Zara’s mother, have also endured) she is forced to become a collaborator (a common practice in communism). Eventually, she marries a communist (whose surprising past is revealed at the end of the novel in an appendix of “top secret” files). After her sister and her daughter (Zara’s future mother) are sent to Siberia, Aliide and her husband move into the freed house, which also serves (unbeknown to Aliide’s husband) as a hiding place for Aliide’s brother-in-law, with whom she is secretly in love.
Although Zara knows who Aliide is, she is unaware of her (and her own family’s) past; on the other hand, Aliide doesn’t know until the end that Zara is her relative, but knows that they have in common a history of surviving male violence. The ending is surprising and, although cathartic, not very plausible. I won’t give it away, but I’ll say that it involves a gun (there is no way that anyone, especially an old babushka, could have owned a gun during communism). There are some other details that bother me, but very likely, they are only noticeable by people like me: besides the gun, I would mention the rape of a seven-year-old, which to me, and probably to most people who’ve grown up in a communist country, seems like a gratuitous addition meant for Western audiences: throw in a scene with a raped child, and everybody will be disgusted with the evil done by the communists. The communists deserve to be accused of many evil things, but the rape of children was not one of them. Nevertheless, the novel is a great read, its best parts being those that describe Aliide in her kitchen, or those dealing with (her) fear. Fear, that feeling specific to dictatorships, is something Oksanen understands and knows how to convey. A good lesson in history, Purge is a novel definitely worth reading.
December 14, 2012
My Top Ten Fiction Books for 2012
The first date is the English publication; the second is the original, where available
1. The Golovlyovs (1975, 1880) by Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin (Russian)
2. The Plaster Angel (2010) by Dezsö Kosztolányi (Hungarian)
3. An Ermine in Czernopol (2011, 1966) by Gregor von Rezzori (Austrian)
4. Seven Gothic Tales (1994, 1934) by Isak Dinesen (Danish/Kenyan)
5. Dangerous Laughter (2008) by Steven Millhauser (American)
6. Five Spice Street (2009) by Can Xue (Chinese)
7. The Twelve Chairs (2011, 1928) by Ilya Ilf and Yevgeni Petrov (Russians)
8. My Brilliant Friend (2012, 2011) by Elena Ferrante (Italian)
9. War and War (2006, 1999) by László Krasznahorkai (Hungarian)
10. 70 Acrylic 30 Wool (2012, 2011) by Viola di Grado (Italian)
1. The Golovlyovs (1975, 1880) by Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin (Russian)
2. The Plaster Angel (2010) by Dezsö Kosztolányi (Hungarian)
3. An Ermine in Czernopol (2011, 1966) by Gregor von Rezzori (Austrian)
4. Seven Gothic Tales (1994, 1934) by Isak Dinesen (Danish/Kenyan)
5. Dangerous Laughter (2008) by Steven Millhauser (American)
6. Five Spice Street (2009) by Can Xue (Chinese)
7. The Twelve Chairs (2011, 1928) by Ilya Ilf and Yevgeni Petrov (Russians)
8. My Brilliant Friend (2012, 2011) by Elena Ferrante (Italian)
9. War and War (2006, 1999) by László Krasznahorkai (Hungarian)
10. 70 Acrylic 30 Wool (2012, 2011) by Viola di Grado (Italian)
November 29, 2012
Europa Editions and Contemporary Italian Fiction
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. Europa Editions, 2012. Trans. from the Italian by Ann Goldstein.
Persecution by Alessandro Piperno. Europa Editions, 2012. Trans. from the Italian by Ann Goldstein.
Europa Editions has become in recent years one of the most important publishing houses of fiction in translation. Among its authors a privileged place is given to contemporary Italian novelists. Having already read and greatly enjoyed Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter and Alessandro Piperno’s The Worst Intentions, I was thrilled to discover My Brilliant Friend and Persecution, both impeccably translated by Ann Goldstein and released this year.
My Brilliant Friend is the story of a friendship between two young Neapolitan women from pre-school age until they reach sixteen, and indirectly a history of Naples from the fifties until the present. I say “until the present” because the story is preceded by a phone conversation between the narrator (Elena) and one of the children of the narrator’s friend, Lila. Elena, who is now sixty-six, is informed that Lila has disappeared, and as a consequence, decides to write the story of their youth. But the novel never returns to the initial frame, and ends, abruptly, with a disturbing scene from Lila’s wedding. This semi-circle, or half-framing, which goes against our expectations as readers, may appear strange to some, but personally, I liked it.
