Alta Ifland's Blog: Notes on Books, page 6

Mihail Sebastian, The Accident (Biblioasis, 2011. Trans. from the Romanian by Stephen Henighan)

Mihail Sebastian (1907-1945) was one of the interwar European writers who were deeply influenced by Marcel Proust, in particular by the jealous ruminations of his protagonists, and the idea that we can never know the truth about another person, which was expressed by portraying a given character through various points of view that created a fluid and elusive “truth.”

The Accident has as a backdrop Bucharest’s (Romania’s capital) cosmopolitan life in the 1930s, when artists, lawyers, businessmen and bohemians rub elbows in bars until two am, go to the same receptions and parties, and spend their winter vacation at Predeal and other ski resorts in the area.

The main character, a dejected, melancholy young lawyer, suffering of some kind of mal de vivre, is trying to heal from a painful relationship. Like Proust’s objects of desire, the woman he is obsessed with is a mysterious puzzle made of many sides shown to the reader alternately, without nonetheless revealing her “secret.” The protagonist is offered a chance to free himself when he meets literally by accident (that is, as the result of an accident) another woman who will teach him how to ski.

The novel’s best pages are the descriptions of the mountains in winter, and the exhilarating sensation one experiences while skiing. A captivating novel and a good translation.

My Top Ten Fiction Books for 2011

1. Sándor Márai, Portraits of a Marriage (2011) [Hungarian]
2. Alessandro Piperno, The Worst Intentions [Italian]
3. Dezsö Kosztolányi, Kornel Esti (2011) [Hungarian]
4. Steven Millhausaer, The Barnum Museum [American]
5. Alina Bronsky, The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine (2011) [Russian-German]
6. Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio [American]
7. Brian Evenson, The Wavering Knife [American]
8. Olga Grushin, The Line & The Dream Life of Sukhanov [Russian-American]
9. Yiyun Li, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl [Chinese-American]
10. Thomas Bernhard, Extinction [Austrian]

The Wavering Knife by Brian Evenson (FC2, 2004)

Among the writers we read there are some who entertain us, some we can appreciate but don’t feel any particular affinity with, some we intensely dislike, and some we admire so much we’d like to be them. And then, there is a small category that transcends all the categories above: the writers we are simply in awe of. I had such a feeling when I read Th. Mann, or Maurice Blanchot. And now—reading Brian Evenson’s The Wavering Knife.

I should say that I didn’t “like” all the stories in this collection—in fact, I disliked some of them because of their violence and cruelty (though this violence makes me think of Georges Bataille, since in many of the stories it’s directed against the first-person narrator—that is, against the author’s alter ego—and is, therefore, a very different kind of violence that the one in, say, Hollywood movies). One could say that the dismembering of the narrator’s body—a leitmotif in many of these stories—is akin to the falling apart of language and its meaning (sorry for the cliché, but it’s hard to put into a language that doesn’t sound ridiculous the experience of reading these stories). Or, one could say exactly the opposite: that in order for language to be born, the writer has to experience a kind of death: “language being the only thing worth living, or dying, over” (from “One Over Twelve”).

Evenson’s descriptions of the various mutilations of the body are, for me, among the most authentic expressions I’ve ever come across of the attempt to capture a lost sacredness of language (again, the word “sacredness” should be taken here in the sense given to it by Bataille or Blanchot). Another author in whose work I felt a similar authenticity is the poet Ghérasim Luca—not by accident are both Luca and Evenson praised by Gilles Deleuze. Evenson doesn’t have Luca’s stammered language—on the contrary, he is a master of the proper word (i.e., of the perfect word in the right place) but there is a pain coming through the page, which can only originate in the author’s body, and which seals the text with an authenticity that refuses to accept any kind of (mimetic) “representation” of the experience.


But there are also stories in this collection that are extremely funny—a dark humor, to be sure—such as “The Intricacies of Post-Shooting Etiquette.” In this story, the characters’ names and “relationships” have a Beckettian absurdness; in other stories this absurdness goes even farther, as the “relationships” are stripped of causality and psychology, and the settings are reduced to their essential elements. It is also interesting that this book is written (for the most part) in two voices: one, infused with Beckettian detachment; and another one, very different, impersonating a Christian, alcoholic, government-hater fundamentalist who, obviously, “doesn’t express the author’s point of view.”

