Helen Adam, A Helen Adam Reader, Ed. by Kristin Prevallet, National Poetry Foundation, 2007.


A HELEN ADAM READER, edited, with Notes and an Introduction by Kristen Prevallet, is a voluminous collection of Adam's life and work. Prevallet's introduction offers an in-depth biography of Adam, chronicling her work in relation to political and personal events. Movements in the late fifties and early sixties, Black Mountain, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Beat Generation, and the New York School, both influenced and were influenced by Adam's work. She did not adhere closely to one particular form; she invented her own style, experimenting with ballads for which she is most remembered. Adam is increasingly important to poetry's history and evolution.


"This magnanimous scholarly compendium of the work and life of Helen Adam is a recovery and reclamation project of major importance, giving weight and measure to an iconic and unique figure"- Anne Waldman




The publication of A Helen Adam Reader is of historical interest, feminist interest–and poetic interest. Adam belonged to the avant-garde, but she was not a formal innovator. Unlike Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, she never issued edicts about making it new or there being no ideas but in things. And while she did lead an unconventional life, she was too eccentric to be valorized as a “role model.” Born in Peeblesshire, Scotland, in 1909, Adam was a teenage poet whose Victorian fairy ballads captivated the British public and earned the praise of the Queen of England. Reviewers lauded her “perfect ear” and “delicate imagination.” The composer Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, who had collaborated with Tennyson, adapted Adam’s first book, The Elfin Pedlar, to music, and performed it with orchestras all over Europe. But this fame, and Adam’s posh Victorian girlhood, vanished into the past in 1939 when Adam, who lived with her mother and sister until their deaths, immigrated to the United States virtually by accident. The three women had traveled from London to Hartford, Connecticut, for a wedding; two months later World War II broke out, and relatives warned them against returning to a city of blackouts and rations.
Adam was included in the landmark anthology The New American Poetry, 1945-1960 but was dropped by its editor, Donald Allen, when the volume was reissued as The Postmoderns in 1982. Adam’s previous collections were only partial and have been out of print for decades. Her possessions were lost when she died a ward of the state, and by the merest of chances they were acquired in a warehouse sale by a used bookstore owner whose manager recognized the cache of poetry and papers. As her things arrived piecemeal to their archival home at SUNY, Buffalo, Prevallet used them to reconstruct Adam’s equally fragmented, enigmatic life and work. Helen Adam may not have been a Modernist giant, but Prevallet’s Reader makes the case that she must be taken on her own terms: as a balladeer, playwright, collagist and necromancer. Adam wrote to raise gooseflesh. Her brand of ballad derived from the northern regions of Scotland, where minstrels evoked the grue (whence our “gruesome”). The grue manifests itself physiologically in the audience’s shiver: the authenticity of a bodily response is the outward sign of the performer’s otherworldly power. Helen Adam had, as they say, “it,” as in these lines from “Kiltory”:

Elena Poniatowska,Here's to You, Jesusa!, Trans. by Deanna Heikkinen,Penguin Books, 2002. [1969.]           
Chapter One

A remarkable novel that uniquely melds journalism with fiction, by Elena Poniatowska, the recipient of the prestigious 2013 Cervantes Prize

Jesusa is a tough, fiery character based on a real working-class Mexican woman whose life spanned some of the seminal events of early twentieth-century Mexican history. Having joined a cavalry unit during the Mexican Revolution, she finds herself at the Revolution's end in Mexico City, far from her native Oaxaca, abandoned by her husband and working menial jobs. So begins Jesusa's long history of encounters with the police and struggles against authority. Mystical yet practical, undaunted by hardship, Jesusa faces the obstacles in her path with gritty determination.
Here in its first English translation, Elena Poniatowska's rich, sensitive, and compelling blend of documentary and fiction provides a unique perspective on history and the place of women in twentieth-century Mexico.



Originally published in Mexico in 1969, this passionate and unflinching classic deserves a warm reception upon its belated publication in English. In the Latin American tradition of the testimonial novel, acclaimed Mexican author and journalist Poniatowska "reports"" the life story falling somewhere between fact and fiction, and based on a series of interviews of a poverty-stricken but amazingly independent woman. Left motherless and with a roaming father in impoverished turn-of-the-century Oaxaca, Jesusa is married at age 15 to an abusive cavalry captain during the Mexican revolution. Always a tomboy, she turns increasingly irascible, vindictive and opinionated, everything a Mexican woman of her time is not supposed to be. When her husband is killed three years after their marriage, Jesusa remakes herself repeatedly, taking on various trades to support herself. She repudiates modern life, has several run-ins with the law and takes comfort in an eccentric religion. As an independent woman at the beginning of the century, she is something of a pioneer and role model, though her eccentric ways leave her lonely and solitary. Because Jesusa, whose real name was Josefina B""rquez, didn't allow herself to be tape-recorded, Poniatowska painstakingly transcribed her story. The result is one long breathtaking monologue, its only plot the incredible life story of its protagonist. Poniatowska never intrudes, but the warmth she feels for Jesusa infuses the sentimental introduction and spills over into the text. Both women benefit from their unusual relationship, Jesusa validating Poniatowska's Mexican existence and Poniatowska saving Jesusa from anonymity. Loss, alienation and hardship are palpable in the narrative, ably translated by Heikkinen, yet faith in survival and self makes this a life-affirming tale. - Publishers Weekly


Elena Poniatowska’s testimonial novel is based on extensive interviews carried out between 1963 and 1964, with Josefina Bórquez, an elderly Mexican woman. Through the novel, Josefina morphs into the character Jesusa Palancares as Poniatowska pieces together her ethnographic field-notes into a narrative that shifts between Spiritualist visions and surreal recollections of a life lived in bars and on the battlefield. Jesusa works as a domestic servant, in factories making boxes, and as a professional drinker, betting on herself to out-drink the men. At night she makes a space for herself where she can: in a woman’s prison, on the frozen ground of the army camp, along a narrow balcony, or in the corner of a stranger’s courtyard.
In such a precarious life, there are few moments of rest, as Poniatowska discovers when she tries to interview Josefina. There is no time to talk, only time to work (Poniatowska [1969] 2002: viii). She alone ensures her survival (Poniatowska [1969] 2002: 101, 132).
Survival means staying afloat, breathing calmly, even if it is only for a moment in the evening when the chickens no longer cackle in their cages and the cat stretches out on the trampled earth. (Poniatowska [1969] 2002: xiii)
Jesusa is a fighter, ‘fiercer than a female fighting cock’ (Poniatowska [1969] 2002: 155). She endures life on the battlefield, first with her father and then with her abusive husband, neither of whom survive the Revolution. She relishes the tough life of a soldadera (Poniatowska [1969] 2002: 212, xvii), and returns to army life when the opportunity presents. Her father once gave her gunpowder water to make her brave (Poniatowska [1969] 2002: 5), and it seemed to work.
Her dignity is essential to her survival. She is fiercely proud, refusing to drink coffee grounds or eat bean soup (Poniatowska [1969] 2002: 241), to be treated as poor. Neither charity nor friendship suit her: ‘Her isolation is striking’ (Franco 1989: 179). At the end of her life, she does not falter: ‘She died as she lived, rebellious, obstinate, fierce. She threw the priest out, she threw the doctor out’ (Poniatowska [1969] 2002: xx).
Nevertheless, Poniatowska, in her account of the interview process and the two women’s cautious friendship, recalls moments of tenderness and tranquility: settling the chickens on the narrow bed; examining the dolls Josefina bought for herself but kept wrapped up; the exchanging of postcards while Poniatowska travels to France. More than anything else, Josefina is revived by the telling of her story:
On Wednesday afternoons, as the sun set and the blue sky changed to orange, in that semidark little room, in the midst of the shrieking of the children, the slamming doors, the shouting, and the radio going full blast, another life emerged – that of Jesusa Palancares, the one that she relived as she retold it. Through a tiny crack, we watched the sky, its colors, blue, then orange, and finally black. A silver of sky. I squinted so my gaze would fit through that crack, and we would enter the other life. (Poniatowska [1969] 2002: xiii)
Through the construction of her own version of events, Josefina places herself at the centre of her world. After a life lived in the shadows, dismissed by those a few rungs up the social ladder, she is able to speak her truth, account for her actions. Once the book is published, Josefina asks Poniatowska for twenty copies to give to men in the neighbourhood, ‘so they’d know about her life, the many precipices she had crossed’ (Poniatowska [1969] 2002: xx).
As a testimonial novel, Here’s to You Jesusa is concerned to honour and enable the voices of those absent from the literary canon. Testimonial literature seeks to represent the social and political experience of the illiterate, the prisoner, the slave descendent, the trade-unionist, the member of the pueblos originarios, the slum-dweller, etc.; in short, all those who exist at the margins of Latin American society. Through testimony, such works seek to raise awareness and to promote social and political change. - earthandstarrs.blogspot.hr/2009/02/elena-poniatowska-heres-to-you-jesusa.html

This is a phenomenal story of a woman's search for identity in the volatile years of the Mexican Revolution. The story follows Jesusa from her earliest memories in a countryside with her family, to the life of a working-class elderly woman in the maze of Mexico City. The reader sees it all, from the peace of childhood to the discovery of her spirituality to industrialization. It seems as though Poniatowska creates Jesusa's narrative to serve as a metaphor for Mexico and what it is experiencing politically, socially, and psychologically at this time. Jesusa is the heroine of the story and, although she is at times so outrageous and difficult to understand, her strength, humor and sense of self give the first-person narrative such an overwhelming authority. For instance:

"Me, imprisoned in my pots and pans, but I'm not much of a fighter anymore or as mean on the streets now, because I got old and now my blood doesn't boil and I've lost my strength and my hair fell out and I just have pegs for teeth, I'd scratch myself, but I don't have any fingernails left after so many came out in the laundry sink. And here I am now, just waiting for it to strike five in the morning because I can't sleep and it all comes back to me, everything I've been through since I was little and I walked around barefoot, fighting in the Revolution like playing blindman's bluff, being beaten, more unwrapped each time in this fucked up life."
Poniatowska is most famous for a collection of memories from surivors of the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968, "Massacre in Mexico." Because of her career as both a novelist and journalist her works combine fiction and documentary forms such as archival pictures, oral histories, and interviews. The introduction of Here's To You Jesusa! has a detailed account of interviews between Poniatowska and a woman that Jesusa's character is based on. This is an extremely compelling and heart-wrenching novel and I highly recommend it. - 7sistersbooknook.blogspot.hr/2006/11/heres-to-you-jesusa.html


Elena Poniatowska, Massacre in Mexico, University of Missouri; Reprint edition, 1991.


Elena Poniatowska's gripping account of the massacre of student protesters by police at the 1968 Olympic Games, which Publishers Weekly claimed "makes the campus killings at Kent State and Jackson State in 1970 pale by comparison."




On the Tlatelolco massacre, Poniatowska achieves two things. One, is that she documents the utter chaos of the killings. Second, she makes clear the immense level of organization there was to the killings. Lets start with the chaos. This comes mostly from the initial reactions of those who were there. There is the anthropologist, Magarita Nolasco, who can’t wrap her head around the amount of blood that is spilled. She uses the word “sticky”, and indeed to track the amount of times the word “blood” is used in her account helps that detail “stick” in a reader’s mind. Nolasco also notes the indistinguishable bodies piling up, how she thought any one of them might be her son. Then, there is Jose Ramiro Munoz’s story of his confusion when his friend never returned from the Plaza. One mother, Elvira B. de Concheiro expressed how dumbfounded she was when the helicopter began firing-like in a movie. She stated, “I wandered around in a daze….until finally someone grabbed me by the arm and stopped me” (Resistance, 143).
The above referenced accounts all evoke chaos. There is lots of gunfire, lots of blood, bullets, bodies, people running in all directions. Certainly, it is traumatic to imagine hiding behind a pillar while those around you are shot to death. It is horrifying not to know whether your son is dead or not. The chaos of the massacre that Poniatowska captures highlights half of the horror from the killing.
The other horrific half is the organization of the events on October, 2, 1968. Most notable is the soldier, Ernesto Morales Soto’s, account. He gives details of the night as if it was a grocery list. For him perhaps it was, because it was simply his orders. He was ordered to wear white gloves to distinguish himself from civilians, and seal off two entrances to “prevent anyone from entering or leaving” (Resistance, 141). These were his orders. The killing was planned. That in itself is horrific, haunting, and calculated. Then, there is the business of the helicopter that uses tracer bullets. It dumfounded Elvira B. de Concheiro. The fact that these were tracer bullets only further solidifies how horrifically organized the massacre was. The bullets weren’t blindly fired, but fired with intent- with a target they were programmed to find.
So, there are two halves to the horror of the Massacre. A chaotic half and an organized half. Poniatowska’s decision to supply excerpts from interviews on the massacre gives us both those halves. Perhaps there is little opinion to her essay, but it is certainly effective. There is no way to read these excerpts, even the Soldier’s claim that he was only following orders, and not feel disgust at what happened October 2, 1968. Poniatowska’s “A Massacre in Mexico” is effective, because it does not beat around the bush. It points out what exactly happened, and needs no help in illuminating the cold horror of it all. - John S.

Driss ben Hamed Charhadi, ALife full of Holes:A Novel Recorded and Translated by Paul Bowles, Harper Perennial, 2008.


One of the most unusual literary innovations ever produced, A Life Full of Holes is the result of a singular collaboration between two remarkable individuals: Driss ben Hamed Charhadi, an illiterate North African servant and street vendor, and legendary American novelist and essayist Paul Bowles. The powerful story of a shepherd and petty trafficker struggling to maintain hope as he wrestles with the grim realities of daily life, it is the first novel ever written in the Arabic dialect Moghrebi, faithfully recorded and translated into English by Bowles. Straightforward yet rich in complex emotions, it is a fascinating inside look at an unfamiliar culture—harsh and startling, yet interwoven with a poignant, poetic beauty.


The author of this book, Driss ben Hamed Charhadi, is an illiterate house servant in Tangier, Morocco. Despite his qualifications for the "Most Unlikely Novelist of Any Year Award," he has, with the aid of Paul Bowles's tape recorder "written" the first novel ever produced in Moghrebi, an Arabic dialect of North Africa. Mr. Bowles, a composer-author known for such novels as "The Sheltering Sky" and "Let It Come Down," says of his translation of Charhadi's taped book, "Nothing needed to be added, deleted or altered."
Charhadi's novel is a simply told narrative of the fight for survival by a boy named Ahmed (who might prove to be Charhadi himself if there were enough facts available about the author to make a comparison). The story begins when he is 8 years old--and his mother marries a man who does not want to support another man's child. It ends with Ahmed around the age of 20. In between he has worked at a variety of jobs--shepherd, baker's helper, watchman, housekeeper for a European pervert--and he has been in prison for theft. At the novel's close, he is not one franc farther away from starvation than when his story began. There is little hope that he will ever be. If Ahmed's life sounds unbearably depressing by our standards, it is not by the author's. "Even a life full of holes, a life of nothing but waiting, is better than no life at all." Ahmed is a fatalist. Since his life is in Allah's keeping, there is nothing he can do about his destiny: "It was all planned and written long ago. . .Whatever is written beforehand has to be gone through." Because of the story he has chosen to tell (and probably because Driss ben Hamed Charhadi has neither written nor read a single word in his entire life), the novel is little more than a series of episodes strung together by the simplest of declarative sentences. At first glance, the style calls to mind those unimaginative children's books which offer things like: "I see the cat. The cat sees me. Do you see the cat?" However, it is not long before the reader adjusts to the Charhadi salt-free fiction diet. One becomes aware of a poetical simplicity weaving through the blandness. On top of that comes the revelation of a natural story-teller at work, one who knows intuitively what to tell his audience and what to omit. Charhadi (or is it Bowles?) never digresses from the main theme of his narrative, Ahmed's daily fight to stay alive. Only in terms of this central thread will he introduce characters, places and events. Time is spanned by the simple statement, "Today and tomorrow, today and tomorrow. . . ." and the story picks up again a week or a month later--or wherever Charhadi instinctively knows it must be resumed. Two outstanding portions of this unique book deserve special mention. The first is a chapter entitled "The Wire," which tells of Ahmed's arrest and imprisonment for stealing from a warehouse. He spends 10 months in jail before sentence is passed on him. There are days when he lives with 80 men in one half of a cell while the prisoner in charge has the other half completely to himself. Guards continuously beat the inmates. Later, in solitary confinement, Ahmed is given only bread and must take his drinking water from the latrine. The continuous contrast of the brutal incidents related and the innocent style used to relate them leaves an indelible picture on the reader's mind. The final chapters devoted to Ahmed's work as houseboy to FranÁois, the French homosexual, though told with the same noun-plus-verb spareness, creates a fully detailed study of human decay. When Ahmed first goes to work for FranÁois, his employer is wealthy, living in a fine house, the owner of a successful business. Because of his fascination with a Moslem boy, whom he allows to rule him completely, he is stripped of everything. Continuous witness to his downfall is Ahmed, who never enters into this bizarre existence and never passes judgment on it. ("Everyone does what he pleases in life.") Ahmed is concerned with nothing but the 500 francs per day he receives for his work. It is a fascinating portrait of corruption seen through the world's most dispassionate eyes. In these two portions, as in the entire novel, Charhadi is concerned with fiction. However, it is as nonfiction that "A Life Full of Holes" will live longest with the American reader. Here is Morocco as seen from the bottom up by an observer too inexperienced to tell anything but the truth. It is a land where anything is tolerated, where anything is acceptable so long as a man can stay alive. Life may be cheap--but it is incredibly precious. The Charhadi-Bowles collaboration may seem like a gimmick at first glance. It is far from that. Taped, translated or what-have-you, this "novel" deserves bookshelf space far more than many conventional products of local literary laborers. Freedom

When a man goes out of jail it is the happiest day of his life. His heart is open and he is not afraid of anything. I said to myself: I'm going home and see my mother. When I got there she said: How are you? Have you really finished this time? Not just escaped? This time I've finished it. Another time you won't try to sell kif? Never again in my life! I told her.--"A Life Full of Holes."  - HASKEL FRANKEL

Have you ever considered what makes a story that is told different from a story that is written down? The most obvious one is your relationship to the person who is recounting the tale. In the case of a story that's been put down on paper, there is a sense of distance between the author and what they are recounting, while the story teller is more directly involved with his narration. Whether or not what they are telling you actually happened is irrelevant, their physical presence and the sound of their voice connects them to their story in a way that creates an intimacy that is hard to recreate with the written word.
It's been my experience that when a story that was originally told is converted into a written work it loses that sense of intimacy. However, that was before I read A Life Full Of Holes, published by Harper Collins Canada, a story told by Moroccan author Driss Ben Hamed Charhadi (the pen name of Larbi Layachi) that was recorded and translated by the great American writer Paul Bowles. Somehow or other, even though you are reading this story, it manages to capture the experience of having it told to you.
According to the introduction, this story was told to Bowles by Charhadi over the course of a couple of months. Charhadi would simply plunk himself down in front of the tape recorder and tell a section of the story without stopping or even pausing to think about what he was going to say next. Instead of adapting the story into something polished, Bowles elected to simply translate it from Charhadi's dialect as literally as possible without any editing.
A Life Full Of Holes is the of the story of Ahmed ben Said Haddari in Morocco. Told in the first person, the story follows him from early childhood through adolescence until adulthood. The picture that is painted is one of abject poverty and misery as he tells us of the various ways in which he tries to make a living, and the misadventures that befall him. From his step-father who refuses to feed him unless he goes to work when he's a child, the beatings he experiences at the hands of bullies, the racism he faces from the Europeans (referred to as Nazarenes in reference to the fact that their prophet Jesus was originally from Nazareth) who occupy and rule Morocco, to the times he spends in jail, his life is one long struggle to survive. Every time it looks like he might finally be getting his head above water something happens to pull him back under again.
What makes this story so powerful is the straightforward manner that Ahmed reports on what happens to him. Whether it's the prison guards stealing the food and cigarettes his mother has brought him in jail or him being arrested for being in possession of kif and his sentence being decided by a representative of the tobacco industry (they want people to smoke tobacco instead of kif and pressure judges into passing stiff sentences against kif users in order to discourage its use and force people to switch to their product), his various misfortunes are presented in a matter of fact manner that makes them seem like everyday occurrences that could and do befall everybody.
There is something about reading about injustices presented without emotion that makes them even more disturbing. It makes them seem like just another part of life that people have to deal with, and that nothing anybody does is going to make it any better. It doesn't seem to matter whether it's the Europeans or fellow Arabs in charge, as anybody whom Ahmed comes across who has some sort of power is corrupt in one way or another.
There is a pervasive element of fatalism that flows throughout A Life Full Of Holes that is personified by the way Ahmed and other characters accept their lot in life. "Allah wills it"– God wills it – eventually becomes his one solace against misfortune as it allows him to take whatever comes his way with a certain level of equanimity. There's no point in getting upset about being sentenced to jail for three years for something you didn't do, because there's nothing you can do about it anyway. If its God's will that you're going to spend that time in jail, you might as well just try to make the best of a bad situation instead of giving yourself aggravation by fighting the inevitable.
What really gives this book its power though is the fact that in spite of it being written out, you still have the sense that the story is being told to you. While Charhadi electing to tell it from the point of view of his lead character in the first person helps create that impression, the fact that it is told completely in the present tense gives it an immediacy that's normally lacking in a written narrative. Each stage of Ahmed's life is recounted while he is living it, so we are experiencing it at the same time he does with none of the usual division between characters and readers.
A Life Full Of Holes is not only a powerful and slightly horrifying portrayal of life for the poorest of the poor in colonial Morocco in the 1960s, it's also a brilliant example of how it's possible to recreate the magic and immediacy of oral story-telling in writing. Most times when people write out a story that's been told to them they tend to adapt it to meet the needs of the novel form. That's not been the case here, and the result is something truly unique and special. - Richard Marcus


Paul Bowles first began translating the stories of contemporary native Moroccans in 1952, transcribing by hand the tales of Ahmed Yacoubi, several of which appeared in Evergreen Review. In the early 1960's, with the aid of a tape recorder, Bowles decided to pursue the preservation of Maghrebi oral literature. This decision was prompted in part by Bowles' acquaintance with Larbi Layachi, a young Moroccan who was working as a watchman at a café at nearby Merkala Beach. Layachi, although illiterate and not a "storyteller" in the true Arabic tradition, proved to be a master of the tautly spun narrative, and his story, obviously nothing more than thinly veiled autobiography, is told with the same stark, unembellished point of view that formed the basis of the Italian neo-realist cinema, yet virtually without pathos, sentimentality or moralizing of any sort. Basically left to fend for himself at the age of eight, Layachi works a series of jobs as shepherd, baker's helper, laborer, watchman, houseboy to a "Nazarene" gay couple, and as a petty trafficker in kif in the rough-and-tumble streets of Tangier at the cusp of post-colonialism, eventually winding up in jail, sentenced to hard labor in a rock quarry. Adversity raises its Medusa-like head on every other page, in the form of betrayal, denunciation, false accusations, uninformed decisions, corruption, or just plain bad luck, of which Layachi obviously had a very generous helping.
Whereas the typical westerner might have difficulty supporting Layachi's dogged fatalism in the face of constant defeat, failure, frustration and setbacks, the majority of which do seem to be of an unjust nature (despite Layachi's at times pathological tendency to blur the parameters of right and wrong), it's Layachi's very determination to go on no matter what that gives A Life Full of Holes its extremely positive and life-confirming slant. To survive such an uncompromisingly negative chain of events without becoming a burned-out, apathetic nihilist is a true test of faith. And while the Koran is frequently cited to explain or justify particularly heavy blows of fate or irrational human behavior ("It's the will of Allah," etc.), it's also Layachi's ironic and cynical sense of humor that serves as a buffer between himself and life's harder edges and as a comic foil against the perpetrators of ill will. Compellingly told and packed with detail, Layachi's story of survival is also one of simple poetry. - Mark Terrill    




Category: An illiterate writer resigned to being unread
Charhadi (the pseudonym of Larbi Layachi) is the second writer on this list affiliated with Paul Bowles. He was an illiterate shepherd and petty drug trafficker in Tangier whose story, ALife full of Holes, was recorded, transcribed, and translated by Bowles. It was the first book produced in Maghrebi, an Arabic dialect of Northern Africa, and relates the story of Charhadi’s life in a fatalistic and unsentimental manner.

Fran Ross, Oreo, New Directions; Reprint ed, 2015.[1974.]


read it at Google Books


A pioneering, dazzling satire about a biracial black girl from Philadelphia searching for her Jewish father in New York City
Oreo is raised by her maternal grandparents in Philadelphia. Her black mother tours with a theatrical troupe, and her Jewish deadbeat dad disappeared when she was an infant, leaving behind a mysterious note that triggers her quest to find him. What ensues is a playful, modernized parody of the classical odyssey of Theseus with a feminist twist, immersed in seventies pop culture, and mixing standard English, black vernacular, and Yiddish with wisecracking aplomb. Oreo, our young hero, navigates the labyrinth of sound studios and brothels and subway tunnels in Manhattan, seeking to claim her birthright while unwittingly experiencing and triggering a mythic journey of self-discovery like no other.


The first time I read Fran Ross’s hilarious, badass novel, “Oreo,” I was living on Fort Greene Place, in Brooklyn, in a community of people I thought of as “the dreadlocked élite.” It was the late nineteen-nineties, and the artisanal cheese shops and organic juice bars had not yet fully arrived in the boroughs, though there were hints of what was to come. Poor people and artists could still afford to live there. We were young and black, and we’d moved to the neighborhood armed with graduate degrees and creative ambitions. There was a quiet storm of what the musician and writer Greg Tate described as “Black Genius” brewing in our midst. Spike Lee had set up a production studio inside the old firehouse on DeKalb Avenue. Around the corner, on Lafayette Street, was Kokobar, a black-owned espresso shop decorated with Basquiat-inspired paintings; there were whispers that Tracy Chapman and Alice Walker were investors. Around the corner, on Elliott Street, Lisa Price, a.k.a. Carol’s Daughter, sold organic hair oils and creams for kinky-curly hair out of a brownstone storefront.

Fran Ross'Oreo is one of the funniest books I've ever read, but I've never quoted it. To do so, I would have to put quotations before the first page and then again at the last. Instead, I just use the words so many others who have been privileged to encounter Oreo use to describe it: hilarious, uproarious, insane. But these adjectives don't do it justice either. To convey Oreo's humor effectively, I would have to use the comedic graphs, menus and quizzes Ross uses in the novel. So instead, I just settle for, "You have to read this," and from just the first page they see what I mean.
Oreo is the story of the biracial daughter of an African-American woman and Jewish father, a man named Samuel Schwartz, who disappeared when she was an infant, leaving behind only a note that told her to later seek him and the mystery of her birth. When as an adult Oreo leaves her native Philadelphia on a quest to New York City in search of Sam Schwartz, she finds instead several sharing that name in the phone book. Soon Oreo is pulled into an adventure that mirrors the Greek tale of Theseus' journey into the Labyrinth, where the vehicle toward humor is the quirks of language in Jewish and black culture and every turn takes the reader deeper into the satire and into the heart of the absurdities of American identity.
As funny as the novel Oreo is — and it is very, very funny — it was ignored during its era. But it is easy to see how such a smart, hilarious novel could escape notice. There are books, great books, that appear at a time when no one is ready to read them. Oreo arrived in 1974, during the height of the Black Power movement with its focus on an African-based identity and black male power. A novel about a biracial woman's search for her Jewish identity, complete with Yiddish word jokes and a structure based around Greek mythology, was about as far away from what was expected of a black writer as possible. Biracial identity didn't even truly exist in the popular imagination at the time of the book's publication: If you were mixed you were considered black, and if you fought that you were branded an Oreo — white on the inside, black on the outside — a joke Ross embraced in the title character.
Fran Ross’s 1974 novel Oreo, rereleased this year thanks to New Directions, is really damn funny if you get the jokes. They only come fast and smart, and Ross will sometimes generously explain them to her readers, like in this scene where the eponymous heroine teases her English tutor:

Oreo overheard him mumbling happily to himself about the many joyous conflations he and his new [girl]friend had had together. That one was easy for Oreo to figure out. “Conflation, from conflare, ‘to blow together,’” she said to herself. ‘Oh, shit. The professor’s just talking about plain old sixty-nine.”

