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Dubravka Ugresic's Baba Yaga Laid an Egg

Dubravka Ugresic’s Baba Yaga Laid an Egg (trans. from Serbo-Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursac, Celia Hawkesworth, and Mark Thompson, Grove Press, 2011) retells the Slavic myth of Baba Yaga (literally “old woman”) as a modern (or postmodern) story about old age and women. The book’s first section is devoted to the narrator’s relationship with her aged mother; the second tells the story of three old women, Pupa, Beba and Kukla, framed within the setting of a luxurious spa in post-communist Czech Republic; and the third is a sort of deconstruction or a “fairytale turned inside-out” of the previous section, penned in the form of a study by a specialist in folklore (Aba Bagay, an obvious anagram of Baba Yaga).

As a former East European who has been fascinated by the American obsession with youth, the preservation of the body, and the myth of immortality—all of which are reflected in the fitness culture on the one hand and the pop mythology built around the myth of Dracula on the other—I read with passion Ugresic’s meditation on all these themes via what appears to be a story at the spa. The spa itself (or its older version, the sanatorium) is one of the most fecund loci in early 20th-century European literature: think of Thomas Mann, to mention only the most famous name. But Ugresic, who is well aware of her predecessors (she herself mentions several writers who have chosen the spa as their setting, among them Milan Kundera), uses it in order to illuminate contemporary mores and obsessions, associating this “healing spring” with the myth of the fountain of youth, and creating a funny satire of the industries centered around the body (vitamin industry, cosmetic surgery, etc.) with their “physics and metaphysics” that reflect an “archetypal dream” of humanity and the “fundamental obsession of our age” with youth and the body.

Structurally, the book’s second section follows the flow of fairytales in that each chapter ends with a rhymed zinger in which the storyteller intervenes to remind us that this is, after all, only a story, and occasionally to comment on the story itself: “What about us? While life may land us in a dreadful plight, the tale speeds to be home in daylight.” This is a translation challenge, as folk and fairytale rhymed zingers are so ingrained in us in that unique form that any translation would sound fake; it is hard to tell whether Ugresic uses here “authentic” zingers from tales she has read as a child—which could never sound “authentic” for an English-speaking reader—or whether she actually invents them (my guess would be the latter).

Lovers of myth, folklore, and anthropology will relish the third section, a hundred-page study of the myth of Baba Yaga, in spite of the fact that one is not entirely sure how to read it in relation to the rest of the novel—an ambiguity the author probably intends. The folklorist Aba Bagay gives us here a mythological (and occasionally psychoanalytical and feminist) interpretation of the story we have just read in the book’s second section. This interpretation is not simply a general reading of “what happens” in the story: it is a symbolic reading of various scenes, sometimes down to the most trivial and apparently inconspicuous (“camouflaged”) details (for example, a little girl’s playful motion to step inside a big boot is compared to a regression into the maternal womb).

Whether Ugresic uses her skills developed while working as a researcher at the Institute for Theory of Literature at Zagreb University in order to make fun of Aba Bagay’s pedantic knowledge and pretentious interpretation, as some American reviewers have opined, is open to debate. While it is obvious that the author has an ironic distance toward Aba Bagay, it would be hard to say that she entirely dismisses her, since the facts presented in the third section are not invented but describe the history and the specialized literature pertaining to this myth, and are verifiable. The question is: how seriously does Ugresic take the folklorist’s interpretation of the second section (especially since she tells us in the first section that she dislikes specialists in folklore)? Is Aba Bagay the opposite of Baba Yaga (as the order of the letters y-a-g-a-b-a-b-a might suggest), or, on the contrary, is she a Baba Yaga herself who turns the myth upside down or inside out? It seems to me Aba Bagay is here merely a pretext (or a post-text) that Ugresic uses in order to give us the “facts” of the myth.

On the other hand, it is evident that Ugresic intended to rewrite the myth from a feminist perspective. The difference in perception triggered by the third section may be caused by the caesura between Aba Bagay’s symbolic logic and the feminist perspective, which belong to two different worldviews, insofar as symbolic logic attempts to find some kind of hidden, universal meaning behind a particular situation. It will be interesting to see the kinds of reading this book will inspire. It is the type of book that can be open to multiple interpretations because it unites within the same space mythological and postmodern thinking. As Susan Sontag has said, Ugresic is “a writer to follow, a writer to be cherished.”