Calling Mr. King by Ronald De Feo

When I opened Ronald De Feo’s Calling Mr. King I was convinced I wasn’t going to read more than a few pages. I had received a free copy at the BEA from the publisher, Other Press, and since I normally don’t read novels about hit men, I thought I would just take a quick look at the hit man’s travels between Paris, London, New York and Barcelona, and get some vicarious tourist enjoyment this way. And then…I couldn’t stop reading. This novel turned out to be a faux thriller written in a minimalist, witty style, in the voice of a man who, after having worked as a hit man for all his adult life, starts to wonder one day about the life and the world inhabited by his “marks.” He begins to do research on Georgian style houses because one of his targets lived in such a house, and eventually, becomes fascinated with art and architecture. The hit man goes through some Sartrian moments of existential nausea, and even begins to change by the end, but the change is credible and not at all moralizing—that is, the author is smart enough not to tell us a story of “redemption” (though one may frame it this way). A very entertaining and witty novel.

The Dream Life of Sukhanov (2005, 2007) by Olga Grushin

I don’t know about you, but as I grow older, I rarely read a book with the total abandonment I used to experience as a child or a teenager. Olga Grushin, a young(ish) American writer who emigrated from Russia at eighteen, must have some special powers in order to cast this spell with both her novels, The Line and The Dream Life of Sukhanov.

The first thing that separates Grushin’s novels from those written by her American contemporaries is that, unlike them, she is still interested in something called “the human condition.” I am always puzzled by the fact that, while apparently political, most (relatively) young American writers, don’t integrate this interest into something one might call “our universal condition.” But then, how could they, when those of them who are in academia, are taught to run away from notions of the “universal” as if they were plague? On the other hand, many writers who integrate a contemporary political experience into their writings—usually poets—do this in such a righteous, sloganeering way that one is instantly tempted to become apolitical. I am thinking here of the numerous bad poems simmering with righteous indignation at W. Bush that I had to listen to during endless poetry readings.

All this to say that it may take a writer who has actually lived in a country where one couldn’t run away from politics, where every gesture ended up being political whether one was aware of it or not, to write in a mature way about the individual versus the collective, the singular versus the universal, fate versus will, and the relationship between the individual destiny and history. One cannot deal with such subjects when one has that nihilist ironic tone many contemporary American writers feel obligated to exhibit.

The historical background of The Dream Life of Sukhanov is that of Russia between the 1930s and the 1980s. The protagonist is the director of the main arts magazine in Moscow, and son-in-law of the most famous painter of day. Both titles implied a privileged position under communism, since one couldn’t get them without bowing to the Communist Party, and they came with numerous perks: access to special stores of the nomenklatura, a private chauffeur, etc.

Little by little, the reader is drawn into the hero’s dream life, and finds out that he had grown up in poverty and fear, having witnessed the killings of the Stalinist era and his father’s suicide. As a young man he fell in love with surrealism, and despised the official rhetoric and the socialist realist paintings depicting optimist laborers singing the beauty of their tractors. And then, one day he had to choose between continuing to be a poor, unrecognized painter, faithful to his ideals, and selling out to those in power in order to provide for his family.

At the heart of the novel is the choice, or rather, the question: what would you do if you had to choose? Sukhanov has to choose between killing the artist in himself and collaborating with the regime, on one hand, and keeping his artistic integrity, but having to survive by doing hard, low paid jobs, on the other hand. But choosing the latter also means committing suicide as an artist, since he wouldn’t be able to exhibit his paintings, and what good is a painting without a viewer?

In appearance, the novel gives us the story of a man who has betrayed his youth, but the closer we get to the end, the more we realize that the novel doesn’t have any easy answers, and that whatever the man would have chosen, he would have failed. At the end of the novel, a character introduced in the very first pages reappears: Sukhanov’s friend, Belkin, who had taken the opposite path, that of artistic honesty and everyday misery. Belkin, who is poor and whose wife has left him, finally gets his first show when he is in his mid-fifties, but then he realizes that he is a mediocre painter.

Until his world suddenly unravels, Sukhanov is rich, happily married to a gorgeous woman, respected (or rather, feared) by those in his profession. In the end, his entire world falls apart, and although as readers we know that he is justly punished, the author doesn’t give us a straight answer regarding the better choice. As Sukhanov’s wife says during their younger (and poorer) days, “There is more than one way to lose one’s soul.”

This is an extremely mature novel, and it is amazing that a writer who left Russia at such a young age can recreate so well not only the people’s daily lives and the country’s atmosphere, but the existential choices communism imposed on people. As rooted as the novel is in a particular time and place, this very anchoring makes it universal insofar as in many ways we are all products of our choices. Last but not least, Olga Grushin is a great stylist, and her paragraphs on art are among the best in the novel.