It’s nice to see the humor pulled out of the book; you can somehow grow inured to it when hit with these wisecracks every other sentence.
A comical reworking of the myth of Theseus, Oreo is a story told in fragments and formal experiments. In brief, comic episodes, scenes, and, sometimes, restaurant menus and math tests, Ross cracks jokes and builds an image of her lead, the young black Jewish woman Christine Clark AKA Oreo, as she sojourns to discover the “secret of her birth.” Through a ludicrous romp of sleuthing, Oreo follows a series of ridiculous clues left by her father on a coffee stained list in an attempt to find him and, by extension, the secret. Armed with her Thesean sword and sandals, a mezuzah on a chain (containing a New Testament passage no less!) and a pair of socks to keep warm, Oreo’s journey takes her all over Manhattan — stinky cheese shops in the Village to a Harlem brothel — concluding the novel with a mythic suicide and some role play at a sperm bank.
Ross’s approach to humor is as much distinct as it is distinctive of the time, at least to the new crop of readers whose image of American humor in the mid-1970s is most likely what they received in their parents’ nostalgic sharings of the male-dominated, often Jewish vaudevillian, comedy canon: Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein (both 1974); Woody Allen’s Bananas (1971) and Sleeper (1973); and the comedy albums of Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Cheech & Chong, and National Lampoon. The novel’s jokes range from crude play with etymology, as seen in the above crack, to the playful turns of mocking absurdity that made Groucho Marx famous: upon meeting his daughter for the first time, Oreo’s father happily notes “You have my eyes,” and Oreo’s response? “I was going to say the same thing to you.” Ross leaves it to the reader to imagine Oreo tapping her cane (which, yes, she is carrying around Manhattan) after this line. In this comic tradition, the humor works as a kind of identitarian smokescreen, as if to say, “Who am I? Someone cleverer than you, and that’s all you need to know.”
The crude and obvious contemporary connection this reviewer would draw to Ross’s work would be Ishmael Reed’s outlandish and sharp satirical novels, such as Mumbo Jumbo (1972) and Flight to Canada (1976). Yet there seems to be something altogether different in Ross’s project. To speak generally, that is, reductively, Reed examines culture on the macro-level as a network of mythologies, identities (racial, gendered, national, and so on), and telecommunication waves. Ross examines culture on the micro-level of individuals acting in the world, making themselves, and, most importantly, having fun with the structural orders that make culture and identity — most especially language. One of the more important and fascinating differences this makes on Ross’s novel is the relationship she builds between her reader(s) and the work, the characters, and herself as the writer.
At the introduction of the novel’s biracial heroine, Ross positions the reader: “A secret cauled Christine’s birth. This is her story — let her discover it.” A cute pun followed by terse, if chuckled, warning to back off. Readers can take this tone as a microcosm for the whole of Oreo— a tale of a black American Jewish woman, who mixed ethnic and racial identities match America’s favorites for (comedic) entertainment. And here I am, a white American goy, being told that Christine’s story is a secret not for me to know before she figures it out.
Ross’s novel offers readers an unending stream of snort-worthy punchlines with implicit boundaries for who can access this story and how they can. Oreo is Christine’s story, and it is for her (read: Fran Ross) and nobody else. Black and Jewish readers probably have more to gain from such a story than readers like me: more aesthetic satisfaction, more bite to the humor, less time spent looking up Yiddish words. But the most significance seems to come from Ross’s claim of her protagonist’s independence from those enjoying the representation of her life. We can watch and laugh if we want to — but never forget that Ross’s life is not for us.
Ross plays with the desires to make certain peoples and their bodies legible according to cultural standards, similar to the way Oreo messes with a perverted caller posing as a medical doctor asking about her age, underwear choices, and virginity. When he asks the fourteen-year-old Christine to tell him “all the words [she] know[s] that mean sexual intercourse,” she casts a “wicked smile” and says, “Certainly. Procreation, cohabitation, coition, coitus.” Knowing she’s mockingly tapped into wrong vocabulary and frustrated him, she then tells the pervert what he wants to hear: “a lot of words that begin with p and c and t and x, that rhyme with bunt and pooky and noontang.” Manipulating and controlling this heavy-breathing perv with her knowledge of language, expectations, and patriarchy, Oreo convinces the caller, salivating with lust, to come to her house, only to greet him with her own specially-developed mixed-martial art: “Way of the Interstitial Thrust.”
Oreo knows how to make herself into whatever she wants to be by playing with the ways those around her perceive her; except that the joke is on them, the kick to the groin is for them, and the laughs are for her. Even the reader, who certainly gets their laughs, is not wholly allowed into her world. When the horny doctor asks for Oreo’s address, Ross doesn’t give her reader a street and house number in the dialogue, instead merely writing: “She gave him her address.” Ross reminds the reader that they are not in charge of this phone call, Christine’s Thesean journey, the language and pop-culture-referential play, or the novel itself. We readers should just be happy to be here.
Am I disingenuously reading a particular politics into Oreo? Totally possible. Ross probably mostly wanted to write a funny novel and make some cash. Such a theory would be supported by Haryette Mullen’s excellent new forward to the novel: struggling to make it as a comedy writer, Ross tries her hand at this ridiculous pile of ink and tree pulp so many people seem to be paying money for. It’s a good way to make a buck when you’ve got a quick wit, and “yucks for bucks” doesn’t necessarily mean political resistance or revolution. But, even so, mythology is more than just Ross’s narrative inspiration for this novel; isn’t mythology in a Barthesian sense the basis of great comedy? Our most revered comedians often play with what we think we know, otherwise known as lies we tell as if they’re truths (such as, stereotypes of black and Jewish women), to discover the sometimes joyful surprise that we were mistaken or that our myths are more fiction than axiom. This play with mythology is often as tragic as it is comedic, but it seems fair to assume that there’s always a political relevance.
Full of jokes on and with the bourgeoisie — clearly the demographic of cultural capital holding gut-busters Ross is writing for — the novel can so easily pull such a reader into the humor. Pages fly by with quips from precocious and insistently impatient characters, and, at the end, this reader can’t help but feel he just sat down and, following the suggestion of junk food in the novel’s title, gave the business to a bag of barbeque-flavored potato chips: staring into the middle distance, chuckling through the gum-cutting soggy debris of fried potato slices, reaching to the bottom of the empty wrinkled reflection-less mirror bag only to come up with my own fingers covered in delicious brown and orange flavor dust.
I am the readerly Janus head of stuffed and starved, pleased and disgusted. Ross certainly came, but how about you, reader? I don’t think Ross, Christine/Oreo, Helen, or any of the women in the novel particularly care about how the reader feels. Oreo is for its readers’ consumption, their over-satisfied stomach aches and plastic sleeves with only the sooty remains of cream-filled chocolate cookie sandwiches are their own business. I picked up Ross’s book, Oreo learned the secret of her birth, and I laughed my ass off, anyway. - Seth Cosimini        


“A brilliant and biting satire, a feminist picaresque, absurd, unsettling, and hilarious ... Ross' novel, with its Joycean language games and keen social critique, is as playful as it is profound. Criminally overlooked. A knockout.” (Kirkus (Starred Review))

“With its mix of vernacular dialects, bilingual and ethnic humor, inside jokes, neologisms, verbal quirks, and linguistic oddities, Ross's novel dazzles…” (Harryette Mullen)

“It took me two years to "feel" Wu Tang's first album, even longer to appreciate Basquiat, and I still don't get all the fuss over Duke Ellington and Frank Lloyd Wright. But I couldn't believe Oreo hadn't been on my cultural radar.” (Paul Beatty - The New York Times)

“Hilarious, touching and a future classic.” (Vanity Fair)

“Think: Thomas Pynchon meets Don Quixote, mixed with a crack joke crafter. I'm not sure I've ever admired a book's inventiveness and soul more.” (John Warner - Chicago Tribune)

“The novel will endure, greeting each new generation of readers with its continuing relevance.” (Amanda Sarasien - The Literary Review)

“Hilariously offbeat. ” (Essence Magazine)

“This is a novel that refuses to be categorized or tamed in any way.” (Bookforum)

“Oreo has snap and whimsy to burn. It’s a nonstop outbound flight to a certain kind of readerly bliss. It may have been first published more than 40 years ago, but its time is now.” (Dwight Garner - The New York Times)

“Uproariously funny…criminally neglected.” (Stephen Sparks - LitHub)


Excerpt:


First, the bad news
When Frieda Schwartz heard from her Shmuel that he was (a) marrying a black girl, the blood soughed and staggered in all her conduits as she pictured the chiaroscuro of the white-satin chuppa and the shvartze's skin; when he told her that he was (b) dropping out of school and would therefore never become a certified public accountant — Riboyne Shel O'lem!— she let out a great geshrei and dropped dead of a racist/my-son-the-bum coronary.
The bad news (cont'd)
When James Clark heard from the sweet lips of Helen (Honeychile) Clark that she was going to wed a Jew-boy and would soon be Helen (Honeychile) Schwartz, he managed to croak one anti-Semitic "Goldberg!" before he turned to stone, as it were, in his straight-backed chair, his body a rigid half swastika,
discounting, of course, head, hands, and feet.
Major and minor characters in part one of this book, in order of birth.
Jacob Schwartz, the heroine's paternal grandfather
Frieda Schwartz, his wife (died in paragraph one but still, in her own quiet way, a power and a force)
James Clark, the heroine's maternal grandfather (immobilized in paragraph two)
Louise Butler Clark, the heroine's maternal grandmother (two weeks younger than her husband)
Samuel Schwartz, the heroine's father
Helen Clark Schwartz, the heroine's mother
Christine (Oreo), the heroine
Moishe (Jimmie C.), the heroine's brother
Concerning a few of the characters, an apercu or two
Jacob: He makes boxes ("Jake the Box Man, A Boxeleh for Every Tchotchkeleh"). As he often says, "It's a living. I mutche along." Translation: I am, kaynaynhoreh, a very rich man."
James and Louise: In the DNA crapshoot for skin color, when the die was cast, so was the dye. James came out nearest the color of the pips (on the scale opposite, he is a 10), his wife the cube. Louise is fair, very fair, an albino manquee (a just-off-the-scale -1). James is a shrewd businessman, Louise one of the great cooks of our time.
Samuel Schwartz: Just another pretty face.
Helen Clark: Singer, pianist, mimic, math freak (a 4 on the color scale).
NOTE: There is no "very black." Only white people use this term. To blacks, "black" is black enough (and in most cases too black, since the majority of black people are not nearly so black as your black pocketbook). If a black person says, "John is very black," he is referring to John's politics, not his skin color.
A word about the weather
There is no weather per se in this book. Passing reference is made to weather in a few instances. Assume whatever season you like throughout. Summer makes the most sense in a book of this length. That way, pages do not have to be used up describing people taking off and putting on overcoats.
The life story of James and Louise up to the marriage of Helen and Samuel
In 1919, when they were both five years old, little James and little Louise moved to Philadelphia with their parents, the Clarks and the Butlers, who were close friends, from a tiny hamlet outside a small village in Prince Edward County, Virginia. When they were eighteen, James and Louise married and had their first and only child, Helen, in the same year.
During World War II, James worked as a welder at Sun Shipyard in Chester, Pennsylvania. Every morning for three years, he would stop at Zipstein's Noshery to buy a pickle to take to work in his lunchbox. He would ask for a sour. Zipstein always gave him a half sour. From that time on, James hated Jews.
After the war, James had enough money saved to start his own mail-order business. He purposely cultivated a strictly Jewish clientele, whom he overcharged outrageously. He researched his market carefully; he studied Torah and Talmud, collected midrashim, quoted Rabbi Akiba — root and herb of all the jive-ass copy he wrote for the chrain-storm of flyers he left in Jewish neighborhoods. His first item sold like latkes. It was a set of dartboards, featuring (his copy read) "all the men you love to hate from Haman to Hitler." No middle-class Philadelphia Jew could show his face in his basement rec room if those dartboards weren't hanging there.
With this success as a foundation, James went on to tie-ins with other mail-order houses. He was able to offer his customers cheese blintzes for Shevuoth, handkerchiefs for Tisha Bov ("You'll cry a lot"), dreidels for Chanukah, gragers and hamantashen for Purim, wine goblets for Passover, honey for Rosh Hashanah, branches for Succoth ("Have the prettiest booth on your block"), and a recording of the Kol Nidre for Yom Kippur ("as sung by Tony Martin"). Next to each item in his catalog was a historico-religious paragraph for those who did not know the significance of the feasts and holidays. "You have to explain everything to these apikorsim," he told Louise, who said, "What say?" Over the years, his steadiest seller was the Jewish History Coloring Book series, including "the ever-popular Queen Esther, Ruth and Naomi, Judah and the Maccabees (add 50¢ for miniature plastic hammer), the Sanhedrin (the first Supreme Court), and other all-time Chosen People favorites." At last, his money worries were over. He was able to send Helen to college and buy Louise the gift of her dreams: a complete set of Tupperware (5,481 pieces).
Temple University, choir rehearsal
As Helen sang her part in the chorale chorus Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring, she constructed one of her typical head equations, based on the music's modalities and hers:
Simple, she conceded, compared with the overlapping fugal subject-answer-countersubject head equations that were her favorites — elegant, in fact, but not quite absorbing enough to keep her mind off the fact she was perspiring and wanted desperately to pee. Samuel, passing through the rehearsal hall, caught a glimpse of Helen's face and, mistaking her expression of barely controlled anguish for religious fervor, was himself seized with an emotion that mystics have often erroneously identified as ecstasy-cum-epiphany (vide Saul on the road to Damascus, Theresa of Avila every time you turn around): the hots. His accounting books fell to the floor.

Nadja Spiegel, Sometimes I Lie and Sometimes I Don't, Trans. by Rachel McNicholl, Dalkey Archive Press, 2015.


Love, injury, deception, uncertainty, and self-sacrifice: debut author Nadja Spiegel is hardly the first person to write about these things, but the way she has written about them is incomparable. Constructing virtuoso depictions of life in a style that lets them get right under your skin, Spiegel's precise, brittle, seemingly straightforward prose paints a vibrant picture of human compromise and cooperation with both humor and restraint. Bittersweet, made up of just a few simple strokes, these stories herald the arrival of an important new voice in European literature.


Austrian author Nadja Spiegel’s debut collection of experimental short stories, Sometimes I Lie and Sometimes I Don’t, describes individuals struggling to retain their senses of individuality. In the coy story, “lisa and elias and me,” Ines involves herself in a casual sexual relationship with the same boy on whom her best friend crushes. She reasons that keeping her romantic affair secret is a form of loyalty to her friend’s happiness. Like most of Spiegel’s narrators, she resists attachment out of a desire to remain unfeeling. She affects nonchalance concerning Elias’ inattention. One begins to feel that her record of events is not just unreliable but overly forgiving on her own questionable decisions. There is also much self-abasement as a form of deflecting others’ acts of unkindness. This is in keeping with the young narrator’s knowing voice, one that is convinced of its own prescience. But her own jealousies emerge as Elias returns Lisa’s advances: “Sure he is, I say. Maybe he really is that kind of guy, I add and bite my tongue before I say the kitchen belongs to me. But what use is a tongue anyway? I’m not the kind of girl who needs a tongue; I’m not the kind of girl who has anything to say.” Here, Ines’ habitual diplomatic handling of Lisa’s innocence almost gives way to the articulation of her own possessive feelings about Elias. Ines is an unromantic lover for Elias’ convenience and for fretful Lisa’s sake, a believer in Elias’ dutiful courtship. But in truth, she is neither. She knows that among company, she is a sham. There is always the sense that Spiegel’s narrators are learning and relearning the rules of propriety; that they are struggling to negotiate public expectations. For this reason, her characters are hapless misfits, loners, or drifters. In the public sphere, they are forced into roles.
Among the protagonists in these fictions, most of the characters in orbit seem to happily admit all their duplicity as necessary role-playing in a dishonest world. By the story’s conclusion, Ines has managed the acting without consequence to either party. More importantly, she has also clung to her sense of herself as a girl who enjoys being romanced but understands that at her age, most boys’ attentions will be shallowly motivated. She deftly slips into roles and lucidly perceives the wants of others. Her confession, “Sometimes I lie and sometimes I don’t” is her recognition of this deftness. But Elias denies her the same tokens of affection he freely awards Lisa. The tragedy is that she craves approval from Elias against her knowledge that he cannot give her the profound sort of love that she desires. She understands “Elias is not the kind of guy who falls in love. He only loves, for instance.” Ines’ isolation, one of the necessary trials of adolescence, is more keenly felt because of her heightened sense of awareness.
The daughter-narrator in “how we forgive” also suffers from a sense of loneliness when the pieties afforded to the dead threaten a truthful commemoration of her mother. Spiegel complicates questions of decorum by suggesting that the girl accidentally caused her mother’s death while she was at the wheel. “how we forgive” is a story that seems to have been penned by the narrator in a precarious state of emotional instability. The self-consciousness typical of adolescence has been carried to a state of paranoia. Even the most mundane detail recalls to her the scene of her mother’s death: “In the restaurant later, when it’s dark, the men’s coats on the window ledges look like rolled-up dead kittens.” This is a narrator writing with a palsied hand and a fitful mind. She discloses her world with a lens unsteadied by the intensity of her emotions. The writing, characteristic of Spiegel, is a form of stream-of-consciousness, one that feels raw with the proximity of the experience described: “I sever my hands at the wrists, cut my cheekbones out of my face and pull my Achilles tendons out of my heels. I have two sets of each already, since my mother died.” There is desperation to this writing, as if all the contained self-hatred were finally allowed a means of expression. The daughter feels that the acknowledged rituals of mourning, whether the praise regarding the noble faces of the dead or certain trite consolatory phrases, falsely evoke her mother.
Spiegel is often preoccupied with the struggle of how to remember the dead, the difficulty of which Roland Barthes lamented in both Camera Lucida and Mourning Diary. The question asked in these stories is thus: How to preserve the memory of an individual against oblivion? Barthes believed in the power of the photograph as a representative evocation of his dead mother. “How we forgive” ends with the daughter attempting to write a story about her mother’s death. Writing as a form of healing in the wake of trauma is nothing novel. However, in this instance, the daughter writes in protest of the public codes of mourning that have depersonalized her mother to just another corpse awaiting burial. Ultimately, the daughter rejects the forgiveness offered her, but not as a matter of absolving herself. What irks the narrator is that to forgive an implicated individual is to ultimately construe death as the result of a logical series of events. It is to think that death can be rationalized, that it can be perceived as an understandable event. For the narrator, this sort of conventional thinking papers over the true senselessness of death. She writes that the other mourners “forgive for no reason.” The sentimental rituals of mourning do a disservice to the narrator by understating her experience of grief. The daughter’s evocation of her mother, to “pronounce her name as she was,” is motivated by a desire to vocalize the extent of her loss amidst all the suffocating pieties.
The strangled voice is a recurring theme in Spiegel’s varied fictions. In “fatherland,” a child yearns to hear his submissive mother articulate herself. Anne, in “meta plays the violin,” seeks acknowledgment from a more talented best friend. Denied confidants, most of these characters reflexively turn inwards, as if they were resigned to the immovability of their circumstances. What is curious is that even when systems of oppression are overthrown or subverted, these characters remain inarticulate. For instance, in “fatherland,” when the abusive father dies, Spiegel concludes with an image of the mother and son at the kitchen table both wordlessly fumbling in the dark: “They sit there until night comes. They don’t know what to do with the night.” An oppressive father described for them well-defined roles. It is an irony that when afforded the alternative — the freedom to speak without consequence — each cannot overcome their habitual reticence. These are voices that have been silenced to a lingering state of muteness. For Spiegel, the recovery of the individual voice after years of suppression is akin to the learning of a foreign tongue.
In this precocious collection, the tyranny of public spaces, the result of inviolable laws of behavior, polices these narrators from self-expression. One feels that most of these stories are diary entries logged by young men and women straining against their own invisibility. These thwarted children, with their voices unheard in lived life, recover their senses of personhood on the page. - Darren Huang


It’s difficult to write about Nadja Spiegel’s debut collection of very short stories: they’re so slippery. They “spool” and “rewind” (these are her words about the voice of “Ophelia”, who is old, but somehow also isn’t, until she’s dead and the whole thing is hardly resolved). The creations of the Austrian author, who is still in her very early 20s, can at first glance seem slight: vignettes of contemporary romantic and family relationships whose elusive protagonists do “nothing in particular” – until they reveal themselves as something a lot darker and more complex. At the start of her tales, most of which are told as internal monologues, it is often unclear how characters are related to each other, or even whether they are male or female.
Many feature doubles, twins, and couples without boundaries: where does one character start and the other finish? There is an intimacy that could be romantic but could be familial, which, in several stories does get too close for comfort. There is no difference between skin and skin, of sisters in particular: “We said nothing for so long that I couldn’t tell where my body ended and hers began.”
For Spiegel, bodies are unreliable indicators of personality. “We were actually pretty alike, we just had different shells,” says an ugly sister of the one she believes to be more beautiful. People are a mystery, because they are often not quite as they appear: “my problem,” says one narrator who has a relationship with her life-class model, “was trying to dissociate Milo’s outer shell from Milo himself.” When he, in turn, paints her: “The way he looked at me made my body irrelevant; it was an artist’s gaze.” She refuses to display the resulting abstract painting in case anyone sees “her” naked.
Spiegel writes on experiencing beauty as an observer who breaks the body down into spare parts in the name of love, or art. As they have only a glancing association with identity, the way bodies fragment is sometimes funny and sometimes horrific, but this fragmented sensibility also allows for moments of awkward sensuality: “Hannes pointed at my thigh, at the hole in my tights, and touched his index finger to my skin; it fit perfectly into the rim of the hole.”
There are many liminal states of dress and undress in the collection: characters are draped in nighties, sheets, towels. Evasive, fey as indie-pop, these are emo stories in which teenagers and twentysomethings make advances to each other via little compliments and gifts. Spiegel’s protagonists drink “hot milk and honey”, they eat Nutella, they offer “a packet of chocolate biscuits”. There are many small, cute things, that somehow turn big and dark, and the stories are littered with sudden images (and acts) of violence: “When Paula played the piano, her face was a derailed train.” There’s a lot of music in these stories and musicians, for music is an alternative to words, which are untrustworthy. Even the stories’ titles are set in shy (or petulant?) lower-case.
The inadequacy of language is particularly evident in Speigel’s mistrust of names: “For three weeks I never heard Malika say anything other than I am Malika,” says one narrator, who fails to know Malika any better via the use of that word. Sometimes Spiegel’s characters are called K and X; sometimes they are called “Marie” but at the same time, “Eiske”; sometimes just “the mother” and “the son”. This use of formalism links Spiegel to other Austrian writers, particularly Elfriede Jelinek, and Thomas Bernhard.
In the end, the collection is about the failures of language, especially to describe human identity: “I can’t find the words for the sentence. I can never find words for my sentences,” says one of Speigel’s protagonists. “And if someone were to ask me Whatisyourname, my answer would be: I don’t know,” says another.
What is left? Things that can be suggested, but not solved by anything Spiegel can put on the page. We’re left with an equation of coexistent facts, equal and opposite: “a) What everyone knows: Meta plays the violin. b) What no one knows.” - Joanna Walsh


Debut collection from an award-winning Austrian author, a fresh new voice in innovative fiction.
The themes explored in these very short stories are both timeless and quotidian: life and death, love and sex, family and friends. Narrators negotiate family and relationships and the uncertainties of young adulthood. What distinguishes Spiegel is her willingness to experiment with form and language. Her strengths as a stylist are what make her debut shine, and those strengths are all on display in “How It Is,” one of the most successful stories in this collection. Written in short bursts of memory and suppressed emotion, doubling back on itself to express feelings that are complex and inescapable, this story has an exquisite shape. The narrator is a young woman describing her sister. It’s not until the second page that the narrator states one of the fundamental facts of this narrative: “My sister is an actor.” The reader already knows this, but it’s clear that the narrator needs to say this—finally—even though she’s no more enthusiastic about her sister’s vocation than their bitter, willfully unhappy mother is. Like much experimental fiction, this story is short on action and devoid of plot, but it’s rich with the razor-sharp language of someone who would rather observe and record than talk: “What’s up? My voice sounds like birch bark, rough. If I peel it, it would sound like: Go away.” The reader doesn’t have to take “How It Is” as autobiography to believe that this protagonist who doesn’t know what she wants to be when she grows up might turn out to be a writer.
This collection is unlikely to bring new readers to experimental fiction, but fans of authors like Lydia Davis, Ben Marcus, and Jenny Offill will want to check it out.  - Kirkus Reviews

 


Alexander Goldstein, The Quiet Fields


Iwas reluctant to tackle The Quiet Fields mostly because I didn’t want to be left without any Goldstein novel to look forward to reading. This may sound a bit strange as he lived to write only two novels, but the sheer literary might of the first one, Remember Famagusta, persuaded me that its author was one of the greatest Russian language stylists of his time, and therefore  his next book must be something out of this world as well. Needless to say, this turned out exactly the case.  The Quiet Fields is a work of  intoxicating linguistic virtuosity and vast erudition which make most of the recent Russian literary produce pale by comparison. Partly fictionalised memoir, partly cultural criticism, this work is Goldstein’s swansong, his final legacy, his ticket to literary immortality. The author was terminally ill with lung cancer when writing this book, and he managed to finish it just shortly before his death. Aware of the fact that the end was near, Goldstein created an intricate tapestry in which he tried to capture as much of the world he was leaving behind as he could. Even partial understanding of this literary arras might require several careful readings as the density of the writing, high as it is, on many occasions goes off-scale.
The narrator, who shares many biographical details with the author, tells the story of his childhood and student years in the Soviet Baku as well as of his later life in Tel Aviv as an Israeli immigrant. But it is not just a story of the people he has known, the places he has visited, and the experiences he has had. It is also a story of literature, art and philosophy that have shaped the narrator and given him his particular voice. Just like in Remember Famagusta, the narrative is fragmentary, with unexpected temporal and spacial leaps. The novel is populated by real and imaginary characters: some of them are the individuals Goldstein personally knew, some are the figments of his imagination, some are historical figures he read about in books. A  life spent reading is as important here as a life spent living, maybe even more. Books, booksellers and bookshops are omnipresent in The Quiet Fields. Throughout the whole novel books are read, discussed, analysed. It appears that for Goldstein literature is just another country, like The Soviet Union or Israel, but more comfortable and more familiar than either of these. He definitely knew it better than any place in the physical world. The abundance of literary allusions playfully scattered on the pages of the novel reveals an encyclopedic mind equal to that of Roberto Calasso or Umberto Eco. We are not talking here about mere references to other works of literature.  The cultural material at Goldstein’s disposal is treated with exceptional subtlety  and is further enriched by passing through the centrifuge of his prose. There seems to be nothing he cannot do with language. Rich in meaning, alliterative and allusive, Goldstein’s sprawling sentences strike by the sheer inventiveness and the originality of looking at things. Even the most mundane situations gain loftiness and solemnity once couched in the baroque luxury of Goldstein’s prose. Nothing which is written nowadays in Russian comes even close to this filigree wordsmithery.
There are fourteen chapters, and the longest one has the same title as the novel – The Quiet Fields. This chapter is the most plot-driven part of the book, although it is unlikely to provide any kind of linearity for an impatient reader. It is a story of friendship of three bookish guys (one of whom is the narrator) in  Baku during the Soviet time.The quiet fields are none other than the Elysian Fields described in Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid, which happens to be the favourite book of Pavel Torgovetsky, one of the three friends. The other friend is Oleg Blonsky, the narrator’s second cousin who provides him with rare books, some of them banned in the Soviet Union. The ordinary story of sharing and discussing books, of joint walks in the streets of Baku, of meals and  teas taken together is not only energised by the verbal pyrotechnics of the narrative, but also by the intrusion of mystical elements. Oleg’s mother Fira, who has some psychiatric disorder, also possesses a supernatural gift of drawing people the way they will look in the future, in ten or more years. When she was a girl, many relatives and  friends of the family came to her to pose for the prophetic portraits, and even paid money for that. The fun continued until one day she  was not able to fulfill the request of a man who wanted to see how he looked in eight years.  As Fira revealed,  there were just five years left for him. One cannot help but see the parallel between this mystical prophesy of death and a lethal medical diagnosis.
The three most important books the narrator acquires with Blonsky’s assistance are Varlam Shalamov’sKolyma Tales, Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and Jens Peter Jacobsen’s Niels Lyhne.  Goldstein writes about each of these works at some length, but even without his explanations, the reader of the novel who has reached this point will be able to see their significance for the narrator given his background, ideas and aspirations. Kolyma Tales narrates one of the most horrible moments of history of the country in which he and his friends have come of age. Shalamov is the Russian Virgil offering to the reader a descent into the hell of Stalin’s labour camps. Whereas in other works on the subject, like Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, some aspects of camp labour are presented in the positive light as a source of meaning and self-actualisation for the dejected inmate, for Shalamov forced labour is a just a type of slow execution. Its only purpose is to wear out and degrade the prisoner until he succumbs to untimely death. Both Rilke’s and Jacobsen’s novels deal with the struggles, hopes and inevitable disillusionment of the aspiring poet who finds it hard to come to terms with the alienating society. It is important to remember that one of the genres mined by The Quiet Fields is the Künstlerroman, albeit the narrator’s formation as an artist, as opposed to that depicted in more conventional works of such kind, is shown  in non-linear, kaleidoscopic manner, with many gaps remaining unfilled.
The trio of intellectuals becomes just a duet after the tragic death of Oleg in a drowning accident. The two friends continue seeing each other, but  it’s not what it used to be. They slowly grow apart as Pavel becomes more and more obsessed with the Aeneid which he considers a prophetic book. He tries to predict the future by opening it at random and reading the arbitrary passage. The literary value of the poem gives way to its purported occult powers. Their walks together become rare until they cease meeting  altogether, restricting their communication to weekly phone conversations. After some time even the phone calls stop. When Pavel dies, the narrator is conveniently sick with flu, which gives him an excuse not to attend his funeral. Interaction with great writers and philosophers via books come easier to  Goldstein’s protagonist than human relationships in real life. Not that it is so uncommon among artists.
The story of three friends is just one of many recounted in The Quiet Fields. It stands out among others as it is the longest and the most fleshed-out narrative in the book. The nature of Goldstein’s novel is such that very often we get just a glimpse or hint of some event, and then it gives way to another before we become fully aware of what has just taken place. Some events and characters reappear later in the book, others disappear forever leaving to the reader a lingering taste of mystery. Besides that there are numerous set pieces of insightful commentary on various writers, artists, philosophers, and historical figures. The list of personalities discussed by Goldstein includes Bertold Brecht, Ernst Jünger, Giacomo Casanova, Iamblichus, Siyyid Ali Muhammad, Paul Scheerbart, Andy Warhol, Ferdinad II of the Two Sicilies, Garcilaso de la Vega, Witold Gombrowicz, Sergei Diaghilev, Sergei Kuriokhin, Louis Althusser and even Tupak Shakur. In the company of Goldstein’s inquisitive and critical mind, we discover a lot of fascinating facts and ideas. For instance, we learn why Andy Warhol’s photograph with a bulldog and a Roman bust counters the ancient doctrine of the great chain of being and also get to know the four important conclusions stemming from Garcilaso de la Vega’s description of the mummified Inca kings. The novel is full of little gems like these. Not less captivating are some ways in which the narrator gets hold of the books that provide him with food for thought, for sometimes the circumstances of acquiring a tome are tinged with the sense of mystery, of occult initiation. The case in point is his acquisition of a book with the writings of the Syrian Neoplatonist philosopher Iamblichus. The book is given to him by a mysterious barefoot man whom he meets in a forest. The narrator asks the man about the meaning of Nothing. After delivering a protracted monologue on the nature of being and reality that touches, among other things, on the philosophical teachings of Gautama Buddha, the artistic ambition of Ezra Pound, and the many-worlds interpretation of Hugh Everett III, the sage wanderer disappears in the woods  leaving the cloth-bound Iamblichus on the moss-covered stone he was sitting on just a while ago. The style of the wanderer’s speech fully conforms to the overall aesthetics of Goldstein’s novel: his ramblings are learned, convoluted and impressionistic. This is how, for example, he illustrates the impossibility of escaping the material world (please note that in no way my translation can do any justice to the original):
Where is the lie? It’s not so easy to explain, but I’ll try. As a sectarian immured in the masonry of the real, totally ignorant of anything but matter in the broad presence of its manifestations, – mettlesome cynic challenge – I was free as a bird, a flaneur on a voyeuristic walk,  everywhere finding the proof of my case. From TheCapitals-talmuds, unread, leafed through out of boredom, from the orators’ speeches, radiochaos, strikes, from the newspaper columns with stock quotes and crime rates, from aviation, jazz, mustard gas, Rabelaisian devaluation and resurrection of money, from the tempo-rhythm of the city flooded by new iniquity (secret clubs, underground lupanars, Roman indecencies of the petite bourgeoisie of Weimar, night life opening the fan of sexual and racial exoticism for the first time surpassed the daytime in saturation), from the discontent of factory workers, from the political provocations, from the black weariness crying for the rabble-rousing to be fettered,  from the plebeian lies and violence there crept the red inflamed carcass of reality, live and complacently rotting meat bored by a million-headed worm, and even the cinema, lunar and theatrical, mistakenly chartered by doubles, psychosis, hypnosis, cocaine and morphine, laceratedhim with hooks, thin like Chinese needles, like needles of embalmers.
On the last page of the novel there is the phrase “the morphine splits the text in two “. It is a grim reminder of the circumstances under which Goldstein was putting finishing touches to the manuscript of The Quiet Fields. Both as a linguistic tour-de-force and as a testimony of its author’s stoicism in the face of death, this book has a special place in contemporary Russian literature. I am not fazed in the least by the small print run of the edition that I have read: just 1,000 copies. It is true that Goldstein is little read in Russian-speaking countries and is almost unknown in the rest of the world. However, judging by his two novels which, when their time comes, will be keeping busy more than one generation of scholars, I personally have no doubt that his fabulous prose already belongs to the pantheon of eternity. - theuntranslated.wordpress.com/