The novel, focused mostly on the two girls growing up in a poor Neapolitan neighborhood and the local family dramas, is more suspenseful and full of excitement than a thriller. The reader is drawn entirely into this world of strong passions and conflicts whose intensity remind one of neorealist films. This coming-of-age story is also a novel about becoming a writer, and about the power of the double. Indeed, the two friends make for a fascinating couple, being opposite and similar at the same time; although with minds of their own, both are dependent on each other, and each thinks of the other as her “brilliant friend.” Lila is the one with a true “voice” and with a fierce sense of independence, and yet, she will remain attached to the same milieu, while Elena will be the one to tell their story.
Ferrante’s world is a violent world, a world in which parents beat their children and husbands their wives, brothers hit their sisters, and male friends feel obligated to engage in a fight each time another male looks at their female companions. Every single time Elena’s group of friends goes out, the outing ends with a fight. And yet, in spite of the violence, this is a deeply humane world.
Piperno’s Persecution is just as intense and, like My Brilliant Friend, has a masterful way of keeping the reader on edge. The novel is a contemporary family drama about a highly successful doctor, Leo Pontecorvo, who has it all: looks; a beautiful, devoted wife; two teenage boys; a great career and, of course, money. A man who’d always been watched over by Providence, Leo has made many enemies but nonchalantly ignored them until one summer day in 1986 when a TV news anchor accuses him of having tried to seduce his thirteen-year-old son’s girlfriend. This is the beginning of Leo’s downfall: eventually, he is accused of rape, but he is so puzzled and embarrassed that he doesn’t even attempt to defend himself before his family, and instead retreats into the house’s cellar.
For the narrator—a mysterious, omniscient voice—Leo is the victim of a disturbed teenage girl and of his family’s lack of faith in him. I would also speculate that this novel is a response to the contemporary cult of the victim, and to the tendency to give immediate credence to stories of abuse. Many European intellectuals regard with suspicious eyes the (primarily American) tendency to make into a hero any self-proclaimed victim, and see this as a consequence of the functioning of contemporary media, and of a perverted idea of “democracy” (basically, a revenge of the “masses” against those more fortunate).
Piperno and Ferrante display a flow and a naturalness of style that come from a vision of literature unhindered by artificial dualisms, such as “craft”/“plot” or “writing”/”story.” They are among that rare species of novelists who, gifted with a critical, analytical mind, are skilled enough to pretend that they simply inhabit their characters, though every once in a while they get out of character, gazing upon it with the critical eye of a god. These novelists prove that good novels are almost always a combination of the skill to entertain and to think critically, and that literary style isn’t simply the result of skillfully moving words around, but the result of being able to structure the world in a new way. After all, sentences are structures, not merely words strung together.
Persecution by Alessandro Piperno. Europa Editions, 2012. Trans. from the Italian by Ann Goldstein.
Europa Editions has become in recent years one of the most important publishing houses of fiction in translation. Among its authors a privileged place is given to contemporary Italian novelists. Having already read and greatly enjoyed Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter and Alessandro Piperno’s The Worst Intentions, I was thrilled to discover My Brilliant Friend and Persecution, both impeccably translated by Ann Goldstein and released this year.
My Brilliant Friend is the story of a friendship between two young Neapolitan women from pre-school age until they reach sixteen, and indirectly a history of Naples from the fifties until the present. I say “until the present” because the story is preceded by a phone conversation between the narrator (Elena) and one of the children of the narrator’s friend, Lila. Elena, who is now sixty-six, is informed that Lila has disappeared, and as a consequence, decides to write the story of their youth. But the novel never returns to the initial frame, and ends, abruptly, with a disturbing scene from Lila’s wedding. This semi-circle, or half-framing, which goes against our expectations as readers, may appear strange to some, but personally, I liked it.
The novel, focused mostly on the two girls growing up in a poor Neapolitan neighborhood and the local family dramas, is more suspenseful and full of excitement than a thriller. The reader is drawn entirely into this world of strong passions and conflicts whose intensity remind one of neorealist films. This coming-of-age story is also a novel about becoming a writer, and about the power of the double. Indeed, the two friends make for a fascinating couple, being opposite and similar at the same time; although with minds of their own, both are dependent on each other, and each thinks of the other as her “brilliant friend.” Lila is the one with a true “voice” and with a fierce sense of independence, and yet, she will remain attached to the same milieu, while Elena will be the one to tell their story.
