Conversational Reading

Darwish in Translation

We'll be publishing an excellent review/essay on the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish in issue 18 of The Quarterly Conversation. In advance of that, The National has an interesting article on how Darwish has been having a second life in translation:

A little more than a year after his death it seems fair to say that Mahmoud Darwish, one of the past century’s signal poets, has finally arrived in English. Six substantial collections of his work have been translated in the past three years and several others are on the way, a level of attention publishers usually reserve for Nobel Prize winners. With a little luck, Darwish might one day join that small group of foreign poets – like Lorca, Cavafy, or Mandelstam – whose idiom becomes a touchstone for peers writing in English. But the Darwish that has begun to come into view for English language readers is, of course, quite different from the one his Arab audience is familiar with.

That last sentence should remind everyone of Bolano . . . it seems like lately this whole issue of different writers for different audiences has been becoming a bigger concern vis a vis writing in translation. As with Bolano, this is a fairly important concern for Darwish, since he's commonly accorded status as a major influence on the voice and identity of the Palestinian people.

Later on, the piece also gets into some issues of translation:

Darwish’s strong preference for his later work has often been mirrored by his critics and translators. Fady Joudah, a Palestinian-American doctor and award-winning poet, has emerged as Darwish’s most consistent, sure-footed English translator. The Butterfly’s Burden, which included three translated volumes of Darwish’s late poetry, was published two years ago and Joudah has now published a further selection of late poems, If I Were Another. The poems in this new volume, chosen by Joudah, are taken from four separate collections, two from the early nineties (I See What I Want and Eleven Planets), and two from the past decade, (Mural and Almond Blossoms and Beyond). Almost all the poems have been translated before, chiefly in two collections edited by Munir Akash, The Adam of Two Edens and Unfortunately, It Was Paradise. There is nothing wrong with having more than one translation; on the contrary, a poet survives by being re-translated, and the earlier versions of these poems were often unsatisfactory and even inaccurate. Still, Joudah’s selection is puzzling given that so much of Darwish’s early work remains unavailable in English.

On That Bolano Myth

Jorge Volpi returns with an all-Bolano installment 3 of his essay on Latin American lit at Three Percent. It's an interesting piece well worth reading. Volpi starts out with a sanguine take on what Bolano has become here:

I do not believe, as some Spanish critics and even some of his friends do, that the American Bolaño is a falsification, a marketing product, a forced reinvention, or a simple misunderstanding: on the contrary, maybe the power of his texts lives in the diverse interpretations, sometimes contrasting or opposed, that it is possible to extract from his books. But the reception of his American critics reveals, however, another phenomenon: not only does the Bolaño read and recreated by them have nothing to do with his Spanish reception, but it seems that none of his panegyrists took the trouble of reading what the Spanish speaking critics had been saying about him—with almost always the same admiration—for more than a decade.

A couple of paragraphs later he defines exactly what he means:

Without a doubt, the relation between the life and works possesses greater enchantment in the United States than in any other part of the world, but the emphasis on his supposed or real penury have played a key role in interpreting (and, obviously, selling) his books. The American literary world has been obliged to construct a radical rebel from a simple misunderstanding: confusing a first person narrator with its author. Bolaño, who during the last years of his life had a more or less normal life, not full of luxuries, but clothed by an almost simultaneous recognition from the publication of his first books (Nazi Literature in the Americas and Distant Star in 1997 and The Savage Detectives in 1998), has been transformed into one of those furious writers who, facing down the scorn of his contemporaries and through a fierce individual fight, manage to convert themselves into tragic artists, posthumous heroes: a new example of the myth of the self-made man.