Kazuo Ishiguro's Nocturnes

Nocturnes is the first book by Kazuo Ishiguro I’ve ever read. I often avoid reading books by famous contemporary authors because they are usually overrated, and I prefer to give my time to underappreciated writers. But Ishiguro was a nice surprise. I read this collection of five short stories in a day—which is very unlike me. The stories have a false simplicity, that is, they are written in an unassuming style, and are all related to music in some way (it is clear that the author is not only a lover of music, but a connoisseur). Most of them are “double narrations”—they are narrated by someone who remembers something that happened to an acquaintance—a technique often used by 19th century Russian writers, which gives these stories a “patina” that is in contrast with their contemporary topic and characters. This patina, together with the psychological subtlety and a certain absurdness present in certain dialogues make the book a great read.

Sándor Márai’s Portraits of a Marriage (Trans. from the Hungarian by George Szirtes, Knopf, 2011)

I had read Embers, The Rebels, Memoir of Hungary, Esther’s Inheritance, and the French edition of The Confessions of a Bourgeois (the English version is yet to come) by Márai, and I am a big admirer of his, but I didn’t expect to be so impressed by Portraits of a Marriage, his latest novel in English, released early this year by Knopf in George Szirtes’s outstanding translation. How should I put this? Portraits of a Marriage is a masterpiece. Portraits of a Marriage is one of the greatest 20th century novels. Portraits of a Marriage is a work whose psychological finesse equals that of Proust. Portraits of a Marriage has some of the most subtle socio-political observations I have encountered on Europe’s (dying) bourgeois society and post-war American society. This is, by the way, the only book by Márai in which he tackles—albeit briefly—the subject of America, the country where he lived in exile for about forty years. And finally, Portraits of a Marriage is a novel about the nature of romantic love written with the raw lucidity one finds only in Tolstoy or Stefan Zweig.

The novel has four parts, each in a different voice: Ilonka’s—the wife of a very wealthy man, who tries to unveil her husband’s secret; Peter’s—the husband secretly in love with his mother’s servant; Judit’s—the servant who has grown up (literally) in a ditch, and who will one day marry the Master (i.e., Peter); Ede’s—Judit’s last lover in Rome (where she lives in exile after the Communists come to power in Hungary), a drummer turned bartender in New York.

Although each part is very captivating, the best is, probably, Judit’s confession. It is the most intelligent analysis of bourgeois culture I have ever read, written from the perspective of an outsider, which makes it sound at times like an anthropological study. This analysis is all the more extraordinary since Márai identified strongly as a “bourgeois,” that is, as belonging to a culture entirely destroyed by the Communist regime.

If you read only one novel this year, read this!Portraits of a Marriage

Alex Epstein's stories

Alex Epstein, Lunar Savings Time (Clockroot Books, Trans. Becka Mara McKay, 2011)

Lunar Savings Time (2011) comes as a complement to Blue Has no South (2010), both by Alex Epstein, from Clockroot Books. The two books complement each other not only physically, but also because they could be part of the same book. Published as “stories,” they would be probably categorized as prose poem or flash fiction collections by most American readers and writers.

There are two major influences that are obvious in this collection: Borges and Kafka. The references to Borges are indirect, and can be detected in a structure many of the pieces have, in which a story and its main protagonist become a tangent to another story with another protagonist, so that each story appears as the fragment of another, bigger story. On the other hand, Kafka’s name appears many times, as well as those of other famous real people, such as Heidegger, Stephen Hawkins, Yuri Gagarin, Emily Dickinson, or mythological Greek heroes, which are appropriated in made-up contexts. Like Borges, Epstein reinvents the truth, the real, and even history, by fictionalizing them (which is not to say that his stories don’t include many real facts).

The Boat to Redemption by Su Tong (Overlook Press, 2011. Trans. from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt)

Although I am a strong believer in the power of the imagination, I also believe that good literature can only be born in an environment that gives us the elements necessary to transmute them into something else. A (good) writer doesn’t simply copy reality, but (s)he can’t entirely reinvent it either. What I am trying to get at is this: if, in a society, all the writers are teaching creative writing, the reality they work with is, by force of circumstance, impoverished. True, this impoverishment is due to more than one factor: one could say that the sterile, aseptic lives most of us live in Western societies—spending most of our time in front of a screen—aren't conducive to creating great works of art; of course, one could also say the opposite: that a sterile environment may trigger in us the desire to create a different world than the one we live in. No matter, one need only read literature in translation from non-Western countries to realize that the flesh of the real and the touch of history do play a role in artistic creation.