Steven Millhauser's The Knife Thrower (1998)

I discovered Steven Millhauser several years ago, when I found his collection of short stories, The Knife Thrower, at a library sale. Milhauser’s technique is very particular in that it uses a realist-psychological approach only to better thwart it by infusing it with elements of fantastic fiction. For example, in “A Visit,” the narrator is introduced to his friend’s wife, who happens to be a gigantic, ugly frog. A different writer would have described the scene in a surrealist style, but Millhauser’s character ponders with a straight face the implications of his friend’s marriage to a frog. This encounter between the means of psychological realism and fantastic literature creates a disruptive tension and provokes in the reader a feeling that transcends the literal description.

Millhauser has the very rare genius of giving us the pleasure of reading that captivating stories usually arouse in us, while reflecting and engaging the reader in a reflection not only on the story itself and on the act of storytelling, but also on some serious topics, such as the relationship between technology and morality, the American obsession with technological progress and the extremes to which this obsession is carried. Yet he does this in such an oblique way that the reader may not even notice that the stories “The Dream of the Consortium” and “Paradise Park” are essentially two critical essays on American lifestyle done in the guise of storytelling. I believe that he manages to weave his ideas so smoothly into the fabric of the story—indeed the ideas are the story—for two reasons: 1) the narrator doesn’t judge from the outside, but is himself one of the crowd and, like the crowd, goes through a series of conflicting feelings, from nostalgia for the charm of the old department stores to being seduced by the new world of mega-malls, in which the old stores and pretty much everything on the planet is copied and transformed into a replica that can be purchased and sold; 2) the child in Millhauser is fascinated by all the incarnations of amusement parks, which, in turn, are incarnations of old fairs and freak shows—a magic world reminiscent of an Oriental bazaar, which is best represented in the story “Flying Carpets.”

It is no accident that the dream store in “The Dream Consortium” and the dream amusement park in “Paradise Park” are extremely similar. Both utopias are built on the desire to replicate life, that is, to transform everything into a copy that ends up taking the place of the original. For the business people in the dream store there is no distinction between a wristwatch and a Roman villa. In the dream store one can order and buy an entire European city, which is, of course, more convenient than traveling all the way to Europe. Sounds familiar? A cross between Las Vegas and Disneyland, Millhauser’s dream store and Paradise Park remind us of Baudrillard’s reflections on technology and simulacra. In “The Dream of the Consortium,” the entire world, or rather its replica, can be bought, sold and possessed by consumers. In “Paradise Park,” the consumers of increasingly titillating forms of entertainment descend into labyrinthine structures that imitate the real world from which they are trying to escape. But the search for ever more titillating amusements eventually turns onto itself like a snake biting its tail, and Paradise Park becomes a sort of Devil’s Park in which the ultimate pleasure is pain.

If one wants to find out more about Millhauser’s understanding of art one should read the story “The New Automaton Theater,” an ars poetica that should be compulsive reading in all creative writing classes. The narrator distinguishes between a “Children’s Theater,” built on a naïve realism that wants to keep the illusion of fiction at any price, and a theater for adults—the “new automaton theater”—in which the artifice of fiction is exposed for what it is, and the realist characters become “automatons.” The new automatons lack the grace of the realist ones from the Children’s Theater, but they are “profoundly expressive in their own disturbing way.”

Millhauser walks the very tight rope between the Children’s Theater and the New Automatons Theater, and he walks it brilliantly.

Sweet Money by Ernesto Mallo

Sweet Money by Ernesto Mallo (Trans. from Spanish by Katherine Silver. Bitter Lemon Press, 2011)

I normally don’t read mysteries, so when I was offered this book I was sure I wouldn’t read more than a few pages. I ended up reading the whole book, and was surprised that not only was it suspenseful (which I had anticipated), but it was also fairly intelligent, well structured, and written in a minimalist style that goes well with the plot. The background is that of the 1980s Buenos Aires, and, as expected, the criminal and the political world are intertwined. Add to this Silver’s great skills as a translator, and you’ll have a very enjoyable read.