This is interesting, although not groundbreaking. But then toward the end Vopli discusses the cohort after Bolano, which I've not seen talked about much in English-language press:

The Bolaño case marks a watershed moment for Latin American literature. While he is unanimously idolized by the greater part of the new writers, none of them has continued the relationship that the Chilean used to keep with the Hispanic American tradition. Dozens of youths imitate his awkward style, his ”fractal” stories, his games and stylish threats, his plots as alleys without exit, his delirious monologues, and his literary erudition, but none, in turn, has looked for dialogue, or war, with his predecessors—with the vast plot that goes from modernism to the Boom—that is found in the center of almost all of Bolaño’s books.

And this last bit follows up on Volpi's assertion that Latin American fiction doesn't exist, although I disagree completely with his conclusion:

It is not accidental that Bolaño, a Chilean who owned a house in Spain, wrote Mexican, Chilean, Argentinean, or Peruvian short stories and novels with the same ease and conviction. It was not about only copying the linguistic peculiarities of each place—a mere exercise of memory and a good ear—but of creating books that would really deal with the tradition of each one of these countries. If the members of the Boom wrote books centered in their respective places of origin with the goal of summoning an elusive Latin American essence, Bolaño did just the opposite: he wrote books that played at belonging to the literature of these countries and ended up revealing the vacuity of the concept.

I would argue that, most definitely, in The Savage Detectives and 2666 Mexico (and even certain parts of Mexico) are extremely important as places than cannot be reproduced elsewhere in Latin America. Likewise, it's hard to image By Night in Chile or even Distant Star playing out in a nation other than Chile. Even a work like Nazi Literature in the Americas, which spans both North and South America and could be seen as Bolano at his most pan-national, trades rather heavily on national distinctions. (Indeed, the best humor in that richly funny book comes from how apt Bolano is as ironizing national differences among the continent, and especially each nation's view of its neighbors.)

King Leary by Paul Quarrington

As part of my efforts to read more books by our neighbors to the north, more or less explained here, I've just finished Paul Quarrington's novel King Leary. (As an aside, how interesting that Mexican novelists seem to get much, much more play here as exotic writers than do Canadians.)

I liked it a great, great deal, despite the fact that it's a serious novel about a pro hockey player, and I generally don't like professional sports-themed literature. Structurally, the book reminds me of The Good Soldier--always a very good thing for me--in that the narrator is extremely unreliable (based mostly on his own ineptitude) and the book heavily uses flashback and digression to complicate the telling of the story. The narrative voice is also excellent; it's a kind of mix of Irish and Canadian vernacular with a good deal of hockey slang thrown in, and Quarrington really mines it for innovative constructions without getting showy or cutesy.

This is a fine one to start off my tour of the Great White North with--just the kind of thing to make me want to read on.

Book Staircases

One of these would help me solve my ongoing (and, seemingly, ever-worsening) bookshelf capacity issues, although seems these models would make it a little hard to access certain titles. Still though, quite a few stairs where I live, and I could always tolerate a few staircases that didn't go anywhere in particular, so long as they held books.

Latin American Fiction Doesn't Exist

Not sure I entirely agree with novelist Jorge Volpi's ongoing essay on Latin American fiction, though he makes a provocative argument. Basically his take is that Latin American literature started out in the best nationalistic traditions of the 19th-century European nations (agreed), but then things seriously leaped into post-national territory with the Boom authors (agreed again), and Latin America hasn't looked back since (not so fast).

If up-to-date critics and academics pursue an essential characteristic of Latin American literature, and organize dozens of congresses from which Spanish writers are always excluded, it is because the ghosts of nationalism are still among us. Even then, nationalism was losing validity among the new Latin American writers, especially those born after 1960. Witnesses of the crumbling of socialism and the discrediting of utopias, and every day more skeptical of politics, these authors seem to have finally freed themselves from any nationalist constipation. Even though they don’t openly grumble about their origins, this fact is now merely an autobiographical footnote, not a stamp of origin for their work. Unlike their predecessors, they don’t seem to be obsessed with Latin American identity—and less for Mexican, Bolivian, or Argentinean—even if they continue to write about their countries or even about their neighbors.