Alexander Goldstein, Remember Famagusta


The English-speaking audience might have heard first the name of Alexander Goldstein from one of the most important contemporary Russian writers Mikhail Shishkin. During his talk at the Harriman Institute, Columbia, he actually said the following:
For me now the top of Russian literature is Alexander Goldstein. […] I’m sure in fifty years here at Columbia University and other American universities all professors will consider our time, our epoch, the epoch of Alexander Goldstein. And we, writers, will be just contemporaries of Alexander Goldstein. We just shared with him the epoch. […] And if you asked me, “What Russian writers are important and genius nowadays?” I would say: “Read Alexander Goldstein”.
This is a very strong statement from a writer whose authority has been cemented by such impressive works as Maidenhair and The Light and the Dark (although, in my opinion, they are not a patch on his mind-bending tour-de-forceThe Capture of Izmail. I’m not sure that Goldstein is really the genius Shishkin would like him to be, but upon reading his first novel Remember Famagusta, I was totally sold on the idea that there had not been a better stylist writing in Russian in the past century, except maybe Andrei Bely, Vladimir Nabokov and Sasha Sokolov.
Goldstein has created his own linguistic universe, a parallel dimension of words, in which the commonly accepted laws and conventions do not apply. Although appreciated by some, the novel in question remains poorly understood . It is impossible to find a single critical article on the novel throwing substantial light on its numerous mysteries.  Regretfully, I have to confess that I am no exception. I am not sure what I have just read. I had been utterly  baffled during the reading so many times that I started to get surprised each time I did understand something. Nonetheless, it would be wrong to consider  Remember Famagusta  ” a Russian version of Finnegans Wake” because Goldstein’s alchemy  rarely invades the word itself; that is to say, the reader has no problem understanding the meaning of isolated words, which is one of the challenges posed by Joyce’s text. It’s the way those words are woven into the texture of the novel, the unexpected lexical combinations and collisions, the baroque over-abundance of luscious imagery that are liable to leave even the most sophisticated reader high and dry.
Having made the necessary disclaimer, I will  share some thoughts on this extraordinary and, for the most part, impenetrable novel. I have my own explanation as to why the narrative is so chaotic and elusive, sending us on a wild chase of its various will-o’the-wisps. The novel is set both at the time of the creation and disintegration of the biggest empire on earth, the Soviet Union. Goldstein’s prose reflects and amplifies these tectonic shifts. The time and space are in a state of constant transformation, and consequently nobody is granted even a moment of respite. The jumps from one place or period to another are abrupt and can even remain unnoticed until later. Moreover, the city playing the central role in the novel is never called by its name, although it is not difficult to guess that it is Azerbaijan’s capital Baku in which the writer used to live until his emigration to Israel in 1990. And here we can confidently draw a parallel with Joyce, for Goldstein does to Baku something similar to what the great Irish writer did to Dublin in Ulysses.
In case of this particular book, it is much easier for me to talk about the characters than about the action. They are a motley and exotic crew. First of all there is the narrator, most probably an alter-ego of Goldstein himself, who describes his youth in Baku and recent life in Tel-Aviv. Then there is Yashar-muallim, a wise old man who is said to have the dowsing powers. Besides that, he copies sacred texts, acts as a spiritual mentor and has taken part in an expedition whose goal was to capture dybbuks, evil spirits of Jewish mythology. Seeking to revive the Sufi doctrine of hurufism, Yashar-muallim tries to recruit one of his students as an assistant and squire. We also get to know the Orthodox priest and polymath Father Paisius who is sent “under the tusks of the Solovetsky SLON”, the latter acronym being identical to the Russian word for “elephant”: hence the pun. SLON stands for  Solovetsky Lager’ Osobogo Naznachenia, i.e.  “Solovki Special Purpose Camp”. Father Paisius manages to survive the hardships of the GULAG and finds solace in writing the history of onomatodoxy, a religious movement that gained currency in the beginning of the 20th century on Mount Athos. Of particular interest to me proved Jalil-the editor, a character based on the Azerbaijani  writer Jalil Huseyngulu oglu Mammadguluzadeh who founded the once famous satirical magazine Molla Nasraddin and stayed in charge of it until its closure in 1931. The passages relating his obsession with early German cinema bring to memory Siegfried Kracauer’s renowned study From Caligari to Hitler. I don’t know if it was possible in the Soviet Baku of the 1930s  to watch Metropolis and Dr. Mabuse in the movie theatres, but there is something fascinating in recognising the masterpieces of expressionist cinema through descriptions of Jalil’s movie-watching sprees. And, most notably, there is the Armenian gladiator Mger-Claudius Mgoyan. In the fifteenth chapter of the novel that can regarded as a set-piece we read an engrossing story about the construction of a modern Colosseum in Baku in the 1920s. Here I am more confident about the time because at some point the funeral of Rudolph Valentino is mentioned.  Mgoyan handpicks the best fighters for the arena, and for three weeks, every day the public watches in awe retiarii, secutores, murmillones and other types of gladiators conjured up from the ancient times clash in combat. There are, of course, other memorable characters, and quite a few of them are real historical personages, such as the Ottoman military leader Enver Pasha and the French philosopher Michel Foucault, but those I have mentioned should be enough to give you at least an idea of what kind of book it is.
The Cypriot city of Famagusta lost to Turkey as a result of the 1974 invasion does not necessarily  invoke  Baku, which the narrator “loses”  after his immigration, but rather the overall sense of loss experienced by millions of people caught between the millstones of major geopolitical  transformations that shaped the 20th century. Both the formation and the dissolution of a great empire inevitably entail for some losing their homeland, language, culture and even identity. However, in such processes, there are also creative forces at work. Cultural symbiosis and cross-pollination that take place when different peoples come into contact quite often give birth to new artistic and literary forms, new ways of looking at the world; staggering achievements in  arts and sciences can come about as a consequence.  Goldstein’s narrative accommodates both destructive and creative aspects inherent in the very notion of the empire, and therefore it is no wonder that some passages might repel and fascinate the reader at the same time.
Now, suppose this beast gets translated some day and you will have a chance to enter Goldstein’s world. When you finish the book, some of you will instantly want to read it a second time. My advice: wait at least for a month, let what little you have grasped settle in, because it would be too much to rush immediately into this maelstrom again.
If I wanted to sound glib, trite and lazy when asked  what reading Remember Famagusta feels like, I would most probably come up with something painfully formulaic like “imagine Pavic writing like Joyce with a dash of classical Persian poetry, Sufi mysticism and automatic writing”. That wouldn’t do the justice to the book, of course. In reality, Goldstein writes like nobody else, and that is why he is one of the greatest writers of the 21st century, still not duly recognised and not even widely-known. But it’s not news to us: remember Melville, remember Gaddis. 
- theuntranslated.wordpress.com/

Andrew Battershill, Pillow,Coach House Books, 2015.


read it at Google Books


andrewbattershill.tumblr.com/


From Boats
Blimpmallow
Chocolate Milk for Miles!


Most of the things Pillow really liked to do were obviously morally wrong. He wasn't an idiot; clearly it was wrong to punch people in the face for money. But there had been an art to it, and it had been thrilling and thoughtful for him. The zoo was also evil, a jail for animals who'd committed no crimes, but he just loved it. The way Pillow figured it, love wasn't about goodness, it wasn't about being right, loving the very best person, having the most ethical fun. Love was about being alone and making some decisions.


Pillow loves animals. Especially giraffes. That’s why he chooses the zoo for the drug drop-offs he does as a low-level enforcer for the mob. Which happens to be run by André Breton and the Surrealists, like Gwynn Apollinaire, Louise Aragon and Georges Bataille.
A gentle soul, Pillow doesn’t love his life of crime. But he isn’t cut out for much else, what with all the punches to the head he took as a professional boxer. And now that he’s accidentally but sort of happily knocked up his neighbour, Emily, he wants to get out and go straight. So when an antique-coin heist goes awry, Pillow sees his chance to make one last big score. But it’s hard to outwit a Surrealist, especially when you can’t always think so clearly. He soon finds himself kneedeep in murder and morphine, kidnapping a pseudo-priest and doing some fancy footwork around a pair of corrupt cops.
With a dark wink of the teeth and a wet fish to the heart, Pillow is literary crime fiction that punches above its weight.


'Wildly effervescent. The dialogue, the pacing, the plot: it sizzles, it sparkles. Pillow is a hilarious, humane, fearsomely original novel by a young novelist – this Andrew Battershill; this wet-behind-the-ears rookie! - who writes with such skill and daring that you'd think this was his tenth book rather than his debut.'– Craig Davidson


A punch-drunk enforcer for a small-time crime syndicate tries to pull off a getaway score when his on-again, off-again girlfriend gets pregnant.
Battershill, co-founder of the literary indie Dragnet Magazine, tries to paint his debut novel with a patina of literary affectation that it really doesn’t need given the quality of its storytelling and the author’s offbeat sense of humor. At its heart, it’s a coy crime novel about a thug named Pete, known to friends and foes alike as Pillow. The former boxer has taken way too many blows to the head, but he still has a gentle soul, levying his affections on animals in the zoo. But Pillow’s condition has forced him to retire in his mid-30s to eke out an existence as muscle for crime boss André Breton. (Those of you with a classical education just pricked up your ears, recognizing that Pillow’s eccentric boss is named and apparently modeled after the founder of French surrealism). “Ah Pillow, adding that touch of kindness to sweeten the scene,” Breton says. “You are a man of the living theatre. An idiot savant of pathos.” Some of the book’s other villains include the morphine addict Antonin Artaud (modeled on the French dramatist), Louise Aragon (after the poet Louis Aragon), and characters based on transgressive writer Georges Bataille and cubism defender Guillaume Apollinaire. When a coin exchange guarded by Pillow goes wrong, Louise is killed and the beleaguered boxer is partnered up with one of Breton’s hired killers to find the coins. But when Pillow’s whimsical girlfriend, Emily, turns up pregnant, Pillow decides to play both sides against the middle in a desperate play to get away clean with both Emily and the coins. It’s a strange mix of poetic license, brusque humor, and simmering violence that may appeal to crime and mystery fans looking for something a little more out there and give a little kick to readers with a philosophical bent.
A darkly humorous novel about a boxer with some fight in him. - Kirkus Reviews


Andrew Battershill is a writer and teacher currently living in Columbus, Ohio. A graduate of the University of Toronto's MA in creative writing program, he was the fiction editor and co-founder of Dragnet Magazine.

Leila S. Chudori, Home, Trans. by John H. McGlynn, Deep Vellum, 2015. // The Lontar Foundation, 2015.
See an excerpt from the English translation


An epic saga of “families and friends entangled in the cruel snare of history” (Time Magazine), Home combines political repression and exile with a spicy mixture of love, family, and food, alternating between Paris and Jakarta in the time between Suharto’s 1965 rise to power and downfall in 1998, further illuminating Indonesia’s tragic twentieth-century history popularized by the Oscar-nominated documentary The Act of Killing.


Home is a remarkable fictional account of the September 30th Movement’s impact on people’s lives. This “movement” led to the murder of a million or more presumed “Communists” and the imprisonment of another tens of thousands of people. At the time, thousands of Indonesians who were abroad had their passports revoked and were exiled. History was manipulated by the Suharto government to cast a favorable light on their involvement in this tragedy. A whole generation of Indonesians were raised in a world of forced silence, where facts were suppressed and left unspoken. Although the tumultuous events of 1965 envelop Home’s background, this is not a novel about ideology. Going back and forth between Jakarta and Paris in 1965 and 1998, Home is about the lives of Indonesians in exile, their families and their friends, including those left behind in Indonesia. It is not only a story of love, lust and betrayal, but also of laughter, adventure and food.


In a recent Tempo article, Goenawan Mohamad described 1965 as ‘a kind of code … for a catastrophic occurrence – and because of this, always simplified.’ He went on to observe that 2012 seemed to be a year of remembering, or imagining, 1965.
One of the most significant manifestations of that remembering was the special September 2012 edition of Tempo that featured interviews with people who had taken part in murdering communists or suspected communists in 1965-1966. In response to this and to the government-appointed Human Rights Commission report on the conduct of the killings, young people in particular have expressed their shock at discovering an aspect of Indonesia’s past of which they had no previous knowledge.
A similar broadening of the discourse on 1965 can be seen in works of fiction reimagining the events of 1965–1966. Such fiction was formerly the domain of authors who had personally lived through the events, such as Umar Kayam and Ahmad Tohari. Now, however, stories on this theme are fictional recollections of an imagined past.
The phenomenon of imagining 1965, alluded to by Goenawan Mohamad, has resulted in a flurry of creative output – fiction, theatre, film – over the last 18 months. Examples include the novels Cerita Cinta Enrico by Ayu Utami (2012), Amba by Laksmi Pamuntjak (2012), Candik Ala 1965 by Tinuk Yampolsky (2011) and Ayu Manda by I Made Darmawan (2010).

Chudori's Pulang

A very important contribution to this literary phenomenon was the publication in December 2012 of Leila Chudori's novel Pulang (Going Home). Greeted with much acclaim by literary critics in Indonesia, this is Chudori's antidote to the 'official history of 1965', which was her diet as a school student growing up under the Suharto regime.
Like many Indonesians too young to remember the events of 1965, but kept in the dark about them, Chudori sought answers about what she calls the 'black hole' of Indonesian history. Because history books did not provide the answers, and because her parents' generation would not speak of the events, she sought to explore and imagine the answers through creative writing – in her case, a novel drawing on years of meticulous research based on real-life characters.
As Chuori describes in her article here, her first encounter with the 'black hole' was her discovery of Restaurant Indonesia in Paris. Founded as a cooperative in 1982, it has always been more than just a restaurant. Its original purpose was to provide employment for Indonesian political refugees, including Umar Said and Sobron Aidit, who were unable to return to Indonesia after the 1965 attempted coup. .
As well as promoting Indonesian culture through exhibitions, dance and performances, it has provided a forum for intense political and philosophical discussions. The key protagonists of Pulang – Dimas Suryo, Nugroho Dewantoro, Tjai Sin Soe and Ristjaf – are loosely based on those unlikely restaurateurs.
While the tumultuous events of 1965 are the backdrop of the story, this is not a novel about ideology or political power. It is about the impact of 1965 and its aftermath on the daily lives of the exiles, their families and friends, including those left behind in Indonesia. Inevitably this includes stories of love, lust and betrayal. It describes the constant low-level intimidation faced by the restaurant owners, regarded by the Indonesian authorities as dangerous on account of their political persuasions. It includes Dimas not being present when his mother dies in Indonesia.
But it also includes laughter, adventure and food – especially food. The completely inexperienced restaurateurs devise mouth-watering menus and prove adept at producing Indonesian dishes guaranteed to win the hearts of the diaspora in Paris and educate the French about Indonesian cuisine.
Notwithstanding several flashbacks to the 1950s, the action of Pulang begins in 1965 and ends in 1998: sandwiched between two cataclysmic events of modern Indonesian history. Dimas Suryo and his colleagues are attending a conference of journalists in Santiago, Chile, at the time of the attempted coup. As suspected communist sympathisers, their passports are revoked and they cannot return home. Moving from Chile to Cuba to China over the ensuing years, they eventually end up in Paris where they open their restaurant. Despite that enforced distance from their homeland, their yearning for and connection with Indonesia is the key thread of the novel.
Despite having a girlfriend back in Indonesia, Dimas marries a French girl during the 1968 revolution in Paris. They give their daughter an Indonesian name – Lintang Utara – that reflects the father's longing to go home. It is not until much later, as a young undergraduate student, that Lintang finally has the opportunity to visit the country of her father's birth, only to arrive in Jakarta on the eve of the chaotic 1998 demonstrations that eventually lead to the downfall of President Suharto.
As she has done in her other writing (see for example the stories in The Longest Kiss, her recently published translated short story anthology), Chudori manages to make Indonesia a constant presence on the pages of this novel without having to make repeated reference to it. It is, of course, an imagined Indonesia for the protagonists - a country symbolised for Dimas by the big glass jars of cloves and saffron in his kitchen. (Chudori has spoken of President Abdurrahman's visit to Paris when he asked what could be done for the exiles. Their poignant response: all they wanted was their green Indonesian passports.) For the next generation, Lintang Utara, Indonesia is 'a blood relationship that I do not know.'
In Chudori's own words, she wanted to explore in this novel the mindsets of Dimas and his colleagues who, although they had lived in Paris for most of their adult lives, 'still felt they were a part of Indonesia, no matter what kind of passports they were issued, and no matter how their government treated them.' Equally, she is exploring the worldview and sentiments of that younger generation of Indonesians who seek a definition of what she terms I-N-D-O-N-E-S-I-A (a deliberately disjointed visual representation of the word, indicating its unfinished status).  - Pam Allen


Leila S. Chudori’s Home takes a look at the history of Indonesia between 1965 and 1998 through the eyes of a family caught up in the tumultuous events of the period.  Dimas Suryo is a journalist with slight leftist leanings, so it’s lucky that he is out of the country in 1965 when a Communist coup fails, thereby avoiding the inevitable and bloody backlash.  Safety comes with some serious strings attached, though – while he is free from the fear of arrest and torture, he can never go home.
Ending up in Paris, he gets married and eventually starts a restaurant, Tanah Air, with three of his fellow expats.  Moving forward, the story shifts focus onto Dimas’ daughter, Lintang Utara, a student of journalism at the Sorbonne.  Urged by her supervisor to examine her roots, she decides to make her final project a video on the victims of September 1965, a decision which leads her to visit Indonesia for the first time.  Little does she know that the time chosen for her visit, May 1998, will be every bit as historical (and dangerous) as the days when her father left…
Where Eka Kurniawan’sBeauty is a Wound looked at some of the events mentioned above in a localised (and allegorical) way, Home provides the clueless foreigner with an explanation of what life in Indonesia at the time was really like.  The novel is bookended by two historical events: the first is Suharto’s use of a failed coup to annihilate his enemies, leading to a mass murder of genocidal proportions; the second is his eventual downfall three decades later.  In introducing a family caught up in these events, Chudori is able to introduce the reader (many of whom, even in Indonesia, have little idea of the ‘real’ version of events) to what actually happened.
In a nice parallel, we first meet Dimas in Paris in 1968.  It’s here he meets his future wife, Vivienne, and while he adores the headstrong Frenchwoman, he can’t help feeling that what she and her friends are protesting against hardly merits the effort:
“To myself, I thought that when it came to the state of a nation, she had no idea what ‘fucked up’ meant.”p.8 (Deep Vellum, 2015)
He knows (and Lintang will see thirty years later) that riots in a civilised country can’t be compared to what has gone on in Indonesia.  Gradually, through flashbacks and Lintang’s experiences, we learn of the chaos in Jakarta, and the bloody rivers full of bodies elsewhere in the country.
Despite the dangers Indonesia holds, and the attractions of the French capital, Dimas maintains his desire to return home.  Never having truly arrived in Paris, he dreams of one day going back, even if only to be buried in his mother country, and the turmeric and cloves in the jars he keeps, the restaurant, the kretek cigarettes he smokes (whose scent makes them his own personal Madeleines…) all serve to remind him that he’s a man in a foreign land.  Years later, when Lintang arrives in her father’s home country, she experiences the same feeling, a nostalgia for a place she’s never known, and begins to wonder just how Indonesian she actually is.
Luckily, on arriving in Jakarta, Lintang receives the support of her extended family, benefiting from the close-knit Indonesian family culture.  It’s this, perhaps, that Dimas misses most of all during his lengthy exile in France, unable to see his brother and the rest of his family.  However, this benefit can quickly turn to a drawback if your blood ties are not what the ruling regime would consider suitable.  Lintang is soon to discover that many people back in Jakarta are forced to conceal their identity lest their past come back to haunt their present life (and job prospects…).
These effects of communist activity are not restricted to the immediate family as even distant relatives can be affected by the taint:
“Every day, at least ten to fifteen people came to have passport-sized photographs taken to attach to government-issued letters of certification that they were not a communist, had never participated in any activity sponsored by the Indonesian Communist Party, and had not been involved in the so-called attempt to overthrow the Indonesian government now known as Gestapu, the September 30 Movement.” (Prologue, p.v)
This scene takes place a few years after the events of 1965, but we later see that it still holds true in the nineties,.  Many educated people are unable to get decent jobs because of links to those accused of being communists decades earlier.
As well as examining family ties, the writer addresses what she sees as a cover up of Indonesian history, with generations educated to believe the Communists (many of whom were brutally slaughtered after the failed coup of 1965) were somehow responsible for all the country’s failings.  The government has clear guidelines on how those who escaped are to be treated by loyal citizens abroad, leaving Lintang amazed by her treatment on a visit to the Paris embassy:
“Just imagine, Maman, for people like me who weren’t even born at the time of the September 30 movement and live far distant from Indonesia, they still require a prescription for what to think.” (p.219)
If this is true in Paris, it’s even more so back in Indonesia.  Through a white-washing of history, aided by stunning museums and compulsory school lessons, the regime attempts to make everyone believe its side of the story.  Slowly, though, the cracks appear, and history shows that when they do, things can change very quickly.
While Home contains some good writing, with lots of information to impart, it can get a little prosaic at times.  It’s never less than fascinating, though, an absorbing tale pulling the reader deeper into the world of Dimas, family and friends.  The novel is also well-structured, with the mix of styles and narrators (some first-person, others third-person) helping disguise the fact that it’s essentially a story of two parts.  The first half mainly takes place in Paris, setting us up for the trip to Jakarata; by the middle of the book, we believe (as Lintang does) that we’re ready to return to Jakarta.  The truth is that we’re not…
Home would be a wonderful introduction to Indonesian literature for readers with an interest in political, historical novels.  It is long, but it’s also very accessible, and the background information it contains on the political events which rocked Indonesia in the twentieth century provide valuable background information for better understanding other books (such as Beauty is a Wound) from the country.  Chudori’s work marks a fitting end to my Indonesian Literature Week, but that’s not the end of this story.  Having found (and received) a few more titles recently, I may well be tempted to revisit the country in the not-too-distant future – do join me then. - tonysreadinglist.wordpress.com/2015/10/18/home-by-leila-s-chudori-review/


Leila s. Chudori : Khatulistiwa Award winner’s commitment to the writing process

Anna Kovatcheva, The White Swallow, Gold Line Press, 2015.
www.kovatcheva.com/




The White Swallow has so many things going for it — starkly memorable imagery, strangeness that feels natural to the story, the feeling that the story itself grew up from the earth like a tree, and an ending that defies moralization. It seems instead to reflect the same unpredictable and mysterious quality of the world that also lets birds go into girls and healing to occur and, for inside all that, love to blossom.— Aimee Bender, judge of the 2014 Fiction Chapbook Competition

Anna Kovatcheva is a brilliant young talent. Her prose is effervescent, toughly lyric, sensuous and sharp-eyed. The White Swallow is so fluently written, one can virtually feel the swallow's wings beating. And the story of the intense friendship of young girls, realized virtually in front of their elders' (unseeing) eyes, is a small miracle, tragically curtailed. But the narrator survives—in language that is a flight of its own.— Joyce Carol Oates


Excerpt:

For strong bones, the old wives recommend blood of a blackbird in a pot of fresh yogurt. She heard ribs grind and straighten, heard them knit together. The cat’s ruptured stomach stitched itself whole, skin and fur slid back into place. The lungs reinflated.




Journal Publications
"The Country is Its Birds" — The Kenyon Review Online, 2015. (Fiction)
"Sudba 1" — The Iowa Review, 2015. (Fiction)Anthologized: "Proprioception,"Menacing Hedge: A Limited-Edition Poetry Anthology for AWP 2014. Ed. Kelly Boyker Guillemette. 2014. (Poetry)
"Proprioception,""Self Portrait as Farm Animal, HB 954," and "Positions" — Menacing Hedge, 2014. (Poetry)
"Post-Modern Escapism: The Zombie Movie as New-Wave Western" — Movable Type, 2012. (Essay)
"September" — The Kenyon Review, 2012. Short Fiction Contest Runner-Up, 2011. (Fiction)
"Crocodiles in Korea" — Used Furniture Review, 2011. (Fiction)
"Save Poor Bob, If You Please" — Vagabond, 2009. (Fiction)
Why #SaveSweetBriar? — March 2015
The KR Conversations: Micro-Inverview — The Kenyon Review Online, 2012. (Interview)



Anna Kovatcheva was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, and holds an MFA in fiction writing from New York University. Her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, and Kenyon Review Online. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she works as a graphic designer by day and writes of Bulgaria by night.

TrenchArt Monographs: hurry up please its time ed by Teresa Carmody and Vanessa Place,Les Figues Press, 2015.




From 2005–2013, the TrenchArt book series was the cornerstone of Les Figues Press. The series took its name from “trench art”—artistic creations produced by soldiers made in wartime using whatever material was at hand, from shell casings to scrap metal to bone. It is art born of conflict and forced community: here we are, together in the trenches.
Each year, the Press published four TrenchArt titles. Accompanying and preceding the release of each annual set was one hand-bound collection of aesthetic essays distributed exclusively to Les Figues members. TrenchArt Monographs: hurry up please its time collects these essays and brings them, for the first time, to a wider readership.
The books in the TrenchArt series are experiments in language, and the aesthetic essays in this anthology investigate the why of those experiments. The essays challenge, too, what an essay looks like, what an essay can do. Manifestos, lists, performative pieces, visual art, critical essays, marginalia, and the entirely unclassifiable—these pieces pull, prod, and play with the concept of “language” from all directions, misdirections, and sometimes no direction at all. This is critique pregnant with poetry, with image, with mutilated lips, with the scent of camphor in hot celluloid.
The text that emerges from TrenchArt Monographs: hurry up please its time is intuitive and revelatory. “Les Figues,” as Vanessa Place writes in her editor’s preface, “was very much born from the desire for cross-talk as conversation,” between writers and artists, between texts. As the why of writing is offered up, it is immediately given up in favor of other possibilities for reading, writing, and listening. And, if you listen closely, you’ll hear the swelling cross-talk, looping in on itself, transmuting, proliferating.