Ferrante’s world is a violent world, a world in which parents beat their children and husbands their wives, brothers hit their sisters, and male friends feel obligated to engage in a fight each time another male looks at their female companions. Every single time Elena’s group of friends goes out, the outing ends with a fight. And yet, in spite of the violence, this is a deeply humane world.
Piperno’s Persecution is just as intense and, like My Brilliant Friend, has a masterful way of keeping the reader on edge. The novel is a contemporary family drama about a highly successful doctor, Leo Pontecorvo, who has it all: looks; a beautiful, devoted wife; two teenage boys; a great career and, of course, money. A man who’d always been watched over by Providence, Leo has made many enemies but nonchalantly ignored them until one summer day in 1986 when a TV news anchor accuses him of having tried to seduce his thirteen-year-old son’s girlfriend. This is the beginning of Leo’s downfall: eventually, he is accused of rape, but he is so puzzled and embarrassed that he doesn’t even attempt to defend himself before his family, and instead retreats into the house’s cellar.
For the narrator—a mysterious, omniscient voice—Leo is the victim of a disturbed teenage girl and of his family’s lack of faith in him. I would also speculate that this novel is a response to the contemporary cult of the victim, and to the tendency to give immediate credence to stories of abuse. Many European intellectuals regard with suspicious eyes the (primarily American) tendency to make into a hero any self-proclaimed victim, and see this as a consequence of the functioning of contemporary media, and of a perverted idea of “democracy” (basically, a revenge of the “masses” against those more fortunate).
Piperno and Ferrante display a flow and a naturalness of style that come from a vision of literature unhindered by artificial dualisms, such as “craft”/“plot” or “writing”/”story.” They are among that rare species of novelists who, gifted with a critical, analytical mind, are skilled enough to pretend that they simply inhabit their characters, though every once in a while they get out of character, gazing upon it with the critical eye of a god. These novelists prove that good novels are almost always a combination of the skill to entertain and to think critically, and that literary style isn’t simply the result of skillfully moving words around, but the result of being able to structure the world in a new way. After all, sentences are structures, not merely words strung together.
October 20, 2012
The Guinea Pigs by Ludvík Vaculík
The Guinea Pigs by Ludvík Vaculík (Trans. from the Czech by Káca Polácková. Open Letter, 2011)
I was familiar with Open Letter’s commitment to translation, but I hadn’t seen their books until recently. I can now state that next to Archipelago Books (another publisher specialized in literature in translation) Open Letter publishes the most beautifully designed books in this country. The covers have a sober elegance that few books have in the current environment in which publishers seem to compete for the gaudiest packaging possible. Everything—the font, the covers, the description on the back cover—is tasteful. The only criticism I would have for the novel I recently bought, The Guinea Pigs by the Czech writer Ludvík Vaculík, is that the original publication date, 1973, isn’t specified in the author’s bio. The date is important considering that the author was one of the literary voices of the Prague Spring in 1968, and that the novel was written during that particular era in Eastern European history.
Written as if it were addressed to children, the novel uses this rhetoric strategy to explain the meaning of various “scientific” terms, and embraces a pseudo-scientific tone when describing the details of the narrator’s experiments on his guinea pigs. The narrator is a father of two young boys who works at a state bank in Prague, where he observes and participates in what for an American reader might be an act of sabotage of the bank. For an Eastern European reader, however, the narrator simply does what everybody else did at the time: steals from his workplace in order to survive. The description of the numerous absurdities of the Communist regime—which is never mentioned as such—combined with the dialogues between father and sons and the “objective” description of the guinea pigs create a hilarious effect.
The most intriguing aspect of the novel is the narrator’s relationship with his guinea pigs. Whether one reads the book at a literal level—as a novel about a Czech family in the seventies and its cute guinea pigs—or as a metaphor about a political system in which the citizens are treated like guinea pigs, The Guinea Pigs makes for a very entertaining (and educational!) reading.
I was familiar with Open Letter’s commitment to translation, but I hadn’t seen their books until recently. I can now state that next to Archipelago Books (another publisher specialized in literature in translation) Open Letter publishes the most beautifully designed books in this country. The covers have a sober elegance that few books have in the current environment in which publishers seem to compete for the gaudiest packaging possible. Everything—the font, the covers, the description on the back cover—is tasteful. The only criticism I would have for the novel I recently bought, The Guinea Pigs by the Czech writer Ludvík Vaculík, is that the original publication date, 1973, isn’t specified in the author’s bio. The date is important considering that the author was one of the literary voices of the Prague Spring in 1968, and that the novel was written during that particular era in Eastern European history.