I definitely agree with the whole "discrediting of utopias, and every day more skeptical of politics" thing. (In fact, I say exactly that in my essay on Horacio Castellanos Moya and the new Latin American political novel.) But I don't see this as resulting in a loss of interest in the identity of Latin American nations (although no one that I've read recently seems to be interested in carving out an identity for the continent as a whole, as the Boom authors tried to).

Moya, for instance, definitely does pursue a very Central American (often Salvadorian) concept of identity. His novels are very much engaged with what it means to be a person living in those societies, to the point that he'll even work in the specifics of recent events, although not in a "historical fiction" sort of way. I'd even say that a highly experimental author like Cesar Aira has general Argentine themes in his work, and of course Bolano was often clearly situated in a Chilean or Mexican context. I agree with Volpi that these authors aren't "obsessed" with their nations of origin, but national issues are much, much more than a "footnote" in their work.

On the whole, though, I think I'm in agreement with Volpi. He seems to retreat from some of his more strident statements toward the end of this piece, and this certainly echoes what I said in my Moya essay:

More than discovering a continent, placing a forgotten region on the map, establishing their own spokesmen, positioning themselves as the avant-garde of the elites, the new narrators speak about their countries without the aftertaste of romanticism or of political compromise, without hopes or plans for the future, and maybe just with the proud disenchantment of one who recognizes the limits of his responsibility in front of history. Instead of presenting themselves as inventors of Latin America—the great achievement of the Boom—they seek to decipher and unarm it.

New Review of The Armies by Evelio Rosero

There's a new issue of The Critical Flame up, a publication that, in my opinion, has put up some great content in its first four issues. It's a publication that very much places quality over quantity, which is nice, since on the Web it's usually the other way around.

This issue includes my review of The Armies by Evelio Rosero, which won The Independent's Foreign Fiction award and which deals with the 40-year war in Columbia.

My review is decidedly mixed, although it's the kind of mixed review I like to write--one where I was definitely taken enough by the book's good parts to want to work out what exactly it didn't work for me. Often I like these reviews much more than the outright pan (which frequently doesn't tell you anything new or of lasting value) and the positive review (which can run afoul of faint praise or just plain cluelessness). Anyway, here's a graf to entice you:

The book starts promisingly with a vision far removed from war: the septuagenarian Ismael is standing in a ladder and peering above his wall, eying the exposed nipples of his young Brazilian neighbor as she sits ravishing and naked with her guitar-strumming husband. Barely have we begun to assimilate this strange scene than we find ourselves within the Brazilians’ kitchen, where the 12-year-old maid Gracielita stands washing dishes as Eusebito, their son, peeps at her and is “fascinated and tormented by [her] tender white panties, slipping up through generous check.” This scene of mutual ogling could be taken in any number of directions—significantly, though, Rosero ends the scene with the information that Gracielita only became a maid after being orphaned “when our town was last attacked by whichever army it was.”

In the following pages, Rosero is deft in elaborating the nuances of the lecherous relationship . . .

Appreciation for Gary Lutz

Philip Christman:

There's a connection between the strangulated ingenuity of Lutz's sentences and the stories of furtive, transgressive sex they give body to. He seduces words out of their typical usages, coaxes them into strange, unsustainable positions, and ends things before they can begin (36 stories in 160-odd pages); a sort of public-bathroom uneasiness hangs over the proceedings. Lutz's sentence rhythms contract rather than cresting, and the stories generally end on a pinched note. "Slops" is fairly typical: a minor academic with colitis enjoys a highly ambiguous liaison with a student. Nothing about the story sounds promising, but Lutz manages both breathtaking stylistic accomplishment and humor in evoking a Comp 101 drone's dark night of the soul:

There were no tests -- just papers....But I read them hard, expecting sentences to have been spitefully spatchcocked into the running gelatinization of barbarisms and typos to check up on me, to see if I was actually reading. For instance: "Dear 'Professor'" You fucking stink. Try wiping yourself once and [sic] awhile [sic]. Or didn't they teach that were [sic] you went to school? Bag it." But I never found such interludings.