Contributors:
Harold Abramowitz, Danielle Adair, Stan Apps, Nuala Archer, Dodie Bellamy, Sissy Boyd, Melissa Buzzeo, Amina Cain, Jennifer Calkins, Teresa Carmody, Allison Carter, Molly Corey, Vincent Dachy, Lisa Darms, Ken Ehrlich, Alex Forman, Lily Hoang, Jen Hofer, Paul Hoover, Alta Ifland, Klaus Killisch, Alice Könitz, Myriam Moscona, Doug Nufer, Redell Olsen, Pam Ore, Renée Petropoulos, Vanessa Place, Michael du Plessis, Frances Richard, Sophie Robinson, Kim Rosenfield, Mark Rutkoski, Susan Simpson, Stephanie Taylor, Axel Thormählen, Mathew Timmons, Chris Tysh, Julie Thi Underhill, Divya Victor, Matias Viegener, Christine Wertheim

The Best Small Fictions 2015,ed by Robert Olen Butler and Tara L. Masih, Queen's Ferry Press, 2015.




It takes many small things to make something big. Fifty-five acclaimed and emerging writers—including Emma Bolden, Ron Carlson, Kelly Cherry, Stuart Dybek, Blake Kimzey, Roland Leach, Bobbie Ann Mason, Diane Williams, and Hiromi Kawakami—have made the debut of The Best Small Fictions 2015 something significant, something worthwhile, and something necessary. Featuring spotlights on Pleiades journal and Michael Martone, this international volume—with Pulitzer Prize–winning author Robert Olen Butler serving as guest editor and award-winning editor Tara L. Masih as series editor—is a celebration of the diversity and quality captured in fiction forms fewer than 1,000 words.

---

S. Kay, Reliant, tNY.Press, 2015.


Selfies, sexbots, and drones collide in these interwoven nanofictions about a society before, during, and after its collapse. With dazzling humor and insight, debut author S. Kay reveals a future that looks disconcertingly like the present. Beautifully illustrated by Thoka Maer, Reliant is a bold examination of society’s unrequited love for technology.

Rich Ives, Sharpen, tNY.Press, 2014.


It’s a catalog that you can’t order anything from. A manual with no instructions. In Sharpen, Rich Ives takes the reader through a series of meditations inspired by tools, bodies, and stranger things. A mix of the surreal and the mundane, these short fictions deal with father-daughter relationships, communication, and intellect, sometimes discarding conventional grammar in favor of a language of emotion.
We at tNY are dedicated to experimentalism, but we will not forget our past; we straddle the fence between new and traditional. In this vein, Sharpen is a pastoral work of fiction like you’ve never seen before.
Each story is illustrated by Jack Callil. Diagrams and book design by Nils Davey.
Rest easy, Sharpen is printed on paper from 100% renewable forests or 100% recycled material, with vegetable based ink, and sent to your doorstep from a solar powered distribution center.




Sharpen is a work in experimental fiction. It is a collection of very short stories and illustrations, organized into a manual for absolutely nothing. Each chapter begins with an diagram of a tool like a vise or the inner ear, followed by a written meditation on varies ideas, and ends with an illustration – a visual representation of the written meditation.
Ives writing oscillates between being very difficult to decipher and beautiful. The reader may walk away from Sharpen scratching their head wondering what on earth they read. It is hard to understand what Ives was trying to get across. Unless the reader is willing to spend a lot of time teasing apart each sentence it is hard to pick out themes. This does not mean that this collection is without beauty or value, but while the beauty may be evident the value is probably a little more elusive. The diagrams are interesting and the illustrations are brainteasers, but be prepared for confusion.
- Nicole McGillagreen




Rich Ives lives on Camano Island in Puget Sound with a Singapore Shrimp, an open-tuned Dobro and a 100-year-old Hopf fiddle. He may have first been sighted by a gossipy albino fox near a northeastern South Dakota cabbage patch of questionable lineage with his thirteen wives, each of whom inexplicably disappeared into the neighboring and not yet Monsanto-ghosted cornfield. As a result, his relatives have mostly given up on him, and yet he remains relative. Rich Ives may actually be a euphemism for a pervasive bearded pollen preferred for cocoon sealing by the Gypsy Moth when overwintering beyond its normal habitat. Rich Ives has no normal habitat, but still he seems to overwinter in a log home despite reports of a great spewing infestation of threads of words and music. The cocoon appears to have as many as three doors through which he enters and exits frequently with these gentle-winged sermons. Why must he explain himself so often when he could be comfortably making himself up?  
We just published your book, Sharpen! If you had to explain what your book is to an alien who has never read a book before, how would you do it? 
When you look at a painting, you “read” it. If you look longer, you get more from it. Now imagine a sculpture of the same scene. Walk around it. Climb above it on a ladder. Climb inside. Lay down. Now imagine that scene inside a tree. When the tree falls open, the painting and the sculpture will both be inside. By now you may have noticed some people talking about what has happened to them. They may not look like people. You may do this more than once with the same book, but there are many books waiting.
If an alien species could communicate without language, what would their stories be like? 
Trade the more obvious candy for a caress. Move the caress inside. Now try to imagine this is not familiar. Because it’s not. Perhaps you forgot that.
Sharpen was illustrated by Jack Callil. What did you think of his illustration style and the way it responded to your writing? 
I wouldn’t say that Jack “illustrated” the book. He participated in it. His responses to the work reveal an understanding of implications, ways of thinking and reacting, activated by what’s implied by the text, not just what is stated. My writing is as much about what is suggested as what is stated and Jack is very attuned to those suggestions, which helps to expand visually the experience of the writing. This is not the same thing as an illustration. It’s much more than that.
What tools do you use the most in your everyday life? 
I’m wedded to my laptop. Sometimes I think of it as a sophisticated shovel. I’ve always used a notebook and parts of my writing process are very much like collage or assemblage, where important parts of the art are dug up, and the relationships “between” the elements are then discovered by sequencing and bridging, by handling innuendos and nuances as well as statements. Perhaps it is also a camera because sometimes it feels very much like a stop-action animation, something not quite the same as reality, but hyper real, where reality is being examined as it is experienced in ways we seldom do in our ordinary lives. I often have several “photographs” open as I move things around and discover relationships and implications, build them and add more bridges, though the bridges are often tentative and delicate at first.
For those citizens of theNewerYork unfamiliar with your life and work, what do you consider the salient details? 
Born and raised in a surreal all-American version of Aberdeen, South Dakota. Educated at Eastern Washington University, the University of Montana, and anywhere I could find water hesitating to move on. Currently, I teach writing at Everett Community College and live about a hundred yards from the many-islanded Canadian-American waters of Puget Sound on Camano Island, where many of my longer-term neighbors have ancestors who were bootleggers during prohibition.
What were your favorite shenanigans that you got up to in college? 
That would be mostly the expected experimental 70s adventures of a blues-rock band I played keyboards for, traveling to gigs in Eastern Washington, Western Montana, Northern Idaho, Eastern Oregon and Canada. I also traveled around Northern Idaho then with writers James McAuley, Anita Endrezze and Nance Van Winckel, for the Poets in the Schools Program. A young student in one of those schools wore a “human finger bone” around his neck and claimed to be the keeper of the “witch’s grave” in a nearby cemetery, which we located by the black rose someone had placed upon the tombstone.
Are you building something? 
Unlike many builders, I don’t plan the house before I begin making the parts and putting them together. I live in the house’s invisible museum long before anyone else knows it’s there, as if the house were to be constructed from what was left behind after it was thought to be gone. I want readers to discover the museum’s nature slowly, thoughtfully, just as I do, filling in their own pauses where mine were.
You occasionally bend or break grammatical rules. How do you decide when to do this, and what are the risks and rewards of playing with the laws of the English language? 
First there is permission. My language should have as much, if not more of it, as life does. Often questioning the rules in one leads to discoveries in the other. I do and say many things that are altered in their meanings by the contexts life puts me in, which I have only partially chosen. With writing, however, you can take it back and re-experience it another way, which I do often to find out what works best, which life is more selective about. Writing is life training that saves wear and tear on your body and lets you go places your body can’t. The rules are constantly changing because communication is really the only rule.
How has your approach to writing changed over the years? 
I discovered Straw for the Fire, constructed by David Wagoner from the notebooks of Theodore Roethke, while in graduate school and began to work by assembling fragments written at different times and often in different moods, which gave me structural and assemblage possibilities that encouraged first great attention to small parts and then a focus on transitions and contrasts. This has continued to expand over the years. I had always thought I would write poetry and short works only, but more recently a novel that took more than ten years to write has grown through this process to a 3-book meditation and character study, tentatively titled A Cloud Where the Ceiling Had Been.
Father-daughter relationships play a major role in Sharpen. Is this a topic that is often on your mind? 
I’m sure that not having children is part of what makes me want to know what that relationship is like, but I come from a family very much shaped by my “older” sister, born five years before I was, who lived only two hours. I didn’t understand these effects until I was old enough to be able to have a sense of what her life might have been like had she lived longer. I’ve written about this more directly in a creative nonfiction memoir, Nursery Crimes (not yet published in book form but parts are in both online and print journals).
Would you show us pictures of your work spaces? 
This might be a little too intimate for many of your readers. My writing work space is my bed, which I usually inhabit naked, head supported by a barrage of large pillows, my laptop on my bent knees. I would also consider “the stage” my work space as I teach writing for a living and perform, as well, in and for small groups with many musical instruments, lately primarily dobro with vocals (mostly country and folk music) and fiddle (celtic, jazz and old-time) interrupted by forays into other instruments  including cittern, lap steel guitar, octave mandolin, and tin whistle. I also sometimes use my library-converted-to-studio to do art work with encaustic paints, collage and assemblage.
What is the most beautiful thing you have ever seen? 
The expression of a woman I have managed to pleasantly surprise. Each nuance is different, whether the attached body is familiar or not. I nearly said “the lives of insects,” but I suspect that is a passing but delightful phase I expect to write about quite a bit.
Have you ever experienced inexplicable, possibly supernatural phenomena? 
I experience a great deal of my life and mind this way, but I suspect it’s only inexplicable to me, for which I am grateful.
What are you building? 
My “self,” which I have discovered only recently is not really mine, and the missing parts (currently the floor) of a log home I have been living in with an inadequate sense of completion.
How do you know when something is finished? 
I don’t. I merely reach a point where I know I have done all I can do with it, and it’s time to take on a different persona, who sometimes wants to rediscover the one I just left. 
Can you ever really be finished? 
Yes, I can, but I doubt it will be my decision when it happens. What is your proudest accomplishment? 
It’s nearly always my most recent work, which I hope will continue to be the case. I’m also quite proud of a healthy beard, which has not left my face since it first appeared there.
If Sharpen came with a warning label, what would be on it? 
Sharpen is the warning label. It comes with many defiant and grieving behaviors. Perhaps it’s too late. 

Thomas Demand & Ben Lerner, Blossom,  Mack Books, 2015.
                                                 
The texts and images presented here are part of Blossom, a collaboration between the artist Thomas Demand and writer Ben Lerner. The images relate to a detail from a photograph of Katherine Russell, widow of Tamerlan Anzorovich Tsarnaev leaving her home in Boston, that first appeared in the New York Times on 4 May 2013.




Thomas Demand’s work lures the viewer into a reality that is not what it appears to be. Carefully contrived from paper, these imaginary worlds are sculpted, photographed and destroyed. The traces which remain are events in which the protagonist is removed, scenes that are both familiar and out of reach. Demand’s work has been shown extensively across the world and is included in most of the significant private and institutional collections. Recent books include The Dallies (MACK, 2012) and Model Studies (Ivory Press, 2011).




Ben Lerner is the author of three books of poetry: The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw and Mean Free Path, all published by Copper Canyon Press. He is the author of two novels, Leaving the Atocha Station, published by Coffee House Press, and 10:04, out this year from Faber / FSG. His recent writing on art and literature can be found in Art in America, Frieze, Harper’s, and The London Review of Books. He has been a finalist for the National Book Award and has received Fulbright, Howard, and Guggenheim Fellowships, among other honors.


Sample Trees
Traditionally, you drink plum wine
Deepening the evening, a length of cloud
Then confuse a falling blossom with
A butterfly / In the photograph
Of the tradition, flowers in small corymbs
Papery against electric light
Blossoming en masse, in time lapse
You refer to a place where water flows
Over a vertical drop in culture / Poems
Fail to mention fission or decay
In the traditional ways, focusing instead
Then renouncing focus, a shimmering effect
In the middle distance, there is a monk
Likening this world to an echo, smoke
Slowly rising from some pyre, another year
Gone, frostwork on the grass/glass
The nu suffix expresses completeness
The mu suffix indicates intention, I
Function to measure impermanence
“Like a passing dream on a night in spring”
The petals shed their details














http://www.mackbooks.co.uk/books/1076-Blossom.html



I think what’s interesting about Thomas [Demand]’s photography is the way that it makes you feel presence and distance simultaneously. So, he does this weird thing—you probably know—where he works with a photograph, like he sees a photograph, and he reconstructs the scene or part of the scene in paper sculpture, and then he photographs that, and then he destroys the sculpture. So it’s at this very strange remove from reality; it’s a photograph of a sculpture of a photograph of a thing… You get this weird undecideable mix of feelings about its immediacy and its mediacy, and that’s how I tend to feel about photographs. - Ben Lerner


For centuries, the cherry blossom has been a lush symbol of the cyclical arrival of spring, and more generally, a representation of the ephemeral passing of time, where birth and death follow each other in the span of a few weeks. As seen and described by countless poets, authors, and visual artists across the ages, a grove of cherry (or plum) trees in blossom (particularly in Japan) has become the epitome of freshness and natural beauty, full of innocence and often the setting of budding romance. Wandering underneath the heavy boughs of flowers is an experience steeped in exciting immediacy, seemingly gone again in an instant and left to linger on in fading memory.
That German photographer Thomas Demand should explore the shifting moods and moments of cherry blossoms has an unexpected ring of daring genius to it. An expert in constructed mimicry, his cherry blossoms made of paper are plausibly real, each petal and branch painstaking crafted to replicate the actual. And yet, of course, his tree is undeniably fake, in a sense the conceptual antithesis of the coveted qualities of natural blossoms – his flowers and limbs are manmade, unnatural, and permanent, emphatic rule breakers each and every one.
While not alluded to overtly in this photobook, Demand’s Blossom project actually got its start as the backdrop of another constructed image. In his work Backyard, he recreated the home of Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev as it was shown in countless news photos. While that image is dominated by a forgettable concrete stairway leading up to the house, a massive cherry tree in full bloom stands behind a wooden backyard fence in the background, a breath of life amid an otherwise dingy scene. So for those that know the backstory, the blossom studies shown here take on another layer of meaning, as the downstream relative of terror and destruction.
While Demand’s tree is a single massive paper construction, the photographer has deftly used changes in camera angle, distance, and lighting to create the striking appearance of diversity. He moves in and out, controlling the scale, taking in broad dense thickets of flowers from afar, and then closing in on clumps of individual blossoms (smartly blurred or placed outside the plane of focus), where each petal seems to have been shifted by an invisible (and nonexistent) wind. As the images are sequenced, Demand has created the feeling of the passing of an entire day, from the lifting blue light of dawn to the white brightness of midday, and from the softer afternoon glow of yellow to the arrival of purple twilight and the dark night dotted by sprays of moonlight. Each moment has its own atmosphere and temperament, as though the changing light could bring us from hearty optimism to deeper melancholy and back again.
The clever construction of the photobook itself supports this immersive experience. Up close images are repeatedly spread across both sides of a French fold, with additional images hiding (and not quite fully visible) inside – the effect is something akin to playful discovery, as if we were dancing in and out of the branches, brushing across the blossoms from all directions in bustling, disorienting twists and turns.
Ben Lerner’s dissolvingly expansive poem is a perfect inclusion, and a reminder that a text that keeps the viewer integrated into the imagery is nearly always more powerful than one that pulls us out to stand at a (disapproving) critical or analytical distance. His words beg to be read aloud, the cadence of his textual rhythms seeming to match a meandering path through the blossoms. The poem meditates on the interplay of real and unreal (especially in the case of photography), the nature of imitation, the time warp of memory, and the shifting depth of distance, following the patterns and cycles of Lerner’s thoughts as they react to and riff on Demand’s visual experience. References and reminiscences seem to evolve naturally, one from another, his poetry forcing us to reconsider our own iterative process of viewing. Most importantly, his words feel fully integrated with Demand’s images (on the same footing); not an afterthought or a bolt-on, but an equal contributor to an overall artistic sentiment (tellingly, both names appear on the spine of the book, Lerner’s first).
In the end, this is a successfully contemplative photobook – it’s a book to mull over and chew on, to allow to steep awhile, and to quietly ruminate over. Demand takes a well worn floral cliché and inverts it, forcing us to look more closely at why we have treasured it for so long, and to think harder about what it means when we dissect and reassemble it. His paper blossoms are cerebrally poetic, lovely in their unabashed mimicry and sharply incisive in their underlying worldview. - collectordaily.com/thomas-demand-blossom/

Wendy Walker, The Secret Service, Sun & Moon Press, 1992.


wendywalker.com/




grand baroque novel, intrigue a la Raymond Roussel


Read an excerpt (pdf)




The Secret Service came into being one night in 1976 while I was playing a game. I would take a list of words encountered in my reading, and which I had looked up in the OED, and write a story using them.  On this particular occasion, the story seemed to promise to go on, though for how long I certainly had no inkling.  My experience of writing it was certainly a long act of following out the premises laid down in the opening, and it led me into such fascinating areas as the history of porcelain, the botany of roses, and scenic design in the nineteenth century theater. 
I have since learned that this game is practiced, under the name logorallye, by the OuLiPo, as a kind of warm-up exercise at its summer workshops.


The Secret Service is a novel of rare range and power. Its overarching plot framework provides a great architecture for Walker’s beautifully made language. Many genres and styles—naturalism, allegory, surreal catalogs, philosophical and metaphysical fables, dreams—are woven into an epic story of intrigue and political maneuvering.
In a Europe that resembles…that of the nineteenth century, the English Secret Service has gotten wind of a plot against the young, newly married king and queen. The details of this plot must be uncovered. The suspected architects of it—an Italian baron, a French cardinal, a German nobleman—are men of finely honed connoisseurships. Each is obsessed with a particular pursuit—one with roses and their infinite variety; another with fine glass and porcelain; another with classical sculpture. The Secret Service has discovered a method of physical transformation that enables their agents to masquerade as objects; in this case, as the precious objects of the foreigners’ obsessions. (Walker’s explication of the fabular physics of this transformation is one of the wonders of the book.)
The events that this transformation set in motion blossom into the most amazing ramifications, creating a fiction second to none for richness of invention, vision, and chimerical psychology. Here is a novel that does not recapitulate banality; Walker honors possibility, and the great range that language, dream, emotion, and intellect together can produce. The Secret Service is a new voice’s finest creation.


This is a curiously fanciful spy novel, apparently set in the 18th century, the time period in which the museum as an institution originated. The central device is that members of a secret service are able to transmute themselves into physical objects – elegant pieces of porcelain, fine glass, and sculpture. These pieces are given as gifts to foreign dignitaries and are able to observe and communicate back. The writing is exquisite, especially how it gives one the sense of actually being an object.—David Wilson


…to become an object may… be a positive aspiration. Beyond ownership, there is the lure of a more complete and intimate possession of an object. This is possession in the same sense that an alien spirit enters a human being, only reversed: a human spirit entering an alien entity. Wendy Walker gives us a rare example of this in her novel The Secret Service. The secret service in question engages in espionage for the king of England in an imaginary version of early-nineteenth-century Europe. The service’s agents have at their disposal an extraordinary scientific discovery that allows them to transform human beings into objects. In describing this experience, Walker does not simply superimpose a human point of view onto an object…Rather, in her novel, the humans take on the perceptual modes of the objects that embody them.—Peter Schwenger


Walker digresses divinely. We view the world as a goblet, as a rose, as a statue, as a dreamer, as a madman; we speculate on the nature of reality, and what Form and Substance mean to one another; we wander in jungles and dangle off glaciers, sit exiled in towers and drift through Paris; and all these seemingly-fractured episodes gradually intertwine and become an unshakable lattice of inextricably linked tales. The action of the plot whirls to a frenzy and then spins slowly to a poised halt; Walker stops before answering all our questions, but she has answered them obliquely, answers about as good as we usually get in life, and we cannot feel cheated.—Elizabeth Willey


We're living in a time of fantastic dreams with human consequences, a time of fatalistic escapism. It's something in the air, like an approaching storm. The scent of acid-tongued rain. Not the familiar flat zaniness of parody or plagiarism. Something less controllable, more mistrustful of its own nostalgia, more awkward in its flippancy: expensive material which insists on rumpling with damp.
Maybe it's an adaptation to the multinationals' marketing of safely multinationalized myths. Pop frivolity no longer protects us. Instead, it seems to be buckling under forces both external and internal, the elaborately arranged fissures lushly decorated. The moment finds expression in Delia Sherman's novels. It also finds expression in Hong Kong films such as Peking Opera Blues and Swordsman II, although the buckling forces differ. Some years ago, Donald G. Keller did a splendid taxonomic job on its expression in American genre publishing, listing influences and concerns of what he called "fantasy of manners". Since then, he and others have begun using the art-historical term "mannerism" instead. Mannerism most commonly identifies the post-Renaissance pre-Baroque styles of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the period encompassing Tintoretto and El Greco, John Donne and John Webster. "Mannerism means experimental response, tentative commitment, learned but personal research, overcleverness in handling conventional forms and elements." (All Mannerism-related quotes are taken from an 1955 Anchor paperback, Four Stages of Renaissance Style, by Wylie Sypher. If only for the pleasure of citing his name.) The "mannerist" label seems out of place when applied to innocuously parodic or derivative work. But applied sparingly and with reference to its origins in art history, I find the label useful. More precisely than "fantasy of manners," it points to what most interests me in a cultural moment which crosses media, genre, and language. For example, in The Secret Service, by Wendy Walker. Published by the perfectly wonderful Sun & Moon Press, specialists in experimental poetry, the novel hasn't been marketed as contemporary fantasy. Its writer shows no signs of having been influenced by contemporary fantasy. Still, it's as clearly a mannerist narrative (and as murkily sui generis) as Swordspoint, Moonwise, Winterlong, or Through a Brazen Mirror. It begins: I am a mousseline goblet, upside-down, set aside to dry, the banquet done. Some daggle-tail scrub-girl has cleansed me. I am also the lacy midinette, binding the bouquet for the courtly gentleman come to purchase camellias before the party, at my aunt's flower shop; I count the change, he glances at my petticoat, ready to turn me upside-down and ring me like a bell. Both complex assertions are literally, manneristically, true. Polly, narrator of the moment, is shopgirl by day and mousseline goblet by night. She is a member of the Secret Service, and the "Service" is both a government agency and a table setting. Literalizing still further, the closely observed-and-observing gentleman will in fact soon ring Polly-the-goblet like a bell.
An explanation can quickly be cobbled together from jacket-copy or contents. In an imaginary England half-Regency, half-Edwardian, a means of transforming oneself into any non-conscious object has been discovered. This would be an incalculably harmful weapon if it fell into the wrong hands, but, by definition, the English have the right hands. The plot which necessitates the weapon's deployment is too obvious to even make for good slapstick: a shell game of infant girls which will supposedly create a scandal capable of destroying the British royal family. Only the Service stands between the kingdom and certain doom, etc. The novel's characters are easy to cast -- or would be, if Powell-Pressburger's stock company was still available. Our heroes are a stouthearted mustachioed Colonel (disguised as a bronze Thisbe), and a clever but overly impetuous young man (disguised as a rose). There's a spunky young heroine à la Wendy Hiller, and a sensible matronly heroine à la Angela Lansbury. The Continental villains (one French, one Italian, one German) reek of absinthe and garlic, cloak themselves in Catholicism and connoiseurship, arrange incestuous marriages and grind children's bones. And new familiar figures keep drifting in: a beautiful princess locked in a tower, a beautiful boy named Ganymede.... So a romp is promised. ("The whole effect is one of melodrama and levity -- or demented ingenuity." -- Sypher on the Chigi Palace.) But in the best mannerist tradition, this proves misleading. The romp leads us into traps so painful as to seem almost lifelike. The first sticking point is the very pleasure of the prose. Not that its vocabulary wraps itself as rapturously in exotic translucency as Greer Gilman's, for example. But somehow, even while describing action, it seems to drift away from narrative, fascinated by the very processes of perception and description. The gaze simultaneously skims the dark ornamentation of the surface and loses itself in deep water. Of course, one might expect a novel in which characters are so often mineral or vegetable to seem a bit static. And it's likely that next, the reader will be struck by the stubborn refusal of characters to continue content in their action-driven roles. ("Often in mannerist portraits the cliché becomes a mask. ...the iconography does not correspond to the psychology." -- Sypher.) The characters' truest instincts are for withdrawal; their basest desire is control; their noblest desire is to not feel, to (at most) observe. Sometimes this passivity is protested. The rose-knight, Rutherford, chafes in his thorns: For the first time he anticipated the fact of his imminent blossoming with a positive physical awareness. Inevitably, following the course of his own growth, he must let down his guard, relax, become open, and how could he allow this? Was it really so natural to allow every passing insect to probe one's most defenseless portions? He would be vulnerable to every curious creature, and how could an agent function with such a liability? But Rutherford's grotesque, sometimes fatal, attempts to take action end best by sitting down and listening to a story.
The frequent intrusion of new stories -- not subplots so much as alternative plots -- provides another clue to the novel's mannerist intentions. The Official Plotline vanishes beneath the attention of its attendants. The most extreme interruption is a 120-page chapter detailing the hermetic Alice-like adventures of a comatose character. Fascinating in its own right, it (like the similarly interpolated "heroic fantasy" of Lucius Shepard's Green Eyes) is likely to irritate many readers. What's the point? The point is to intrude, to distract, to delay. ("The logic of the structure does not coincide with the structural elements." -- Sypher on Michaelangelo's Medici Chapel.) The sub-Dumas intrigue dissolves, swamped by the deeper concerns of the book, until it can be plucked away so easily that its resolution hardly registers. The narrative structure resembles the aimlessly intent inward drift of the characters. Both model the book's true concerns in their process, if not always in their content. In The Secret Service, the aim of possession is to take the place of the thing possessed, and self-possession is therefore a hall of mirrors. ("This device for self-contemplation is dramatically immediate, but preposterously contrived, like some of the self-regarding poems of Donne." -- Sypher on Parmigianino's "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.") Heroes, villains, and victims all seek transformation into the simple and inanimate, and, reluctantly, with toll paid, seek to return again. The price is their humanity, as the extravagantly artificial characters grow colder and more damaged. The book is a series of variations on the old dream of irresponsibility, of striking out for the interior: an interior simultaneously frontier and self and womb. Then in the growing lassitude of her temptation, a thought returned to her, of a box she had seen... in which a marble hand served as a cot to a sleeping child.... She drove on through the ooze, the image of the baby floating before her, growing in her mind until it drowned out the dreadful bogs. She envied its clean, supple nakedness, glowing with warmth and sleep; how entirely secure it was, ensconsed unconscious in the protective hand. Irresponsibility finds its most extreme expression in lifelessness, and so the lifeless are envied, and even emulated. Responsibility cannot be evaded indefinitely, however. While the observer may be jealous of the marbleized hand's gentle warmth, the meat cooks within.
This is the other source of the heat, that it cannot disperse itself through my skin and is thus ever increasing inside it.... You would not guess to look at my hand, or to touch it, that it was boiling so inside. Even as I writhed Mme. Lenore held my hand, but could feel nothing of what was causing me such agony.
Over character or plot, the book concerns itself with the tension between soul and matter (as expressed in the contrast between understanding and observation), and the unsatisfiable desire to retreat into -- just one? No, it's perfectly clear that both pure soul and pure matter mean death. No, to somehow retreat into both, but safely, cleanly. ("The vacillation between flesh and spirit is the true metaphysical tension; and there is no resolution beyond a dramatic accomodation." -- Sypher.)
Obviously, the literary conventions of stiffly-upper-lipped British and unflappable aristocracy are well suited to Walker's theme; they are not simply parroted or simply satirized. At its best, the arch Eurocentric nostalgia typical of mannerist narrative is as misleading as the pretense of science in the best science fiction. The mannerists' true force shows itself in the cracked surface, in the need to escape their own affectations. ("The insolence and calculation in mannerism do not arise from self-confidence, but are really signs of anxiety and repression.... Mannerism is not only decorative but also expressive in a taut uneasy way, as if the figures had the resistance of the coiled spring. Yet they appear passive, suffering mutely from internal and unintelligible strain." -- Sypher.) Thus the climactic scenes in mannerist novels: breaking a window, breaking a horn, breaking one's own stilled stone limbs.... Given Sypher's description "of the mannerist depersonalization or frigidity as lacking an appearance of humanity although the sensitivity to experience is extreme," Walker's novel of inanimate spies is a direct translation of mannerism into narrative. As is so often the case with mannerist narrative, the perfection implicitly promised by the ostentatiously worked surface is not fulfilled. The structure is awkward, the shifts more disclosing the crafter's hand than disclosing craft. The antiquated plot adds neither depth nor luster to the surface it supports. Nevertheless, as is also so often the case, the force and originality of the work win out. It is pleasurable, moving, and memorable in ways incompatible with smoothness. It delivers the mindfuck missing from the mainstreams (including the mainstreams of science fiction and fantasy). Yes, the mindfuck may seem absurdly contrived, artificial, bitter, fetishistic; entangled with questions of class, commerce, and power -- but that's the '90s for you. The time in which we and The Secret Service live.
- Ray Davis