Written as if it were addressed to children, the novel uses this rhetoric strategy to explain the meaning of various “scientific” terms, and embraces a pseudo-scientific tone when describing the details of the narrator’s experiments on his guinea pigs. The narrator is a father of two young boys who works at a state bank in Prague, where he observes and participates in what for an American reader might be an act of sabotage of the bank. For an Eastern European reader, however, the narrator simply does what everybody else did at the time: steals from his workplace in order to survive. The description of the numerous absurdities of the Communist regime—which is never mentioned as such—combined with the dialogues between father and sons and the “objective” description of the guinea pigs create a hilarious effect.
The most intriguing aspect of the novel is the narrator’s relationship with his guinea pigs. Whether one reads the book at a literal level—as a novel about a Czech family in the seventies and its cute guinea pigs—or as a metaphor about a political system in which the citizens are treated like guinea pigs, The Guinea Pigs makes for a very entertaining (and educational!) reading.
October 11, 2012
Confusion by Stefan Zweig & Kokoro by Natsume Soseki
Confusion by Stefan Zweig (Trans. from the German by Anthea Bell. Intro by George Prochnik). NYRB, 2012.
Kokoro by Natsume Soseki (Trans. from the Japanese by Meredith McKinney). Penguin Books, 2010.
I don’t know about you, but when I read I encounter synchronicities about as often as I do in real life. I happened to read Confusion by Stefan Zweig immediately after having read Kokoro by Natsume Soseki, and the similarities between these books are uncanny. They are all the more unexpected considering that the former is a novella published in 1927 by an Austrian writer, and the second a novel published in 1914 by a Japanese writer.
Both books have three main characters: the narrator—a young man who is a student; the narrator’s friend—an elder who, in Confusion, is the narrator’s teacher, and in Kokoro, although not a teacher per se, is the narrator’s mentor and is called (by the narrator) “Sensei” (i.e., “teacher” in Japanese); and the friend’s/teacher’s wife. Both stories consist in the narrator’s ruminations about a “secret” his teacher/friend seems to have. In both, there are numerous dialogues between the wife and the young narrator whose main topic is the mysterious teacher—an enigmatic character the young narrator attempts to decipher. Even the titles have similar connotations: in Japanese, “kokoro” means both “heart” and “mind,” and its use by the narrator appears to indicate his emotional and mental confusion regarding his friend.
But the endings couldn’t be more different, and one could say that they are emblematic: in Kokoro, the “secret” has to do with a shameful act Sensei had committed in his youth; in Confusion, shame is also associated with the secret, but it is—of course!—of a sexual nature (let’s not forget, this is the period when Zweig’s compatriot, Freud, is at the peak of his career). Another difference is stylistic: Kokoro is written in a simple, straightforward way; Confusion, on the other hand, in Anthea Bell’s masterful translation, is one of Zweig’s best stylistic accomplishments.
Both stories are rather slow and monotonous, but it is a pleasant monotony, like the purring of a cat.
Kokoro by Natsume Soseki (Trans. from the Japanese by Meredith McKinney). Penguin Books, 2010.
I don’t know about you, but when I read I encounter synchronicities about as often as I do in real life. I happened to read Confusion by Stefan Zweig immediately after having read Kokoro by Natsume Soseki, and the similarities between these books are uncanny. They are all the more unexpected considering that the former is a novella published in 1927 by an Austrian writer, and the second a novel published in 1914 by a Japanese writer.
Both books have three main characters: the narrator—a young man who is a student; the narrator’s friend—an elder who, in Confusion, is the narrator’s teacher, and in Kokoro, although not a teacher per se, is the narrator’s mentor and is called (by the narrator) “Sensei” (i.e., “teacher” in Japanese); and the friend’s/teacher’s wife. Both stories consist in the narrator’s ruminations about a “secret” his teacher/friend seems to have. In both, there are numerous dialogues between the wife and the young narrator whose main topic is the mysterious teacher—an enigmatic character the young narrator attempts to decipher. Even the titles have similar connotations: in Japanese, “kokoro” means both “heart” and “mind,” and its use by the narrator appears to indicate his emotional and mental confusion regarding his friend.