Having said this, I would rather spend all my life in an office than live in Su Tong’s China where there is no escape from history. The narrative takes place, as far as I could tell (since there are no dates) in the late seventies, in post-Maoist China. The setting: a fishing village where the population is divided into the boat people and those on the shore. The main character is a teenager—and later a young man—nicknamed Kongpi from “kong,” empty, and “pi,” ass (not the most popular boy in town). The boy and his father end up among the boat people when the father, who had been a Party Secretary, falls out of favor with the local nomenklatura. His disgrace is the result of a tragic-comic situation: having been considered until then the son of a local revolutionary-martyr (that is, a young woman who had been killed by the previous regime, and as a consequence, had been transformed into the closest equivalent to a saint—she is the object of a cult and her sculpted likeness is guarded as a precious relic), he is now declared a fraud. This ritual of a fall from grace, all too common in communism, is subjected to a sarcastic scrutiny by Su Tong: the proof of the father’s claim to fame (as the martyr’s son) is the fish-shaped birthmark on his behind. Once he is declared a fraud, no matter how often does the poor man drop his pants down to show the proof, no one believes him any more. Not only that, but, after having been unfaithful for many years, he loses his wife too. And the solution he ultimately finds to his overpowering sexual urges is…to cut off his penis. Young Kongpi himself, who has inherited his father’s urges, struggles for the entire novel with his undisciplined penis, which has a tendency to stand erect at the most inauspicious moments.

This is the background on which appears Huixian, a charming, clever nine-year-old girl, who is adopted by the boat people, and who becomes the object of Kongpi’s most secret desires. The girl turns into a beautiful young woman, who, for some time, seems to have a great future as an actress performing a Communist revolutionary, until she too, falls from grace. Huixian’s character is, actually, very complex, as this woman changes from a powerful diva into a cheap conformist, and from a beautiful woman into the closest equivalent to a redneck (she spends most of her time cracking melon seeds). Kongpi’s adventures too are endless, and one could almost call him a picaresque hero. This is an extremely captivating novel, and the translator, Howard Goldblatt, deserves special credit for an impressive translation.

How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Sasa Stanisic (Trans. from German by Anthea Bell, Grove Press, 2008)

How The Soldier Repairs the Gramophone has an unusual structure: it is divided into two parts, the first one with the same title as the novel, the second titled “When Everything Was All Right” and authored by Aleksandar Krsmanovic, the novel’s narrator (and, obviously, an alter ego of Sasa Stanisic). This is not a story within a story, but rather, two twin stories, as both tell the story of a young boy growing up in a small Bosnian village in post-Tito Communist Yugoslavia.

Stanisic’s novel is not written according to the structure of a gradually thickening plot; rather, it is a chronicle of a world about to be swept off by history. The chapters focused on the life before the war seem taken from a film by the French director Tati, revealing a series of picturesque characters and their daily interactions. Aleksandar’s grandfather, the main object of the narrator’s affection, a charming old man very likely based on the author’s own grandfather, happens to be a Communist who holds some title in the local Party nomenklatura. Interestingly, unlike writers from older generations, Stanisic doesn’t seem very critical of Communism, probably because in comparison with the hell that followed, it was “all right.”

There are parts in the novel, especially at the beginning, that made me feel ambivalent about it: on the one hand, Stanisic is, undeniably, a very talented writer, and his characters are extremely vivid; on the other, there is a certain…cuteness in the description of this old world (justified, in part, by the fact that the book is written in the voice of a thirteen-year-old) that I sometimes found off-putting.

In 1991 the villagers’ life (which, in retrospect, appears idyllic) is disrupted by the unthinkable: war. Once the war beings, the narration acquires a raw authenticity that makes it (and not only in my opinion) one of the best works on war in modern literature. Although I am a strong believer in the power of imagination, I think that there are certain extreme events that one can only write about in an authentic way if one has experienced them, and war is one of them. This is not because one cannot imagine war, but because often, when representing such extreme situations, writers tend to transform them into something spectacular (in all the senses of this word), and therefore ob-scene (a spectacle made to be shown on stage). There are numerous accounts of contemporary tragedies that revel in their bloodiness, usually written by authors who haven’t witnessed them.

Stanisic’s honesty, combined with his gift for storytelling (by which I mean the telling of a story in a way bards used to do it, that is, an account informed by orality) give the novel a poignant immediacy. There is a chapter describing a soccer game during the war, when, apparently, the Serbian army and the Territorials (i.e, the Bosnian army) used to play in opposite teams during brief cease-fire breaks. Nowhere else is the absurdity of war more evident than when the soldiers stop the carnage against each other to play together, and afterward go back to killing each other. The chapter describing this absurd game, at the end of which the Serbian leader orders a bloodbath—breaking the rules of the game—is extraordinary.

If one takes into account that Stanicic published this novel at 28 in his second language, German, one can predict a great future for this young writer.