No one reads Wendy Walker’s The Secret Service (1992), a spellbinding and disorienting spy-novel/gothic fantasy (to narrow it down to two broad and non-exhaustive categories) that nearly defies description.
The premise of The Secret Service is simple, at least in the barest retelling: set in England in 19th century, a continental conspiracy is uncovered that if revealed will disgrace–and quite possibly ruin–the British royal family. The secret service of the title are called to unravel the plot, a task seemingly made easier by a recent discovery that enables agents to transform themselves into objects–in this case: a wine goblet, a bronze statue of Thisbe, and a rosebush–to infiltrate the conspirators’ ranks. As with all remarkable fiction, Walker’s plot at this, the simplest, point turns back upon itself, digresses, and passes into realms familiar to readers of Calvino, Poe, Borges, and Dickens.
The book’s flavor is perhaps best hinted at by lists; lists that tantalizingly allude to the infinite while always falling short even of the object they hope to describe. Henry Wessells writes:
The novel is filled with strange erudition, sensuous descriptive language, broken glass, crackpot science, gruesome technology, unexpected turns, and a succession of stories within stories…
And Douglas Messerli, who published the book in the now-defunct Sun & Moon Classics series, describes it in terms that remind one of a modern Metamorphoses:
Walker’s world is a world of mystery, castles, architectural wonders, secrets, changelings, doubles, madness, terrorism, and death—in short, as she herself prefers to characterize this work, she is writing in the tradition of Gothic fiction, horrible and terrifying in its revelations. If her writing style outshines even her inventiveness of story, these two work in tandem to create themes that for some may be even more overwhelming. For Walker’s world is also one of eternal change, constant alteration where humans and landscape morph into one another and, in so doing, transform experience into a series of encounters dangerous for those who prefer tranquil stasis.- writersnoonereads.tumblr.com/post/34700660599/no-one-reads-wendy-walkers-the-secret-service








Set in a 19th-century Europe that does not quite obey the contours of the real place, the story concerns a dastardly plot against the British royal family, led by three scheming continental notables. These three, a German, an Italian and a Frenchman, are also obsessive collectors, aesthetes dedicated to their respective fields of expertise: roses, rare tableware, classical statuary.
In order to infiltrate the enemy, the British secret service have developed a remarkable weapon. By scientific methods they can transform their agents into physical objects, indistinguishable from the real thing. Thus the British spies can turn themselves into a rare perfect rose, a superb antique glass or a Roman sculpture, and observe the villains from very close quarters. This transformation operates as far more than just a gimmick. Rather, Walker uses it as a far reaching, exhaustive metaphor for the nature of being human, and as a generator of exceptional language.
The book begins with a ceremonial banquet for the marriage of the young king and queen, to which the three villains have been expressly invited in order to be seduced by the beautiful objects before them, little realising they are all in fact human spies. The table is covered by the entire British secret service masquerading as a tumbler, plate or vase, all straining to catch the attention of the enemy and be taken home to their collections.
The result is like a fin de siecle Ruritanian adventure re-written by Gertrude Stein and Ronald Firbank. We read detailed descriptions not only of what it is like to be a rose, but also, for example the dream of a rose, what passes through a rose while it sleeps, from the point of view of the flower itself.
And The Secret Service, despite its historic setting, has become curiously topical. The plot to overthrow the institution of British monarchy by introducing marital scandal into its ranks, has recently become more vivid a notion than Walker could ever haye imagined.
But in an even more extraordinary example of life, or technology catching up with imagination, what would previously have been the most unfilmable of books, has become a highly feasible movie project. For the proccess of 'morphing', seen at its most advanced in Terminator 2, reproduces on screen exactly what Walker describes, the transformation of humans into physical objects and back again. The Secret Service is the first masterpiece of the age of morphing. - ADRIAN DANNATT      
           


In 1982 Wendy Walker, at the suggestion of Charles Bernstein, sent me the manuscript of The Secret Service. In retracing the long history of that book, I’ve discovered that it wasn’t quite yet finished at the time; the author completed it later that year. While I quickly accepted it, given my perpetual financial difficulties and the size of the text, I was slow to publish. The following year Wendy finished a new collection of stories, The Sea-Rabbit, Or the Artist of Life, also sent to me, which I immediately recognized as a work that might be more easily assimilated by the public, arguing that it should appear first. The Sea-Rabbit was published—with some very good review attention—in 1988 (after only a three year wait!). Meanwhile, Wendy continued to revise The Secret Service, finishing her revisions in 1990. I published that book finally in 1992—ten years after its original acceptance!




Imagine a painting that covers a wall. Incredibly detailed images cover its surface, illustrating a frozen moment in time. Painted not on canvas, but porcelain. You watch this painting every day for a year. And each day there is a small change, something moves. Shifts. A new detail that grows into a new thread in that frozen moment. Gradually, over that year a story is played out. And eventually you are shown the whole. This is the Secret Service. It is an expression of both stillness and motion, both poetic and beautiful. Where every paragraph is a world mapped out in prose. Set in a world much like our own, it is at the same time strangely divorced. Not just through time, but also in a timeless Europe it is difficult to recognize. It could be a hundred years ago, it could be two. The story offers crystalline clarity, its pure simplicity standing as a solid frame that hold it all together. At its centre is a plot so nefarious that the heart of the British Empire is threatened with collapse. A group of decadent Europeans who would attack the very morality of the Royal Family through subterfuge constructed over decades. Britain's one defense against this plot is The Secret Service. A group of dedicated, miraculous individuals, who thanks to a unique genius, find themselves able to lose their form and become a still life background to the events that are played out before them. As beautiful gifts they are sent into enemy territory, to discover what they can of this plot. The strengths of this novel reveal themselves early, the sheer descriptive strength of Walker's prose draws you along with almost breathless wonder. Yet at a languid relaxed pace that only gives a sense of urgency at certain key moments. You are taken outside the mundane and shown the world through the senses of objects. How does a vase experience the world, how does a rose experience the world through overlapping fumes. From outside it may seem strange, yet from the inside it all makes perfect sense. The background to the transformations, the explanations of the original discoveries, are expressed in such a poetic way that the logical science behind it loses all its coldness. There is nothing but beauty in this novel. It is never dull, always inventive, and like the members of the secret service, inanimate objects with living souls that writhe within them. So, to the book, has layers within it. A story within a story for instance, that could almost have been a novel of its own, where a victim of a tragedy attempts to pull themselves back from the brink. In a symbolic world where little is exactly how it seems. The return from this sojourn makes the rest of the novel seem all the more grounded in reality, despite its obvious fantastical elements. Even toward the end, when it tends toward the traditional, it never loses its sheen. My only disappointment was guessing the final outcome long before the conclusion, it was in the end the only way to steer the story toward the required conclusion, but it would have been all the more fascinating to play the story out with the rules laid down early in the game. For it is a game, a complex political and diplomatic game. No minor disappointments could do anything to detract from this novel. It is without a doubt of the most enjoyable literary experiences you are ever likely to have. Like an epiphany gradually carved over four hundred and fifty pages, one that ends only with the turning of that final page. - Ian Davey




Court intrigue and romance abound in this first novel from short-story writer Walker ( The Sea-Rabbit ). Set in a fictional British past, supposedly sometime during the 19th century, the story begins with the discovery of a conspiracy to overthrow the young king by bringing to light scandalous revelations about his bride. His Majesty's Secret Service springs into action: its agents have discovered a Tibetan technique to make themselves appear as inanimate objects, thus able to spy upon the plotters by posing as the things most precious to them. For Cardinal Ammanati, it is classical sculpture; for Baron Schelling, glass and porcelain; and the Duc stet spelling/pk D'Elsir's passions run to rare roses. Unfortunately, while Walker's ornate prose can be beguiling, it is often leaden and obstructs the storytelling. Another problem is the central premise itself. Any book in which the heroes protagonists spend much of their time as flowers, crystal goblets and statues is trapped into offering more observation than action. Still, this rococo blend of fantasy and high romance may find its audience. - Publishers Weekly




Wendy Walker, The Sea-Rabbit, or, The Artist of Life
Read an excerpt (pdf)


After I finished The Secret Service, I wanted to work on shorter pieces.  Having spent years inventing one large and complex alternative-history world, I hoped to explore more various provinces of the fabulist kingdom. I decided to try my hand at the Grimms’ tales, and, dissatisfied with psychoanalytical readings of them, to follow the lines of experience in these tales and so delve more deeply into their key images, and particularly the passages that represent moments where the protagonist is transformed out of a narrow human role into something much broader.  I was influenced in my approach by Robert Darnton’s “Peasants Tell Tales: The Meanings of Mother Goose” and the microhistorians Carlo Ginzburg and Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie.


Reading these nine masterful tales, one feels as if one has uncovered a wondrous long-hidden manuscript; as if the Grimm brothers’ tales had been transcribed by Emily Dickinson, or as if Rimbaud had taken up fable-writing.
A young peasant lad outwits a murderous princess by transforming himself into a small, dazzling beast; a princess’ s suitor uncovers the secret of how she and her sisters wear out their dancing slippers each night; a young woman renowned for her cleverness discovers the dangers of too much foresight; the saints of a cathedral debate with the gargoyles on the spires concerning the design of the church. Walker plays with our foreknowledge of these ancient tales—her surpassingly rich description and fantastic, eccentric plottings create some of the most original stories of our time.


… (Walker’s) haunting images… fuse the past with the present….Her tales…renew the fairy-tale tradition by undermining the authoritative voice of the Grimms’ tradition and exposing problems that are directly related to our present troubled times and cannot be easily resolved.—Jack Zipes


Metamorphoses of castigation, of appeasement, of flight, of preservation: every variety of metamorphosis found in the texts of the ancients serves an apparently naive, but perfectly controlled, narrativity. Walker does not exploit this solely for the production of the marvelous: into her legendary canvas she slips many a metafictional thread which the eye must follow with attention… It can hardly be doubted that beyond sumptuously written texts which tempt us to delightful readings, beyond the ancient wonders of rediscovered childhood, what we are invited to witness is the metamorphosis of the fairy tale. (Complete essay on JStor)—Marc Chénetier


 The nine tales in this collection, Walker’s first published work, are elegantly gaudy revivifications of folk/fairy stories in a kind of jeweled, poetic prose. Walker’s sentences grow and ramify as luxuriantly as vines in an enchanted wood. In each tale, familiar motifs lie embedded, recombined and transformed through the alchemy of the author’s heady imagination. Outstanding is “Arnaud’s Nixie,’ a variation of the Cupid and Psyche legend, where Esperte undergoes ordeals and quests to recover her darling Arnaud, snatched from her by a cruel lady of the lake. Women who jam their blistered feet into a slipper to catch a melancholy prince’s attention turn up in the exquisite ‘Ashiepattle,’ a tale whose heroine has birdlike affinities, wears a bizarrely furred and feathered gown, and flutters high in a dovecote. The despised, poor or clumsy suitor who wins a princess through some special gift or charm appears in ‘The Unseen Soldier,’ and in the title story. ‘The Contract with the Beast,’ a labyrinthine adventure echoing the tale of Beauty and the Beast, has a winsome hedgehog for its hero. Deliciously quirky twists and unexpected endings increase the reader’s surprise and delight.—Publishers Weekly


Nine retellings of traditional fairy, folk and religious tales, reshaped and enriched with insight, detail, and Walker's precise, poetic language. Adult fairy tales are usually tongue-in-cheek, pornographic or psychoanalytic. Not these: Walker remains true to the spirit of her source material while giving it grown-up appeal. She takes stories drawn from the oral tradition and moves them over to the literary tradition, turning archetypes into individuals, adding some psychological motivation, dark irony, and a touch of overt metaphysics. In the title story, the Princess Mengarde, who has executed 97 aspirants to her hand, views the latest suitors through a window ""which was revelatory of various degrees of cunning."" She sees that the ""eldest possessed that bluff professionalism that veils deep dishonesty,"" while ""the second disclosed to her observation the laziness of the capable man, who need not think anything through because he owns a strong arm and a deceptively winning smile."" Another window reveals motive, right down to ""the ravenous hunger of birds in their graceful swoop, and the love of destiny in the inwinding curve of the road."" Walker's imagery is especially suggestive with characters who stand midway between man and beast: In ""Ashiepattle,"" the King remembers his first glimpse of the Queen-to-be: "". . .the ragged convolvulus of her enormous ballooning sleeves, iridescent blue, green and white, like the splayed abstraction of mallards hung on a door."" A tribute to the magical, folkloric heritage of Western Europe, these literary fairy tales may even raise an occasional adult frisson. - Kirkus Reviews


After reading Wendy Walker's _The Secret Service_, I read _The Sea-
Rabbit_; having done so, I strongly recommend that you read her book
of tales first, as it provides a good introduction to Walker's writing
in a less-overwhelming context than _The Secret Service_.  The same
motifs of transformation, concealment, and the animate inanimate (all
of them different faces of the age-old tension between Sein and
Schein, Being and Seeming) ripple through these nine tales as through
the novel; in addition, the stories and the novel share a view of
human character which may be easier to apprehend in the smaller
episodes of the tales before one grapples with it in the novel.
Walker has taken her material from a handful of fairy tales and
legends well-known to us all; in the title story "The Sea-Rabbit" she
has blended the conventions (three sons, an exacting princess, and a
riddle- game) to come up with a new-but-old story that left me
guessing until the ominous end.  In all the stories, Walker infuses
character archetypes with a fallible humanity they have lacked in most
other "modern fairy tales" I have read.  Indeed of all the "modern
fairy tales" I've seen lately, the one that comes closest to Walker's
sensibilities is Martha Soukup's "The Spinner" in _Xanadu 2_; like
Soukup, Walker sees the streak of cruelty in all of us.  Walker shows
the human cruelty of the powerful as well as the weak, and knows that
it is limited only by the scope afforded it.  Thus Ashiepattle's king
forces her crippled sisters to pack her rich gowns in a heavy chest,
and to carry the chest; the unseen soldier toys with the twelve
princesses for three nights, when one would have done; Elsie's husband
torments her when a scolding would have sufficed; Jack My Hedgehog, no
Utopian here, brutally uses an innocent princess to punish her
rascally father; and Princess Mengarde is a bloody despot, "though in
most everyday matters a fair one." This is fairy-tale justice in
human terms, with harsh punishments meted out more liberally than
rewards.
Transcendent human kindness is also shown, but we recoil from it.
Berthe, the princess who accepts Jack My Hedgehog, appears to be
fulfilling some secret wish to immolate herself; an amusingly domestic
Delilah's forgiveness lulls Samson to destruction.  Destruction and
compassion are tied together in these tales.  Even the fox who aids
Bernard to win Mengarde's hand and kingdom has, in a sense, destroyed
Bernard with his help.  Walker does not follow this pattern rigidly,
of course; it's not a monotonously harped-on rule, thus we are left
doubting, anxious about a tale's outcome, until its end.  Notably,
"Arnaud's Nixie" features a gentle, sincerely helpful chatelaine
(suffering in her own fairy-tale hell) who helps Esperte reclaim
Arnaud, no strings attached.
The fascination of Walker's prose is in its richness and complexity.
Readers are advised not to be deceived by the brevity of the stories;
all must be read slowly, closely, and thoughtfully to appreciate her
sensitive, ravishingly beautiful writing about the world experienced
in conditions human and otherwise.  Walker assumes other perspectives
and explores them deeply and sincerely, then relays her observations
to us in evocative and colorful, yet lucid, prose, ringing with
insight seldom found in such stories since Lucius was an ass.  It is
customary to focus on the humanity of the other, but Walker instead
stresses the alien; and this strategy serves her best when she finds
the alien in the human, as in Elsie's overwrought imagination and
Esperte's despair, in an Idiot and in Jack My Hedgehog's father
Bekynsaw.  Yet, in the end, the most difficult and rewarding
transformations here are those of the characters who become more
human, learning to know themselves, and these are the changes that
stick in the mind, when one sets the book down, and that spur
rereading.
This is a very fine collection of stories.  I hope to see more in
print from Wendy Walker soon. - Elizabeth Willey






Wendy Walker, Stories Out of Omarie, Sun & Moon Press, 2000.
Read an excerpt (pdf)


The tales in Stories Out of Omarie developed out of my need to understand what love is– not serene love but the force that tears lives apart.  I had been reading Marie de France’s lais, one of the many books put into my hands over the years by Tom La Farge; this one gave me stories that would serve as matter for my investigations. Then in 1985 we went to Paris for the summer.  In a tapestry at the Cluny Museum I found a formal composition ripe for conversion into narrative structure, and used it in the first tale of the series, “The Passing of Graelent.” The books I read in my attempt to understand took me all through world literature.  At some later date, I may make a bibliography and post it here.


Stories Out of Omarie, Wendy Walker’s new collection, deals with forbidden love in medieval Europe and North Africa. A knight meets a naked woman in the forest who rescues him only to lead him later to drown. Two lovers, forcibly separated, continue their involvement in letters delivered to each other by a swan. A passionate affair in which the lovers never touch brings a jealous husband to dismember a nightingale. Venus realizes in the middle of narrating a story that she is the invention of one of her own characters. In the title story, a father forces his daughter into a barrel and throws it overboard in the middle of the sea; rescued by pirates, she is given to a sultan who teaches her to read, and whom she deserts for her father. In story after story, each written in Walker’s impeccable and densely rich style, the author takes us to the brink of passion where the characters totter, ready to retreat entirely from love or fall into the pit of sensuous transgression. Once again, she takes the reader for a breathtaking venture on the “tempting regions of web.”


In her Stories Out of Omarie, Wendy Walker has given us English versions of eight medieval tales based on lays of Marie de France and her school…The stories in Walker’s collection range over Europe and Northern Africa, but especially Brittany and England. They represent some of the best tales available to the English court of the twelfth century… What makes this collection valuable to the lover of early English literature is Wendy Walker’s “impeccable and densely rich style,” a style that runs through these tales of forbidden love.—Jack Byrne


The Twin Knots is a complex tale of love and adventure… Delve into it to witness the transformative powers of love and to experience the depth and beauty of Wendy Walker’s discourse… The words leap off the page to form a visual interpretation of the unfolding events.—Nicole McClain



Wendy Walker, Blue Fire: A Poetic Nonfiction, Proteotypes, 2009.
Read an excerpt (pdf)


In BLUE FIRE, a major new work in poetic non-fiction, Wendy Walker reexamines the case of Constance Kent, protagonist at 15 of “the Great Crime of 1860.” Accused of murdering her younger half-brother and stuffing his body down the privy at her father’s house at Road in Wiltshire, Constance was cleared at the coroner’s inquest. In the view of most at the time, the boy had been killed by his father and his nurse. Yet five years later in 1865 Constance, under the influence of a priest, confessed to the crime. Her death sentence commuted to twenty years in prison, on her release she left England to spend a further sixty years as a nurse in Australia. The murder and the investigation inspired both Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone and Dickens’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
It also was the subject of the first true-crime book, The Great Crime of 1860, which Joseph Stapleton wrote largely to exonerate his friend, Constance’s father. Walker has taken this book as the base text for a compositional procedure based partly on the non-fiction work of the poet Paul Metcalf and partly on the mesostics of John Cage. She has selected one word from each line of Stapleton’s text and used them in order to create a poetic secondary text, both to bring out the patriarchal bias in his writing and to contest his version of the facts. Then she has gone to books and documents about the case, other books that Constance is known to have read, and still others published between 1860 and 1865, and extracted passages to place facing the sections of her derived text on which they comment. The book may thus be read in two different directions, as a consecutive poetic narrative, and as a commonplace book illustrating the mindset of the early 1860’s.
From 1991 to1993 I tried to write a novel and failed. The subject of the novel was Constance Kent, 15-year-old protagonist of “The Great Crime of 1860,” the Road Hill House Murder. (To see an out-take from that first attempt, go to Hysterical Operators. The case was remarkable on many counts. Constance Kent, a young girl from a well-to-do family, was implicated in the murder of her young brother, but acquitted.  Four years later, under the influence of an Anglican priest, she confessed to the unsolved crime.  Forensics was in its infancy but even then it was clear that the evidence did not support her story. Yet she was convicted and sentenced to death. The case gave rise to the first true-crime book and inspired both the “sensation novel” and the country house mystery. Both  Wilkie Collins  and Dickens made use of it, in The Moonstone and The Mystery of Edwin Drood, respectively. Everyone in England took sides as to whether Constance had “done it.”
As for my novel, I failed because I tried to set the events within the characters’ points of view and found that using Constance’s own necessarily assumed that I could know what was going on in her mind. I found myself attributing to her, and other characters, my own interpretation of her story and my own feelings about it; I had turned it into an allegory about the creative process, something quite far afield from what it actually was,  and that felt dishonest. So I abandoned the novel form for something radically different.
I took that true-crime book, The Great Crime of 1860, written immediately after the crime by Joseph Stapleton in order to exonerate his friend, the boy’s father, and I extracted one word from every line of the text. This “mesostic” method was used by John Cage in Roaratorio. From these words, in the order in which I found them, I composed a secondary text that follows the narrative. I set them in groupings; then counted the words in each grouping and selected passages with as many lines as the groupings had words. These passages came from books about the case, books Constance was known to have read, and books published between 1860 and 1865. I chose passages that commented in some way on the text I had found, a method borrowed from Paul Metcalf. The extracted “mesostic” text runs down the left-hand page; the passages are placed on the right-hand page across from the word-group they comment on; sometimes there is more than one such passage. The result is Blue Fire, my attempt to create a polyphonic history.



Wendy Walker composes a magnificent book incorporating found text, [and] visual elements, in which voluminous research… is translated into a crisp, angular, paratactic poem, which, in turn, becomes a filter for the research.—William Gillespie

Far from writing unchallenging books, a good example of the effort modern authors put into their books is provided by Wendy Walker’s essay “Imagination and Prison.” It includes a valuable description of how she put together… Blue Fire (2009). Inspired by the real-life tale of Constance Kent, Walker’s Blue Fire attempts to carry its own critique. Literally. Encoded in her novel (but interestingly, not in her essay) is a counter-narrative, and though the details of its construction were interesting, I was more intrigued by her deconstructionist idea that “all texts contain its own critique, like the statue hidden in a block of marble”… It’s intriguing, because as John Bender explains in his book Imagining the Penitentiary (1989), narrative techniques not only represent consciousness in action, they also represent the developing social consciousness. … when Walker constructs a novel that contains its own critique, it leads me to wonder if we’re beginning to see the rise of a less narcissistic society, one conscious of its flaws and limitations, but secure enough to tolerate dissent.—Anil Menon



This is the first published edition of a work that I have followed over the years as Wendy Walker, author of The Secret Service  (1992) and the most perceptive practitioner of the critical fiction mode working today, researched the life of Constance Kent and the Road Hill House Murder of 1860, evolved the intrepretive mode, and brought the project to fruition. I have one of a very few copies of Blue Fire : Confessing Constance Kent  (May 2001; not published), an earlier form and format of the book. I am too closely linked to the author and the project to review the book, so the following is a brief critical commentary.
What is remarkable about Blue Fire. A Poetic Nonfiction  is Wendy Walker’s insistence upon working with the literary materials and facts of Constance Kent’s life in an ethical manner and in creating the broadest possible context. “ The Great Crime of 1860 ” was sensational in its day and was important, too, for certain legal precedents, so the sensation has never entirely dissipated. Recent accounts of the crime have seemed of too narrow compass. It is an appalling situation that a young woman could be sentenced to death upon the basis of a false confession that conflicted with facts established during the earlier, inconclusive hearing. And the ultimate silence of Constance Kent, during her imprisonment and after her release, raises other issues. The power of Walker’s approach is rooted in recognition that to render it in fiction would be unethical appropriation.
Because so much historical fiction plays irresponsibly with the past, and because so much history and biography leaves its sources unacknowledged, I wish to be as transparent as possible about my method in Blue Fire .
The reasoned delivery of information is one aspect of clarity. Most of the introduction to the published edition is found in the earlier version. The triumph of Blue Fire is in making visible — and tangible — that Walker has employed, together with a subtle re-ordering of the movement from exposition of background to implementation of process.
As I studied the mosaics that Constance Kent had made, a mosaic method of composition came to seem apposite. The specific way of combining texts that could be described as mosaic was inspired by my reading of Paul Metcalf, who created text in poetic non-fiction by a careful splicing of significant passages drawn from other writers. So I set the issue of genre aside and began to collect such shining passages.
Walker’s introduction now includes an example of the process by which she derived the poetic text and the passages in justaposition. I like to see the traces of the scaffolding by which a text is shaped. Blue Fire  presents a poetic text that makes use of white space to emphasize drama and deliberation. This occupies the left hand pages ; the right hand pages are the gloss upon this text, passages from Walker’s source material that are inseparable from the poetic text and at the same time information of a different order. The range of Walker’s reading is the rock solid structure in and on and about which the poetic text dances : in particular, her close study of the literary and scientific works forming the contemporary climate of 1860. The result is kinetic and enables the reader to “ catch Constance in the spaces between speech, her own and others’. ” - endlessbookshelf.net/archive0409.html#BlueFire






Wendy Walker, My Man and Other Critical Fictions.
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MY MAN AND OTHER CRITICAL FICTIONS MY MAN & OTHER CRITICAL FICTIONS is a collection of eight pieces by a daring literary explorer. Like the writings of Borges, or Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, Walker’s critical fictions examine other works of literature and explicitly make use of these earlier texts to create surprising insights and compelling stories. Walker is a reader of unflinching perspicacity whose critical fictions chart her responses to works by Joseph Conrad, Helen Adams, Olaudah Equiano, and Harry Mathews, as well as Anna Maria Ortese’s The Iguana, the pre-Shakespearean sources for Cordelia, and a whole archipelago of literary post-modernists. The critical fiction is a literary mode that takes as its subject another literary work and treats of that work’s construction, obsessions, and sources in narrative and poetic, rather than expository/critical terms.


I began writing critical fictions in 1993 out of a sense that an essay (at least one by me) could never rival in intensity the reading of writers I admired. So I came up with the idea of a cross between critical essay and narrative fiction, and called it “critical fiction.” I intend the term, which others have used, to describe a text that treats of the matters usually discussed in literary analysis, but uses narrative and poetic means, rather than expository ones. I see the critical fiction as providing for the reader a way of being simultaneously inside and outside an author’s work, inhabiting it and seeing its structure.


“An original collection of 8 critical fictions on Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, King Lear, Olaudah Equiano, Harry Mathews, The Iguana, and other writers and texts. The critical fiction is a literary mode that takes as its subject another literary work and treats of that work’s construction, obsessions, and sources in narrative and poetic, rather than expository/critical terms. Wendy Walker is one of the chief proponents of the critical fiction today; some of her predecessors include Jean Rhys, Jorge Luis Borges, Angela Carter, and Guy Davenport.”
Some of the pieces in My Man and Other Critical Fictions were first published in Conjunctions, The Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative American Poetry: 1994-5, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, 3rd Bed, Fantastic Metropolis, English Studies Forum and Proteotypes’ Libellulae Series.




Mixing collage and Burroughs-esque cut-up technique with traditional narrative, Walker… presents works that veer from the whimsically self-reflective to the fragmented and obscure. In ‘A Document from the Secret Archive of Grent Oude Wayl, Esquire,’ the language of the story becomes a landscape navigable by the inhabitants of the country it describes. ‘being nothing content’ alternates a historical account of King Lear with cut-and-pasted strings of words whose chaos reflects the turmoil of Lear’s personal drama. Similarly, ‘Hysterical Operators: The Inspector of Factories Visits the Lover of Melodrama’ intertwines linear and non-linear narrative strands that evoke the opposing personalities of the titular characters.—Publishers Weekly






Wendy Walker, Hysterical Operators, Proteotypes,
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In 1991 I began a novel about a young girl named Constance Kent and her involvement in the famous murder case that inspired Wilkie Collins’ TheMoonstone. Many aspects of the case intrigued me, not only the fact that Constance confessed to a crime she almost certainly did not commit, but that her confession rattled the relation of Church and State. In the course of writing about the sensational circumstances of the crime, I came to feel that I should not be using them in fiction; that it would be exploitative to use my own fiction to overturn Constance’s. I put the manuscript away. When I later returned to the subject, I wrote a very different kind of book,  Blue Fire (Proteotypes, 2009), a polyphonic experiment in poetic nonfiction. That book asks the reader to hear many voices– not subsumed within my own– and to consider the complex ways in which the story of the crime echoes and informs other contemporary stories.
So, back to Hysterical Operators… It is the only surviving piece of my abandoned novel about Constance Kent. This is the scene that leads up to the killing. It relates the nighttime tryst in which the father of the little boy, the victim in the case, visits his son’s nanny in the nursery where the boy was sleeping. In a dialogue of contrasting modes, Mr. Kent, the Inspector of Factories, speaks in an assemblage of technical language drawn from Andrew Ure’s Philosophy of Manufactures (1835), and the nursemaid replies with floating fragments of Victorian melodrama.