But the endings couldn’t be more different, and one could say that they are emblematic: in Kokoro, the “secret” has to do with a shameful act Sensei had committed in his youth; in Confusion, shame is also associated with the secret, but it is—of course!—of a sexual nature (let’s not forget, this is the period when Zweig’s compatriot, Freud, is at the peak of his career). Another difference is stylistic: Kokoro is written in a simple, straightforward way; Confusion, on the other hand, in Anthea Bell’s masterful translation, is one of Zweig’s best stylistic accomplishments.
Both stories are rather slow and monotonous, but it is a pleasant monotony, like the purring of a cat.
September 10, 2012
My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard
My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard (Archipelago, 2012. Trans. from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett)
My Struggle by the contemporary Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard is one of the rare books in translation to have gotten any attention these days. The reviews have been so positive some have declared the book a masterpiece.
My Struggle is a memoir about the author’s life that moves between his childhood and the present, and focuses on his difficult relationship with his father. The passages in which the narrator reflects on life and death are by far the best. Also impressive are the photographic details recreating the narrator’s surrounding reality. Never have I encountered a fictional universe imitating so close the real one. Yet, there is a lingering sensation that, in the end, nothing transcends the accumulation of all these details. Plus, the comparisons with Proust made by some reviewers are absolutely unjustified. There is nothing this writer has in common with Proust. In fact, I would say that Knausgaard’s desire to replicate reality in all its prose is the very opposite of Proust’s desire to mythologize desire itself, never mind his (Proust’s) disinterest in a literal reality.
My Struggle by the contemporary Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard is one of the rare books in translation to have gotten any attention these days. The reviews have been so positive some have declared the book a masterpiece.
My Struggle is a memoir about the author’s life that moves between his childhood and the present, and focuses on his difficult relationship with his father. The passages in which the narrator reflects on life and death are by far the best. Also impressive are the photographic details recreating the narrator’s surrounding reality. Never have I encountered a fictional universe imitating so close the real one. Yet, there is a lingering sensation that, in the end, nothing transcends the accumulation of all these details. Plus, the comparisons with Proust made by some reviewers are absolutely unjustified. There is nothing this writer has in common with Proust. In fact, I would say that Knausgaard’s desire to replicate reality in all its prose is the very opposite of Proust’s desire to mythologize desire itself, never mind his (Proust’s) disinterest in a literal reality.
August 23, 2012
Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen
(Modern Library, 1994; 1st pub. 1934)
I owe my acquaintance with Isak Dinesen to Carmela Ciuraru’s Nom de Plume. This is how I found out that Dinesen is the pen name of Danish Baroness Blixen, who wrote in English and lived most of her life in Kenya (she is the author of the famous Out of Africa).
I haven’t read any other book by Dinesen, but Seven Gothic Tales is one of the most extraordinary collections of stories and novellas I have ever read. It is very rare for a writer to display such a masterful combination of skills: imagination, analytical powers and style.
Most of the stories take place in the early nineteenth-century, and are framed in the tradition of Boccaccio’s Decameron, but their atmosphere is reminiscent of Poe, and the writer’s insights are in the best tradition of the psychological novel. Add to this Dinesen’t ability to make puns in three languages—English, French and German, and sometimes a combination of the above—plus her razor-sharp wit, and you will have an idea of her extreme originality. Even more impressive is her ability to take the stories in the most unexpected directions. Often, when we read fiction, we know more or less where the writer is going. With Dinesen it is impossible to predict how a story will end.
I owe my acquaintance with Isak Dinesen to Carmela Ciuraru’s Nom de Plume. This is how I found out that Dinesen is the pen name of Danish Baroness Blixen, who wrote in English and lived most of her life in Kenya (she is the author of the famous Out of Africa).
I haven’t read any other book by Dinesen, but Seven Gothic Tales is one of the most extraordinary collections of stories and novellas I have ever read. It is very rare for a writer to display such a masterful combination of skills: imagination, analytical powers and style.
Most of the stories take place in the early nineteenth-century, and are framed in the tradition of Boccaccio’s Decameron, but their atmosphere is reminiscent of Poe, and the writer’s insights are in the best tradition of the psychological novel. Add to this Dinesen’t ability to make puns in three languages—English, French and German, and sometimes a combination of the above—plus her razor-sharp wit, and you will have an idea of her extreme originality. Even more impressive is her ability to take the stories in the most unexpected directions. Often, when we read fiction, we know more or less where the writer is going. With Dinesen it is impossible to predict how a story will end.
Notes on Books
Book reviews and occasional notes and thoughts on world literature and writers by an American writer of Eastern European origin.
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