The book under review is Stories in the Worst Way. TQC has also reviewed the pleasant-sounding Partial List of People to Bleach.

Effective at Destroying the Last Vestiges of British Morality

Harper's nice essay on JG Ballard is liberated from behind the pay wall. Enjoy:

Sometime in the 1960s, however, a rawer Britain emerged. One way out of dying Britishness was ribaldry or irony, and at this the novelist Kingsley Amis, the dramatist John Osborne, and the critic Kenneth Tynan excelled. Another less obvious but equally effective route is evident in the strange, half-underground career of J. G. Ballard, who went from being a science-fiction writer through to avant-gardism of a sort, ending up as a national sage. Like the Orwell of 1984, as well as Daniel Defoe and Thomas Hobbes, Ballard was an arch-dystopian, making his debut amid the postwar British scene of cracked Bakelite, chipped teacups, and squadrons of bombers on the flatlands of East Anglia, readied for Armageddon. He didn't believe that human actions were rational or easily fathomable, and it was probably this, more than any view of history or aesthetic theory, that led him away from what he regarded as the staleness and artificiality of contemporary literature. He was to prove formidably effective in destroying the last vestiges of the British official morality of cheeriness and stiffened upper lips, and you can still see people reading Ballard in the crowded, ramshackle carriages of the London Underground, absorbing a whiff of catastrophe between the familiar, blandly named tube stations, as their forebears must have done when turning the pages of H. G. Wells's end-of-civilization fantasies.

The Workings of Percival Everett

Dan has some intriguing thoughts on Percival Everett:

Everett certainly does take liberties with form in his novels, and they are liberties frequently accomplished to hilarious effect. However, these efforts seem mostly directed toward simply dismantling the novel as "form", without much interest in aesthetically reconstituting the text, Everett's text, as at least a temporary alternative to established forms, as a new iteration of form in fiction. The first target of Everett's satire is the writing of fiction itself, which is portrayed implicitly as an enterprise saturated in pretension and moribund assumptions. Although intellectual and academic fraud and pretension in general, as well as the cultural frauds historically perpetuated by white American institutions, are the ultimate objects of satire in most of Everett's fiction, the force of this satire is so intense and thoroughgoing it seems irresitably to extend to the literary/philosophical underpinnings of fiction as an "institution" of intellectual practice.

And later:

To some extent, Everett's practice in a work like Glyph is an illustration of M.M. Bakhtin's concept of the "carnivalesque," in which an attitude of "radical skepticism" makes it impossible for anything to be taken seriously. But Bakhtin makes a distinction between carnivalesque comedy and satire--the latter takes nothing seriously except its own, its author's, authority, which is invoked to ridicule that which requires amelioration. My sense of Everett's fiction is that finally it does not fully relinquish that authority, that its attack on literary processes and pretensions seeks to evade comedic reduction where the work of Percival Everett is concerned. That Everett, or the text at hand, at least, depicts the assumptions behind literary representation to be risible does not mean that Everett's text is also risible. The alternative to "causing the form of [novels] to mean everything" is causing Everett's satire of it to "mean" at least something.

We'll be doing a review of Everett's latest, I Am Not Sidney Poitier: A Novel in the winter issue of The Quarterly Conversation, which should be popping out in just under a month.

Two New Reviews at TQC

First one is The Last Supper by Polish experimentalist Pawel Huelle. Review:

The premise of Pawel Huelle’s novel is simple: An artist invites twelve of his friends to his studio in order to take a photo recreating Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.” No one is told which disciple he is going to be; in fact, the men themselves are told to keep moving from position to position so that they aren’t the same person twice. Before completely adjusting to the idea, one character states: “In a Bach fugue we follow the main theme in rapture. It keeps vanishing, like the thread in a cross-stitch pattern. And whenever it disappears, it’s still there in our heads, and we wait in suspense for it to reappear. Whenever it comes back—because that’s the principle of a fugue—we’re thrilled by the masterful way it has been transformed. And most of all by its reappearance.” And this is essentially what Huelle attempts . . .