Zero and Other Fictions by Huang Fan (Trans. from Chinese by John Balcom. Columbia UP, 2011)

Huang Fan is a Taiwanese author who is worth reading, but who had the misfortune of having been translated too late. Zero is a dystopian novella written in the speculative tradition and originally published in 1981. To predict a world in which the upper classes live in a sterile environment in which they often interact only through computer screens, books have been digitized and print no longer exists, and the planet is a global village led by an international elite with a dubious past, would be impressive in 1981—but not in 2012.

The book has other short stories, some with political references (“Lai Suo”) and others told with dry humor within a sophisticated, metafictional frame (“How to Measure the Width of a Ditch”). For all these reasons, this should be a captivating book, and yet, it’s not. As often with Chinese literature, it is hard to know whether the problem is the translation, the original, or both. The reader can tell that the writer is intelligent and (sort of) witty, but the humor is sometimes flat. And the stories are uneven, oscillating between the (desire for the) sublime and the ridiculous.

Tyrant Memory by Horacio Castellanos Moya (Trans. from the Spanish by Katherine Silver, New Directions, 2011)

I read this novel a few months after having read Moya’s The She-Devil in the Mirror (New Directions, 2009), both translated by Katherine Silver. They are equally captivating, both written, at least in part, in the voice of a woman who, although apparently apolitical, ends up being, through her record (her diary in Tyrant Memory; her monologue in The-She Devil) an incredible witness to a crisis in a chaotic San Salvador. I should add that the author himself, born in Honduras but raised in El Salvador, has been living in exile as part of the City of Asylum project in Pittsburgh.

The events in Tyrant Memory take place in 1944, when the general leading the country with a dictatorial fist is forced to resign after weeks of political turmoil. The crime in The She-Devil is non-political, but the background is the chaos of post-civil war. Both novels have an immediacy that reminds me of Bolaño’s style in The Savage Detectives (though I confess I only managed to read half of that novel). Although Tyrant Memory doesn’t claim to adhere strictly to history, I couldn’t help notice the slight inadequacy of the word “Nazi” used by both the opposition and the general to insult each other. I doubt the word was used in this way in 1944.

Moya is a writer definitely worth reading, and his translator, Katherine Silver deserves, I think, as much praise as him for her outstanding translations.

Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser (Knopf, 2008).

Of all the writers I know, Steven Millhauser has probably the most uncanny imagination, the biggest range in themes, and at the same time, the most recognizable (ie., unique) style.

The first story in Dangerous Laughter, “Cat’ n’ Mouse,” is written like a precise report of a Tom and Jerry cartoon. In fact, having watched dozens of episodes of the latter as a teenager (on Romanian TV!), I am convinced that Millhauser has written many of the passages while watching the cartoon.

“The Room in the Attic” reminds me of Dickens. As in many of Millhauser’s stories, the narrator is a teenager fascinated with another boy his age, or rather, with the mysterious, wondrous world his friend gives him access to. The recurrent theme of the initiation into another, mysterious world, which often happens to exist across from our own home, is paralleled by the locus of the dark room as a variation on the magic behind the velvet curtain at the movie theater.

Several of the stories in this collection—“The Dome,” “The Tower,” “The Other Town”—revolve around an architectural theme, which is one of Millhauser’s preoccupations. In this, he is truly a creator, as he imagines alternative architectural possibilities to the ones we are familiar with: an entire town, then the entire country, covered by a dome, like a huge mall; a town, which is an exact replica of its neighboring town; and an imperfect version of the Tower of Babel, inhabited by humans.

This would have been one of my favorite Millhauser collections had it not been for the last part. Though interesting conceptually (For instance, “A Precursor of the Cinema” is fascinating as a combination of historical fact and fiction, not to mention a hidden reference to Balzac’s Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu through the character’s “self-erasure”) these stories were a bit tedious. Still, Millhauser is, as far as I am concerned, the best contemporary American writer.