In 1991 I began a novel about a young girl named Constance Kent and her involvement in the famous murder case that inspired Wilkie Collins’ TheMoonstone. Many aspects of the case intrigued me, not only the fact that Constance confessed to a crime she almost certainly did not commit, but that her confession rattled the relation of Church and State. In the course of writing about the sensational circumstances of the crime, I came to feel that I should not be using them in fiction; that it would be exploitative to use my own fiction to overturn Constance’s. I put the manuscript away. When I later returned to the subject, I wrote a very different kind of book,  Blue Fire (Proteotypes, 2009), a polyphonic experiment in poetic nonfiction. That book asks the reader to hear many voices– not subsumed within my own– and to consider the complex ways in which the story of the crime echoes and informs other contemporary stories.
So, back to Hysterical Operators… It is the only surviving piece of my abandoned novel about Constance Kent. This is the scene that leads up to the killing. It relates the nighttime tryst in which the father of the little boy, the victim in the case, visits his son’s nanny in the nursery where the boy was sleeping. In a dialogue of contrasting modes, Mr. Kent, the Inspector of Factories, speaks in an assemblage of technical language drawn from Andrew Ure’s Philosophy of Manufactures (1835), and the nursemaid replies with floating fragments of Victorian melodrama.
This fragment was one of my first critical fictions, taking as its target not an author or a book, but an historical event that had important literary and social repercussions.
This fragment was one of my first critical fictions, taking as its target not an author or a book, but an historical event that had important literary and social repercussions.
Note: This text is collected in My Man and Other Critical Fictions.







Wendy Walker, Knots, Aqueduct Press, 2006.
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Four spellbinding tales, selected from Wendy Walker's critically-acclaimed short fiction collections Sea-Rabbit, Or, The Artist of Life (1988) and Stories Out of Omarie (1995), showcase some of her finest work as she takes on the themes of art, memory and tragic love in pre-modern Europe and North Africa. ''Twin Knots'' presents the Goddess of Love's take on an affair between a knight and an unhappy queen. In another tale, a count punishes his daughter for the attempted murder of her husband by placing her in a barrel and sending her out to sea, where adventures with pirates and a powerful sultan ensue. Publishers Weekly writes, ''Walker's sentences grow and ramify as luxuriantly as vines in an enchanted wood.''  


In 2005 Timmi Duchamp wrote to me suggesting that Aqueduct Press publish a selection of my tales in its Conversation Series.  Knots was the result. The tales come from my two short fiction collections  The Sea-Rabbit, or, The Artist of Life (1988) and Stories Out of Omarie (1995), ones that focus on the complex and beautiful intertanglements of art, memory, and tragic love in pre-modern Europe and North Africa. In “The Twin Knots” my goal was to present  the Goddess of Love’s take on an affair between a knight and an unhappy queen. In “Story Out of Omarie” a count punishes his daughter for the attempted murder of her husband by placing her in a barrel and sending her out to sea, where adventures with pirates and a powerful sultan ensue. “Ashiepattle” is a version of the Cinderella myth. I wrote “The Cathedral” in 1974, one of my earliest tales, in response to an intense experience of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.
Publishers Weekly writes about Knots: “Walker’s sentences grow and ramify as luxuriantly as vines in an enchanted wood.”
This quotation and comment are printed on the back cover of the book:
“And as she moved, he saw that the shape of her wolverine cape described the very quadrilateral of the field, belonging to his father’s renegade vassal across the mountain, which he so long and so ineffectually had yearned to possess; and the pure launch of her skirt mimicked the very contour of the fertile hillside claimed by the Bishop of Tours, which he had not briefly, nor successfully, disputed in the ecclesiastical and secular courts, and yet could not yield his claim. He had stridden after her then, and gained upon her figure slowly, intent on capturing her for one sole galliard at least…” —from “Ashiepattle”
Four spellbinding tales, selected from Wendy Walker’s critically acclaimed short fiction collections The Sea-Rabbit, Or, The Artist of Life (1988) and Stories Out of Omarie (1995), showcase some of her finest work as she takes on the themes of art, memory, and tragic love in pre-modern Europe and North Africa. “The Twin Knots” presents the Goddess of Love’s take on an affair between a knight and an unhappy queen. In another tale, a count punishes his daughter for the attempted murder of her husband by placing her in a barrel and sending her out to sea, where adventures with pirates and a powerful sultan ensue. Publishers Weekly writes, “Walker’s sentences grow and ramify as luxuriantly as vines in an enchanted wood.”




Walker uses European poems and fairy tales as her inspiration and source material, merging rich language and modern ideas with classic plot lines to craft complex adult fare…Read her work for the history, the complex tales, and the vivid language offered—where the true beauty of Walker’s work lies.—Nicole McClain


DOUGLAS MESSERLI: Wendy, given the diversity and broad range of genres that your writing represents to date, it seems to me it might be useful to begin by discussing some of your youthful interests. If I remember correctly, in your university days you were involved with both art and theater. Might you describe these concerns? Did you have similar interests even in high school or earlier on? How did these interests develop?
WENDY WALKER: I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t writing or drawing or making things, usually puppets. Making puppets was an early way into theater, in which I could control all the elements. It was the first visual/verbal art form that I felt comfortable in. Even when I didn’t write a play for performance, I was creating a character. Some of those characters helped me to imagine the excessive, sexually ambiguous connoisseurs I later put into my fiction, especially The Secret Service.
My main concern in high school was with mastering traditional poetic forms and writing essays, mostly about plays. I spent a year writing a long essay about Hamlet—for my own pleasure, not for school—convinced as I was at the time that I had solved the riddle of his character.
I spent a lot of time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is not far from the school I attended [Dalton], and I studied sculpture with an artist named Rhys Caparn, who had been a student of Archipenko. I spent a lot of time drawing and painting, as I found it necessary to balance all the verbal and analytical work of school with a practice that was physical and non-verbal, and I still do.
DM: Yes, I know what the Metropolitan means to you. One of the most revelatory visits to that museum I ever experienced was with you and your husband, Tom La Farge, where suddenly your comments revealed paintings, tapestries, and even armor to me in a way that I had never previously perceived them before. Your eye for details is remarkable, and the questions you ask are often startling. I kept feeling, “Why hadn’t ever thought of that?”
Did these same interests continue when you attended college? And how and when did this first begin to develop into writing full fictions such as your first novel (I want to say fantasy or romance, since it’s really not a “novel” in the formal generic definition.) I know you also wrote on art. Did this come before or after your turning to fiction? And how did that “turn,” if it was in fact a shift, come about?
WW: I wish we could visit the museum together more often, Douglas!
At Harvard I tried out some new interests, anthropology and art history. The art history stuck—those lectures were the only ones with a visual component, and so much easier for me to concentrate on. Since that was my major, I wrote many essays analyzing and comparing works of art. But I took the writing courses that concentrated on poetry, working with Robert Fitzgerald, the poet and translator of Homer. That again gave me a very solid grounding in traditional English poetic forms, and the history of versification, which taught me how English poetic speech evolved, and how the language works musically. I learned an enormous amount, but became increasingly dissatisfied with the small canvas of the poem, and what then seemed a very small audience for poetry.
DM: Still a small audience, of course!

WW: Meanwhile I had discovered three dazzling writers—Borges, Calvino, and García Marquez—who offered a prose as intense as any poetry. One day I was at a lecture on Genet when I suddenly understood that prose was the real poetry of the large canvas, and that that was where I had to try to go. I discussed this with Fitzgerald and he encouraged me to write some fiction. I was dissatisfied with what I produced, but the piece did contain the character who later became the Corporal in The Secret Service.
As for the practicing art side, I took courses at Carpenter Center in design and theater design, since there were no drawing or painting courses at Harvard at that time, and during the summers I attended the Rhode Island School of Design and Boston University’s art program at Tanglewood. I think it was over one of those summers that I wrote a story that I called “The Room of Boxes,” which later became the beginning of the dream journey in The Secret Service.
We could get into a long argument, Douglas, about whether or not The Secret Service is a novel. I think my fiction has to be seen as fitting into the European tradition more than the English or American one. If Calvino’s Invisible Cities or Roussel’s Locus Solus are novels, why not The Secret Service? Certainly it contains a “romance,” but Hawthorne called several of his novels romances so the precedent in American literature should be well established.
DM: Over the years of our long friendship, we have argued about just those generic terms, if I recall. But I’m not sure if such a discussion would be appropriate or even interesting in a more general interview centered upon your writing and life. Frankly, I’m not truly interested in categorizing any fiction. If Americans and the British want to call all long fictions novels, and continental Europe wants to describe all fictions as romances (Romans), that’s fine. The only problem I have is when such generic generalities get in the way of the enjoyment or understanding of fictions, such as those by Gertrude Stein, who utterly confused many of her early readers (and still does confuse readers today) by exploring almost every literary genre in both prose and poetry. Or in the case of Djuna Barnes, whose Nightwood was dismissed by some for not adhering to what they perceived as the standard patterns of a novel or, even worse, those who sought to create an entirely new genre, like Dostoevsky scholar Joseph Frank, who attempted to create an entirely new genre, “spatial fiction,” to explain what he perceived as the abnormalities in Barnes’ and other writers’ works. Had he simply read Northrup Frye or other specialists in genre studies, he might have recognized that Nightwood, although not a “novel,” did represent a well-established form of fiction, the anatomy (or “Menippean satire”), as the author had even sub-titled her fiction on the manuscript’s original title page. E. M. Forster, moreover, found Tolstoy’s War and Peace to be a baggy monster because it didn’t fit into his notions of what a novel was. Dickens has always been a problem, finally, to novel-centric critics.
Today, when we call everything a novel, however, I suppose it doesn’t matter. But I find the “novel” a rather narrow box (if you agree with Frye’s definition of it) in which to put all of fiction. And, I think, this is a particular problem—or I should say delight—with/of your fictional creations, which purposely cross so many generic boundaries, and refuse to be pinned down.
Enough said. More importantly, what seems interesting to me in what you just said is how you perceived, at such a young age, that fiction could be (although it is surely not always) a kind of large canvas for poetry, since your works, no matter how one does or does not define them, must be described as poetic. How wonderful, moreover, that Fitzgerald was so willing to see you move away from what he was focused on. It’s also amazing to me that you were able to write a chapter from such a mature work at such an early age, particularly when I recall the junk I was writing at the same age. Can you describe a bit more in detail, how you came to the story of The Secret Service? That work seems more of a kind of writing that might have been created by a middle-aged Isak Dinesen than a young college woman. What was happening in your life that spun you into such a complex and baroque (in the very best sense of that word) fantasy?
WW: Well, to begin with, I have to say that I never thought of what I was writing as fantasy, but as the creation of a completely possible and probably true alternative nineteenth century. I had been introduced to some ideas about quantum mechanics, and it seemed to me that—I will not phrase this well enough for those who really understand physics—if an atom can occupy many points in space simultaneously, there must be an infinite number of co-occurring histories, some of them quite similar to the ones we accept as valid. If this is the state of things, then imagination is a perception of reality rather than an alternative to it. The other major problem I was trying to solve is the one of metamorphosis, how it might occur, physically, and then later on, what the result would be for consciousness if the subject transformed were human.
As for what was going on in my life, most of it consisted of the pain and frustration that make escape into books and art so necessary. After I graduated (in 1972), I put myself on a course of reading fiction and broadening my vocabulary. I made lists of words that were new to me, and I kept a notebook where I transcribed the sentences where I had found them, their definitions and etymologies. I was trying to write something every day, and sometimes I would take one of these lists and try to use all the words in a story. (I recently learned, from Daniel Levin Becker, that the Oulipo has a name for this procedure—logorallye.) One night in the fall of 1974, I sat down to do my stint, but I was having some pain, so I took what I found in the medicine cabinet—a pill for toothache—and then went back to my list of words. While I was putting down the first sentence I remember saying to myself, “If Kafka can start a story this way, so can I.” A couple of wonderful hours’ writing later, I realized I had the beginning of a book. So that was how the first chunk of The Secret Service came to be written, and a great deal of the plot is implicit in that first chunk.
A couple of things shaped that first chapter. One was my reading of Isak Dinesen and Djuna Barnes. Dinesen gave me some characters and a world of values, and Barnes gave me an example of what sentences could be. I also learned a great deal from a friend who had been a teaching assistant in astronomy and the history of science at Harvard. He encouraged me to read Giorgio di Santillana’s Hamlet’s Mill, and answered many of my questions when I set about writing the essays that are embedded in the first chapter. As for the theme of subatomic particles, that was undoubtedly prompted in part by the fact that a cousin of mine, whom I had never met, Murray Gell-Mann, had won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1968 for discovering subatomic particles. He named one of them “quark” from Finnegans Wake.

DM: Through Charles Bernstein, I received the original manuscript of your The Secret Service in 1982, a work which, in hindsight, you suggested was not quite yet in its final form. I immediately loved the work, and, if I remember correctly, I accepted it rather quickly.
Sun & Moon, however, which depended upon grants and the limited sales of backlist titles, was always slow in its publication of books. I think we had originally planned for publication of the book in 1983; that same year you sent me another book, a collection of what can I only describe as the “delicious” tales, based on the Brothers Grimm, The Sea-Rabbit, or the Artist of Life. In those days, the press received a great deal of review coverage in the major newspapers and review journals—as opposed to today’s near silence—and I felt that the second book would be so appealing to such reviewers that it might put you on the literary map, so to speak. And, in fact, to a certain degree that did happen, with positive reviews in Publishers Weekly and even the usually pernickety Kirkus Reviews, and other places.
I also felt that the very brilliance and density—not to ignore the page count—of The Secret Service might put off some readers, who even back then were becoming more and more resistant to even opening up books that seemed to demand an intellectual response. But the very fact that I changed the order of those titles, publishing your remarkable stories finally in 1988 before publishing The Secret Service in 1992 must have set you back emotionally and, in your mind, in terms of your career. Of course you spent some of those years intelligently revising the earlier book. But still, and I wince in even asking you this, these long waits certainly must have affected you. Can you describe some of your emotions?
And since we now have moved on to what was originally your second creation, how did you come to write The Sea-Rabbit? You once told me that you felt the stories, in some ways, were rather close revisions of the Grimm Brothers. But in rereading their stories (in translation of course) I am stunned by the utter transformations of your writing, the jewel-like styling of your language and the kind of fluidness of your “plots.” Your storytelling, in its sometimes seeming randomness, almost has the feeling of Jane Bowles rather than the more traditional patterning of folk tales.
WW: I should say, first off, Douglas, that I have always been, and will always be, extremely grateful to you for publishing my work. I felt then, and still feel, that you saw me clearly and recognized what was of value in my writing, rather than being sidetracked by considerations of genre. I have learned a great deal from you over the years and have cherished our friendship. Perhaps because of all these things, rather than in despite of them, I found the delays you mention very hurtful and really quite impossible to understand. The worst aspect of the situation was that it damaged my credibility with my family (always excepting Tom) and my friends. I told people that a book was coming out, and then it didn’t, and I kept revising the date, and it still didn’t appear, and so on and on. Some people may have thought I was lying about these books that I claimed I was having published, but others, more charitably, probably concluded that I was suffering from some delusion of aggravated wishful thinking. I felt deeply embarrassed, very depressed, and, of course, simply angry as I saw one writer after another taking precedence over your commitment to me. However I don’t think I ever lost sight of the fact that my distress was completely negligible by the standards of  twentieth-century writers’ problems, and that my luck in other respects, specifically in finding a brilliant and completely supportive literary life partner, more than counterbalanced anything in my life that didn’t go as I would have wished. I tried not to dwell on the endless delays and kept on working, and, in fact, the situation, or at least the first few years of it, worked to my advantage. It allowed me to make both the books more perfect stylistically than they were in the drafts you accepted. I went through the manuscripts sentence by sentence and caught all the little bumps and bits of clumsiness. I’m very glad I had a chance to do that. For the rest of it, my “career” and so on, I see now that I received a valuable lesson in how the world really works. It helped me to keep on asking the hard questions.
The tales in The Sea-Rabbit were a joy to write. I was teaching art full-time in a private secondary school in Manhattan and I would write early in the morning and after dinner. After finishing The Secret Service I couldn’t face starting another novel. I kept thinking about how Shakespeare used sources. I thought of taking stories from the oral tradition that seemed to contain some grain of historical truth, to explore them from within to try to discover what had originally happened. It seemed to me that all stories that impress us with dramatic truth bear witness to something that has happened that was not well understood, and which could only be explained by recourse to supernatural forces. I had been much taken with Robert Darnton’s essay “Peasants Tell Tales: The Meanings of Mother Goose,” (first published in the New York Review of Books and later collected in The Great CatMassacre), and I started reading the Annales historians and others who were doing “history from below,” Le Roy Ladurie, Ginzburg and so on. I would take a tale from the Grimms’ collection and analyze it, figuring out what I thought it was “about”—then I’d discuss it with Tom and together we would invent a structure for telling the story. (Working closely in this way had been our habit throughout the writing of our first books—it was a way of working that went far beyond just reading and editing each other but fell short of full collaboration.) Although people have enjoyed these stories, and there has been some very perceptive writing about them, I wish more attention had been paid to their structure, as it is entirely integral to their “meaning.” For instance, it is essential that the reader of “The Cleverness of Elsie” ask—and decide—who the narrator of her story is. The same thing is true of another tale “The Unseen Soldier,” which is structured like a Mobius strip, and so on.
When I told you that I was sticking very close to the originals, that was true, in the sense that I treated every detail as a clue to be interpreted. Though every reader will bring her own experience to the stories, for me they are allegories about artistic development as a mode of survival. The writing is highly visual because for so many years I had been immersed in visual thinking, designing sets and costumes in the Theater Design MFA program at NYU. I actually did some costume drawings for the story “Ashiepattle” so that I could clearly describe what the main character was wearing.

DM: I can only apologize, as I have before. If only the press had had money to be able to produce the books at the rate of my literary appetite! That Sun & Moon Press was able to publish nearly 300 books, most of them major literary contributions, without any substantial financial support other than matching grants (some of them not devoted to publication), still seems nearly miraculous to me. But obviously, it put many writers such as you in a position of seeming jeopardy. You can only imagine how many sleepless nights I suffered, and how anxious I was to bring those books into the world.
The most angering fact to me is that once we had produced your amazing fiction, The Secret Service received very little critical reaction except for a short enthusiastic review in Britain’s The Independent. The national attention to serious literary works (never a loud voice) had clearly dwindled in only a few years.
I am terribly interested in your comments about how you and Tom share your writing in process. I had intended from the beginning to ask about what seems to those of us who are on the outside looking in as one of the most perfect relationships possible: both you and Tom have somewhat similar attractions to various literary genres, and both of you, in your writings, are remarkable stylists. You both also embrace not only tradition but are excitingly involved in what Tom has described in several small books, as “friction,” fictions that work with or against formal structures in ways similar to groups like Oulipo. You apparently both love to travel, having spent long periods of time in Morocco and Central America. And both of you, being well educated, are fluent in French. The empathy between the two of you appears to the outsider to be very special. I love my companion Howard, who is also a writer, but he certainly is not always entirely sympathetic to my kind of writing. Might you wish to comment of this?
And speaking of French and its influences, did your next collection, Stories Out of Omarie of 1994, based on the lays of Marie de France, begin out of concerns similar to those of your exploration of the Grimm Brothers? In these stories, on the other hand, I see a much more detailed narrative intertwining, almost like the Arabic patterns you describe in one of your stories. Here your tales seem far more dense and less capricious (and I do not use that word negatively) than the tales of The Sea-Rabbit. In Omarie your long tales seem almost inevitable.
WW: The reaction—or lack of it—to The Secret Service was extremely disappointing. Fortunately, a few of my friends brought in positive verdicts, which convinced me I hadn’t failed. There was one review, quite negative, in Publishers’ Weekly, that found a percipient reader in the writer Henry Wessells, who was then doing some programming for WKCR and editing a wonderful little magazine called Temporary Culture. Convinced that the reviewer had misunderstood the book, Henry ordered it and thereafter became one of its greatest advocates. It found its warmest reception in the science fiction/fantasy world. I was pleased to have reached that readership, but it wasn’t the one I’d been hoping for. I began to see how completely polarized the American fiction-reading audience was.
Meeting Tom was my great piece of luck. A mutual friend had shown him the first part of The Secret Service. I suppose that if Tom hadn’t liked it, we might not have met, but our friend, perhaps knowing how important the literary taste test would be, put that first. From the first week that we met (this was January 1978), we started writing together. Every day we would set ourselves a problem, write for about an hour, and then read the results to each other. I learned so much. Tom came up with ideas based in Renaissance allegory and rhetoric, such as the paysage moralisé. Sometimes we’d take a photograph or painting of a figure, and tell a story from its point of view. We kept up the writing exercises for years, and were very strict about it, even sticking to the routine on family visits. We also, of course, gave each other books to read (the first one I got was Beckett’s The Lost Ones). So although we initially shared a common taste for the classics and a disdain for some of America’s most popular novelists, we also helped each other to grow into new tastes.
To this day I have not met anyone else with whom I can have such—serious? profound? far-reaching?—literary conversations. To begin with, no one seems to have read the books, certainly not with such deep attention. Those of Tom’s students who read this will know what I mean.
Some difficult things have contributed to our closeness. One was the utter opposition of his family to our relationship. Another was the complete absence in the so-called literary world of anyone with whom either of us could discuss what we were doing. The poets considered narrative second-rate and couldn’t be bothered to read anything that might change their minds. The interesting fiction writers who had not given up writing lived far away from New York. The fact that we had both spent time in Europe as children also contributed to our closeness. For both of us, growing up in the 1950s in America, Europe became a kind of ideal landscape, of fascinating things to see, do and eat. We both feel comfortable traveling and indeed seek out the strangeness of truly foreign surroundings. Finally, we’ve both been willing to make the well-being of the other of paramount concern. It’s easy to say, but in practice requires a certain ruthlessness. Rilke had the perfect phrase for it: to make yourselves “the guardians of each others’ solitude.”
I am not fluent in French—I wish I were! —but it is certainly the language I feel most at home in after English. In 1986 we spent a long summer in Paris, and during that time Tom gave me Marie de France to read. You are right to link it to The Sea-Rabbit, and some of the same concerns with history were in play. But because Marie’s poems (as they are in Old French) all deal with the experience of love, I set myself the problem of figuring out what love is, as though it were an extraordinary animal I had heard about and just discovered. It was an excellent excuse to read through the literature of love, courtly and otherwise, looking to learn from Stendhal, Chrétien de Troyes, Barthes, Shakespeare, the Brontës, Plato, Donne and so many others what the phenomenon is and how to understand it. I came to the conclusion, through analyzing Marie’s poems and revising them, that love is a form of extremely compressed narrative, an unwilled and often unwilling act of the imagination. Each of the tales explores some aspect of the way love and narrative intertwine with each other, how one cannot exist without the other, how they are two faces of the same being. The inevitability you remark on is certainly an aspect of love, one that lends itself beautifully to its manifestation as narrative. On a more mundane level, I had thought, here are some sexy stories that revise a major female writer of the Middle Ages, surely this will be of interest to many readers. But in fact, the book went entirely unnoticed, much more so than The Secret Service. I might have dropped it down a well. Certainly this contributed to my turning away from fiction later on, something I have always felt sad about.

DM: We all felt sad about that decision, and I attempted to convince you, if you recall, not to give up fiction; but I also understood your frustrations. They were mine as well. And I feel things have only gotten worse in the years since—but then as we age most of us generally feel things are falling apart. I try to resist that.
Fortunately, you continued writing, creating entirely new works that related to fiction, biography, criticism, and other genres in new ways.
If I recall correctly, My Man & Other Critical Fictions began with an essay-review you wrote on the works of Harry Mathews, in which you used a collage of his own language to comment on the works. That book also contained pieces on Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, Ana-Maria Ortese’s wonderful The Iguana, and other writers. The forms and languages of these pieces were truly radical, as was your approach to the “fiction” Blue Fire, a work that, while still telling a memorable story, consisted of quotes from biographies and other commentaries about the noted nineteenth century child murder of Savill Kent, and a seemingly related work, Hysterical Operators, a “critical fiction” about the “missing hours” of that murder. All three of these are what I might describe as breakthrough works in the sense that, to my knowledge, there are no other works quite like them. Although we can point to writers who might have influenced your writing—Roussel for example—I think that these are truly original contributions which take most readers, I presume, some time to assimilate. Even I, in my review of Blue Fire, had to rethink my conditioned ways of approaching narrative. Here was a story that could not be truly told, because it was never completely comprehended. How do you tell such a tale?
Might you describe how these works came into being?
WW:   I did listen to your counsel, Douglas, as I always do on such matters. I had already begun, a few years before Stories Out of Omarie appeared, another novel, this one based on true events, the case of Constance Kent and “the Great Crime of 1860.” I worked on it for several years and then experienced a real crisis (which I have written about elsewhere), about the ethical nature of what I was doing. To put it briefly, I realized that turning Constance Kent’s story into an allegory of my own preoccupations was a kind of crime of narcissism. So I stopped working on the novel and did a lot of reading in an attempt to understand the difference between history and fiction, between historical truth and fictional truth. The last bit of the novel had taken off in an interesting formal direction, and I came to feel that that section, which reconstructs the killing of the child, was the only piece worth saving. I called it “Hysterical Operators: The Inspector of Factories Visits the Lover of Melodrama.”
So, I had put the novel aside, but I had to keep writing, so I started playing around with shorter pieces. I had signed up for a month-long NEH (National Endowment for Humanities) seminar on Conrad, and at the end I was supposed to write an essay on a topic of my choice. I didn’t feel that an essay could encapsulate my thought, so I asked the seminar leader for permission to use Conrad’s language to produce a critique. The resulting piece was “My Man,” my first critical fiction, about the character Martin Decoud in Nostromo. The piece is a cut-up, but a directed one that replaces the expository approach to argument with a narrative and poetic one. Also, I had adopted the hypothesis that every text contains its own critique, the way, to use Michelangelo’s notion of concetto, every block of marble contains a statue whose existence the sculptor must sense and liberate. This procedure seemed to work, so I produced another critical fiction, about Olaudah Equiano’s lost polar journal. Instead of using Equiano’s language, I used the language from polar journals contemporary with his voyage.
This all happened around 1993. At the same time I was asked to write an essay about Harry Mathews for Parnassus: Poetry in Review. I proposed the critical fiction form as an alternative and the editor accepted it. For that piece, because so many books were involved, I decided to create a landscape out of the aspects of Mathews’ books that had most intrigued me. I made my narrator a scientist/explorer relating what he finds while traveling through this landscape. This critical fiction resembled a story more than a prose poem, but I added footnotes throughout so readers could turn to the book and page “discussed.” Every author or book I have treated in the mode of critical fiction has demanded a different approach. I try to create a form which itself comments on the literary subject. Thus, for the pre-Shakespearean character of Cordeilla, I wrote a play, a Steinian one, using some of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s text, and so on.
As for my stalled novel, I tried very hard just to close the door on it and chalk the years wasted up to something-or-other, but the material had sunk its claws too deep. I realized I had to find a way to extricate myself from it or I would never be able to move on. A completely different approach seemed necessary. With the help of a grant from the Lounsbery Foundation, I went to England and followed Constance Kent’s trail, exploring the houses in which she lived and where the domestic tragedy unfolded, photographing mosaics that she had had a part in creating while in prison, and going through the relevant files in the Public Record Office. I also read though the books she was known to have read, and others published between 1860 and 1865, gathering passages that had some congruence to aspects of the crime and the trial. Then I developed a formal structure, composed in part of mesostics (slightly different from those used by Cage in “Roaratorio”) and partly of texts and images arranged according to a numerical algorithm (a more detailed explanation can be found on my website). I had been reading the works of the Oulipo since the late 80s and I felt I was using their approach if not their ideas. The idea of creating a story out of pieces of texts contemporary to a subject had come to me through reading Paul Metcalf, whose books you, Douglas, had sent me while we were living in Morocco.
So the shift in direction happened quite organically. I certainly had nothing to lose by being more radical. And though I have my doubts about the intrinsic value of these works, I hope that I have mapped out some new avenues of approach that other writers will be able to use.