Te second is The Ninth by Ferenc Barnás. Review:

Telling a story from a child’s point of view is one of the most difficult modes of fiction to write successfully. The narrator of Ferenc Barnás’s The Ninth is a nine-year-old boy—The Ninth child of ten (eleven, counting the brother who died) in a large Hungarian family—whose inexperience and bare vocabulary are compounded by a speech disability.

In writing The Ninth, Barnás seems to have wanted to give himself a taste of what difficulty his narrator must face when trying to give expression to his experience. Overall, Barnás succeeds . . .

Gender Bias in PW's Best Books of the Year?

Matt Cheney:

The good people at Publisher's Weekly are probably speaking what they think is the truth when they say, about their all-male list of 10 "best" books of the year, that "We ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz." I believe them when they say, "It disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male."

But being disturbed is not enough. What they have done is shameful.

This is not just some blogger's list of favorite books of the year. This is the publishing industry's trade journal telling the world what ten books from 2009 deserve most acclaim and attention. This list will affect how books are stocked in stores and it will affect what books are bought by libraries. The fact that the list only includes male writers contributes to a problem.

The editors who created this list have chosen to perpetuate sexism. They have deliberately and knowingly made it easier for male writers to have access to sales and publicity at the expense of women writers. Their list perpetuates the idea that the best, most serious, and most consequential books are written by men, and that idea will continue to have an effect out in the world.

Of course Matt is absolutely right when he says that this will have a real effect in the world, and he's likewise right that PW should do some soul searching, although I find it hard to cast too much blame on PW unless I can at least know who was involved in picking these books and how it was done. Granted, though, this should have them scratching their heads and trying to figure out something a little more diverse next year, just as the NYTBR's all-Knopf classic should have them re-examining their processes (fat chance).

More on Communist-Style French Book Pricing

Chad fleshes out a bunch of the details surrounding the French approach to flat book prices:

Although it was never really stated this way, the fixed book price law has prevented France’s noble book culture from devolving into the quasi-cesspool that we have here in the States, where celebrity “books” are stacked miles high and offered for 45% off, and people read a lot of crap (but not always) because it’s cheap and everywhere. Our book landscape is like a 180 to France’s: Whereas the French state that “books are not a commodity like any other,” a huge proportion of businesses and business people in America tend to see them as exactly that—a commodity plain and simple. (A commodity with crappy profit margins, but still.)

As stated above, the goal of the fixed price law was diversity. Diversity achieved by protecting the independent booksellers and independent publishers. Now although there are like 800 “points of sale” for books in Paris (the bookstore count was a number is complete dispute over the course of our trip . . . seemed that every day, someone would cut this in half, from “800 stores! We rock!” to “well, there are really only 400 bookstores“ to “there are maybe 200 real bookstores,” to “we really only deal with the 100 great indies.”), we didn’t actually meet with any indie booksellers during out trip. So, I don’t have a good sense of what the indies actually think about this law, but based on material evidence—like the fact that there are actually independent bookstores that are surviving—I think they’d approve. And that they like competing with FNAC (the major French bookstore chain) on categories such as presentation, selection, ambiance, rather than something so crass as price.

And this is just the start of government regulation and support of the book industry. There are also grants for bookstores and publishers, loans to expand stock, and a new designation for the absolute best stores in France. (More information about all of this can be found in Lauren Elkin’s fantastic article in the recent issue of Five Dials. She’s got all the details in a much more comprehensive way than I can present them here.)