The Lizard’s Tale by José Donoso (NUP, 2011)

For an unfinished novel, José Donoso’s The Lizard’s Tale is surprisingly polished and well structured. Credit should be given to the editor, Julio Ortega, and the translator, Suzanne Jill Levine. I haven’t read the Spanish, but a glimpse at the title in Spanish is enough to give one an idea of the translator’s ingenuity. The title means, literally, “lizard without a tail,” but the translator and the book designer have created a word play in English that doesn’t exist in the original. The book cover features a lizard whose cut tail is replaced by the words “The Lizard’s Tale.” This is an example of “unfaithfulness” in translation that not only doesn’t contradict the spirit of the novel, but it complements it. It also shows that a book’s meaning comes not merely from its “content,” but from everything, including the cover.

The novel’s protagonist, Antonio, is a Spanish painter who abandons art and Barcelona’s bohemian world, “as a lizard sheds its tail,” and retires to the isolated village of Dors, a place of untouched architectural beauty, whose many old houses go back hundreds of years. The flashbacks of Antonio’s previous life with their focus on the “informalists” are reminiscent of scenes from Cortazar’s Hopscotch, or Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives and its “visceral realists.” The latter, however, was first published in 1998, while Donoso’s novel, written in 1973, was set aside and published for the first time in 2007.

Antonio—and through him, Donoso—laments the commercialization of tourism “which brings in foreign currency but destroys all identity,” and which is merely an extension of the prostitution that characterizes modern art in general, and the “informalist” movement in particular. Although most readers wouldn’t disagree, like me, they might find tiresome these repeated laments, which might have been more original in the early seventies when Donoso wrote them. I was afraid the novel might turn into some kind of homage to rustic, authentic life versus the corrupt life of the city—and I was wrong. Not only doesn’t Donoso idealize the former, but his description of the villagers is rather cynical (and, as such, is closer to reality than any kind of sugary idealization). As it happens, the villagers despise these old houses, and all they want is to sell them and move into modern, functional, interchangeable apartment buildings. While this desire might be justified by practical reasons, the villagers’ relationships among themselves and their status in the community are less justifiable: as in most communities, the big players in the village are the most ruthless and unscrupulous ones. As a consequence, as soon as he arrives in Dors, Antonio succeeds in making enemies, and it is by creating enemies that he becomes part of the community—an irony that is, certainly, not accidental.

When people from Antonio’s previous life begin to show up in the village—his latest lover, her daughter (who becomes his lover too), the lover’s doctor, Antonio’s former wife, their son, and the wife’s entourage, whose eccentricity brings to mind Fellini’s La Dolce Vita—a new air infuses the village. Antonio—and with him, the reader—is confronted with a paradox: the intruders will, no doubt, destroy the peaceful, traditional life of the village, for which he’d come there in the first place; at the same time, the intruders, whose tastes are similar to his, are the only ones who can help him preserve the old houses by buying and renovating them. The salvation and the destruction of the past seem to come from the same source.

This conflict is very much a reframing of The City and the Mountains by the Portuguese writer Eça de Queirós, in which the conflict is between technological progress or civilization, on the one hand, and nature, on the other. Eça de Queirós’s novel is, however, slightly less ambivalent, as the narrator’s preference goes definitely toward nature. The city—which happens to be Paris, where the writer wrote this novel in 1895—is described as an infinite source of pointless agitation, a place where one can find all the pleasures imaginable, but which in the end have one result: tedium. When the novel’s rich protagonist is called by a business emergency to his rural property in Portugal, the narrator describes his new life in the mountains as that of a “benefactor” who proceeds to remedy some of the local poverty by implementing urban technologies that would make the peasants’ lives better. Thus, the city finds its way into the mountains in the same way the attempt of Donoso’s protagonist to protect the village ends up opening it to the outside world.