DM: I’d forgotten your British travels, but I recall now how remarkably thorough and intense I felt your research was. It was rewarded by such an absolutely fascinating critical text, where there are no answers, but several possibilities of truth.
Your writings I realize, now that I’ve heard you talk about them, are all built around brilliant strategies that seek to uncover the form that best relates to the subjects and issues of your literary endeavors. I think there are few writers—a major exception being Gertrude Stein, who one might argue explored nearly every genre in her attempts to communicate how life in the twentieth century might be perceived—who worked in this manner. Earlier in this interview you described yourself as always “making things,” which is another way, perhaps, of describing your process of creating structures appropriate to revealing your various topics. I presume you’re proceeding in a similar pattern for your newest work-in-progress, “Sexual Stealing,” on the Gothic novel, a section of which has been published in my on-line magazine EXPLORINGfictions [and recently in 3:AM Magazinehere].
WW: Yes, the approach is similar. The piece on your blog presents many of my ideas about Gothic Literature in the traditional expository manner. I have long been fascinated and, frankly, somewhat appalled, to watch how certain texts— Lovecraft’s stories being the most obvious example—have moved over the course of my lifetime from the extreme fringe of literary taste to the center; and how “Gothic” in so many cultural manifestations has overtaken, and even swamped, Western sensibilities. I couldn’t help feeling that something very large was missing from the standard account of the origins of Gothic literature, an account that singles out the French Revolution and German Romanticism as its primary impetus. So I began reading through the works of the first Gothic novelists (Walpole, Lewis, Beckford and Radcliffe), and in doing so noticed a pattern which I call “sexual stealing”, that is, the unlawful appropriation of libidinized “objects.” The objects were sometimes living bodies, sometimes treasure or works of art, sometimes property or inheritance, virginity, freedom, life itself, and so on. Because such appropriations fill our world, escalating massively in American consciousness during the nightmare years of the Bush/Cheney presidency, an explosion and deepening of Gothic horror made perfect sense as a symptomatic reaction to, and rebellion against, a social transformation ordinary people have been powerless to stop. And when you take the long view of American literature, and consider this country’s history in relation to “sexual stealing,” it is no wonder Gothic goes straight back to the source, to our first novelist, Charles Brockden Brown. I had learned during this bout of reading that the books I’ve been referring to were originally dubbed “terrorist literature,” an epithet we might do well to revive, as it seems so astonishingly prescient of where we are now.
So, I was thinking, all throughout the writing of Blue Fire (my book about Constance Kent) about how writers, particularly very gifted young ones (Lewis, Beckford and Mary Shelley) respond to types of social stress for which they can find no ready vocabulary. It seemed to me that the first works of Gothic fiction came into being by doing just that. If you look at the language, independent of character, plot, and setting, certain preoccupations appear again and again. The mesostic constraint (as I use it, that is, taking one word from each line of text, skipping no lines) allows you to zero in on these preoccupations. When I tried the method on Beckford’s Vathek, I immediately found an anxiety about race, both black and “Indian.” In reading Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteriesof Udolpho (which takes place in mainland Europe), I had been struck by how often the word “plantation” appeared. And in all the books, blackness, torture, absolute power within a walled-off domain, recur again and again. Incomprehensibly, most of the scholarly criticism ignored the fact that two of the four seminal Gothic authors, Lewis and Beckford, owned huge sugar plantations in Jamaica, with many human beings numbered among their “property.” I guessed that the anxieties given release in these authors’ books bore at least as much relation to what was going on in the Caribbean as to political and literary events in Europe.
So, in “listening” to the preoccupations embedded in the texts, and isolating them in fragments, I found a broken picture of eighteenth-century chattel slavery as practiced in those islands, on plantations of whose nature all four novelists were aware. What I have been doing in the book I call Sexual Stealing has been to arrange the fragments of voice and message, derived through the mesostic constraint, so that a coherent albeit fractured picture emerges. I have intercut my derived text with images and quotations from contemporary documents alluding to Maroon Wars (1665-1796), the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) and plantation life in general.

DM: For years and years you and Tom lived in a beautiful condominium on West End Avenue in Manhattan. I visited you there many times. Over the past five or so years you and Tom have made a significant change in your life (one also made by many of my writer friends) by moving to Brooklyn. And there you both have become very involved with the gallery and art space, Proteus Gowanus. Can you tell me a little about any changes this may have made in your lives?
WW: The change has been entirely positive. Life in Manhattan was profoundly lonely for me as a writer, even though I had lived there all my life, and thought for a long time I would never live anywhere else. But for a writer such as myself, who transgresses genre along more than one boundary in an entirely intuitive way, the Manhattan literary world was a wasteland. It was, and perhaps still is, divided up into clans, each one obsessed with its own territory, ideology and lineage. Throughout my contact with it, it seemed that at every turn people were primarily interested in power, not writing. Nothing else could explain the amount of hypocrisy on display or the number of lies told about inferior work. Fortunately, I have always had many friends who are visual artists, and I have almost always worked in some advisory capacity with some gallery or other. This, and some collaborations, particularly with the artist Florence Neal, have helped mitigate my loneliness and to some degree replaced the company of colleagues in my own métier.
Two things happened to interrupt this long period of literary isolation. First, in the spring of 2006, I attended the &Now Conference for Innovative Writing at Lake Forest College, and there met quite a few writers, some of whom had been published by you, Douglas, under the Sun & Moon imprint, who shared my dissatisfaction with the American literary scene. Indeed they had started &Now in response to their frustrations. This was tremendously affirming, especially since so much of their work met my standards of literary excellence. Second, in 2008, I met the artist Sasha Chavchavadze, who, with her husband P. K. Ramani, had founded Proteus Gowanus, “an interdisciplinary gallery and reading room,” in an old box factory on the Gowanus Canal. Sasha was gathering work for a show to be called “Library.” I told her about the chained libraries we had seen in England, and before the evening was over she asked me to be “a library correspondent” for that show. The association quickly deepened and developed in the direction of publishing. Tom and I realized immediately how special and indeed revolutionary Proteus Gowanus was, and decided to move to Brooklyn to be closer to it. [Proteus Gowanus closed its doors in 2015 but most of its projects continue to operate in other spaces throughout Brooklyn and Queens.]
I never would have believed that relocating from one borough to another could make such a difference in my life. I have certainly met more seriously open-minded creative people in five years in Brooklyn than in the previous thirty in Manhattan. Tom and I now run two projects under the gallery’s umbrella: Proteotypes, the gallery’s publishing arm, which rethinks gallery initiatives in the form of books, and also prints pamphlets of an innovative literary nature, and the Writhing Society, a weekly salon/class devoted to writing with constraints. Proteus is run and supported by artists who have rejected the art world and the gallery model as currently constituted. I feel I am watching the evolution of a new kind of art space, one devoted to making sense of the world and how responsibly to be in it, rather than to scoring points in some hierarchical academic game. So although I have still not really found a “literary world,” I have found a context in which I feel respected and happy. A happy ending, or rather, stopping place for the moment. - ww.3ammagazine.com/3am/art-writing-and-the-untellable-douglas-messerli-interviews-wendy-walker/






For an interview with Henry Wessells and Wendy Walker on Jorge Luis Borges, click here:
http://criticalfiction.net/wordpress/?p=160




Essays
Imagination and Prison
This version of the introduction to Blue Fire, concentrating on process,  was published in Narrative Power:Encounters, Celebrations, Struggles,  ed. L.Timmel Duchamp. Download the essay (pdf)




Sexual Stealing: On the Gothic Novel
This essay presents some of the material I discovered while researching my work-in-progress, the poetic nonfiction Sexual Stealing (see below). I discuss Beckford’s and Lewis’s homosexuality as an ancillary source of stress driving the creation of the Gothic novel, and the political trauma behind the works of Charles Brockden Brown, America’s first novelist, another master of the Gothic. The bibliography may be useful to the reader who wishes to delve further.View the essay




Herzog’s Aguirre
“Herzog’s Aguirre” (1992) was written for an anthology, never realized, of essays by writers on particular films. The selection of the film was left up to the writer.Download the essay (pdf)


Balthus’ Picture-Book
Balthus’ Picture-Book, four essays on that painter’s immersion in narrative, offers a reading of the major paintings and some minor ones, as well as two sets of illustrations. I wrote these essays in response to the retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1984, and to satisfy myself that the unusually widespread puritanical reaction to the work (revived in Metropolitan’s 2013 exhibition title, “Balthus: Cats and Girls– Paintings and Provocations”) was invalid.
The first essay presents the scaffolding of ideas that Balthus used and upon which he endlessly elaborated. The second goes further along that road, dealing primarily with his “self-portraits.” The third essay analyzes his illustrations for Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and the fourth looks at his childhood production, the picture book  Mitsou, while using it as a lens to consider some more paintings.
My attempts over the years to publish these essays failed partly over the prohibitive cost of image reproduction. I have tried to obviate the problem here by making the work available but not for sale, and by providing URLs for all the images discussed, insofar as that was possible.  The images discussed in each essay and their URLs are listed at the end of each essay.
An abbreviated version of the first essay, without images was published in Ironwood.
Download Balthus’ Picture-Book, Chapter 1: Parsing the Enigma
Download Balthus’ Picture-Book,  Chapter 2: The Self-Portraits
Download Balthus’ Picture-Book, Chapter 3: The Illustrations for Wuthering Heights
Balthus’ Picture-Book, Chapter 4 to follow


Work in Progress
Sexual Stealing
Sexual Stealing is a long work in poetic nonfiction that uses a constraint I first practiced in Blue Fire (Proteotypes, 2009). Authors often produce texts that know more than they do; the text’s greater knowledge of itself can be elicited by submitting the whole to some method of thinning such as mesostic selection.  Sexual Stealing has grown out of my understanding that British Gothic fiction of the late eighteenth century found the source of its horror in plantation slavery, specifically the sugar plantations of Jamaica and San Domingo (Haiti). William Beckford and Matthew “Monk” Lewis both drew their fortunes from such plantations. The violence with which slaves had their freedom and every libidinal object taken from them (hence my title) was displaced to other settings—the Orient, Italy—but the language of the plantation is there to be found. I have extracted it from Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, taking one word from every line of that novel, in order, and forming a secondary text that I have then tried to amplify and contextualize with texts and images from my research. Excerpts have appeared in I’ll Drown My Book: ConceptualWriting by Women, ed. Bergvall, Browne and Place, and in Re:Telling, ed. W.Walsh. The excerpt offered below consists of the first ten pages of the book. Download an excerpt


Cut-Ups
Cut-ups provide an instant closed system of lexical elements. One can shape the system by choosing to use one text alone or to merge several.
“In the beginning was my wishing… ”


In the example offered here, a collaboration at a distance with the writer Gretchen Henderson, I took one of the texts at her Galerie de Difformité and cut it up into segments of two, three or four words. Gretchen’s text (which can be downloaded here and in print from Lake Forest College Press) is itself built around quotations using the word you. Limited to her language and the language she had appropriated, I let the segments magnetize each other.
It was with the cut-up form that I first tested my idea that every literary work contains its own critique, like a statue hidden in a block of marble.Download In the beginning…


Constrained Writing
The primary value of constrained writing lies in the way it liberates the writer from her agenda, literary superego and the ever-replaying internal tape loop. You cannot intend to say any particular thing when you write with constraints; you see what the constraint allows you to say. With many constraints you start by finding the words or phrases that obey the arbitrary rule, and then arrange them according to how they magnetize each other. The great delight is one of surprise and of discovering what you didn’t know you knew.
Constraints also offer a way to think about literary form that is not tied to and enforced by traditional merchandising categories, that escapes political ideologies set into ordinary language-uses. When you have familiarized yourself with some of the better-known ones, you are ready to deploy them, or some variation of them, or simply what you have learned from them about language on another occasion. Lipograms (writing with a restricted set of letters) sensitize you to the emotive power of certain phonetic sounds by completely eliminating others; these musical properties, once learned, can then be deployed for dramatic effect in so-called “normal” writing. Filigranes make you see that every word implicitly contains numerous stories. “The Only the Wholly the” shows how much thinking is done independent of identity and description; and so on.
The piece printed below was written using “The Prisoner’s Constraint.” The writer limits herself to letters without risers (such as h, b, k) and descenders (such as p, j, g). Imagine Houdini tied up in his strait jacket, curled up inside a box.
I met the poet Abdelkrim Tabal through my friend Rabia Zbakh during the year I was living in Morocco. Tabal, one of Morocco’s best-known and best-loved poets, is unusual among his colleagues in that he writes in Arabic, not French. His work is closely tied to the winding streets of Chefchaouen, its mountain locale, Andalusian-style houses and revolutionary history. He composes his poems as he wanders the narrow streets; to walk is an essential part of his process.
After I returned home, Rabia and I decided to collaborate on a translation of Distant Flames, one of Tabal’s more recent books. Another friend, the artist and printmaker Florence Neal, thought we should turn it into an artist’s book. The resulting bilingual text, some pages of which are shown below, was exhibited at the Center for Book Arts and Proteus Gowanus in NYC and at the Atelier Lacourière-Frélaut in Paris. The translations were also published in 26, Circumference and Marginalia.
With Tabal’s permission I have made available a pdf of the poems shown below with their translations. Download Distant Flames excerpt.

Other Projects

The Writhing Society is a salon/class devoted to writing with constraints. It meets weekly at Proteus Gowanus and is open to anyone interested in language and serious play. We explore constraints invente by the Oulipo and others, and invent some of our own. View The Writhing Society Blog

Brian Catling, The Vorrh, Vintage, 2015.
www.briancatling.net/index.php


Prepare to lose yourself in the heady, mythical expanse of The Vorrh, a daring debut that Alan Moore has called “a phosphorescent masterpiece” and “the current century's first landmark work of fantasy.”

Next to the colonial town of Essenwald sits the Vorrh, a vast—perhaps endless—forest. It is a place of demons and angels, of warriors and priests. Sentient and magical, the Vorrh bends time and wipes memory. Legend has it that the Garden of Eden still exists at its heart. Now, a renegade English soldier aims to be the first human to traverse its expanse. Armed with only a strange bow, he begins his journey, but some fear the consequences of his mission, and a native marksman has been chosen to stop him. Around them swirl a remarkable cast of characters, including a Cyclops raised by robots and a young girl with tragic curiosity, as well as historical figures, such as writer Raymond Roussel and photographer and Edward Muybridge.  While fact and fictional blend, and the hunter will become the hunted, and everyone’s fate hangs in the balance, under the will of the Vorrh.

Foreword by Alan Moore:

Brian Catling’s entrancing novel comes with blasts of high praise from two heralds of the Great Literary Reconciliation, Iain Sinclair and Alan Moore, who have long promoted the notion that popular genres – especially fantasy, with its sophisticated lexicon of narrative imagery – can be the seedbed for a new type of literary fiction. In the 1960s, this was the hope expressed by the likes of Ballard, Aldiss and others of us around New Worlds magazine who despaired of conventional literature’s inability to engage substantially with the modern world and thought to experiment with the subject matter and methods of imaginative fiction. A generation or so later Salman Rushdie and Michael Chabon, in particular, expressed similar frustrations and solutions, only to be attacked by those US academics whose livings were perhaps most threatened by the possibility that they were right.
Brian Catling has spent much of his creative life blending and bending. A performance poet, sculptor, novelist and sometime academic, he riffs here off the French surrealist Raymond Roussel, whose idiosyncratic book Impressions of Africa also featured a forest called the Vorrh. Thinly disguised, Roussel is a major character in what is one of the most original works of visionary fiction since Peake or Carpentier. Like them it is sui generis and like them will probably influence many future works of imaginative fiction.
The Vorrh is a semi-tropical forest older than mankind. It is immeasurable and apparently has no centre. Somewhere within it lies the Garden of Eden and near it roam Adam, Eve and their children, degenerate cannibals, or so some believe. Every story about the Vorrh is true and untrue, every narrative embodies countless other narratives, all taking place within the forest. The Vorrh, like so much in this novel, is sentient. It might be intelligent. At its southern edge it permits a few to hack a wedge in and take its timber. A great, decaying Middle European city, Essenwald, stands at the edge, existing chiefly on the timber trade. Large mansions display the wealth of its founders. A train makes regular journeys carrying a few tourists and explorers and near-human native slaves in and logs out. The slaves are unnaturally passive: only two Europeans at the log-front know the disgusting, unthinkable secret of making them work. They are tainted, addicted, morally and physically corrupt.                         
Meanwhile, the Bowman, armed with a massive Gabbet-Fairfax Mars pistol and his sentient bow and arrows, seeks to cross the Vorrh, while a human native, Tsungali, tracks him, wanting to kill him with the Lee-Enfield rifle issued when Tsungali was a colonial policeman. All the weapons have names and personalities. Ghosts and dreams inform them. The Bowman cannot remember if he has crossed the forest or not. Mysteries proliferate. Every image has at least one meaning. Slowly, various narratives come together.
By the time “the Frenchman”, evidently the neurasthenic Roussel, arrives on the scene, followed a little later by the experimental photographer Eadweard Muybridge, the book has acquired some of the best qualities of a Pynchon novel. Indeed, Pynchon is Catling’s nearest comparison. His themes are the many forms of psychic and physical colonisation. Combining several different kinds of narrative, as well as referencing many more, Catling borrows from popular and marginal sources to tell a story which has all Peake’s remorseless drive and remains in the mind the whole time one is away from it.
The novel is written in good, muscular language as original as its imagery; it contains paragraphs and observations you continually want to quote. Like an early Ballard novel, The Vorrh does not promote exoticism for its own sake yet is full of wonderful, telling imagery and a strong sense of resolution. For all its page-turning story, it is a poet’s novel, a serious piece of writing. I understand there are to be two sequels. I can barely wait to read the next one. - Michael Moorcock


Before Brian Catling's debut novel, The Vorrh, was published in his native England in 2012, he'd already racked up an impressive list of credentials — just not as a fiction writer. His poetry, sculpture, paintings and performance-art pieces have been getting international acclaim for decades.
Catling turned to The Vorrh at the urging of friend and fellow polymath Iain Sinclair, and his first foray into long-form fiction does not disappoint. Instead, it feels like the midcareer highpoint of an established novelist, full of lyrical subtlety, piercing clarity and an understated assurance. What it doesn't possess is restraint: The Vorrh— which is finally being published in the U.S. — is a sprawling, omnivorous novel that gobbles up history, geography, mythology and fantasy, then delicately chews it into a rarified pulp.
Like Jeff VanderMeer's recent Southern Reach Trilogy, The Vorrh takes place in a fictional area that exists within our world, nestled in a spot on the map that's never specifically identified. Catling's mysterious domain, which shares the name of his book, is a vast, uncharted forest somewhere in Africa — but other than that, the reader is left deliciously disoriented. Outside of the Vorrh sits another fictional place, the city of Essenwald, which was relocated from Europe, brick by brick, as a symbol of colonial dominance.
The era is post-World War I; the Vorrh sits on the cusp of antiquity and modernity. For reasons that aren't entirely clear, Peter Williams — an English veteran of the French trenches — ventures into the Vorrh alone. But he's not going unaided: His lover, a woman named Irrinipeste who belongs to a native tribe called the True People, has died, and Peter gruesomely fashions a bow out of her sinews and bones. The arrows he shoots from this bow guide him as he treks deeper into the forest that no one has ever reached the heart of — at least no one who has ever lived to tell the tale.
Catling's plot and prose, like his setting, are dreamlike and hyper-vivid. His frequent and liquid shifts in point-of-view only add to that kaleidoscopic vision, and his surrealistic style dovetails empathetically with the source of his inspiration: The real-life surrealist writer Raymond Roussel, whose 1910 novel Impressions of Africa briefly mentions a forest called the Vorrh. In this sense, The Vorrh is not only a work of alternative history, but of alternate literature; Catling builds his imaginary story of the conception of Impressions of Africa into his Joseph Conrad-esque voyage into the unknown. He also intricately weaves in half-true, half-invented lives of historical figures such as pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge and Sir William Withey Gull, the physician to Queen Victoria (and suspected Jack the Ripper). Roussel becomes a central character, rendering The Vorrh a tangled, dizzying dialogue with the work that inspired it.
There are a staggering number of elements to juggle, and Catling practically levitates them. As Peter's journey becomes stranger, so does The Vorrh's voluminous cast. Ishmael is a Cyclops — literally, a man with one large eye in the center of his forehead — who seeks to track down Peter in the Vorrh and therefore further his own quest to discover his origins, as abominable as he fears they may be. In Catling's world, a miraculous healing touch becomes a plague of unchecked beneficence, where primitive tribes of cannibals do not adhere to the racist stereotypes of the time, and where angels must bury themselves under the soil in order to sleep. None of these wonders is there for show; they each play a part, sometimes pivotal and sometimes peripheral, in the teeming conceptual ecosystem of The Vorrh.
For all its eye-gouging, mind-bending spectacle, The Vorrh makes room for hushed poignancy and philosophical heft. Ishmael is a man-monster as compelling as Frankenstein's, and the nature of perception, time and the ghosts we both battle and become are tenderly explored. "They say that the forest lives on in memory, and that it devours the memory of men," Ishmael says to Peter, who has long ago forgotten how long he has been in the Vorrh, or even why he's there. It's a testament to Catling's skill as a sculptor of words that such otherworldly ideas and images not only connect, but resonate to the bone. - Jason Heller


as B. Catling built a novel? As well as being a poet and novelist, Brian Catling is an English sculptor and performance artist, and this shows: He has not constructed a book so much as a happening, established the framework for a literary situation in which anything may occur. His novel The Vorrh is bold, shaggy, and surprising; often beautiful, arresting, or both. It has its problems, but they have nothing to do with timidity.


Brian Catling’s The Vorrh is a sprawling fantasy set in colonial Africa, populated by historical figures such as surrealist writer Raymond Roussel, Edward Muybridge, Sir William Gull, and Sarah Winchester. And then there is the Vorrh itself, the ancient, eldritch forest that dominates the novel:
For years, it was said that nobody had ever reached the centre of the Vorrh. Or, if they had, then they had never returned. Business expanded and flourished on its southernmost outskirts, but nothing was known of its interior, except myth and fear. It was the mother of forests; ancient beyond language, older than every known species, and, some said, propagator of them all, locked in its own system of evolution and climate.
Much of the action of the novel takes place in the town of Essenwald on the edge of the forest, a town whose compound name of “essen” (to eat) and “Wald” (forest) already indicates that much of what enters the Vorrh may never escape (or at least, may only emerge utterly transformed). “Essenwald is a library to the forest, an appendage. It was attracted here when the Vorrh was already ancient,” another character tells Roussel before guiding him through the forest. The Vorrh may contain Eden within it, or the first man. Saints may live in the Vorrh; monsters certainly do. Most of the characters are not just fictional, but fantastic: from the robotic nursemaids that raise the Cyclops Ishmael, to the child-witch Irripineste and Peter Williams, the man who shapes her body into a bow to carry with him through the forest, to Cyrena, the woman whose blindness is inadvertently healed by Ishmael under highly unusual circumstances.
The Vorrh opens with Peter Williams following the orders of his dead lover Irripineste to form her corpse into a longbow that he will use to carve his path through the Vorrh. Meanwhile, Tsungali, who has previously crossed paths with Williams during their involvement in Tsungali’s people’s uprising against the British colonizers, is hired to kill him. In Essenwald, Raymond Roussel arrives with his entourage and meets a beautiful young man who promises to escort him through the Vorrh, and the Cyclops Ishmael is “liberated” from his robot nursemaids by the debutante daughter of local industrialists. Each finds themselves drawn to the forest, where their paths cross with each others’ and with a host of repulsive and fascinating secondary characters both human and not.
Reading The Vorrh may leave you with a strange sense of unease, one not entirely sourced in the body horror and ominous vegetation of the novel itself. The Vorrh joins the numerous works of fantasy of the past decade that have approached the history of colonialism and its attendant horrors, such as N. K. Jemisin’s Inheritance series or the Weird fiction of China Miéville. Many of them have worked through lush, decadent language, horrifying and glorious by turns; The Vorrh is not unique in this regard, either. The sense of unease is not precisely rooted in any of these factors, but rather in what, at times, seems to be an uncomfortable divide between them. This comes out most strongly through the chapters centered on photographer Edward Muybridge, which seem largely disconnected from the main narrative, an intriguing but otherwise inert appendage. Set some thirty years before the rest of the novel, the chapters are intermixed with the rest of the storyline. Yet unlike the rest of the chapters, which focus on specific storylines whose threads weave together at various climactic moments, the characters of Muybridge’s plotline never cross paths with the residents or visitors of Essenwald. Tsungali’s righteous fury at the European colonizers who have stripped his culture bare is thrown into sharp relief by Catling’s characterization of Josephine, the beautiful and mute African psychiatric patient who is described in overtly sexual, exotic, and animalistic terms during her encounter with Muybridge in London.
It could, of course, be argued that the descriptions of Josephine are a result of their narrator, that Edward Muybridge as a historicized figure characterizes Catling’s writing of the characters he encounters, but that argument falls short when confronted with the events within his plotline. Josephine’s violent assault on Muybridge is isolated from the rest of the plotline, and seems to have very little relation to it beyond the possible thematic associations with the Cyclops Ishmael’s sexual development. Ultimately, it remains unclear whether Muybridge’s story affects the rest of the plot at all. Yet many of the plotlines are masterfully interwoven, and characters’ actions — however small — have ramifications that reverberate past their immediate surroundings. Dreamlike and horrifying, The Vorrh is permeated with an ominous power despite its flaws. - Eleanor Gold        


Not a few folks make a meal of it, but the act of differentiating between books good, bad and abundantly ugly is fairly straightforward, I find. Several simple indicators—including care, competence and consistency—suggest which side of the divide to place a particular text. Assuming it surpasses these rudimentary measures, the thing is at least reasonably well written.
It is far harder, however, to pick apart the truly great from the good. There is no steadfast formula to work from, and often no fathomable factor beyond one’s feelings. Be that as it may, where there’s a will, there’s a way. I’m inclined to look for beauty—and indeed, The Vorrh is a beautiful book. So too does a sense of intelligence prove paramount when separating the standard from the remarkable—and Brian Catling’s dark fantasy debut certainly has smarts.
But all other considerations pale, in my eyes, when compared with a book’s ability to surprise. To wit, take the following statement for the compliment it is, rather than the complaint it might be perceived to be: The Vorrh is an exceptionally shocking novel.

By now you must be wondering: what is the Vorrh?
That’s easy. It’s a forest — albeit an imaginary forest, conceived by the poet and playwright Raymond Roussel (a fictionalised version of whom features hugely herein) in his 1910 novel, Impressions of Africa.
Next question!
Do I hear a ‘What’s so extraordinary about that, then?’
Well… that would be telling. Nothing and everything is, equally. But here, a hint:
“For years, it was said that nobody had ever reached the centre of the Vorrh. Or, if they had, then they had never returned. Business expanded and flourished on its most southern outskirts, but nothing was known of its interior, except myth and fear. It was the mother of forests; ancient beyond language, older than every known species and, some said, propagator of them all, locked in its own system of evolution and climate.
[…]
“Dizzying abnormalities of compass and impossibilities of landing made it a pilot’s and navigator’s nightmare. All its pathways turned into overgrowth, jungle and ambush. The tribes that were rumoured to live there were barely human — some said the anthropogphagi still roamed. Creatures beyond hope. Heads growing below their shoulders. Horrors.”
At bottom, then, the Vorrh is a Bermuda Triangle of sorts, practically uncharted and wholly unknowable; a landlocked expanse of eerie trees and creepy creatures which almost all of our narrators find themselves drawn towards, for one reason or another.
There’s the basement-bred cyclops, Ishmael, who aims to escape the hatefulness of humanity after being brutalised during his first trip into town. Hot on his heels comes Ghertrude Tulp, his conflicted lover-come-carer, and alongside her, another of Ishmael’s admirers: blind since birth, Cyrena Lohr is suddenly sighted after a dalliance with the one-eyed man. Now she worships him, from afar if not necessarily nearby.
Then there’s the aforementioned Frenchman, initially unnamed but eventually unmasked as the creator of this forest in actual fact. In the less literal fiction, Raymond Roussel visits the Vorrh with a perfect specimen of the tribal True People. He imagines it will inspire him, and in its way, it will — but what price enlightenment? One far higher, I fear, than this pilgrim is prepared to pay.
And the book features another almost-anonymous narrator whose identity I’ll refrain from giving away. To boot, it begins with him—in of one of the year’s most memorable scenes—as he carves a bow out of the bones of his late lover, strung with sinew, and fashions arrows from Este’s organs. From here on out, we know him as the Bowman. Sudden onset amnesia means he knows little else about himself—and we are as in the dark as he—except that “everything in his life was a mystery […] his only purpose seemed to be to travel through the Vorrh.”
There are, however, powerful forces set against him—not least the assassin Tsungali, who half-remembers his target from an impossible encounter decades earlier—and others who oppose those who oppose our fair wayfarer. Sidrus, for instance:
“He had to find [a] way of stopping the wretched Englishman from being butchered in the Vorrh as he tried to pass through it for a second time. Nobody had ever accomplished such a thing; the great forest protected itself by draining and erasing the souls of all men; all except this one, apparently, who walked through it with impunity, even appearing to gain benefit from it. Sidrus did not know how or why this unique possibility had manifested itself, although he guessed that the witch child of the True People had worked some blasphemous magic with her protégé. What he did know was that if the Englishman passed through the forest again, he alone would have the opportunity to understand its balance, its future and maybe even its past. Not since Adam had such a single being altered the purpose and the meaning of the Vorrh, and now he was being hunted by a barbaric mercenary.”
Obviously The Vorrh is quite a complex novel, and not always easy to follow, what with its unnamed narrators and its array of peripheral perspectives—I haven’t even mentioned the neurotic photographer Eadweard Muybridge, nor a certain Scotsman—but though the going gets tough, the tough makes for good going soon enough. I’d go so far as to say great, as indicated at the outset of this article. And if its story seems iffy initially, rest assured that things become clearer beyond the book’s fulsome first third, by which point I warrant you’ll be comprehensively caught in the inexorable vortex of The Vorrh.
A large part of its appeal originates with the astonishing setting Catling renders so delicately. Evoking elements of the uncanny, The Vorrh takes place in a landscape like but unlike ours—a vista at once oh so similar, yet distinctly different—giving credence to the awful or else incredible events that occur against it. The author’s worldbuilding is neither overbearing nor too neat and tidy; here Catling’s confidence is clear from the first, thus The Vorhh feels markedly more natural than most fantasy fiction, which I fear tends to fall afoul of one of those two traps. As the author of Voice of the Fire asserts in his involved introduction:
In the literature of the fantastic, almost lost beneath a formulaic lard of dwarves and dragons, it is only rarely that a unique voice emerges with a work of genuine vision to remind the genre of what it should be aspiring to and what it’s capable of doing: a Hope Hodgson, Mervyn Peake or David Lindsay; untamed talents who approach the field as if they’re the first sentient beings to discover it. In Brian Catling’s phosphorescent masterpiece The Vorrh we have […] a brilliant and sustained piece of invention which establishes a benchmark not just for imaginative writing but for the human imagination in itself.”
I couldn’t agree more with Mr. Moore, but if the truth be told, Catling is marginally less successful when it comes to character than he is vis-à-vis the world of The Vorrh. Though the death toll is satisfyingly high, some developments are more substantial than others… yet this is but the beginning of a trilogy, and occasional allowances must be made for multi-volume novels. Narratively, the author somewhat sacrifices accessibility for artistic ambition, likewise frankness for suggestion and impression, but considering Catling’s complementary careers—as a performance artist and erstwhile Professor of Fine Art at Oxford—this is not utterly unexpected, and what plot there is is gripping.
When even the warts of a novel are winning, it’s hard to misunderstand that you have something special on your hands, and The Vorrh is absolutely that. Equal parts dark fantasy and surrealist dream, it is inescapably dense, and unrelentingly intense. Shelve it shoulder to shoulder with 2012’s other most notable novels, be they of the genre or not, then consider carefully which stands lacking in comparison. - Niall Alexander 


The Vorrh is an extremely ambitious book, and one that has garnered a lot attention for its complexity and effortless ability to bend genre labels. Not quite fantasy or mainstream literary fiction, it hovers nebulously somewhere in its own orbit. Catling uses his ample page space to explore a diverse array of themes concerning magic, myth, colonialism, and human nature, with real historical figures and events sprinkled judiciously throughout.
Imagine the Vorrh as a massive, primordial forest that predates the birth of humanity. No one has ever penetrated its core, and civilization comes to an abrupt halt at its shadow. What could be more intriguing than a peek at what lurks inside? The forest is an alien life— a glimpse at a reality where mankind takes a backseat to greater forces. There are a lot of characters in the The Vorrh, but it may be the forest itself that truly dominates as Catling’s most imaginative and vivid creation (although the opening scene of Tsungali making a bow out of his former lover's dead body will definitely stick with me).
There are times when the writing gets a bit carried away with itself. Prepare for a fair amount of this: The black bread and yellow butter had seemed to stare from its plate with mocking intensity, the fruit pulsing and warping into obscene ducts and ventricles.
That’s just a description of breakfast. Sometimes the prose is beautiful, sometimes it’s dense and exhausting. Chapters tend to fluctuate between voices, moving from more matter-of-fact narration to strange and dreamlike fugues.
Between all of the quixotic imagery and high-mindedness, I find myself feeling rather conflicted about The Vorrh. I’m not certain whether to appreciate its originality, or wish that the journey to its center had been less labyrinthine. Inevitably, the most accurate answer is probably both; Catling has written a complicated tale that invokes a complicated response in its readers. But there's no doubt that a real meal can be found here for the curious mind to chew over. - Leah Dearborn      

Brian Catling, The Blindings,  Book Works, 1995.       