Just to jump on that last point Chad makes, about the Franch government's role in the book industry, that was one of the big eye-openers for me last week in Toronto: the extent to which the Canadian government feels it has a role in the literary marketplace and an imperative to be there. Judging by pretty much everyone I talked to on this issue, the Canadian government feels that it has a job to do to protect and promote Canadian literary culture, said job extending to helping breed the next generation of literature lovers and keep the current generations active. Obviously things aren't quite the same in the free market paradise. I'm not going to go so far as to claim that this wholly accounts for the difference between relative engagements of Canadian, French, and American citizens with the literature available in each country, but I'd hardly say the connection isn't there either.

How Is The Lacuna Barbara Kingsolver?

Odd. The Lacuna is no Barbara Kingoslver I know:

Barbara Kingsolver provides a foil to this tendency with The Lacuna, all the more remarkable, it's fair to say, given the position reserved for it on best-seller lists. The novel's own artifactualness is never in question, since, to highlight the deceptive ways we both perceive and receive history, Kingsolver has dreamed up a series of private journals, fictitious news accounts, invented book reviews, and other faux-archival stuff to make a riddle of her story. And though Kahlo is a character, as are Trotsky, Diego Rivera, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Richard Nixon, the shyly sweet heart of the novel is the completely made-up Harrison William Shepherd. He is also its not always dependable narrator, because much of the truth Kingsolver wants to reveal about human nature caught in the sweaty grasp of historical events is uncovered by unpeeling the layers of a personality -- Shepherd's -- belonging to someone who writes fiction himself.

The book actually sounds fairly interesting, and I'm certainly not going to knock Kingsolver for attempting to break out of her niche (yes, I know, The Poisonwood Bible anticipates some of this, thanks). That all is great, but it was kinda surprising as I was reading the review.

The Borders "In-Stock Guarantee"

Given that over the past year or so I've never actually found the novel that I'm looking for in Borders, I could make a killing here:

Borders, which earlier in the year struggled to keep books in stock as it reduced inventory levels, has introduced a new holiday program under which the retailer will provide free shipping on any item listed on Borders.com that is not carried in a store where a customer is shopping.

I understand this is all a ploy to get me to buy more books at Borders, but it is kind of nice to know that, if I put forth the effort to drop by Borders on my lunch break, I wouldn't have to be disappointed when I found that, in fact, I'd just wasted my time since The Charterhouse of Parma isn't something they carry.

Review of Running Away

Nice to see a review of Jean Philippe Toussaint's Running Away at Words Without Borders, although the general cold-shouldering of this author continues to baffle me (well, not really . . .):

This brief summary leaves out the feelings that form the real unity of the book; a dramatic plot is clearly not the main organizing principal of this novel. Toussaint makes use of the devices of a plot-based narrative, yet he consistently leaves mysteries unresolved and continuously deflates any dramatic tension that may have built up. From the beginning, the generic elements of a thriller are put into play, but here they fizzle and fade out. The narrator's "sort of mission" for Marie involves giving a manila envelope of cash to Zhang, whose dealings are possibly "dishonest and illicit" though the narrator “hadn't heard anything about [him] being involved in organized crime." At one point Zhang receives a phone call and drags the narrator and Li away from their bowling game (a scene not without some of Toussaint's characteristically dry humor) and onto a motorbike for what is perhaps a furious chase scene. Or maybe it's not, as nothing comes of it. The events of the plot point to pursuit and danger; Zhang drags Li and the narrator to the motorbike and they rush off, accompanied by the scream of sirens, taking a shortcut through a construction site. Yet, in the end, no one appears. Zhang delivers his package to a bar, and the narrator is left to return to his hotel.

We also reviewed this book in The Quarterly Conversation (as well as offering a slew of other Toussaint-related content). The Front Table also reviewed, as did (obviously) the Complete Review.

By the way, check out the cover at one of the above links. Dunno if this will scare away potential readers or intrigue them . . . call it the extreme approach to book covers.