Little by little, a story focused on an artist who runs away from one kind of community (that of Barcelona’s artistic bohemia) to a rural community that ends up rejecting and ostracizing him, turns into a philosophical reflection on the impossibility of any kind of community. As in a Greek tragedy, Antonio becomes the scapegoat the villagers feel they have to excommunicate in order for the village to return to its previous harmony. And when a young man dies, Antonio is declared guilty of a crime he hadn’t committed, and has to run away again. At the end of the novel—in the form given to us by its publisher—Antonio is hiding in an apartment in Barcelona, but we don’t know what the “real ending” is since the writer never finished it. In an interesting parallel, de Queirós never finished revising his novel either, and the ending to his novel—a little too naively enthusiastic for the “eternal” beauty of “gentle” nature—was chosen by another writer.

Five Spice Street by Can Xue

Five Spice Street (Yale UP, 2009) by the contemporary Chinese writer Can Xue is one of the strangest, most original novels I’ve ever read. It also happens to be one of the worst translations. There is a difference between deliberate strangeness—Can Xue is known for her unusual writings—and a strange feeling resulting from a bad translation. Spice Street is strange, I’m afraid, in both ways.

The novel’s deliberate absurdness resides in its way of “telling a story” (the novel is full of ironic quotes, by the way). The “story” revolves around a few questions: Who is Madame X? What is her relationship with Q? Do they even have a relationship? For 329 pages, a series of picturesque characters from Five Spice Street—a widow proud of being both very sexy and virtuous, a coal miner infatuated with Madame X, a female friend jealous of Madame X, several male characters with dubious intentions, Madame X’s sister, who ends up living in a shed surrounded by…shit, and others—give us their points of view on Madame X. These perspectives intersect, complement or contradict each other in a way that is voluntarily absurd. The story takes the shape of a maze or of a diagram that is unrolled and undone before the reader’s eyes. The novel could be described as a “meta-story,” but unlike other such narratives, this one is very funny, and the writer doesn’t escape Can Xue’s ironic eye either. Unlike most classic novels about writers in which the character-writer is almost a copy of the author-writer, here, the writer is not even the same gender as the author (i.e., Can Xue). In fact, writers in general are made fun of as “geniuses” who are “usually sitting on a deserted mountaintop or the roof of a thatched cottage,” having dialogues with the gods.

One could also look at this novel as a sort of upside-down “comedy of manners” in which the author (Can Xue), using the research done by the character-writer and all the other characters on Five Spice Street, gives us a study of the sexual behavior of “our people.” There are many hilarious passages, but the comic is not always obvious, sometimes because of the translation, other times because of the grotesque element in many of the scenes, or because the comic of the language is based on a parody of Communist slogans. Some of the scenes seem in the tradition of the slapstick (or that of traditional Chinese theater): “they reached the granary [where they usually had sex] and he was kicked in the butt and fell. This was a good kick, very educational. He was kicked back to reality, and began to fulfill a male’s responsibilities.”

Since the translation of a novel from the Chinese is no easy feat, I am willing to give the two translators (Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping) some credit for their hard work, but still, I cannot but deplore the result. Here are a few (very few!) examples: “how could that person shout so loud as to scare a person?”; “I’m so confused inside” [rather than “outside”?]; “Everyone knew he was a doll” [in the context it’s clear the author meant “a puppet”]. And yet, in spite of the translation, the novel is worth reading. If someone at Yale UP reads this, please try to edit this novel and reprint it! The author deserves it.

The Golovlyovs by M. Saltykov-Shchedrin

A 19th century masterpiece about a Russian family of landowners. The psyshological drama and the descriptions of everyday life in the Russian countryside are among the strongest I've ever come across. The characters are built in the tradition of great archetypes, in particular that of the Miser (see Molière and Dickens). It's one of those books that you can't put down, and which are entirely satisfying on an intellectual and emotional level. The ending is pure Dostoevsky: it has an unexpected catharsis, in which the "bad" (not to say "evil") characters attain a brief, saint-like illumination through a symbolic, rather than plausible, repentance. On top of this, the edition I have has gorgeous ink drawings by a certain Kukrynisky (one name). The Russian publisher (yes, the book was published in Russia in a beautiful English translation) is asking the book's readers to write them with their opinions on the novel, the book's design and the translation. I wish I could do this, but I doubt they still exist or have the same address 36 years later. (The book cover I am attaching here is not of the edition I read.)