‘These texts are lunges to capture handfuls of another time and place while passing through it in the curious guise of a witness to my own crimes.’
‘Looking and writing on the slippery stage of memory is as uncomfortable as it is mysterious, especially when chronicling one's own works.’ – Brian Catling

The Blindings is a description of a group of works and performances made between spring 1993 and winter 1994, revisiting them after the event in order to reconfigure them for the printed page as a modulated sequence of handwriting, description and print.
The texts for The Blindings are handwritten: each of which contains a pronouncement that a fluid, gas, suspension or extract has been injected into the eye; manipulated photographs are used to corroborate the truth of this fiction. A solid sans-serif type is used for the sections of the books that were actually spoken whilst a lighter serif is used to describe the performances and the intentions behind them.




Brian Catling, Several Clouds Colliding, Sternberg Press; Co-published Edition with The Swedenborg Archive, 2013.


philosopher, inventor, mathematician, astronomer and visionary Emanuel Swedenborg is the inspiration behind the London based Swedenborg Society. In this intriguing collection of essays and documentary material from the society s achives, artist/poet Brian Catling and writer/filmmaker Iain Sinclair reveal a secret history of Swedenborg: madman or messiah, you choose. The author performers reconstruct and reflect on the extraordinary events surrounding an exhibition and performance held at the Swedenborg House on February 17, 2010. Catling is known for his teaching at Oxford and exhibitions at the Serpentine and the ICA and Sinclair for his publications and films including Ghost  Milk:  Calling  Time  on  the  Grand  Project (2011): they join forces to create this peculiar but seductively engaging journey into the psycho geography of religious ritual.
                


Poetry books:

2009  A Court of Miracles. Catling compendium. Etruscan Books
2007  Bobby Awl. Etruscan books 
2001 Thyhand  published by Alfred Davis Press.
2001  Large Ghost,  Equipage.2001
2001  Late Harping. Etruscan books 2001
The First London Halo (single book), Bookworks.
Thy hand, Parataxis.
Soundings; A Tractate Of Absence, Matt's Gallery.
Future Exiles, Three London Poets, Paladin Press.
The Stumbling Block, Bookworks.
Boschlog, Few Goats Press,  N.Y.C.



http://www.aktb.no/artists/catling.html
http://www.mattsgallery.org/artists/catling/home.php
http://www.galleri-se.no/artist/catling/
http://www.inglebygallery.com/exhibition_detail.php?id=68





INTERVIEW: Brian Catling Digs Deep Into THE VORRH, What Inspires Him, and More


Brian Catling is a poet, sculptor, performance artist and writer. He is a Professor of Fine Art at The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford.  And, with the publishing of novel The Vorrh (the first in a trilogy) now a novelist whose work has been lauded by fellow Englishman Alan Moore (Watchmen, From Hell, V for Vendetta) with the following kind words:

Nowhere, though, is Catling’s way with literary clay revealed more eloquently than within the genuinely monumental pages of The Vorrh. It’s represented in the trilogy’s enormous mass and in its artful combination of bark, metal, mud and stone to build an edifice inside the reader’s mind; a tactile craftsman’s attitude that’s signalled from an unforgettable opening scene which centres on the manufacture of a legendary bow. The scene in question, from this brief description, might be taken for a standard trope of fantasy and myth that could derive from Tolkien, Robin Hood or Rama, were it not for the material of the item’s manufacture. With this early revelation, the intrigued and startled reader is informed that, if indeed this is a work of fantasy, it is a fantasy quite unlike anything they may have previously encountered in that much-abused and putatively primal genre.
Primal because in this field of things that never happen we can perhaps see the origins of the imagination as a human faculty, and much-abused because of the absurdly limited palette of concepts which have come to represent fantasy’s most identifiable features and markers. By definition, surely every fantasy should be unique and individual, the product of a single vision and a single mind, with all of that mind’s idiosyncrasies informing every atom of the narrative. A genre that has been reduced by lazy stylisation to a narrow lexicon of signifiers … wizards, warriors, dwarves and dragons … is a genre with no room for Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, arguably the earliest picaresque questing fantasy; for David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus with its constantly morphing vistas and transmogrifying characters; for Mervyn Peake’s extraordinary Gormenghast books or for Michael Moorcock’s cut-silk Gloriana. It is certainly a genre insufficient to contain the vegetable eternities of Catling’s Vorrh.

The following questions are based on an ARC of The Vorrh provided by SFSignal, and answered by Mr. Catling view email over several weeks. Lately, I’ve trended toward interviewing Brit authors (see the Moorcock interview); I’m feeling the need to invent a time machine so I can interview Mervyn Peake!

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Larry Ketchersid: You’ve participated in a wide variety of creative endeavors: from performance art to sculpture and poetry. What was your inspiration/motivation to target that creativity toward novel writing?
Brian Catling: The making of objects and the writing of poetry were the major poles in work for a long time. Performance sparked up between them way back in the 80’s. Then making videos joined in the creative scrum and allowed a new voice to appear.
I had made some tentative stabs at writing fiction in the form of long poems themed around imagined installations and acts; In Written Rooms & Pencilled Crimes, chambers and action were described in forensic detail. But the novels never escaped until 2006, even though I had the opening sequence (The making of the bow) and the title of The Vorhh for a long time. I had never got past page three before consigning the multiple attempts to the waste bin. Three things happened to changed that:

• laptops came into being  (a profound invention for a dyslexic cockney stutterer)
• I was inspired by the brilliance of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and
• enraged by the puerile lazy grayness of other less talented contemporary authors.

Together these made a push /pull mechanism that provided the friction to ignited the whole thing. I thought The Vorrh was going to be a slender and obscure surrealist work, so when the 500 pages of The Vorrh appeared I was astonished. When it grew into a trilogy I was shocked. When the next five others books followed it I gave up pretending that I knew what I was doing and gave in to the tide.
LK: CREATIVE SCRUM. As one of the few but growing numbers of Texans that played Rugby, I am familiar with that phrase on many different levels.
As for Inspiration and Enragement as motivators, I can relate; “best selling author” tends these days more to be about marketing than anything else. With self-publishing there is a lot of noise, a lot of volume for readers to sift through…which is both fortunate and unfortunate.
What did you find different about the creative writing process vs. the process/method you pursue in these other areas?
BC: The writing of fiction wiped away the video work, because it was direct and had a kindred narrative potency. It hushed the poetry because it drank deeply from the same blood of mystery and enigma. The sculpture and performance work evolved sideways, so that my obsession with making things and bringing them to life was not compromised by description and the need to explain.

The bow I carry with me, I made of Este.
She died just before dawn, ten days ago. Este had forseen her death while working in our garden, an upcapping of mementum in the afternoon sun.
Este was born a seer and lived in the experience of her departure, a breeze before a wave, before a storm. Seers die in a threefold lapse, from the outside in.
Her long name was Irrinipeste, and she had been bron to Abungu in the Vorrh, the great brooding forest that she said was older than humankind.
We said goodbye during the days leading to her night. Then all of my feelings were put away; there were more important rituals to perform. All this I knew from our first agreement to be together as it had been described, it had been unfolded.
I stood before our wooden table, where her body lay divided and stripped into materials and language. My back and hands ached from the labour of splitting her apart, and I could still hear her words. The calm instructions of my task, embedded with a singsong insistence to erase my forgetfulness. The entire room was covered with blood, yet no insect would trespass this space, no fly would drink her, no ant would forage her marrow. We were sealed against the world during those days, my task determined, basic and kind. (pg. 9)

LK: The ‘making of the bow’ sequence (note: this is the scene that Alan Moore refers to in the prologue excerpt at the beginning of this post) and the title of the VORRH….which came first? I assumed the VORRH came out of Roussel’s poem, but is that the correct assumption?
BC: The making of the Bow and the title were simultaneous . The seeds from which all else grew. Yes the VORRH is from Impression of Africa. Roussel had no real interest in the forest, just a savage backdrop the the events that he invented there.
LK: About the Vorrh (the forest/jungle where the story takes place) itself: The Vorrh appears malevolent, only taking, not giving. Is this related to the Adam myth that permeates the book, that the ultimate gift was thwarted and now taking is now the only way to balance?
BC: A damn good question and a reasonable answer. A few years ago I travelled in the red heart of Australia and came across landscape so ancient that it had not even noticed that humankind existed. A vast total indifference. A system that dealt with itself . I think the VORRH is about like that. Adam, the Tree of Knowledge and Guardian Angels being a graft that did not set. The anthropophagi are closer to be indigenous and even they might be seen as new comers by the trees. I think the balance was never noticed by the VORRH.
LK: What is the time period in which the story takes place? The boatman who takes Williams is described as having been a bargeman in “the Great War half a century earlier”. I assumed that was WWI, and the time was the 1960s. But the historical characters would place it in the late 1800s.
BC: The 1/2 century bit for Paulus is a mistake. I don’t know how I missed that. Thank you for pointing it out. The boatman is a little thumbnail homage to the memory of my old mate Paul Burwell.


LK: Most of the female characters in the book (with the exception of Este I guess) are somewhat trodden upon by the male characters. Is this again a reflection of the VORRH’s malevolence and vindictiveness (Eve forcing Adam to be the “graft that did not set”) or a sign of the timeframe of the book?
BC: It’s both , but I think the men are week and reflecting a time. The women  grow in strength in the next two books they shine and take over.
The graft was not the rib but Gods implanting of generation without knowledge.
Charlotte is treated like shit by Roussell , but I don’t think it makes her weak, the opposite.
LK: The historical characters populating your book are an interesting (and not very well known) lot: Roussell; Eadweard James Muybridge; Sir William Withey Gull (who I believe was not only a noted doctor but also a suspect in the Jack the Ripper murders). Is there a common thread in your career or research that had you bring this eclectic group together in your novel?
BC: You are certainly right about Gull. He also invented the term Anorexia nervosa. I had always had an interest about him. In an early book of Iain Sinclair poems I even used his (then) obscure name as a nom de plume for the drawings I made there. When I was writing the VORRH I told Sinclair about my usage of Muybridge and he dropped the bombshell that it was Gull that Muybridge visited about his head wound after his stage coach accident. That warped the plot and opened a vein into Whitechapel and forced me to extend the surgeon and the photographers relationship. There are suggestion that the Muybridge machine was used in his absence in the Whitechapel room in book 2.
Roussel, Muybridge and Gull overlapped and each created their own version of the time in which they lived , and each invented a disturbing lens in which to view it.
LK:  Dr. Gull and his anorexia patients, and his actions to push those patients into that state, made me want to invent time travel just so I could go back and beat the snot out of him (side note: one of those closest to me suffers from Anorexia, and the thought of a physician experimenting to put women into that state of mind pushes me towards violence). Were those experiments real occurrences that you found in your research, or did you create them? If you create them, what did you use as your point of reference?
BC:  Gull had a series of “private wards” that are not spoken of in biographies but were mentioned in some of the less “official’ ripper books. some of my best ever students (and friends) are anorexic. There is no record of Gull’s research.
LK: The Cyclops, Ishmael, is a fairly central and transformative character. I saw this from one of your performances:


Is there a particular reason for this interest in Cyclopses?


BC: My Cyclops thing first started in the Hungarian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, London. In the dental section, in back from was the tiny head of a human Cyclops birth. Red haired and pickled. A tragic, haunting abnormality that did not survive ( or was not allowed to ) birth. Some years later when making a performance in the London Library a camera caught my reflection bisected in a glass case and I saw the Cyclops again, I could become it. So its mentality, speech and isolation grew from there.
LK:  What can you tell us about the next two books? What are the titles and which characters continue?
BC: V2 is The Erstwhile, V3 The Cloven.  A lot more people and things enter the cast list including Hector Schuman a 72 year old Heidelberg academic who accidentally becomes the seeker of the Erstwhile angels that escaped the VORRH. Ishmael , Ghertrude, Cyrena, the Mutters, the Limboia, Nebsuel, Sidrus and Wassidrus go on. joined by the once living: Max Linder, Leo Frobenius, Eugene Marais. The magic gets blacker and the pace gets faster.
LK: In the introduction to this interview, there is a snippet of the foreword from Alan Moore. How did that acquaintance come about?
BC: Alan, Iain Sinclair, Michael Moorcock and myself had been doing a reading in London. Alan asked what I was working on, and asked to read it, so I sent him the MS.
Months later he made a blog interview in which he was asked ‘had he been reading anything interesting recently?” He then raved about The Vorrh.
That’s when the telephone starting ringing.
The publisher asked me if Alan would consider writing the forward. So I modestly asked him. His response was and still is overwhelming! - Larry Ketchersid


April 28 will mark the release of a new edition of author, poet, and multi-media artist Brian Catling’s book, The VORRH, a fantasy novel about a sentient forest:
In the following short interview, Catling and I discuss artistic spaces, the eternal appeal of forests, and more.
You’re well-known as a poet and conceptual artist. What drew you into fiction, particularly fantastic fiction?
I have always been dedicated , obsessed by the imagination and i believe that fiction can be a valuable tool to examine fact. The prose began in an attempt to describe object, events and atmospheres that i could not construct in reality. The earliest manifestations being WRITTEN ROOMS & PENCILLED CRIMES. 1987, a series of impossible installations and actions. The VORRH was in my head for years , I had the opening scene and the conclusion, everything else occurred once i started writing it. I had no intention of writing fantasy fiction, it just unwound that way. I thought i was writing an obscure surrealistic narrative.
Alan Moore (who wrote an introduction for the book) is one of my favourite graphic novelists and all-around creative persons. How did you become involved with him?
Alan and I first met on a poetry reading event and then on the set of Iain Sinclair’s film The Cardinal and the Corpse, we were both playing ourselves being Maji. A few years ago we did another reading with Sinclair and Michael Moorcock and Alan ask me what i was working on , I told him I had just finished The VORRH and he asked to read the manuscript. He did and loved it. Some time later he was asked in a blog what he had recently read that excited him. He was (and still is) enormously generous about The VORRH. then the phones started ringing.
Many of your readers have described your literary style as visionary and baroque. I wonder what you think of that? Is your prose in any way coloured by your experiences writing poetry?
Yes I think it must be. But I think its become less baroque the more i write , the scrolls and filigrees have unwound to make tighter and more fluent sentences. Visionary yes! but in the physical sense that I see all i write, there is no literally construct , i write what i see or imagine i see, a kind of occulted ekphrasis.
The cyclops is a recurring element in your work. The creature fascinates me on several levels, and is the subject of one of my favourite paintings by Odilon Redon. What draws you to it, and what does “cyclops” mean to you?
I have been taking students to anatomical museums for years (part of my Professorship at Oxford is engaged with the running and teaching of the anatomy course at the Ruskin School ) In the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, before its glitzy makeover there was a backroom of Orthodontic peculiarities.
There in a small glass container was the head of a human cyclops with red hair and two pupils in its stunted eye. It was an object of pity and woe. It produced strong feelings of compassion and disgust that made me want to do something about it. but not with the actual specimen.
Some years later I was making a performance in the Kings Gallery of the British Library. A zeal-full cameraman took a picture of my head reflected in one of the glass cases; bisected and doubled, and there it was the same face, the same terribly distortion. I then went on to produce the effect in performance and videos. Also writing a dialogue for the monster in which he explained his beauty and your ugliness, explaining that a single eye, an uncross single optic nerve running in a straight line from the outside world to its undivided brain. This condition creates a certain dogmatic clarity. Thus the monster bathes again in the doubt of our reactions.
The small egg tempera portraits of Cyclops came later ( briancatling.net) It was inevitable that Ishmael, my VORRH cyclops, came into being.
Your novel concerns a quest into a mysterious and forbidding forest. That’s a classic fantasy premise if there ever was one. I’m reminded of fairy tales, Arthurian quests, and of course, contemporary fantasy stories like Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood. What is it about the forest that resonates with us, and why do we associate it with the supernatural?
We know very little about plants. The life of a forest is a complex and ancient thing. The root structure alone is a baffling enigma. I suppose the most influential fictional forest or rather its effect on humans , for me is The Man Whom Trees Loved by Algernon Blackwood. a greatly unrated author of the uncanny.
Can you tell me a little bit about the VORRH itself? What is it like? Do concepts like “real” versus “illusory” apply there? What about sacred versus profane? There’s an Edenic quality here, isn’t there?
It is the only and every forest. Eden is an overgrown scrub patch lost in its centre, haunted by the failed angels who did not protect the Tree of Wisdom. I have never been much good at weighing real and illusory, sacred and profane. Or seeing the clear profile and texture of each. The forest would have no sense of those vapours. Some years ago I was in the Red Heart of Australia, a parched and lonely place, so old that it was totally indifferent to humans. It had not even noticed that they had come into existence. the Vorrh is a bit like that.
Speaking of real versus illusory, you’ve mixed characters from fiction and real historical personages together. How did you assemble this motley crew?
The real ones were reluctant volunteers. Some had been heroes, some demanded exploration, perhaps the most amazing coincidence (if you believe in such things) is that Muybridge actually meet Sir Willian Gull after his near fatal stagecoach accident. Gull had been an interest of mine for years: The man who coined “Anorexia Nervosa”, and a Royal surgeon who arose from near rural poverty to become a man of influence and sinister power.
There have been mentions of him in many Jack the Ripper books and some claim that he was the mysterious murderer himself. I had no intention of a “ripper” sub plot being in the book , but once Gull and Muybridge met and started talking talking it was inevitable. And a clear example of the way I write. I was another invisible person in the consulting room high above London Bridge, listening while they talked and occasionally occupying each man to see the other.
In developmental psychology there’s the idea of the “magic circle”: a prescribed place in which participants agree to be bound not by the rules outside of the circle, but by those of a game. As a bit of an artist and creative type myself, I suspect that it carries over a bit–maybe not even consciously–to the studio, art object, or mental space in which we make art. I mean, a painting itself has certain “rules” that are dictated by the medium and artist’s vision. Writing a book must occur within its own magic circle, too. The Vorrh strikes me as highly conceptual, and I wonder to what extent the forest serves as a creative or ritual space. Or is it just a wilderness and I’m reading too much into this?
That’s right, it is a conceptual portal with inherent rules, none of which I know. But it is also just the wilderness, capable of devouring all .
Who are some of the authors who influenced you most, and what might you recommend for people to read once they’ve finished with The VORRH?
Poe, Melville, Beckett, Kipling, Cormac McCarthy, Roussell Dickenson, Lautréamont, Highsmith, Huysmans, Borges, Flann O’Brien, Hamsun, the usual suspects!
What’s your next project? Where can people find you online?
The VORRH is a trilogy, after that I wrote a quartet of Westerns. Yes Westerns!!! A Cockney, Oxford Don dares to take on the sacred plains.
The Doc Quartet is centred around Doc Holiday , without re-telling the same old stories.
I am also working with Terry Gilliam, Ray Cooper and Christian Gwinn on the prospect of The VORRH flickering off the page.
What’s your next project? Where can people find you online?
I am currently writing a piece called HOLLOW : A mounted band of Peckenparish warriors desend the spiral path of a cone shaped, snow covered mountain. They all speak in King James biblical english. Far below are a series of villages and events all taken from Bruegel paintings, including the horrifying “Triumph of Death” and the drunken slapstick comedy of the “Fight Between Carnival And Lent’ They carry a boneless oracle who warns them of meetings and consequences of their journey, “Saint Christopher is a dog head man” being one of them. Three-quarters of the way down they discover that the ‘mountain’ is in fact the Tower of Babel and that its insides are being eaten alive by a hoard of lost demons and sad imps that have escaped from the painters imagination.
My webpage is currently hiding because it know that it needs to be washed & combed, when it appears it should be briancatling.net  - Matt Staggs

Alessandro Spina, The Confines of the Shadow, Trns. by André Naffis-Sahely, Darf Publishers, 2015.
Volume 2 will appear in the Fall of 2016, with Volume 3 to follow in 2017.


"Civilisation," muses the fretful wife of an Italian governor in early-1920s Libya, means no more than "the rubble on which others will build another edifice once they've reconquered their freedom".
Even if they did not take place mostly in Benghazi, these tales of an Arab land under European rule would still have a salutary relevance today. Whatever happens in the Westernised city, "a graceful little fable fenced off from the outside world", in the desert hinterland, tribal traditions that "nobody could uproot" hold firm. Cameron, Sarkozy and their allies could have profitably read these stories of colonial hubris and nemesis in Libya before they ousted Gaddafi.
"Alessandro Spina" was the pen-name of Basili Shafik Khouzam, a Syrian Christian born in Italian-occupied Benghazi in 1927. After study in Italy, he managed the family textile factory in Libya until Gaddafi's revolution drove him into exile in Lombardy. During and after his business career, he wrote novels and stories that drew on the Italian invasion of 1911 and its bloody aftermath to reflect on the forced encounter between cultures.
Heroically, André Naffis-Sahely has now begun to translate Spina's vast narrative patchwork of Italy's Libyan adventure. This first instalment of three gathers works written after 1964: two short novels, The Young Maronite and The Marriage of Omar, and a story: "The Nocturnal Visitor".
Don't expect from Spina polished late-imperial romance of the sort that fans of the twilight-of-the-Raj school, from Paul Scott to Vikram Seth, know and love. True, he does create Forsterian figures, anguished doubters torn between two worlds: Hassan, or Captain Martello, whose "identity crisis" drives him to vanish amid the ruins of ancient Cyrene. Repeatedly, the Italian officer class discovers that "the other's truth imperils our own".
But these stories also experiment with alternatives to realism. So The Young Maronite begins with a lurid variant of an Arabian Nights tale, as the child bride of mighty but lonely Hajji Semereth falls for a servant boy. Interrupting this retro yarn, the Italians often converse in stilted comedy-of-ideas dialogue – somewhere between Shaw and Pirandello. Meanwhile, Spina's favourite metaphor depicts colonial life as an opera: part-Verdi, part-Rossini, part-Mozart, played out as melodrama on a "little golden stage" of deluded privilege.
Even though Naffis-Sahely tracks these shifts of register with skill, you feel that Spina may be finding his feet as a narrator. The Marriage of Omar achieves a more fluent style, as it explores the dialectical intimacy of ruler and ruled. "Oppression is an injustice," reflects governor Alonzo, "and injustice is the fatal link that binds us." - Boyd Tonkin


In the opening of Alessandro Spina’s novel The Nocturnal Visitor (1979), night is falling on Sheikh Hassan’s home in a valley in eastern Libya so small that it fits “in the hollow of a hand.” The sheikh is ready to embark upon his reading, a nightly voyage he takes with his books as “enigmatic traveling companions.” But his reveries are troubled: A crime has been committed in his home. What follows is a series of doubles and double-crosses, in which guilt shifts with each new revelation—a plot that could have sprung from one of Sheikh Hassan’s treasured books. A boy in his household, accused of trying to sleep with his sister, is exiled from the valley. In town, he finds another boy who bears a striking resemblance to him and lures him back home to be punished in his place. In doing so, he unearths their secret, shared parentage, and commits an even worse crime. Most of the characters in The Nocturnal Visitor discover that their identity—as son, sibling, father—is not what it seemed. Just as the narrative reaches its tragic climax, it abandons the personal and fantastic and enters modern Libyan history. It’s 1927, the beloved valley is occupied by advancing Italian forces, and the sheikh must slip away in the night, an exile joining the resistance.
The Nocturnal Visitor has many characteristics of Spina’s fiction: the inspiration drawn from Arabic culture (in this case partly from the great medieval itinerant scholar Ibn Khaldun, repeatedly quoted by the sheikh); the view of literature as a voyage of discovery, and of historical change as irredeemably violent; the possibility of parallel identities. With this last characteristic especially, Spina was borrowing from his own life, for he had several identities of his own. He was born Basili Shafik Khouzam in Benghazi in 1927, the son of a Syrian Maronite who relocated to Libya to find his fortune just as the Italians wrestled the province from the Ottoman Empire. At age 12, he was sent from the Italian colony in Libya to Milan for his education, where he conceived a passion for theater, opera, and literature. He returned to Benghazi to run the family textile business in 1953. He lived independently (he married once, but it didn’t work out), and his job provided him with a good livelihood and ample opportunity to observe Libyan society. In 1954, he penned his first story, set in Libya’s eastern province of Cyrenaica. He would write of nothing else but Libya for the next 40 years, even after he had to leave the country in 1979 and retire to a villa in Lombardy. It would be an understatement to say that Spina, who died in 2013, took his time with his fiction. Spina belonged to a set of privileged, wandering, mercantile minorities whose identities could not be reduced to nationalities, and who have been all but swept out of the Middle East by xenophobia, conflict, and ethnic cleansing. Spina aspired to cosmopolitanism but inverted its usual polarities: He liked to shock his Italian friends by telling them that he had “un-provincialized” himself by moving from Milan to Benghazi. His influences and references range from Proust to The Thousand and One Nights to the fifth-century Greek philosopher and bishop Synesius of Cyrene. But for all his cosmopolitanism, Spina was not interested in universalism. What he valued, above all, was being unique. He was a Catholic moved by the daily presence of the divine in traditional Muslim society; a successful industrialist who viewed modernization with skepticism and melancholy; a critic of colonialism who was also dismissive of superficial tiers-mondisme; and a scathing critic of the silence of all Italian political factions regarding the country’s colonial crimes. The nom de plume he adopted—spina means “thorn”—suited him perfectly: The Italian he wrote in is exquisite but prickly. His sentences are thickets, dense and erudite, demanding to be reread. But his sharp, poetic images lodge instantly in one’s memory. “The cold hand of that old man an unbreakable dam” is how he describes the severe and orthodox teacher who curbs the young Sheikh Hassan’s flowing curiosity in The Nocturnal Visitor. Spina abhorred shortcuts and banality—journalists, whom he viewed as purveyors of the commonplace, were his bêtes noires. And he didn’t think of difference as something to be dismissed or overcome. “Nothing is more fruitful and more vital than the irreconcilable,” he wrote. Spina can be counted among a small group of expatriate writers who are hard to classify: Home is a place they have made for themselves at the intersection of East and West. One thinks of Paul Bowles in Morocco, or of Albert Cossery, who was born in Cairo of a Francophone Orthodox Levantine family in 1913, moved to Paris at 17, and then spent the next half-century writing wonderful satirical novels in French that are not only set in Egypt but are also deeply Egyptian in their cynicism and humor. There is also the Egyptian writer Waguih Ghali, whose Beer in the Snooker Club (1964) is a deceptively lighthearted gem written in English and featuring a penniless upper-­class layabout bumbling around Nasser’s Cairo. These writers have never found a place in the Arabic literary canon, not only because of linguistic barriers, but also because they have little respect for nationalist orthodoxies. And they haven’t always found the audience they deserve in the West.